Valve Unveils Steam Machine: A Powerful Living Room Gaming Console

"...Valve is about to challenge the Xbox and PlayStation on their home turf...."

"...It’s the culmination of Valve’s hardware and software efforts over the last decade, and it looks a lot like the leaks that have been coming out over the past year...."

"...If that sounds like a huge compromise, you should know that countless happy Steam Deck users disagree...."

"...The Steam Deck has dramatically outsold Windows handhelds through word of mouth alone, because Linux now runs Windows games better than Windows, and because Windows is far from the Steam Deck’s pick-up-and-play console experience...."

"...I’ve heard many lapsed gamers say the Steam Deck brought them back...."

"...While the Steam Deck is more powerful than a Nintendo Switch, it’s nowhere near a PS5...."

"...Big-budget games are beginning to leave it behind, and even the Nintendo Switch 2 can provide better 4K-upscaled TV graphics in its docked mode...."

"...The Steam Machine is Valve’s answer, bringing the Deck experience to your TV with far more powerful guts...."

"...Valve says it offers six times the power of a Steam Deck, and it looks like it’ll offer at least PS5-level performance and possibly beat the PS5 Pro...."

"...These are unusual components for a gaming PC, but they might work well together!..."

"...While I didn’t have time for robust testing at Valve’s headquarters, my first impressions were promising...."

"...It looked nice and crisp from about 9 feet away...."

"...The prototype didn’t do nearly as well at native 4K — just 24fps average — but consoles generally don’t play the most demanding games at native 4K, either...."

"...I also benched with the same 720p settings I use to test every handheld and saw a solid 131fps, though the low resolution looked pretty ugly on a 4K TV!..."

"...How did Valve fit PS5 power into a box around half the size of a PS5 at just 3.8 liters, including an internal power supply so you don’t need a separate brick?..."

"...When Valve hands me a peeled-apart Steam Machine to let me peek inside, the answer is: there’s almost no wasted space within...."

"...Aldehayyat says the team designed the entire Steam Machine around its cooling system — starting with a whisper-quiet 120mm PC fan with custom blade geometry...."

"...“We probably have more computational fluid dynamics time on this than an F1 team in a calendar year,” he jokes...."

"...“We have a lot of wind tunnel time on it as well.”..."

"...It’s all sandwiched together into an incredibly dense, weighty package where the main gaps are all dedicated to airflow: the space around the massive heatsink’s fins, the vents on the bottom, and the multiple vents in front...."

"...Aldehayyat says Valve knew it couldn’t count on a lot of airflow in the living room, so it designed a lot of redundancy...."

"...“It’s really hard to block every single one of those vents.”..."

"...Plus, those vents on the front are where the Steam Machine’s swappable magnetic front panel lives...."

"...While the basic design is plain black, Valve shows me a wood panel that gives the Steam Machine a Fractal vibe and a Team Fortress 2-themed panel, and I even spot a panel with an embedded e-paper display which reveals that the Steam Machine is codenamed “Fremont” after all...."

"...Valve won’t necessarily sell any of those extra panels, but says it’ll release the CAD files so you can design and 3D print your own...."

"...“I’m sure someone will make a [Portal] Companion Cube out of this, but we did not,” Valve engineer Steve Cardinali tells us when we ask...."

"...Below the panel, Valve also has a customizable RGB light bar that it plans to turn into a progress indicator for downloads and updates...."

"...And this Steam Machine will finally be (optionally) sold with a gamepad that’s both familiar and worthy of playing PC games from the couch...."

"...The new Steam Controller is no longer a bulbous experiment in precision but now a comfortable, familiar, and powerful twist on a traditional gamepad (read my colleague Jay Peters’ story for more)...."

"...The downside of Valve’s impressive sandwich is that the Steam Machine isn’t really upgradable beyond the SSD and — if you dig deep — the 16GB of memory, which does come on standard laptop memory sticks...."

"...But the upside is an incredibly tiny game console that can alternatively double as a full desktop PC...."

"...You should be able to plug in just about anything — including Valve’s new 6GHz dongle that gives the console a direct wireless connection to the Steam Frame headset — and you can install Windows if you really want...."

"...We’re holding a subscriber-exclusive AMA today, November 12th, at 3PM ET...."

"...Drop your questions here and we’ll do our best to answer them...."

"...If this exact Steam Machine is not your cup of tea, the company hints that other versions might be available through partners in the future...."

"...While Valve won’t repeat history, letting companies go wild and create a ragtag band of various kinds of Steam Box like it did a decade ago, Valve says it’s willing to let end users try desktop SteamOS on their own PCs — and selectively work with companies, like it did with Lenovo, to bring future Steam Machines to market...."

"...But partners probably will want to see how Valve’s own Steam Machine fares first, designer Pierre-Loup Griffais suggests to me...."

"...In the two weeks since I set foot in Valve’s headquarters, there’s only been one big question on my mind: What will this cost?..."

"...Will Valve price it like a console, putting the Steam Machine toe-to-toe with PS5 Pro?..."

"...Or will it be priced like a PC, making buyers weigh a heftier price against the opportunity to tap the PC’s wider library of games?..."

"...Valve says it hasn’t finalized pricing yet...."

"...But when I explicitly ask if the console will cost more than a PS5 Pro, the answer is: “Steam Machine’s pricing is comparable to a PC with similar specs.”..."

"...When I listen to my interview audio, I find an additional hint from Griffais: “We intend for it to be positioned closer to the entry level of the PC space, but to be very competitive with a PC you could build yourself from parts.”..."

"...Poking around the web, I find I could probably assemble a computer with this performance for $800, not including labor...."

"...But it could easily consume half the room under my TV...."

"...A compact system with a similar GPU can cost $1,000 without storage, memory, operating system, or a gamepad...."

"...But hey, everything about buying video games is getting more confusing and expensive these days...."

"...If Valve can deliver a pick-up-and-play console that supports decades of inexpensive PC games, I know people who’ll put down PC amounts of money to get it...."