Wednesday, June 24th 2026
Steam Machine Sells Out in Japan Despite Woeful Pricing
As was the case with the Steam Deck, Valve is selling the Steam Machine via Komodo Station, an Asian reseller that serves much of South-East Asia, and as a result, it skips the reservation and lottery system that is currently in place on Valve's own Steam Store. While this doesn't combat issues like scalping and shortages as well as Steam's in-house system, it provides a much more realistic indication of current stock levels. According to Komodo Store, however, all versions of the Valve Steam Machine have officially sold out less than 48 hours after the new hardware launched.
In Japan, the Steam Machine starts at $1,175 for the 512 GB model and goes up from there to ~$1,638 for the 2 TB model with two Steam Controllers and two additional faceplates. It remains to be seen how well the console will sell in the west when it officially starts shipping on June 25, however, since the price is quite high, especially compared to consoles like the PS5 Pro and similar small-form-factor PCs. As far as sentiment goes, there appears to be a divide forming in online spaces, like r/steammachine on Reddit, where some are saying the convenience of not having to set up any hardware is worth the price trade-off. The Steam Machine was seemingly meant to cost around 30% less initially, but it's unclear if or when it will come down to that price, which will only be possible if the RAM crisis comes to an end and hardware prices ease.
Source:
Komodo Station
In Japan, the Steam Machine starts at $1,175 for the 512 GB model and goes up from there to ~$1,638 for the 2 TB model with two Steam Controllers and two additional faceplates. It remains to be seen how well the console will sell in the west when it officially starts shipping on June 25, however, since the price is quite high, especially compared to consoles like the PS5 Pro and similar small-form-factor PCs. As far as sentiment goes, there appears to be a divide forming in online spaces, like r/steammachine on Reddit, where some are saying the convenience of not having to set up any hardware is worth the price trade-off. The Steam Machine was seemingly meant to cost around 30% less initially, but it's unclear if or when it will come down to that price, which will only be possible if the RAM crisis comes to an end and hardware prices ease.
36 Comments on Steam Machine Sells Out in Japan Despite Woeful Pricing
People/Influencers claiming this product is 'DOA' either misunderstand the term or are out of touch with the market.
HDMI CEC as a standard feature? Have you heard of this insane relic of technology called the universal remote? Wake on bluetooth has some use, but also requires you to continuously broadcast and listen for Bluetooth, which is a security risk, and we've been able to wake up PCs with wireless keyboards and mice for eons now.
Just like their comments about opening up SteamOS, a linux OS, to nvidia and intel hardware, Valve seems to be getting significant praise for doing things that already exist. But it's Valve, so they could put a turd in a blender and get praise for it.Without actual numbers, this is not impressive. Selling 100k units in 24 hours would be meh sales wise compared to consoles, 1000 units would be absolutely laughable.
Pretty sure people know what DoA is and consumers are pretty in tune with what the market wants.Steam also has Big Picture mode and has so for a decade now.
Though universal remotes require setup, the Steam Machine or a console will power on when a TV does, no need to leave the system on sleep mode.
And Valve has done a lot of the work for getting gaming to be more easily accessible on linux than any other linux distro, until Valve provided an incentive with their own linux development, Nvidia didn't give a crap about linux and only provided proprietary drivers which have been significantly worse than Windows drivers.1000 units for a very niche console like PC is still impressive, especially in a market where people prefer the PS5 and Switch over gaming PC's.
All of the screaming DOA unsurprisingly comes from out of touch youtube influencers with RTX 5090's , and it probably has some wanting the Steam Machine even more.
It costs the same as anything from Minisforum, Acemagic or Beelink that has a Ryzen 9 HX 370 in it with a much weaker iGPU and no VRAM.
Everything related to the Steam Machine was gone by the end of hour 3. And rumors here (I'm in Japan) are that they had 800 units.
Komodo is on X if you wanna visit... x.com/KOMODO_Games_JP
Even my Silverstone Milo ML-09 is over 7 litres with only low profile GPUs and severely limited space for the CPU cooler.
Nobody is buying this here. Just because is out of stock, doesn't mean it sells like hot cakes.
Everybody I spoke with, said that the price is ridiculous, and nobody in their mind would even consider paying that amount for a basically gaming NUC, when with those money you can buy an RTX 5080 for triple the performance, and have some money to spare.
I mean, is pretty common sense.Most of them were bought in bulk by Chinese and Taiwanese resellers, not by locals.
Yes, the SM is pretty much a gaming NUC, which I think is pretty darn cool. Of course it's a niche product for a limited audience, but still.Any source on this?
Early on (8086/8088/Z80/6502 days) PC's caught on for home/personal use and continued growing through the 386/486 32bit era. By the end of that 15~20% of homes had a "PC" but almost no one gamed on them. It was all about PC Engine, Famicom, and SEGA (With a little NEO-GEO mixed in). Then dual purpose machines like the MSX and the Sharp X68000 coaxed gamers over to the PC side. That morphed a bit but it's still relatively the same here. Not that many PC owners use them for gaming. Consoles make up a much bigger share of gaming here than they do in the US. In the States (in the "West"?), PC gaming is way stronger as you all know - and has been for years. Japan's market is like, 70% mobile, 20% console, 10% PC, while the US is closer to 45% mobile, 30% console, and 25% PC. (for gaming)..