Valve opens Steam Machine pre-orders with queue lottery and hefty prices amid AI squeeze

Valve has opened pre-orders for its forthcoming Steam Machine – but it is going to cost you quite a lot, thanks to the AI-induced storage shortage. However, the company is expecting such high demand that it is setting up an automated lottery system, so that the lucky people whose orders go through will get random places on the waiting list. The machine will come with an AMD Zen 4 hexacore CPU, as we covered back in November when the company's three new hardware models were announced. The desktop model will be offered in two configurations, with either a 512 GB or 2 TB SSD. You can order just the base unit, or if you want, get it bundled with Valve's new Steam Controller. The announcement lays out the pricing: Both models come with 16 GB of DDR5 RAM (plus 8 GB of GDDR6 VRAM), and if you're feeling rich, you can upgrade the main memory yourself. There's a microSD slot for more storage. You can pre-order the machine on its Steam Store page, although this vulture isn't eligible – in our 15 years on Steam, we've never bought a game. If you do want to get in line, you have until Thursday, June 25, to do so. There's also a Steam Hardware News Hub for news and updates. The company is randomizing the placement of orders, and there are separate queues for North America, Europe (including the UK), and Australia. Or you can do-it-yourself with SteamOS 3.8 The reason that the largely non-video-game-playing Reg FOSS desk is looking at the news is that the machine will run SteamOS 3, which, as we have covered before, is a relatively radical Arch-based Linux distribution. It has dual immutable Btrfs root partitions, which update one another ChromeOS-style, with automatic rollback and recovery in the event of failed updates. SteamOS 3.8 was released just last week. It now uses KDE Plasma 6.4.3 and defaults to a Wayland session, although you can still choose X11 from the Steam developer settings or via the steamosctl command. Perhaps the most interesting thing about this version is that the company now permits you to install SteamOS on your own hardware – so long as it uses an AMD GPU. (Nvidia support is planned: the company says "we're working on expanding support for the future.") The latest version of the SteamOS Installation and Repair page includes downloads and instructions. We lack suitable hardware for testing, but it looks like you need an 8 GB USB key for installation, the machine needs to have UEFI firmware, and you need to disable Secure Boot – all of which are very reasonable. However, the fancy partitioning scheme means that it doesn't dual-boot – so any existing OS will be erased. If you have anything on your machine you want to keep, we suggest buying a second-hand SSD, and disconnecting any other drives just in case. Bootnote Despite the continued non-appearance of Half-Life 3 – which has been awaited for so long that even this geriatric vulture played the original game 28 years ago – Valve seems to be doing well. It is privately held company, so it doesn't release public finances, but industry analysts peg the company's annual operating profit at around $2 billion to $3 billion – most of that coming from Steam. According to Robb Report, which seems to be a website for very rich people to learn about other very rich people's new toys, Valve boss Gabe Newell has just ordered another new €700 million yacht for his collection, part of a fleet which to his credit is also used for marine research. Perhaps he will keep it with his other six. ®