It is a singularly bad time to purchase computer parts or release a computer product. The RAM crisis has made memory and storage costs astronomical, and the most recent indignity it's inflicted around our neck of the woods is the price of the Steam Machine—a box whose min-spec edition will still set you back $1,049. Valve itself wishes it was cheaper.
But I guess even an expensive box is better than no box at all, which—to hear Valve tell it—may have been a possibility. When we sat down and chatted with Valve engineers Yazan Aldehayyat and Pierre-Loup Griffais, we got to chatting about how the company's overall stock of Steam Machines is looking as it gears up to ship them. The answer? Less than there would be in a pre-RAM-crisis world, but way better than the beginning of the year, when Valve wasn't certain it would have any Steam Machines at all.
Griffais said the stock of Steam Machines is "a little bit less" than it would have been pre-crisis, but that Valve's built up "a sizable amount compared to what it initially looked like. Things looked really dire at the beginning of the year. We weren't sure if there was gonna be anything at all."
Compared to that, I suppose any number of boxes seems good, and heck, securing supply even in non-apocalyptic circumstances is hard: "I wanna emphasise that, even under the best of circumstances, getting enough quantity for day one is always hard-slash-impossible, I think," said Aldehayyat. "From our perspective, we still got to a pretty good place," said Griffais.
"Typically what happens with a product like this, is the day one demand is going to be a big, big percentage of the year one demand," Griffais continued. "You just cannot have your factory building for six months… there's always gonna be some gap between supply and demand the first couple of days, couple of weeks." Thus, the Steam Machine reservation system that has been running since last Monday, which lets people enter themselves into a queue which is set to be all shaken up today, ideally achieving a modicum of fairness in distribution.
"I'm really proud of where we're at in terms of, like, our sourcing guys did a great job. I think the quantities we have are really good given the circumstances, and our hope is to kinda catch up to demand as quickly as possible," said Griffais. It's certainly better than nothing.
