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Steam Machines have returned: all the news about Valve’s new hardware universe
Valve signals it won’t subsidize the Steam Machine.It’s not going to be a sort of subsidized device, like Valve is not going into this thinking we’re going to eat a big loss on this so that we can group market share or category or anything like that, correct?Valve’s Pierre-Loup Griffais:No, it’s more in line with…
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Valve signals it won’t subsidize the Steam Machine.
It’s not going to be a sort of subsidized device, like Valve is not going into this thinking we’re going to eat a big loss on this so that we can group market share or category or anything like that, correct?
Valve’s Pierre-Loup Griffais:
No, it’s more in line with what you might expect from the current PC market. Obviously our goal is for it to be a good deal at that level of performance, and then you have features that are really hard to build if you are making your own gaming PC from parts.
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Here come the third-party Steam Machine accessories.
Jsaux was early to ride the Steam Deck wave, and it’s even earlier to committing to the Steam Machine. Months ahead of its launch, Jsaux shared renders of two screen-equipped face plates, one of which seems similar to Valve’s not-for-sale e-paper prototype. My big question: how will these be powered?
Steam Machine and Steam Frame: your questions answered
Image: Kristen Radtke / The Verge, Valve
Valve wants to let your docked Steam Deck automatically update itself like the Steam Machine.
Valve hardware engineer Yazan Aldehayyat won’t promise anything, but he told us “that is something we are really interested in supporting” during our big Valve trip. It’s not as simple as it sounds, he says: What if users pull it off the dock mid-update?
It could fail and you’d be stuck in that state forever, right? Or you lose Wi-Fi connection and be in a weird state. There’s all kinds of situations where we want to be able to have acceptable behavior if that happens.
The Steam Machine feels like the TV gaming PC I’ve always wanted
Image: Valve
The morning of Monday, October 27th, I started my workweek by asking my colleagues at The Verge for advice on buying a gaming PC. I wanted a small, portable, and semi-powerful machine that could easily sit beneath my living room TV and occasionally move over to my desk to play games or even use for work. My dream was to find something as easy to use as the Steam Deck, which has become my primary gaming device due to its simplicity and massive catalog of PC games.
Just two days later, I walked into Valve’s headquarters and was introduced to the new Steam Machine, a gaming PC and console hybrid. It checked basically every box I was looking for.
Steam Frame doesn’t let you see the real world in color because Valve’s considering your wallet.
Valve’s marketing video for Steam Frame is a bit misleading — its monochrome cameras mean you’d see the world around the screen in shades of grey, not color. But I’m hoping that means affordable. Valve’s Jeremy Selan told us:
While this is a premium headset, we did want to be cost considerate because we’re really trying to make this accessible to as many people as we can.
The Steam Controller doesn’t have a headphone jack, and Valve told us why — kind of.
“This is both a peripheral controller for a PC as well as the Steam Machine or whatever else you want to plug it into,” said hardware engineer Steve Cardinali. “Most of the time, your audio will be coming from that, not directly your controller.” Because of that, “we just didn’t feel like it was necessary.”
I still wish it was there; I use the DualSense’s headphone jack for quiet audio at night all the time. Otherwise, I really like the controller.
Valve is making microSD cards the next game cartridges
The Steam Deck changed the way I buy and play games. Just like how the Nintendo Switch blew me away with how it let me play the latest and greatest Nintendo games on the go and on a TV, the Steam Deck has drawn me in with how it offers a vast catalog of PC games that I can play portably or on a big screen. And with the Steam Deck’s microSD card slot, I can add a lot more storage just by tossing in a tiny memory card, meaning I can bring even more games around with me on the device.
But with its new Steam Machine PC and Steam Frame VR headset, Valve is about to make any microSD cards you use with the Steam Deck even more useful. Like the Steam Deck, both of those devices also run Valve’s Linux-based SteamOS operating system, and both have microSD card slots, too. So if the microSD card you’ve plugged into your Steam Deck is formatted for SteamOS, any games you’ve stored on it will be immediately visible by the Steam Machine and Steam Frame as well.
Steam Frame vs. Meta Quest 3.
I brought our Quest 3 to Valve’s offices just in case we’d be seeing the Steam Frame, formerly known as Deckard — and it paid off! I didn’t have time to directly compare optics, but I’d say comfort is superior. It’s noticeably smaller, with controllers that are bigger.
A look inside the Steam Machine.
What’s inside Valve’s six-inch cube? We got a dozen photos of the console’s guts, including all six sides.
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Gallery: Peek inside Valve’s new Steam Machine with our photos. Photo by Everything Time Studio / The VergeValve didn’t announce Half-Life 3, so why all the secrecy?
Valve wants Half-Life: Alyx to work well standalone on Steam Frame
Image: Valve
When I tried Half-Life: Alyx streaming from a PC to Valve’s new Steam Frame VR headset, I was blown away; thanks to the Frame’s dedicated wireless adapter and a cool trick Valve calls “foveated streaming,” I didn’t detect any latency as I explored an industrial building and fought some head crabs.
But the Frame also has an Arm chip inside, meaning it can run games locally. While I didn’t get to test playing Half-Life: Alyx that way, based on comments Valve gave to other publications, it seems like Valve is optimistic that it might be able to make the game run well when played standalone.
Steam Deck Verified = Steam Machine Verified.
According to Valve, games are already Steam Deck Verified, they’ll “automatically be verified on Steam Machine.” There will be a Steam Frame Verified program, too.
Up close with the Steam Machine and Steam Controller.
