Valve is not hiding its frustration over the situation surrounding the Steam Machine and Steam Frame. The company wants to launch its new hardware at a competitive price, but the global RAM shortage and rising component costs have seriously complicated its plans.
When Valve unveiled its trio of new hardware devices in November 2025, anticipation around them was unusually high: the Steam Machine, Steam Controller, and Steam Frame were all announced in a single move. What the company did not expect was for the RAM crisis to hit the gaming industry quite this hard. So far, only the Steam Controller has launched on schedule, arriving on May 4, while the other two devices still do not have a firm release date, which is causing considerable frustration inside the team.
Valve offered some explanations to PC Gamer regarding the missing launches of the Steam Machine and Steam Frame. Lawrence Yang, a designer at Valve, spoke openly about how the company feels internally about not being able to release the previously announced hardware. “Obviously, we’re bummed out that things are this way. At least we’re not the only ones in this boat; everyone is trying to overcome the obstacles of RAM shortages, price increases, all of that,” he explained.
According to Yang, it is inevitable that the situation will affect any product built with those components. “We’re doing everything we can to keep the product price-competitive, but it’s complicated, no doubt,” he said. His colleague Steve Cardinali, a hardware engineer at Valve, added that no engineer designing a product wants to get to that stage and then be hit with a last-minute challenge like this. He described the situation as frustrating, while stressing that the team is working as hard as it can to resolve it.
Interestingly, around the same time as these comments, the global trade tracker NBD Data recorded that Valve‘s warehouses in the United States had received “a huge number of video game consoles” in the final weeks of April. This is the same category used for the Steam Deck, Steam Frame, and Steam Machine, which makes it difficult to determine exactly which device is involved. Some believe it may simply be a Steam Deck restock, since the device had been unavailable for several weeks on Valve‘s store, but the timing and the imminent launch of the Steam Controller have led players to speculate about whether the shipment could be connected to the Steam Frame or Steam Machine.
Yang, however, made it clear that launching the Steam Controller on its own was not a tactic designed to delay the other two devices. “We knew there was a possibility that the schedules would shift, and that we would simply launch each product when it was ready. Earlier this year, we already knew that the Steam Controller would likely come out first, so there was no point in artificially delaying it to make everything come out at once,” he concluded.
The situation, then, is not that Valve has abandoned the Steam Machine or the Steam Frame, but that the hardware market has applied the brakes at a particularly bad moment. The RAM shortage, import costs, pricing pressure, and player expectations are all hitting the company at once, and Valve clearly does not want to launch at a price that would alienate its audience on day one. The question now is how long the company can wait before interest around its new hardware starts to cool.
Source: 3DJuegos
