The big unknown that's been a popular topic of discussion is whether Valve locked in a long-running contract for the hardware before the RAM price increases happened. If they did, then they can probably offer favorable prices, and they're probably sitting pretty. If not, then they won't.

My guess is that they didn't, since:

• They announced that they would hold off on announcing pricing due to still working on figuring out the hardware cost (which I suspect very likely includes the RAM situation).

• I'd bet that they have a high degree of risk in the number of units that the Steam Machine 2.0 will sell. The Steam Deck was an unexpectedly large success. Steam Machine 1.0 kinda flopped. Steam Machine 2.0 could go down either route. They probably don't want to contract to have a ton of units built and then have huge oversupply. Even major PC vendors like Dell and Lenovo got blindsided and were unprepared, and I suspect that they're in a much less-risky position to commit to a given level of sales and doing long-running purchases than Valve is.

I've even seen some articles propose that the radical increase in RAM prices might cause Steam Machine 2.0's release to be postponed, if Valve didn't have long-running contracts in place and doesn't think that it can succeed at a higher price point than they anticipated.

Pricing