Valve’s grim experience with the launch of the Steam Controller, where scalpers scooped up so many of the devices that they sold out in under 30 minutes, led it to announce an improved system of upcoming restocks. But that change also inadvertently alerted canny code-scourers to details about the sale of Valve’s unreleased Steam Machine. Via WCCF Tech, they discovered that the new SteamOS mini-PC will seemingly come in four different SKUs at launch, with some extra protections in place to try to prevent scalpers from ruining pre-orders for everyone.
Following May 4’s Steam Controller launch, Valve announced it was going to handle things very differently when the device was restocked, requiring a registration queue to access orders, purchase limits of one, and a Steam account that’s in “good standing” and has made purchases before April 27, 2026. This is all in an effort to limit the abilities of scalpers looking to flip the highly sought-after controller. The code for the store page making this possible has been scoured by users who have discovered it also makes reference to the forthcoming Steam Machine, Valve’s much vaunted teeny PC boxes designed to sit under your TV and allow PC-like gaming from the couch, and reveals that there will be four different ways to buy it.
Valve had already made it known that it would launch what I insist on thinking of as a spiritual successor to the Nintendo GameCube at two different specs, the 512GB model and the 2TB. That would explain two of the possible ways to buy, but the other two are unknown. It seems pretty likely that these would be bundles that also include the new Steam Controller, given the two are clearly designed to be paired (and you can only assume they were originally intended to launch simultaneously). But it’s fun to imagine what else could be, not least if the Controller becomes a separate add-on via some other mechanism.
Room for improvement
A 512GB Steam Machine model seems like a waste, given it’s barely enough space to hold just three new AAA titles. (Forza Horizon 6 alone will be nearly 160GB on PC, and Call of Duty titles have come in as large as 250GB.) It’s disappointing that it’s even an option, and hints that the unknown prices of the Steam Machine are likely to be preeeeetty high if corners like that are being cut for a lower price model. 2TB is sensible, but I’d definitely be far more tempted to go for a theoretical 1TB were it to exist (as WCCF suggested) and could save me a chunk of cash. That’s enough space to have a few different games on the go (and dozens of smaller games, of course), and not be constantly worrying about deleting something every time I look at the store.
It’s very unlikely that there’d be any other technical variety in this launch model, given Valve has already stated the Steam Machine will have 16GB of DDR5 and 8GB GDDR6 VRAM across the board, alongside its “semi-custom” AMD CPU and GPU. But yeah, it’s going to be Controllers.
It’s also good news that it seems the Steam Machine will launch behind similar scalper-defeating measures as are being implemented for the Controller, although we don’t know for sure how many will translate across. It could be argued that having a Steam account with prior purchases might be an unfair or just bizarre restriction for someone looking to get started with PC gaming by buying the machine, but clearly, purchase limitations are an absolute must.
Of course, we don’t yet know how much the Steam Machine is going to cost, let alone when it will actually be released. It’s part of a big hardware year for Valve, with its forthcoming VR hat, the Steam Frame, also likely to appear sometime in 2026, and indeed also mentioned in the website code.
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