The common wisdom was that the cost would doom it. Valve’s new machine carries a steep price, and a good number of observers dismissed it well before launch day.
The early figures, though, are painting a very different picture.
Boiling Steam, whose analysis draws on Steam’s ranking of top revenue-earning products, estimates that the Steam Machine is selling in the range of 12,000 to 15,000 units per week. Because Valve keeps its official sales data private, these figures are estimates and calculations rather than company-reported numbers.
Currently number two across the entire platform
At the moment, the hardware holds the second spot on Steam’s worldwide top-grossing chart — trailing only Counter-Strike 2 while sitting above Palworld.
Reversing the math from the estimated weekly earnings of those games points to somewhere around $10 million to $18 million each week generated by the Steam Machine on its own.
Which model most people are choosing
The breakdown covers both editions of the device. Roughly 65% of purchasers pick the 512 GB configuration, while the other 35% go with the 2 TB variant.
That works out to an average sale price of $1,154.
Extend those figures across a whole year and yearly sales could fall anywhere between 600,000 and 750,000 units. The analysts note the familiar caveat: fresh products usually enjoy a surge of interest immediately after release that tapers off over time.
Windows drivers have opened things up further
The recent arrival of official Windows drivers is likely to give it another boost. Buyers can now load Microsoft’s operating system and reach games and applications that SteamOS still can’t run.
That covers certain multiplayer games relying on aggressive anti-cheat software — exactly the sort that have traditionally been off-limits on Linux-based systems.
As for any concern about the switch, there’s little cause for it. Tests to date indicate that the gap in performance between SteamOS and Windows 11 is only marginal in the majority of titles.
For a product widely predicted to stumble immediately, resting a single rung beneath Counter-Strike 2 is an unusual position to find itself in.