[STEAM] Is Valve Finally Getting Ready To Launch The Steam Machine?

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Just this week, Valve launched the

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on its own, despite it initially being planned for launch at the same time as the

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and the

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. But, it looks like Valve has been getting a lot of shipments of 'game consoles'. Could this mean an imminent Steam Machine launch?

This all comes via

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user

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, who noticed the uptick in Valve's imports on NBD Data, a shipping analysis platform. It appears that over the last couple of weeks, Valve has received multiple shipments of mysterious 'game consoles' from China, which suggests the company is building up for a release sometime in the near future.



Valve is receiving a ton of “Game Consoles” these past couple weeks in their USA distribution warehouse..

— Brad ****** (@SadlyItsBradley)

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Even more..

so many…

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— Brad ****** (@SadlyItsBradley)

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It is entirely possible that these shipments are just a giant

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restock. After all, Valve's handheld has been out of stock for months at this point and a restock is probably coming at some point. However, even though some of the shipments that ****** spotted are a couple weeks old at this point, the Steam Deck is still sold out on Steam. And given that we talked to Valve last week and it doesn't seem like it's planning on launching a new handheld any time soon, the Steam Machine would be the best explanation.



It's important to take this all with a grain of salt, though. No matter how promising a bunch of console shipments looks, we won't actually know these are Steam Machines until Valve actually makes some kind of announcement. According to

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, which did a little bit more digging, though, it seems like the sheer scale of the shipments does mean Valve is planning something.

Valve has been delaying the Steam Machine all year, due to high RAM prices. If Valve was waiting for RAM to get back down to a normal price, we're not quite there yet. A 16GB kit of RAM will still set you back a good $250 on

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right now, so we're not quite in the clear yet. If Valve is getting ready to ship the Steam Machine now, I can't help but wonder whether or not it was able to secure a great deal on memory, or if it's just launching the Steam Machine for a higher price.

When

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, Valve engineer Pierre-Loup Griffais told us they're "trying to make sure to keep options open and to work with as many different manufacturers as we can." and that "from the get-go, we've been trying to make sure that we have many options there, and that's been proving really useful in this kind of climate, because we can work with all the big players and some of the smaller ones as well."

I guess we'll find out one way or another soon enough.

Jackie Thomas is the Hardware and Buying Guides Editor at IGN and the PC components queen. You can follow her

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