Valve has announced that the new Steam Controller will be available to purchase from May 4th.
Starting at 10 am Pacific / 1 pm Eastern / 6 pm UK, residents in the US, UK, Europe, Canada, Australia, Japan, South Korea, Hong Kong, and Taiwan will be able to buy the new controller, priced at $99 USD / $149 CAD / €99 / £85 / $149 AUD.
Back in February, Valve delayed the announcement of prices and release dates for the Steam Machine, Steam Frame, and Steam Controller amid the rapid rise in PC component costs.
Speaking with Polygon, Valve hardware engineer Steve Cardinali said that the company saw little sense in holding back the release of the Steam Controller while components like RAM remain in short supply.
“This doesn’t have RAM in it, and it’s not as complicated to start getting out the door for us,” Cardinali said. “We’re ready for it. We wanted to build up quantity so that we could try to address everybody who wants one at launch, but it’s possible that the demand for it far exceeds our expectations.”
While the ongoing component shortage has derailed Valve’s release plans, Cardinali claimed that the staggered hardware launch isn’t entirely out of step with their original launch plans.
“From the beginning, these were all different products,” Cardinali said. “We had always thought, obviously we want them to work together well — especially the Steam Machine and the Steam Controller, they’re in a lot of ways a pair made in heaven — but we saw no need to ship the Controller at the same time as the Machine.”
“The really only hard deadline is we didn’t want to ship the Steam Machine before the Steam Controller. We want to have that out for the Steam Machine… It wasn’t really ever the plan to ship them together unless it landed nicely that way. So there’s no point in holding it back while we work through the other stuff.”
Valve announced the Steam Controller in November 2025, alongside the Steam Machine and its standalone VR headset, the Steam Frame. Since then, it’s been reported that DRAM contracts have risen by more than 170%, owing largely to the massive demand from AI companies such as OpenAI.