Valve have reworded a Steam blog post after its original, unsure-sounding text left open the possibility of further long-term delays to the new Steam Machine. The 2025 Year in Review article only briefly touches on the Machine, as well as the upcoming Steam Controller redesign and the Steam Frame VR headset, but its previous phrasing of “We hope to ship in 2026” – accompanied by a reminder of ongoing and widespread memory shortages – did have the kind of noncommittal yeah-we’ll-seeism that one might apply when responding to an unwanted dinner party invitation. The grim possibility of another delay, this time into 2027, hung heavy.
Now, however, that passage has been replaced with a more confident and definitive commitment to a 2026 release. “We shared recently that there have been challenges with memory and storage shortages,” Valve’s update reads, “but we will be shipping all three products this year.”
This doesn’t take additional delays entirely off the table. “This year” could still mean much, much later in 2026, when the original delay – from “early 2026” – still came with the assurance that the Steam Machine, Controller, and Frame would be out in the first half of the year.
Still, at least the degree of another hold-up might not be as bad as that original, crossed-fingers wording might suggest. Significant disruption to hardware plans – and not just Valve’s – is broadly expected to continue, like the component shortages themselves, into 2027. There’s a distant chance that parts (and thus products) will be cheaper by then, but waiting for so long will also cost the Steam Machine a year of potential relevancy. Not something that should be sacrificed lightly, as like the Steam Deck, its relatively modest performance already comes at the cost of being less futureproofed for newer, more demanding games. That’d be another year, too, that the Machine wouldn’t have to get a head start on Project Helix, Microsoft’s next Xbox that’s confirmed to run PC games as well.
Basically, I wouldn’t fancy being in a decision-making company at a big hardware-making company right now. Obviously, being a journalist instead, I’ve never had to walk back anything I’ve written in my life.
