Of all the hardware announcements Valve made recently, the one that seems to be getting the most buzz in the circles I follow isn't their pretty cool looking Steam Frame VR headset, but the Steam Machine. It seems to be their idea to break into the console market with something that's still a PC, but much more focused. The first attempt at the idea was a flop and it's easy to see why, but it was also a wholly different idea and rather ill conceived from the start.
The Steam Deck was the first major win of their new direction. It hasn't sold like consoles, but has taken portable PC gaming from a tiny niche to just a niche and that's an accomplishment itself. Now they want to target the living room with something more powerful, but just as streamlined. People are excited on one hand, but there's also a lot of skepticism that it doesn't have the power to compete with consoles, despite costing more. A lot of this is warranted, but I think many critics might not be considering the whole picture and are judging it from the perspective of people it isn't aimed at.
As someone who builds his own gaming rigs and has since the 90s, Valve's already got me in their ecosystem and they'd probably be the first to say the Steam Machine isn't for me. My Steam library is obscenely large--and I say that more out of embarassment than as a flex--and like consoles, is designed to make little profit on its own, but to drive much more by bringing in more Steam users. The hardware isn't where the money is, it's the 30% cut they take off the top of every software sale.
Until recently, I probably would have ignored the Steam Machine entirely, but now have a reason to see what it can offer, my girlfriend Kristy. We met a few months ago and among many other things, I was attracted to her because she's a gamer. She's not a hardcore nutjob like me, but has played since she was young. Her platform is Xbox and she's been intrigued by PC gaming and the unique things it offers, but didn't know the best way to get into it. To long-time PC gamers, this may sound silly, but for the masses who just use a computer for work, the intimidation is real. She didn't want to game at a desk and wanted to use a controller on her TV, but didn't know how easy that is to do with PC now. Then like many, when it came to buying or building a rig, the immense variety of specs and prices just overwhelmed her. But now, she has a PC gaming sherpa!
My plan was to take my Ryzen G-based home server that I want to replace next year, put a used mid-tier GPU in it and give that to her to try out. If she liked it, we could build her something beefier if she wanted or she could use it for lower fidelity indie games and keep her Series X for AAA stuff. Then the Steam Machine fell out of the sky. A small, self-contained box that plugs into her TV and runs SteamOS, which makes PC gaming almost as easy as her Xbox? It's basically tailor-made for her!
Of course, the price is a big question mark and I'm certain the reason Valve hasn't said what it is yet is that RAM and storage are currently exploding in price as the AI bubble has sent demand through the roof. This could end up making the Steam Machine much more expensive than they planned or potentially cause them to eat a loss on it, at least initially. Valve has said that it won't be priced like a console, but more like an "entry-level PC" which is a nebulous term, but also one with some guardrails on it. I don't think it has to be as cheap as consoles to be successful, especially since the thing literally is a PC and they aren't putting any restrictions on what you can do with it, even installing Windows if you want. However, it also has to be able to go toe-to-toe with those consoles at least and that's where some skeptics have concerns.
It comes with a semi-custom AMD CPU and discrete GPU, both based on older generation technology that can't be upgraded. It also comes with 16GB of system RAM and a 512GB or 2TB SSD, both of which can be upgraded. The real sticking point for many is the anemic 8GB of VRAM, which also can't be upgraded. In enthusiast circles, 8GB of VRAM is something that should only exist at the cheapest tier of graphics cards and many believe it is hamstinging the advancement of PC gaming. Indeed, there are AAA titles that struggle to run on 8GB cards that you can buy today. On top of this, Valve is claiming the Steam Machine is capable of 4K, 60fps in even many AAA titles when using FSR upscaling. That's a very tall order to begin with but beyond that, the chip they're using doesn't even support the latest FSR 4 iteration, which puts older versions to shame in both image quality and performance uplift.
