Valve stated that rising prices in the global memory and storage markets increased the cost of the Steam Frame, preventing the headset from achieving its originally planned lower price. The current price of the Steam Frame is $1,059.
Valve developer Jeremy Selan stated that the company initially hoped to launch a much more affordable device, but changes in the global memory and storage markets affected Valve in the same way as other manufacturers. The team put significant effort into keeping the price at its current level.
Valve has not confirmed whether the Steam Frame is sold at cost. The company previously stated that the Steam Machine, a living room PC priced at $1,049, was sold at cost. Valve developer Pierre-Loup Griffais hinted that the pricing of the Steam Frame roughly aligns with the cost of its components.
Regarding why they didn't lower the price by reducing memory, Griffais explained that product development was already at a relatively advanced stage, making it impossible to make thorough adjustments to the overall design.
When the Steam Frame was first announced, Valve had planned to keep its price below that of the Valve Index. The Valve Index launched at $999 and required a direct PC connection; the Steam Frame features a wireless design and can stream PC content via Wi-Fi or the included 6GHz USB wireless adapter.
The Steam Frame is also equipped with a Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 chip and 16GB of RAM, allowing it to run less demanding games independently. Valve stated that this amount of memory helped the team achieve native performance for Half-Life: Alyx on the headset.
Valve believes that prices for other computing devices have risen simultaneously, giving them confidence in the current pricing of the Steam Frame. Griffais stated that products with similar memory capacities show similar price trends, and just as the Steam Machine and comparable PCs changed within the same market environment, so too does the Steam Frame.