From 12:48 of the video:

Gamers Nexus: "Were you able to lock in contracts for memory with the suppliers directly or did you have to jump through a bunch of hoops or..."

Rep from Valve: "Look there's no contract, there's nothing. Those guys...they are...they give us a price every month, and they say 'you can buy that many', and it's yes or no, and if we say no then they never talk to us again".

Gamers Nexus also links another video they made specifically about the DRAM cartel.

I feel sorry for them for the team that designed this. They had all this shit ready to go and then the RAM and SSD prices went through the roof, and tbh if you're speccing a machine for mass production, those seem like the bits that were always gonna be cheaper by the time it comes to actually building it. Why would they ever go up? They never have before.

It was a nice idea, but the timing had completely fucked it. I don't think it was ever going to compete with the PS5 on price, but right now it's barely even competing with PC on price...

Even the Steam Deck isn't competitive any more.

This is what shows in Steam when you search for it.

This is all you can buy.

Its always rough when you are dealing with a cartel..

I bought a PNY 2tb drive to upgrade my Steam Deck in August of 2025, it was $95 (USD). Today the 1tb version is $165, 2tb is $290.

I hate micron so much now especially. They basically rug pull all consumers and only sell B2b now. So they can make more money on Ai datacenters.

Problem is there are only a few companies that even sell memory. And micron made it so much worse for the consumer market. I will not forgive, I will not forget.

Damn the verge now just quotes GN? They may as well just link their video without writing anything, lol. They added nothing to this article.

Not that I can read much of it because of the paywall.

This really bums me out not cuz I was looking to buy one but because I wanted it to shake the market up and make every company do better for the consumer... I feel like this price takes them completely out of the console market and purely into the entry-level PC market where I think it still is a decent specs and price for that market. It's just not what it was made to be

This all so people can rot their brains out to fruit videos...

Seeing the LTT video where they build their own PC with similar parts (but slightly better) for the same price was really the nail in the coffin for this one. The performance of the SMachine makes the value proposition… lackluster.

The only redeeming quality is the form factor. Would definitely fit very well in a living room. Would it make a good couch party game machine ?

After reporting how much the Steam Machine costs, I could tell already. RAM manufacturers are in paradise right now!

If RAM prices are so bad, couldn't Valve give an option to order a Steam Machine with no RAM? So that people could use RAM they already have or buy some locally for a lower price.

The point of shitty old processors was to get them cheap. Now that RAM and storage are the biggest factors, they could have gone with newer processors and not be significantly more expensive but significantly more performant.

My question is: how far back in time do we have to go to get to where RAM and SSD prices were this high (for a given capacity) in the past? Like 2021?

And the RAM crunch isn’t projected to get better anytime soon.

Projections by whom? What timeframe does "soon" cover?

With increasing objections, blocking, and cancellations of data centers, and some big-name AI companies going public soonish, and the recent OpenAPI finance press… it could be "soon", within a few months, that it could get better. It's certainly not a certainty, maybe even unlikely, and can't be "projected" from the current RAM market alone, but if you want to hope…

Not only that but they're dealing with another legal headache claiming they're a monopoly which is part of why they aren't subsidizing it. One of the staff members did say they're considering selling them with RAM/SSDs which if they do will significantly reduce the price.