Many in the community are rightly asking how they think they can achieve that with this hardware and how future proof it will be for the price being asked. After all, they're trying to make this streamlined, yet it's going to cost more than consoles do. However, Valve aren't known to lie to their customers and many a similar claim was made about the Steam Deck, which people largely adore. Personally, I think Valve knows what they have and are confident they can make it work. But how can this thing hold its own with such seemingly anemic hardware? I think SteamOS is the key to that.
The Xbox Series and PlayStation 5 are effectively slightly modified PCs under the hood, just like the Steam Machine. In like-for-like gaming scenarios, the consoles will always outperform a similarly specced PC. Why? Unlike a PC, the primary function of a console is playing games and it's operating system is designed to that. A PC plays games, but can also browse the web, run office applications, media, Discord, do streaming and a million other possible tasks. Windows, MacOS and even Linux have to be able to do all those things, sometimes several of them at once and on everything from potatoes to über rigs. That causes a lot of extra overhead that makes the same hardware need to work harder. Consoles don't have that problem. Did you know that the Xbox Series consoles actually run a version of Windows underneath? So how are they able to start up and get back into games so much faster than a Windows PC? Because the Windows it has is running the dashboard, the game and that's it.
That's why SteamOS could be the secret sauce here. It's Arch Linux underneath, but it's tailored and tweaked to be a lean and efficient gaming OS before anything else. When you strip away all that extra overhead, suddenly weaker hardware can do more than it could if you put a regular OS on it. As I write this, I have Chrome open with a bunch of tabs, as well as a couple of work applications I haven't closed yet and I have 7.7GB of my GPU's 16GB in use. That's nearly the entire VRAM of a Steam Machine and I'm not even running a game! If I close Chrome, that'll drop by about half, but that's still over 3GB of VRAM with no game being run. That's because Windows is a general purpose OS and is trying to keep everything running its best, not sheeding as much load as possible that could be a drag on a game. On SteamOS, that VRAM usage will likely be under 1GB, and probably closer to 0 than not. That amount of extra VRAM can take a game that can't run on a Windows PC with an 8GB GPU to running decently on a Steam Machine.
See what I'm getting at here? When your OS is designed first and foremost for gaming and also innately knows the intricacies of the hardware it's working with because it was made by the same people, it can suddenly perform minor miracles. The Steam Deck has shown just how much Valve can make lower-end components sing with this strategy and with the Steam Machine, they have something they claim is 6 times more powerful to work with. Is it going to run Cyberpunk 2077 or Battlefield 6 as well as a Series X or a PS5? Probably not (at least at 4K60), but Valve is as interested in also getting you to play the metric shedloads of indie and AA games that Steam offers, most of which don't have the demands of the latest AAA blockbusters. Once you're in the Steam ecosystem, it doesn't matter if you buy the Steam Machine's successor or decide to upgrade to a full-blown PC later. The game sales are where the money's made and now they've got you.
Were it not for what Valve's already pulled off with the Steam Deck, I'd be a lot more skeptical of the Steam Machine. However, they seem to have learned much in the last few years and know how to do a lot with a little. PC gamers are fickle and demanding and Valve knows we won't tolerate them making this thing an overpriced potato. I think this could be perfect for someone like Kristy though and Hell, as someone who primarily plays indie games these days, I could see myself getting one for the TV and just using Steam in-home streaming to play AAA stuff piped over from my main rig.
With Microsoft flubbing Xbox because of the AI bubble and Nintendo off in their own little money printing world as always, the console market needs another disruption before Sony gets too arrogant and we get another PS3 era from them. The Steam Machine probably isn't going to be another big competitor and I don't think Valve's aiming for it to be. It could however give the console guys an incentive to stay a bit more humble and honest by giving us a box that's easy, but also expandable and messed around with by people who want to and know how. That can only be a good thing. Obviously, the proof will be in the playing and I don't intend to have Kristy pre-order one of these and will wait for reviews and testing first. However, betting against Valve is rarely a bet worth taking and I think they could really surprise the critics here. I really hope they do.
