Valve shook up the gaming world with the announcement of the Steam Machine, but we’re all still curious about the million-dollar question of pricing. While there’s plenty of speculation, we finally have some sort of indication from Valve directly. In an interview with Skill Up’s Friends Per Second podcast, Valve’s Pierre-Loup Griffais revealed that the Steam Machine will not be subsidized but will still have competitive pricing.
“I think that if you build a PC from parts and get to basically the same level of performance, that’s the general price window that we aim to be at,” Griffais said on the podcast. “Obviously, our goal is for it to be a good deal at that level of performance, and then you have features that are actually really hard to build if you’re making your own gaming PC from parts.”
Griffais didn’t offer a concrete price range since Valve was still early in the process, adding that “right now is just a hard time to have a really good idea of what the price is going to be because there’s a lot of different things that are fluctuating.” When asked if the Steam Machine would be subsidized like how other companies often sell new consoles at a loss or slim profit margin to generate early momentum, Griffais said no and that it would be “more in line with what you might expect from the current PC market.”
However, Griffais also revealed that Valve is potentially interested in doing a Steam Machine Pro, but that the company is currently focused on this mid-range level as a “good trade off between affordability and the level of power we get.”