Everyone currently holding a Steam Machine reservation should get an option to buy before the end of this year, according to a new update from Valve. The company began shipping at the end of June, right on the summer window it committed to, and is now fulfilling orders daily by sending purchase emails out in the order people landed in the queue after randomization.
Reservation queues and waitlists are handled per product and per region, which means they move at different speeds depending on demand. Valve says it has already reached the end of the reservation queue for some products in some regions and has started pulling people off the corresponding waitlists. No one on a waitlist is jumping ahead of an existing reservation holder, though, since Valve only dips into a waitlist once that particular queue runs dry.
Valve also owned up to a misstep with the first group moved off a waitlist, who were sent an option-to-order email automatically without an intermediate step. Anyone coming off a waitlist from here on will first get a message confirming they’ve been added to the reservation queue, with the purchase email following sometime after that. It’s the same queue system Valve has been refining on the Steam Controller side since May.
Once a purchase email does land, there’s a 72 hour window to complete the order before Valve moves on to the next person in line. That applies to everyone who gets one, so the inbox tied to the reservation is the one to watch.
Two smaller updates came alongside the queue news. FSR 4.1 is now available on Proton Experimental for titles that support the FSR upgrade path, and the CAD file for Steam Machine’s external geometry is now available to download from Valve’s GitLab.
Steam Machine pricing starts at $1,049, and Valve has been filling in the gaps since launch with things like an official setup guide video. Our own Steam Machine review publishes tomorrow, Wednesday, July 29, after two weeks of testing.