Since people seem interested on our social media channels: Valve really does have a giant valve at HQ! A huge red wheel that spins in place on a huge screw, anyhow. It’s fun to throw, heavy, lots of inertia keeps it spinning. No word on what happens if you let the Steam out.
Dbrand is turning the Steam Machine into a Companion Cube
Dbrand did the thing: it announced a Portal Companion Cube skin for Valve’s boxy new Steam Machine, allowing you to turn the new PC / console hybrid into a facsimile of gaming’s most loyal sidekick.
The Companion Cube skin is limited edition, and will release some time in 2026, though we don’t know if it will launch alongside the Steam Machine itself, which is targeting early 2026. There’s no price yet either.
Valve isn’t talking about Steam Deck 2 because the right chip doesn’t exist.
Griffais says:
“We’re not interested in getting to a point where it’s 20 or 30 or even 50% more performance at the same battery life. We want something a little bit more demarcated than that.”
Valve will let you side load APKs onto the Steam Frame.
APKs can also be side-loadable just like any non-Steam applications on Steam Deck. We expect that VR APKs that don’t leverage proprietary APls to just work.
Valve thinks Arm has ‘potential’ for SteamOS handhelds, laptops, and more
Valve won’t talk about a Steam Deck 2. It probably wants to keep the attention on its just-announced living room console, comfy new controller, and Arm-based headset instead. But now that the company is preparing to sell an Arm headset, one that can even run Android apps, there’s an obvious question. Is Arm a one-off experiment for Valve, or might it power future SteamOS hardware?
Valve software engineer Pierre-Loup Griffais makes it sound like the sky’s the limit. I don’t want to oversell what he said — he was excited about the potential, not any specific devices, and you’ll see that in more context when we publish the interview later this week.
Valve is welcoming Android games into Steam
Image: The Verge
You can think of the just-announced Steam Frame as a wireless VR headset for your PC, or a Steam Deck for your face. But another way to think about it is that Valve is finally entering the mobile realm. The Frame doesn’t just run Windows games on its Arm-based Qualcomm Snapdragon chip — Valve will now support and encourage developers to bring their Android apps to Steam as well.
It’ll try to make some of them first-class citizens, too, Valve engineer Jeremy Selan tells The Verge. “From the user’s perspective, our preference is that they don’t even have to think about it, they just have their titles on Steam, they download them and hit play.”
Valve has no news about Steam Deck 2 — because it’s still waiting for the right chip
Photo by Vjeran Pavic / The Verge
Valve enters the console wars
Image: Kristen Radtke / The Verge, Valve
On the 15th floor of an upscale office building in Bellevue, Washington, security guards line the halls. They’re here to make sure we don’t stray — because I’m visiting Valve’s headquarters, a place few journalists ever get to go. The guards help escort me to a tiny demo room, where a pair of Valve engineers show me their pride and joy: a glowing 6-inch cube, barely bigger than a box of Kleenex, that they hope might be the future of video game consoles.
For a moment, I feel like I’m watching history repeat itself. Twelve years ago, in a different Valve office half a mile away, the maker of Half-Life and Portal showed me what ultimately became one of the biggest technology flops of the decade, a new gaming system called the Steam Machine. Back then, it also looked like Valve was building the video game console of the future. The company had combined its vibrant Steam storefront with the flexibility of PC hardware — a formula that appeared poised to wrest the living room away from Xbox and PlayStation dominance.
Our first look at the Steam Machine, Valve’s ambitious new game console
The Steam Machine. The Steam Frame is a surprising new twist on VR
Valve is about to launch a new virtual reality headset, and with it, a comprehensive new approach to what a VR device should be. Most VR headsets I’ve tried have ended up collecting dust after the novelty wore off, and I thought I had sworn off VR for good. But after trying Valve’s new headset for myself at the company’s headquarters, I was nearly ready to put down my credit card before I walked out the door.
The new headset is called the Steam Frame, and it’s trying to do several things at once. It’s a standalone VR headset with a smartphone-caliber Arm chip inside that lets you play flat-screen Windows games locally off the onboard storage or a microSD card. But the Frame’s arguably bigger trick is that it can stream games directly to the headset, bypassing your unreliable home Wi-Fi by using a short-range, high-bandwidth wireless dongle that plugs into your gaming PC. And its new controllers are packed with all the buttons and inputs you need for both flat-screen games and VR games.
Valve’s new Steam Controller might be my dream controller
One of the best parts of the Steam Deck is its many different controls, and how you can customize them to let you do whatever you want with every single one of your games. Now, Valve is bringing that same level of flexibility into a new gamepad. I recently got to try it at Valve’s headquarters, and it feels like the controller I’ve always wanted.
Today, Valve announced the second-generation Steam Controller. It’s a Bluetooth controller that works with any device that runs Steam, including Valve’s new Steam Machine PC and Steam Frame VR headset, and comes with a puck that serves as a low-latency wireless connector and doubles as a charging station. It will launch in early 2026 for a price that’s yet to be announced, though Valve is aiming to make the price competitive with other controllers with “advanced inputs,” according to hardware engineer Steve Cardinali.
Here’s the secret Steam Machine that Valve probably used to test headsets.
Jon Bringus isn’t saying how he obtained this unicorn, but it looks completely legit!
It self-IDs as a “Valve Steambox,” fires up a Steam screen, makes Steam hardware sounds, and natively pairs with Steam Controllers! Intriguing components inside, like a presence-sensing front panel that fires up its iconic ring light. It appears to have a VirtualLink USB-C port, so it probably helped Valve designers test wired VR headsets before that standard failed.
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