Steam Machine should undercut PlayStation 5 price hike

Let's cut straight to the point—now that both models of the PlayStation 5 have seen a pricing surge of $100 ($599 Digital, $649 Disc) and the PlayStation 5 Pro went up by $200 (now $899), there will never be a better time for Valve to announce the Steam Machine's pricing and launch date, especially if it manages to land below $899 or $649. With rumors of PlayStation drawing back from PC ports due to the Steam Machine announcement and even an (ex-)Xbox executive believing that Steam Machine will be what competes with PlayStation 5 and 6 rather than Project Helix, it's clear that the existing console industry is treating Valve as a serious competitor for the living room space.

Of course, it's no secret why these console-uncharacteristic price hikes have finally fallen upon PlayStation after they were lambasted by Xbox fans and critics last year—the ongoing RAM and NAND supply crisis have made storage and memory disproportionately expensive for builders and brands alike. Since modern consoles are using PC hardware, these pricing woes have struck them hard, too, and that's not even mentioning the ever-shifting global trade dynamics around imports and tariffs. These same market conditions are exactly why Valve has hesitated so long to announce a finalized price or release date for not only Steam Machine, but also its standalone VR headset Steam Frame. It's also led to highly-sporadic availability for Steam Deck OLED, and the outright discontinuation of Steam Deck LCD.

In any case, solely tactically speaking, PlayStation finally bending the knee and raising prices on its hardware makes this by far the best time for Valve to market Steam Machine to its fullest extent as a PlayStation 5 competitor. The hardware onboard should certainly prove capable of it—Zak Killian, one of my colleagues at Hot Hardware, built and benchmarked a simulated Steam Machine across 27 games. That simulated Steam Machine cost about $600 before adding RAM and didn't benefit from any savings Valve may squeeze from manufacturing or buying in bulk. There's also the fact that Steam is by far one of the most profitable software storefronts in the world—some tactical loss lead pricing from Valve here could go a very long way, and used to be quite common in the console space.

Realistically, Steam Machine simply won't be capable of reaching the same graphical peaks as PlayStation 5 Pro, since its GPU is substantially weaker. The CPU is not, though, and since PlayStation 5 Pro is restricted by the same AMD Zen 2 CPU spec as its non-Pro counterpart, that means that Steam Machine should be able to squeeze out higher framerates than either PlayStation console, at least with lowered graphical settings. But even at comparable graphical settings, especially targeting 60 FPS, Steam Machine is already looking more than adequate as a PlayStation 5 killer thanks to superior AMD FSR and Intel XeSS upscaling support on PC. That comparison will look even better if the rumored AMD FSR 4 support comes to fruition.

The ball is in your court now, Valve—and speaking within the limits of my authority as a decade-long tech writer and lifelong gaming enthusiast, I implore you to use it.