[seanalltogether]

I wonder if these RAM shortages are going to cause the Steam Machine to be dead on arrival. Valve is probably not a big enough player to have secured production guarantees like Sony or Nintendo would have. If they try to launch with a price tag over $750, they're probably not going sell a lot.

[pja]

Yeah, I think (sadly) this kills the Steam Machine in the short term if the competition is current consoles.

At least until the supply contracts Sony & Microsoft have signed come up for renewal, at which point they’re going to be getting the short end of the RAM stick too.

In the short term the RAM shortage is going to kill homebrew PC building & small PC builders stone dead - prebuilts from the larger suppliers will be able to outcompete them on price so much that it simply won’t make any sense to buy from anyone except HP, Dell etc etc. Again, this applies only until the supply contracts those big PC firms have signed run out, or possibly only until their suppliers find they can’t source DDR5 ram chips for love nor money, because the fabs are only making HBM chips & so they have to break the contracts themselves.

It’s going to get bumpy.

[fullstop]

> At least until the supply contracts Sony & Microsoft have signed come up for renewal, at which point they’re going to be getting the short end of the RAM stick too.

Allegedly Sony has an agreement for a number of years, but Microsoft does not: https://thegamepost.com/leaker-xbox-series-prices-increase-r...

[jeroenhd]

Valve has already commented informally that Steam Machines will be priced on par with gaming PCs of similar hardware specs.

They won't be able to defeat console makers on the short term, but PC gamers will be paying the same price, so for those the value proposition remains unchanged.

[arvinsim]

That's true. But then if you are building a PC, prices are going up anyway so maybe in that comparision the Steam Machine is still worth getting.

[seanw444]

Or Valve draws from their deep pockets to sell them at a loss in the short term to gain product loyalty in the long term.

[delfinom]

If anyone that has hidden cash reserves that could buy out even Apple. It would probably be Valve.

Lol, wacky reality if they say "hey we had spare cash so we bought out Micron to get DDR5 for our gaming systems"

[quickthrowman]

Valve is worth maybe 0.1% (single digit billions is what I’d guess) of Apple, which made $112B in net income in 2025. That’s profit, not revenue.

Apple could probably buy Valve for 30 days of its net income, which is around $9.3B ($306M per day in profit, including weekends)

There’s zero chance that Gaben has squirreled away Four Trillion Dollars in cash.

[quesera]

To save my fellow ignorami some math, Valve is estimated to be valued at approximately 3.2% of Micron, or 0.2% of Apple. :)