A senior Valve official indicated The Steam Machine’s release date announcement is getting closer, with the company saying that only one barrier remains between its new gaming hardware and consumers. Meanwhile, the new controller that was originally announced alongside the Steam Machine will hit the market in early May 2026.
Valve revealed the Steam Machine along with the Steam Frame VR headset and Steam Controller in November 2025. All of them were promised to be delivered by 2026. Half a year later, the company announced that the Steam Controller will be released on May 4 at a price of $99.99. No equivalent date or price has been set for the Steam Machine.
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Valve Dev Says 'Things Are Going Well' With Steam Machine
An encouraging sign has now been shared by SteamOS developer Pierre-Loup Griffais, a Valve veteran who helped port the Source Engine and Steam to Linux. In a recent interview with IGN, Griffiths said that Valve expects to share Steam Machine news soon and that “in general, things are going well” regarding its pre-release pipeline. Among other things, the engineer identified supply chain logistics as the only remaining hurdle. “It's really about the logistics of getting it into the hands of the users,” Griffes said.
That said framing suggests that the hardware itself is effectively finished. Driving this point home, Griffess compared the Steam Machine experience to something many existing Valve customers already have access to: Steam Deck in dock mode. That said, anyone who's tried that setup has a good idea of how Steam Machine will feel, with the new hardware adding meaningfully more GPU horsepower on top. The overall difference is still remarkable, as the Steam Machine packs more power than its small physical footprint might first suggest. It combines a custom RDNA3 GPU with 16GB of RAM and 8GB of GDDR6 VRAM and a Zen 4 processor clocked at up to 4.8GHz, on top of the deck's RDNA2 silicon and a 16GB pool of shared system and video memory.
Griffais also noted that the Steam Controller was intentionally released before the Steam Machine, describing PC users as the primary audience for the peripheral and that Valve did not want them to wait for mass production. While the controller is now dated, Griffiths' comments point to the Steam Machine as the next-to-be-released item in a three-product rollout that Valve recently confirmed remains on track for 2026.
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The rollout of Steam Controller may suggest that Steam Machine doesn't get much advance notice before release. On the other hand, as potentially the most expensive product of the three, its initial momentum may be more dependent on pre-orders, which could encourage Valve to provide a more substantial pre-release window. To be clear, the company is not offering pre-purchases for the Steam Controller. On Valve's digital storefront, both Steam Machines and Steam Frames are still listed as “coming soon”, effective from late 2025. Since Valve announced both devices alongside the Steam Controller, many fans initially assumed that all three would launch simultaneously. However, recent developments now point to a separate release for each product.
