Valve is about to challenge the Xbox and PlayStation on their home turf. Ten years to the month after Valve’s original Steam Machines went on sale, the company is announcing… the Steam Machine.
I flew to Valve’s headquarters to try the company’s new PC-based game console, alongside a brand-new Steam Controller and the new Steam Frame gaming headset. 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.
Here’s what the new Steam Machine is all about.
Photo by Everything Time Studio / The Verge
The promise
Shipping early 2026 in every region where the Steam Deck is sold today, Valve’s new living room box is best thought of as a far more powerful, stationary version of the same technology. It’s a 6-inch cube that runs Windows games, but without Windows at the helm. Like the Steam Deck, it runs Valve’s Linux-based SteamOS operating system, using a compatibility layer called Proton to make games think they’re running on Windows and translate their API calls.
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.
But the Steam Machine has two things the Steam Deck does not: raw power, and the promise that you’ll never be waiting around for a game to update. “The Steam Machine has the ability to keep all your software, your OS, your games, and your cloud saves updated in the background … so the games are always ready for you to play,” says Valve hardware engineer Yazan Aldehayyat.
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.
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