Valve announced the Steam Controller, Steam Machine console, and Steam Frame VR headset together in November last year. Today, we have a lot more concrete information on one of those products, but not the other two.
The Steam Controller is ready. Orders will open up on May 4. Along with other members of the press, we’ve had one in our hands for a while and have published our review — Giovanni Colantonio reckons it’s “so close to being the perfect PC gamepad.” Valve engineers have been generous with their time talking about the genesis and philosophy of the new device.
Steam Machine and Steam Frame, meanwhile, are nowhere to be seen. In February, Valve effectively delayed these devices, saying it had to revisit its schedule and pricing due to the worldwide shortage of computer memory and storage, effectively delaying them. At the time, it said that its “goal of shipping all three products in the first half of the year has not changed.”
Asked by Polygon about the sudden appearance of the Steam Controller without the Steam Machine and Steam Frame to go alongside it — and without any update on their status — Valve downplayed its significance. While the Steam Controller is designed to pair with the Steam Machine, it’s a separate product that’s also compatible with the Steam Deck handheld and with any PC that runs Steam. And while Valve didn’t want to release the Steam Machine without the Steam Controller, the reverse wasn’t true.
Why release the Steam Controller now? Because it “doesn’t have RAM in it,” Valve hardware engineer Steve Cardinali told Polygon. That being the case, it’s easy for Valve to price, manufacture, and begin to ship, and the company clearly feels there’s demand.
“We wanted to build up quantity so that we could try to address everybody who wants one at launch,” Cardinali said. This suggests that Valve sees an upside in releasing the Controller separately and satisfying some of the demand now, rather than potentially facing supply issues if customers both with and without Steam Machines tried to buy Controllers all at the same time.
There’s no mystery about why we still don’t have any price and release information for Steam Machine and Steam Frame. The RAM crisis that caused Valve to delay them shows no sign of abating. The incredibly steep rises in cost of both memory and storage chips between November 2025 and February 2026 have flattened out somewhat, but they haven’t started to drop. It’s possible that storage costs haven’t even peaked yet.
It is simply a terrible time to try to price, manufacture, and launch new computer hardware. Valve is presumably wary of both supply issues and the reputational damage of launching the Steam Machine at a very high price, even if it’s able to bring that price down later.
But Valve’s decision to go for a full launch of the Steam Controller now does tell us something — and it’s not good news.
To begin with, it seems incredibly unlikely that Valve will ship the Steam Machine and Steam Frame in the first half of the year, as is still its stated goal on paper. That would put their releases in a window of only eight weeks after the release of the Steam Controller on May 4, which doesn’t make a lot of sense.
Further, it’s my guess that Valve’s decision to launch the Steam Controller now indicates either a very significant delay to the other two devices — or, perhaps more likely, that Valve simply doesn’t know when it will be feasible to launch them (or strategically sound to put a price on them). If Valve had even a vague new timeline to offer, now would have been a perfect time to do it, but it hasn’t.
Steam Machine seems further from release than ever; it’s even questionable whether it will see the light of day in 2026. Then again, as Valve itself noted, the biggest challenge of the RAM crisis is its unpredictability — how quickly the situation can change. A steep drop in prices could result in a speedy launch for Steam Machine. But let’s not hold our breath.
What will Valve’s Steam Machine cost, anyway?
Steam Machine looks like a console, but is primarily competing with PCs — which means Valve can go in a lot of directions for its new hardware
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