Last week, an intriguing gaming announcement happened and could potentially be game-changing. Meet the Steam Machine, Valve’s upcoming gaming PC console coming soon to a household near you.
The design is reminiscent of a larger Nintendo GameCube, with its 6-inch cube shape. It is a PC designed to rest next to your TV, runs SteamOS 3, and can run a different OS, install apps, games, etc., just as you would a normal PC, and access games via your Steam library. It can support 4K gaming at 60fps, has a customizable LED strip on the outside to display system status, and has its power supply built inside.
The Steam Machine is powered by a custom AMD Zen CPU up to 4.8GHz, a custom AMD RDNA GPU, 16GB of RAM, a choice of 512GB and 2TB storage options, and slots for high-speed micro SD cards. It also has a 1 Gbps Ethernet port, DisplayPort 1.4, HDMI 2.0, 1 USB-C, Bluetooth 5.3 support, and a total of 4 USB-A ports. But wait, Valve has more to offer than just a console.
Meet the Steam Frame, a lightweight gaming headset that appears to be a VR headset but also plays non-VR games. It’s more of a streaming-first PC, powered by a Snapdragon chip, and supports controller input for both PC and VR games. The headset offers 2 LCD panels with 2160 x 2160 resolution and 72-144Hz refresh rate in each eye, hi-fi audio, and 4 monochrome cameras for tracking.
And lastly, connecting them all is the Steam Controller. This is a new gaming controller, which is inspired by the layout of the portable Steam Deck console. It offers features such as trackpads and joysticks on both sides of the controller, a D-Pad on the left, the atypical 4-button layout on the right, 4 additional buttons spread across the front of the controller, 4 triggers on the rear bottom, 4 buttons on the top, and motors for haptics.
Interestingly enough, the idea of the Steam Machine sounds similar to what Microsoft’s vision for its next-gen Xbox would look like. Valve didn’t release any additional pricing information, but everything is set to arrive sometime in 2026. Hopefully, the wait is only 6 months to a year. As long as Valve’s hardware gets released before GTA 6, I think everyone will be happy.
