Everyone assumed the price tag would be the problem. Valve‘s new box isn’t cheap, and plenty of people wrote it off before it shipped.
Turns out the early numbers tell a different story.
According to an analysis from Boiling Steam, which is built off Steam’s list of top revenue-earning products, the Steam Machine is moving somewhere between 12,000 and 15,000 units every week. Valve doesn’t publish official sales figures, so these are estimates and calculations, not numbers straight from the company.
Second on the whole platform, right now
The device currently sits in second place on Steam’s global top-grossing list. It’s behind Counter-Strike 2 and ahead of Palworld.
Work backward from the estimated weekly revenue of those titles and you land at roughly $10 million to $18 million a week for the Steam Machine alone.
What the average buyer is actually picking
The analysis folds in both available versions of the hardware. About 65% of buyers go for the 512 GB model, and the remaining 35% opt for the 2 TB version.
That puts the average purchase price at $1,154.
Run those numbers out over a full year and annual sales could land anywhere from 600,000 to 750,000 units. The analysts add the obvious caveat: new products tend to see a rush of demand right after launch that cools off later.
Windows drivers just widened the door
The recent release of official Windows drivers should help too. Users can now install Microsoft‘s OS and get access to games and apps that SteamOS doesn’t support yet.
That includes some multiplayer titles with demanding anti-cheat systems, the kind that have long been a dead end on Linux-based setups.
And if you’re worried about the tradeoff, don’t be. Testing so far shows performance between SteamOS and Windows 11 differs only slightly across most games.
For a box people expected to stall out of the gate, sitting one spot below Counter-Strike 2 is a strange place to be stuck.
