Valve suggests memory crisis is "still getting worse," admitting, "we're limited by memory capacity, for sure"

"What people are seeing on retail shelves right now is lagging what we're seeing from a bulk supply by three to six months"

Image credit: Valve News by Vikki Blake Contributor Published on July 20, 2026 Follow Valve Steam Machine developer and gaming giant Valve has admitted that sourcing memory and storage supply for the Steam Machine - and beyond - is "still getting worse."

In an interview with Bloomberg , engineers who worked on developing the Steam Machine admitted that while they "knew there was going to be an issue with sourcing" due to the AI industry's demand for data centers and memory, "the extent was beyond anything we actually expected."

"We're basically building everything we can get our hands on," Valve engineer Pierre-Loup Griffais said. "We're limited by memory capacity, for sure."

"Honestly, it's still getting worse," added another engineer, Yazan Aldehayyat. "Just in case people are not aware. What people are seeing on retail shelves right now, from our observations, is lagging what we're seeing from a bulk supply by at least three to six months."

That said, Valve insists that the ongoing crisis will not impact the Steam Machine's roadmap, and suggests that the pricing will eventually stabilize, either by costs falling or, conversely, with current pricing normalized.

Steam announced pricing and extremely limited availability for the Steam Machine, the desktop/living room sibling of the successful Steam Deck, last month . It's available in 512GB and 2TB versions, priced at $1049 / £879 and $1349 / £1149. Availability was determined by a lottery system, and today would-be purchasers need to join a waiting list.

Analysts speaking to GamesIndustry.biz say that Steam Machine will be a "niche device" , due to a combination of its price and form factor, as Valve admits that its Steam Machine hardware has a higher cost than it would have liked .