Valve's will still try to find a way to price Steam Machine competitively, but the company also knows that it won't be an easy feat to pull off while AI data centers have a chokehold on RAM and socioeconomic factors keep making affordable products a rarer occurrence.
Asked in a PC Gamer interview about how the state of the industry affected the Steam Controller, launching this month for $99, hardware designer Lawrence Yang says he's "not the expert on this" but knows the price of the accessory "has gone up from where we originally wanted it to be." And the product is only able to ship this soon because it doesn't have RAM in it, of course.
