- The Steam Controller will officially launch on May 4 for $99
- Valve hardware engineer Steve Cardinali says the driver will be released first because it “doesn’t have RAM.”
- Steam Controller, Machine and Frame were delayed earlier this year
Valve has announced that it will release the Steam Controller next month, ahead of the Steam Machine, amid the current RAM shortage crisis.
Earlier this week, Valve confirmed that the Steam Controller will launch on May 4, 2026 for $99 / £85 / $149 AUD.
The news follows a blog post in February, in which the company delayed its plans to release the Steam Machine, Frame and Controller in early 2026, citing “memory and storage shortages.”
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“When we announced these products in November, we planned to be able to share specific pricing and release dates by now,” Valve said at the time.
“But the memory and storage shortages you’ve probably heard about across the industry have increased rapidly since then. Limited availability and rising prices for these critical components mean we need to review our shipping schedule and exact pricing.”
Valve noted, however, that its goal of shipping all three products in the first half of the year had not changed, but now the Steam Controller will arrive first.
In a new interview with Polygon, Valve hardware engineer Steve Cardinali explained that because the controller doesn’t have RAM, he’s in a position to release it soon.
“This has no RAM and it’s not that complicated to start getting out the door for us,” Cardinali said. “We’re ready for it. We wanted to increase the quantity so we can try to serve everyone who wants one at launch, but demand may far exceed our expectations.”
However, despite the recent RAM shortage and the fact that the Steam Controller will be released first, the hardware engineer claims that there was never a plan to release all three pieces of hardware together.
“From the beginning, these were all different products. We had always thought, obviously, we wanted them to work well together, especially the Steam Machine and the Steam Controller, they are in many ways a match made in heaven, but we didn’t see the need to ship the Controller at the same time as the Machine,” Cardinali said.
“The only really tough deadline is that we didn’t want to ship the Steam Machine before the Steam Controller. We want to have that for the Steam Machine… It was never actually the plan to ship them together unless it landed well that way. So there’s no point in delaying it while we work on the other things.”
TechRadar Core Tech editor-in-chief Matt Hanson reviewed the Steam Controller and called it a “huge improvement over the flawed original, offering some great innovations while also coming with a more conventional, user-friendly design.”
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