Apologies for yet another downbeat post about PC component shortages. But you don't often get insight from as significant a player—and one with quite the same track record for a certain brand of transparency—as Valve. It turns out the problem for the company regarding memory and storage for the new Steam Machine hasn't just been cost, but just getting hold of supply at all is a major challenge.If you haven't already watched Andy and Jacob's recent interview with Valve's Steam Machine reps Pierre-Loup Griffais and Yazan Aldehayyat, may I suggest you get that done pronto, it's well worth a watch. But among other takeaways from the chat is insight into just how acute the memory and storage supply crisis has become.You might have thought that it's just a pricing issue. In other words, paying more fixes the problem. But apparently not."Things that were a year ago, two years ago, commodity things," Griffais explains, "you'd just pay the normal price for it and it's all good, now you have to negotiate really hard just to secure a few thousand. And there's so many more people in line in front of you."Griffais says Valve saw evidence of this problem before it fully impacted retail memory and SSD prices. "Most people have started to see this in the past six months. But we've been dealing with it for eight months to a year.The Steam Machine is a lovely little thing. But it's very hard to justify at $1,049. (Image credit: Future)"Compared to the retail channel, we see —we're talking directly to suppliers of things that will get built and then will get put on shelves, and so we've had to deal with it a little bit ahead of everyone else in the public.""It's a really weird climate right now for memory and storage," Griffais concludes. Indeed. Somehow, Valve still managed to build up sufficient stock to get the Steam Machine launched. But as we've already covered, it was touch and go for a bit. At the beginning of the year, it wasn't clear that they would have any Steam Machines to sell.As it is, the Steam Machine has launched, but at that painful $1,049 price. You have to assume Valve would have loved to have pushed the Machine under $1,000, just for the optics of a three-digit sticker. So the fact that they went with the uglier $1,049 figure probably speaks volumes about just how tight the whole thing was.Undoubtedly, it's all a bit of a pity. But until, and indeed if, the memory and storage market returns to something resembling normality, there's little to be done. We just have to suck it up. And maybe pay even more attention to saving money on the best deals for other components. May I suggest monitors? There are at least some stellar deals on those of late.