While Valve has been quiet about the potential release date of the Steam Machine, AMD CEO Dr. Lisa Su has noted in a recent quarterly earnings presentation that the former company is “on track” to launch its custom Linux-based PCs “early this year”. Commenting on AMD’s gaming revenue, Dr. Su acknowledged a 50 percent year-over-year increase. She also spoke about future projections for AMD’s semi-custom SoC (system-on-a-chip) business, noting a possible double-digit percentage decline.
“In gaming, revenue increased 50% year-over-year to $843 million. Semi-custom sales increased year-over-year and declined sequentially as expected,” said Dr. Su (via IGN). “For 2026, we expect semi-custom SoC annual revenue to decline by a significant double-digit percentage as we enter the seventh year of what has been a very strong console cycle. From a product standpoint, Valve is on track to begin shipping its AMD-powered Steam Machine early this year.”
Valve’s Steam Machines have been highly anticipated for how disruptive it will be in the market. Among many other issues, the global memory shortage has meant that building a new gaming PC has become an expensive concept due to the high prices of DDR5 RAM. Along with this, its use of the Arch Linux-based SteamOS has also been seen as having major implications, especially thanks to dissatisfaction in the current state of Windows 11. To top it all off, the Steam Machine is expected to have at least one major launch game: Half-Life 3. That last one comes courtesy of a rumor from back in December, which noted that Valve was initially aiming for a Spring 2026 launch. Soaring RAM prices, however, seemingly had a major role in changing these plans.
Despite all the excitement behind the Steam Machine, however, the pre-built PC isn’t expected to be priced competitively with PS5 and Xbox Series X/S consoles. Valve has remained quiet about its price tag, which has led to quite a bit of speculation revolving around its hardware specs and performance capabilities. According to Linus Media Group’s Linus Sebastian, however, his discussions with Valve’s engineers resulted in the room going silent when he brought up the potential of a $500 price tag.
“I can’t tell you what the price will be, because I literally don’t know,” said Sebastian on an episode of WAN Show. “When I said I’m disappointed it isn’t going to follow a console pricing model, where its subsided by the fact that manufacturer is going to be taking 30 percent of every game sold on it over the lifespan of this thing, because I feel that would be a more meaningful product, they asked what I meant by console price and I said $500. Nobody said anything, but the energy in the room wasn’t great.”
The Steam Machine was unveiled alongside VR headset Steam Frame and a new take on the Steam Controller. Valve has described the PC as running on an AMD Zen 4 six-core CPU at 4.8 GHz, a semi-custom AMD RDNA3 GPU with 28 compute units, 8 GB of GDDR6 VRAM and a max sustained clock speed of 2.45 GHz, and 16 GB of DDR5 RAM. With these specs, Valve claims it can run games in 4K/60 FPS thanks to FSR.
