t’s certainly been a journey for Valve. A week prior to the Steam Frame’s launch, we spoke with two engineers at Valve about the project: Joy Lyons, hardware engineer, and Jeremy Selan, software engineer. The memory crisis and the price were a big part of that conversation. From that chat, we can confirm that Valve had aimed for a lower price point than the one it’s launching the Frame for today.
Here’s Lyons on the memory crisis:
“We set out to design this hardware with one particular price in mind, but we’ve made choices to make sure that we’re making a product that is choiceful, that people can purchase, they can upgrade with different features later. But we wanted to make sure we had a base product with really great performance. Then that price target shifted due to the ongoing RAM crisis around the world.”
Lyons also said that forecasting for the cost of certain components used in the Steam Frame is an ongoing challenge.
Not exactly boding well of the Steam Deck 2.
I wonder what that price was. According to https://pcpartpicker.com/trends/ 16GB RAM seems to be up by about $100 to $150, 256GB SSDs are up by about $75 to $100. So probably the price they were at last year was around $849
All semiconductors are up because the same fabs make it all.
Further, hardware producers are likely starting to look at the “new normal” of ever-increasing prices as a reason to be extra conservative on pricing, because pricing for this moment sets them up to have to increase the price if costs continue to rise, turning customers off even more.
I suspect it was $500-600.