- The Steam Controller will officially release on May 4 for $99
- Valve hardware engineer Steve Cardinali says the controller is releasing first because “there’s no RAM in it”
- The Steam Controller, Machine, and Frame were delayed earlier this year
Valve has announced that it will release the Steam Controller next month, before the Steam Machine, amid the ongoing 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 “the memory and storage shortages”.
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“When we announced these products in November, we planned on being able to share specific pricing and launch dates by now,” Valve said at the time.
“But the memory and storage shortages you’ve likely heard about across the industry have rapidly increased since then. The limited availability and growing prices of these critical components mean we must revisit our exact shipping schedule and 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.
Speaking in a new interview with Polygon, Valve hardware engineer Steve Cardinali explained that because the controller doesn’t have RAM, it’s in a position to launch it soon.
“This doesn’t have RAM in it, and it’s not as complicated to start getting out the door for us,” Cardinali said. “We’re ready for it. We wanted to build up quantity so that we could try to address everybody who wants one at launch, but it’s possible that the demand for it far exceeds our expectations.”
However, despite recent RAM shortages and the fact that the Steam Controller is releasing to market first, the hardware engineer states that there was never a plan to launch all three pieces of hardware together.
“From the beginning, these were all different products. We had always thought, obviously we want them to work together well — especially the Steam Machine and the Steam Controller, they’re in a lot of ways a pair made in heaven — but we saw no need to ship the Controller at the same time as the Machine,” Cardinali said.
“The really only hard deadline is we didn’t want to ship the Steam Machine before the Steam Controller. We want to have that out for the Steam Machine… It wasn’t really ever the plan to ship them together unless it landed nicely that way. So there’s no point in holding it back while we work through the other stuff.”
TechRadar’s managing editor, core tech, Matt Hanson, reviewed the Steam Controller, calling it a “massive improvement over the flawed original, offering some great innovations while also coming with a more conventional – and user-friendly – design.”
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