Steam Frame is still shipping sometime in the first half of 2026, although now Valve says the current component shortage has led the company to revise both price and release date of the standalone VR headset.
Valve announced in a hardware news update that Steam Frame, Steam Machine, and Steam Controller are all being affected by the component shortage.
“When we announced these products in November, we planned on being able to share specific pricing and launch dates by now,” Valve says. “But the memory and storage shortages you’ve likely heard about across the industry have rapidly increased since then.”
Due to a surge in demand from AI and data centers, RAM and storage prices have increased significantly since this time last year, with PCPartPicker data charting a 300 percent price increase in DDR5 RAM alone.
As component availability dwindles and prices rise, Valve says it “must revisit […] exact shipping schedule and pricing,” noting that both Steam Machine and Steam Frame have especially been affected.
Still, Valve says that its hoping to ship all three products in the first half of the year—ostensibly releasing sometime before July 1st.
Valve told Road to VR in November that it expects the price of Steam Frame to be ‘cheaper than Index’, although the company didn’t qualify pricing further than that. At its 2019 launch, a Valve Index ‘full kit’ was priced at $1,000 (headset, controllers, SteamVR trackers), while the headset alone was priced at $500.
While Valve hasn’t commented on what Steam Machine will cost, it confirmed with YouTuber ‘Skill Up’ back in November the PC won’t be subsidized like a console.
Price estimations are fairly scattered at this point. Linus Tech Tips has suggested the lowest configuration could fetch somewhere around $700, based on a custom PC built on comparable parts.
In early January, Czech retailer Alza may have leaked Steam Machine’s pricing, with the 512GB model priced around $950 USD and the 2TB model at $1,070 USD.
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