The recent announcement from Valve of a new slate of hardware products has excited players, but while a revamped Steam Controller and an updated virtual reality headset, the Steam Frame, have drawn plenty of attention, the biggest buzz is around the new generation of Steam Machines.
Designed to sit under your TV as comfortably as it would under a monitor, these are micro PCs—but only because Valve seems shy of branding them consoles.
The new Steam Machines are Valve's second attempt at launching a dedicated device to bring the PC into the living room. The first generation Steam Machines launched a decade ago, in November 2015, and while that iteration ultimately flopped, the marketplace in 2025 is much different.
The Steam Deck has been a huge success, inspiring a whole fleet of gaming handhelds—with even Xbox joining the party—and PC gaming as a whole is in a much stronger position.
So, when the announcement video for this new product family went to great lengths to explain that the new Steam Machine is still a PC and not a console, it shouldn't be too much of a surprise. Valve makes and sells PC games; here's a PC to play those games on. Except … c'mon, look at it: in every way that counts, the new Steam Machine effectively is a console—and that's no bad thing.
Courtesy of Valve
Meet In the Middle
Pop quiz: what defines a games console? Traditionally, they've been devices manufactured by a single company, with a uniform hardware design, intended to play games developed specifically for that machine, most commonly on a big screen television.
The benefits include fixed specifications meaning developers know exactly what they're building games for, and buyers knowing that any game they buy for that system will run (catastrophic bugs aside, of course). Roughly every half-decade, they might buy a new generation model.
What then defines a PC, gaming or otherwise? Almost the opposite—a typically desk-bound rig, built from whatever parts the user fancies, and when they need a bit more power, they can swap out the graphics card, or RAM, or even core CPU rather than buying a whole new rig. PC gamers aren't beholden to a particular storefront to get their games, allowing them to shop around for better prices. The downside is that having no fixed specs invites bugs or crashes if some combo of parts doesn't like each other—and even a single component can be thousands of dollars.