The Steam Machine came out to a 62/100 review average and sold out its entire reservation queue in about 10 minutes anyway. Both things are true at once, for the same reason a lot of us are still running 2024 RAM prices in our heads and getting a nasty surprise every time we actually check.
What the reviews actually say
Reviewers like the hardware. Low noise, a real dedicated-VRAM design, SteamOS finally mature enough to feel like a console instead of a science project. Nobody’s calling it broken.
The complaint is entirely price-to-performance. The GPU lands around RTX 3060 territory and it costs $1,049 to $1,428, in a market full of mini-PCs with comparable specs for less. PC Gamer called it the biggest casualty yet of what everyone’s started calling the RAMpocalypse. That’s the actual story. Valve didn’t build a bad box, they launched it into the worst memory market in years.
Why RAM got like this
DDR5 went from around $6.84 per GB in September 2025 to $27.20 per GB by December. Call it four times more expensive in three months. A 32GB kit that ran $200 to $250 last fall is $600 to $650 now.
None of that is a normal supply hiccup. Manufacturers are deliberately shifting fab capacity away from consumer DDR5 and toward HBM for AI accelerators, because HBM margins are better. AI is on track to consume roughly a fifth of all DRAM production this year. Most analysts don’t expect real normalization before 2027.
Where that leaves anyone building something
We’ve been watching this exact number for our own hardware, same as everyone else putting off a build until it stops looking insane.
A console launching at a bad price is Valve’s problem to price around. A homelab, a NAS upgrade, a new AI box, those don’t get to wait for a review cycle to tell you it’s a bad time. They cost what the market decides that week, and right now that’s a genuinely worse number than a year ago, for reasons that have nothing to do with what you’re building.
Sources: PC Gamer on the Steam Machine and the RAMpocalypse, The Shortcut’s review roundup, Wccftech on the DDR5 shortage.