Steam Machine is heading our way this summer – better start saving, or maybe just don’t bother

Hands up who thinks Valve cranked up the price of the Steam Deck last week to soft-prepare us for the gut-punch we are going to get, then it finally announces the price of the Steam Machine and Steam Frame.

I don’t believe in coincidences and after “global conditions” finally caught up with Valve’s handheld, today we have the first confirmation that we should be seeing the Steam Deck and Steam Steam Frame as soon as this Summer.

Now, summer is still a vague old time frame – it might even mean Australian summer, which is winter. Much like it’s always 5 o’clock somewhere, the same seasonal theory applies to summer, but it’s odd that we now know that timeline, but still have no idea of the cost.

Sure, it could be that Valve is holding off trying to get the very best deal for us all, but that would suggest the RRP could fluctuate, when in reality it will only ever fluctuate upwards. More likely, it is allowing us all to acclimatize to the fact that the new gear is going to cost as much as your first car.

Even if you then decide you can afford one, you will still have to go through the annoyance of actually trying to cop one. If you are an experienced scalper, you will probably be fine; if not, it will be pot luck or maybe sending four times the RRP to the dude who’s put a screenshot of his receipt on eBay.

Leave it on the shelf

Or you could just not bother, which is currently my plan of attack.

If, as seems to be the case, Valve is suggesting that if your game worked fine on the Deck, you will be okay, and even if it didn’t, you might be, I’m even less interested in selling a kidney to fund this extravagance.

In a post announcing it was to expand its Verified programme to the Deck and the Frame, Valve said: “Long story short: If your game already runs well on Deck, it will also run well on Machine with no extra work required from you. And if it doesn’t run great on Deck because of CPU or GPU performance, it may still run great on Machine. If you have games like this, you don’t have to take any action: We’re already testing every title on Machine that fell below our performance requirements on Deck.”

This, to me at least, is bringing our expectations down via the medium of PR.

When the Steam Machine was first unveiled at the end of the year, it was like, “Oh, cool, that will be great to play games on in the lounge for around $500.” Not realistic. Now though, it seems like it will less be the gateway to a world of PC games for console owners, more a glorified Steam Deck in a cube and at the moment that means I am out.

Not all of this is Valve’s fault, obviously, but you could argue that announcing something that wasn’t clearly specified to garner attention was marketing dark arts. The problem now is that the landscape has shifted so much in such a short period that we no longer really need it. Certainly not at the price it is probably going to come in at.