Not quite four years on from the industry-bending success of the Steam Deck , Valve is back with its most ambitious collection of gaming hardware yet. Today, the pioneering PC gaming company is taking the wraps off the Arm-powered wireless Steam Frame gaming headset, a new Steam Controller that takes its design cues from the Steam Deck, and something I never would have guessed, given its past failures : a new compact, cube-shaped Steam Machine gaming desktop, rocking some more semi-custom AMD silicon.
Valve invited us to its headquarters for some early hands-on time with all this new hardware, and I came away mostly impressed. These are big swings for a company that has a tiny number of employees compared to competitors like Epic Games or Microsoft.
But after the huge success of the Steam Deck (and its many pricier copycats), Valve has firmly established itself on the hardware front. Its controller and Linux-powered gaming desktop have a good shot at success if the price is right (Valve isn’t talking pricing on any of its new hardware yet).
For those more interested in traditional PC gaming, we’re breaking the cube-shaped Steam Machine and new Steam Controller out into its own story [here]. We’ll dig into the new headset in detail below, because as much as we love desktops and controllers, the Steam Frame headset is both the most interesting and complex of its new devices, and the one that might be the hardest sell.
(Image credit: Tom's Hardware)
But the company’s secret weapon might be one of its simplest features, which applies to both the Steam Frame headset and the Steam Machine: the ability to pull the microSD card from your Steam Deck and insert it into either of the company’s new SteamOS machines and get instant access to your library and saved games. We’ll have to see how well that trick works once we get review hardware, but it sounds like a great way to get gamers to further buy into your hardware ecosystem and your game store.
Steam Frame: Arm meets SteamOS in a feature-packed gaming headset meant for more than VR
(Image credit: Tom's Hardware)
The Steam Frame headset, formerly known in leaks as its codename, Deckard , is the real wildcard in Valve's new lineup, as well as the most complex. Aside from, perhaps, Valve's own Half-Life Alyx, compelling, high-production AAA VR games haven't materialized, despite a decade of hardware pushes from Valve, HTC, and most notably Meta.
Valve's solution? The Steam Frame (and its controllers) are designed to play VR titles, as well as traditional PC and mobile games in a resizable in-headset window that actually felt like a big-screen experience during my hands-on time with the headset. Valve engineers told me the company thinks of the Steam Frame less as a VR headset and more as “a new way to play your entire Steam library.” The Frame can do this both by streaming titles wirelessly from your PC, or running them internally on its built-in Arm-based Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 chip.
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