Steam Machine Pricing Announced; Random Ballot Reservations Opened

Valve has announced pricing and opened reservations for their next hardware offering, the highly-anticipated Steam Machine, and reaction to the pricing is...less than desirable.

There'll be two main variants of the Machine, a 512GB and a 2TB offering, and each can be purchased with or without a Steam Controller included. Valve will be selling the console in Australia, the US, Canada, UK and Europe. In Japan, Taiwan, and Hong Kong, it'll be sold by their distribution partner, KOMODO. Pricing is as follows:

Steam Machine 512 GB

• Steam Machine 512GB: $1,049 USD / 1,509 CAD /  1,039 EUR /  879 GBP / 1,609 AUD /  4,389 PLN 

• Steam Machine 512GB + Steam Controller: $1,128 USD / 1,628 CAD / 1,108 EUR / 938 GBP / 1,728 AUD / 4,698 PLN

Steam Machine 2TB

• Steam Machine 2TB: $1,349 USD / 1,919 CAD / 1,359 EUR /  1,149 GBP /  2,109 AUD /  5,739 PLN

• Bundle: Steam Machine 2TB + Steam Controller: $1,428 USD / 2,038 CAD / 1,428 EUR / 1,208 GBP / 2,228 AUD / 6,048 PLN

Purchasers of the 2TB model will also get red fabric and solid walnut faceplates as a bonus.

Steam will be using a randomised ballot reservation system to try and stop scalpers in their tracks (and presumably to prevent server load). If you want a Steam Machine, you have until this Thursday June 25th at 10 a.m. PST (that's 4am Friday morning for those of you on the east coast of Australia) to place your reservation. Valve will then randomly select the reservations from that list and be in touch with how to place your order.

The company says it will start sending Steam Machines out from Friday and continue to send through the reservation orders as they work through their allocations of stock.

The Boardroom Read: The Price Dilemma

Reaction to the pricing has been negative. Surprisingly, Valve themselves have been quite vocal about their own pricing. In their announcement blog post, the company said that "[their] original goal for the price of Steam Machine is no longer viable" and this was due to the ongoing shortage and inflation in price of technology, with memory and storage being key call-outs.

Speaking to Eurogamer, Valve engineer Yazan Aldehayyat touched on the difficulties of setting the price on the device:

"It's hard because I don't think we ever really had an official price or anything like that - I think we had some ideas - but it's really difficult to quantify it." [via Eurogamer]

Valve aren't alone in this. A couple of weeks ago Xbox head Asha Sharma called those exact components out as having inflated the costs of the machine dramatically, with some of those components having risen as much as five times what they used to cost the company, and are possibly partly to blame for the company needing to make difficult decisions surrounding its first-party studios as it struggles to gain a foothold in the changing industry.

I've put my name down for a Steam Machine in hopes to cover it for the site. Let's see what pans out on Friday morning. Sound out below if you happen to call dibs on one, we'd love to hear your impressions.