Since the launch of the Steam Machine, which has been blasted online for its high pricing and middling performance, Valve has been fairly transparent about pricing woes relating to the hybrid console, with engineers previously going so far as to say that pricing before the AI-fuelled RAMpocalypse was as much as 30% cheaper than launch pricing, and that the light at the end of the tunnel is faint.

More recently, in a new interview with Bloomberg, Valve engineers Pierre-Loup Griffais and Yazan Aldehayyat, have once again reiterated that pricing of the Steam Machine, and hardware in general, "is lagging what we're seeing from a bulk supply by at least three to six months." In other words, the pricing for the Steam Machine and other PC components that have been impacted by the RAM crisis in mid-July are, at best, prices from February. If true, it also means that Valve effectively has a bit of clairvoyance when it comes to hardware pricing, as one would when working closely with suppliers, and the engineers only see it getting worse, at least for the next three to six months.