Steam Machine developers reveal bleak outlook on rising hardware costs

Steam Machine engineers have revealed a rather bleak outlook on what the immediate future of gaming console hardware looks like.

Pre-orders for the Steam Machine opened on 22 June with the console releasing seven days later on 29 June. There was a window that opened where people could apply for a pre-order link with certain people selected at random.

Steam Machine consoles start from $1,049 (£879 / €1,039) for the 512GB model with no controller, with the most expensive option, the 2TB model with a Steam Controller, priced at $1,428 (£1,208 / €1,428).

On the UK Steam website, there are no versions of the console available at all. The only option is to sign in and join the waitlist.

Speaking to Bloomberg's Jason Schreier, engineers have said this is a reflection of the state of the gaming industry due to the ongoing memory crisis right now - and it's only going to get worse before there's any chance of it getting better.

Yazan Aldehayyat, a Steam Machine engineer, said: "Honestly, it's still getting worse. 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."

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

The memory crisis, along with shortages of other key components used in the manufacturing of gaming consoles, is being caused by huge tech companies using up supplies by building AI data centres.

This has had a huge effect on the gaming industry in that prices of older gaming hardware have unprecedentedly gone up instead of reducing over time.

PS5 and XBOX Series X/S consoles have already been affected, as have PC components, with Nintendo raising the prices of some of its hardware later this year.

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