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Valve’s Steam Machine Starts At $1,049, And The Price Isn’t The Only Problem Worrying Fans







The long-awaited Steam Machine console is now available to pre-order ahead of its June 30th launch date. Sort of. The 512 GB model starts at $1,049, and it gets up to $1,428 for the 2 TB model with a controller. You wouldn’t be alone in thinking that’s pretty pricey for what Valve calls “an extension of PC gaming,” but those that are still interested have yet another hurdle: the reservation system. 

In order to get a Steam Machine at launch, you’ll need to essentially be one of the lucky ones drawn from the waitlist. You have until June 25th at 10 AM PST to sign up for the wait list. At that time, there will be a one-time randomized drawing to select those that will be added to the reservation queue, allowing you to make a purchase starting June 29th — throughout the remainder of 2026. The unlucky ones will also get an email, but this one will say that Valve will let them know when more units are available, which would likely start in 2027. 

“In theory, this deters bots from hammering the reservations faster than any real human and securing units for resellers to sell at inflated prices,” Valve stated. As such, you can only order one Steam Machine per household — and Valve will be checking the shipping address for duplicate entries. It’s frustrating, but with scalpers buying up Pokémon cards, gaming consoles, and esports event tickets, it’s easy to see Valve’s reasoning.

Why is the Steam Machine more expensive than predicted?

Paying over $1,000 seems a bit overwhelming for some gamers — especially those that expected the Steam Machine to start around half that price. Valve’s not saying was the original asking price was, but last December some predicted it’d be around $700 to $800 based on the rising cost of its components for PCs. Unfortunately, over 6 months later, it’s now $1,049 minimum to get this console-PC hybrid with a 512 GB NVMe SSD card — and it doesn’t even come with a controller at that price. Valve admitted the original price goal is “no longer viable” as the cost of RAM and storage components continues to rise. Even more troublesome, Valve was unable to find these components at all in some cases, which is another reason it turned to the lottery system due to a limited launch quality.

The memory chip shortage — due to AI companies requiring more and more storage and RAM– has impacted the video game industry as a whole (and it’s not the only one). In 2027, Xbox is expected to pay five times the current price for storage, resulting in multiple price hikes for its struggling consoles. The Nintendo Switch 2 has also increased in price multiple times as the memory shortage continues. Said Valve engineer Yazan Aldehayyat to Eurogamer: “I think we were aware of the market trends of pricing going up, but I don’t think anybody really expected or predicted the extent to which they were going up and [are] still going up.” If you want to save some money, SlashGear built an alternative PC.





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Measuring Political Violence in America: A Language Model Experiment


Another day, another politically motivated attack in the United States.

This morning’s shooting at a Dallas ICE detention facility – where a sniper killed two detainees and wounded another before taking his own life prompted me to revisit a question that’s been troubling me: Is political violence actually increasing in America, or does it just feel that way?

To explore this, I’ve conducted what I’ll call a methodological experiment.

Rather than relying on traditional datasets, I’ve used ChatGPT and Claude to construct a synthetic index of political violence in the US since 1945. Let me be absolutely clear: this isn’t conventional data. It’s data generated through language models, with all the limitations that implies.

The Methodology (and Its Limitations)

Here’s what I did: I asked both ChatGPT and Claude to generate lists of politically motivated violent incidents since 1945, then had them score each incident’s severity on a scale where 50 represents a “normal” level.

The models assessed both casualties and symbolic significance, and I used them to cross-check each other’s work. I then quality-checked the output myself and categorised perpetrators by political affiliation where this was clearly established.

This approach is, admittedly, unorthodox. Language models are trained on existing texts and may reflect biases in their training data. They might overweight highly publicised events or recent incidents that featured prominently in their training corpus.

The “data” we’re looking at is essentially a structured synthesis of what these models have absorbed about American political violence.

Yet there’s something intriguing here. These models have processed vast amounts of information about political violence – news reports, academic studies, government documents. Their output might capture patterns that traditional datasets miss, though it might also amplify certain narratives or blind spots.

What the Synthetic Data Reveal

With those caveats firmly in mind, the patterns that emerge from this exercise are concerning. The model-generated index shows a clear upward trend in political violence over the past decade.

Looking at the breakdown by perpetrator ideology (where clearly established), the data suggest that right-wing extremist groups have been responsible for the majority of incidents in recent years, though we cannot draw conclusions about today’s attack whilst investigations are ongoing.

The synthetic data align with some empirical observations. Princeton’s Bridging Divides Initiative recorded over 600 incidents of threats and harassment against local officials in 2024 – a 74% increase from 2022. The University of Maryland found that in the first half of 2025, 35% of violent events targeted U.S. government personnel or facilities – more than twice the rate in 2024.

The Charlie Kirk Assassination and Recent Patterns

The September assassination of conservative activist Charlie Kirk marked a particularly dark moment.

The incident followed numerous recent acts of political violence, including the murder of Minnesota Democratic state Rep. Melissa Hortman and her husband, and two assassination attempts on President Trump in 2024.

What the synthetic data reveal is not just increased frequency but a shift in patterns. While overall levels of physical political violence remained low in 2024 compared to years prior, acts of vigilante violence grew as a proportion of all reported incidents.

We’re seeing less organised group violence and more lone-wolf attacks – a pattern that’s harder to predict and prevent.

The Epistemological Challenge

When we use language models to generate “data” about social phenomena, what exactly are we measuring? We’re essentially extracting structured information from the collective corpus of human writing about these events. It’s aggregating distributed information, but through an AI intermediary rather than traditional data collection methods.

This raises fascinating questions.

The models suggest that right-wing extremist violence has been responsible for a fairly large majority of U.S. domestic terrorism deaths since 2001. But how much of this reflects actual patterns versus the way these events are covered and discussed in the sources the models were trained on?

The synthetic data are, in a sense, a mirror of our collective discourse about political violence. They reflect not just what happened, but how we’ve talked about what happened. That’s both a limitation and, potentially, a feature – understanding the narrative landscape around political violence might be as important as counting incidents.

An Experimental Tool

I’ve built an interactive app (using the AI coding tool Lovable) based on this language model-generated violence index.

Users can explore the synthetic data, examine patterns across different time periods and perpetrator groups, and understand the methodology behind it. Think of it as an experiment in using AI to structure historical information rather than a definitive dataset.

The value isn’t in treating this as gospel truth, but in what it reveals about how these events are recorded, remembered, and synthesised in our collective digital memory.

When language models trained on our civilisation’s text output show rising political violence, it tells us something – even if that something is as much about narrative as about underlying reality.

This morning’s tragedy in Dallas reminds us that behind every data point – whether traditionally collected or AI-generated – there are real victims and real consequences. Understanding the patterns, however imperfectly, is the first step toward addressing them.

Try the tool here.





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