Valve overnight announced new gaming hardware to compliment (or replace) the Steam Deck – here’s my early thoughts.
Valve never made it a particular secret that it had ambitions beyond the Steam Deck, and overnight it announced three new pieces of Steam-branded hardware. I’m not going to reinvent the wheel here, as pretty much everything you need to know is in the company’s own showcase/hype reel for the new devices.
My early thoughts, you say?
On the plus side, it does appear that Australians won’t have to wait if they want to get a Steam Machine, Steam Frame or Steam Controller, with Valve outright stating that:
All three products will ship in all the same regions we currently ship Steam Deck (US, CA, UK, EU, AU) as well as regions covered by KOMODO: Japan, South Korea, Hong Kong, and Taiwan.
Mind you, it does give itself something of an escape clause on that, because it also states that:
Our goal is to start shipping in early 2026, with specific launch timing and pricing to be shared sometime after the first of the year.
It’s probably safe to say that quantities will be limited, and it wouldn’t 100% shock me if stock went to the larger US market first… but I guess we’ll have to wait and see on that score.
Update: Or we won’t! I reached out to Valve for clarification, and, honestly, I expected no comment back; instead I’ve been told that the plan is to ship all three products in the regions that they currently ship to (as per the above) but that they will not be staggering regions.
So in other words, all three devices should go on sale in Australia at the same time they do in the US — and with the international dateline in mind, maybe even earlier!
Of all three machines, the one I’m most interested in is easily the Steam Machine box, both because it’s such an obvious shot across the bows of the existing console makers, but also because, what with SteamOS being (ultimately) Linux, it dovetails nicely into what I’ve been playing around with in my efforts to revive some older hardware by way of open source operating systems:
Also read:
Have we finally reached the year of Linux on the desktop?
Year of Linux on the Desktop Part 2: Mac It So
It’s deeply amusing to me that of all the companies with a decent crack at making desktop Linux happen in the consumer world it would be Valve. Just me?
Also in the “just me” category (and I’m showing my age here), the Steam Machine deeply reminds me of the ill-fated G4 Mac Cube. Hopefully it won’t meet the same market fate.
However, given the expanded specifications, as per Valve, the Steam Machine does open up an interesting catch for existing Steam Deck owners.
Also read:
Steam Deck Australian Review: Was it worth the wait?
That’s in the fact that – not surprisingly, really – the Steam machine’s specifications are much higher than that of the ageing Steam Deck architecture, which opens up a lot of possibilities for Steam Machine owners to play higher-end titles, while at the same time putting something of a barrier in front of future Steam Deck development.
Do Valve have a newer, more powerful Steam Deck in development? It seems quite likely, but one of the effects of the popularity of the Steam Deck has been in PC game developers optimising for the platform, which is, I would argue, a general good for PC gamers generally. Games which are Deck Verified sell well, so developers develop for that spec.
Better optimised games are better for everyone, you know? The higher end Steam Machine’s specs remove some of that friction, which could lead to titles that could be optimised missing out. Again, it’s a wait and see matter.
I’m perhaps being pedantic, but it does strike me as slightly odd that Valve has opted for Wi-Fi 6E on the Steam Machine; it’s a tethered box that doesn’t particularly need to sweat battery life, and having Wi-Fi 7 would have given it an even more powerful set of networking tools – and a little more future-proofing to boot.
The Steam Frame is an interesting proposition too, but I am in that percentage of the population that finds VR rather difficult to deal with on, even as it has advanced and gotten better at dealing with those of us who all too easily get motion sickness from it. Maybe the Steam Frame will solve that, maybe it won’t… but I’d definitely rather try before I buy for that one.
I don’t know that I particularly like the look of the new Steam Controller per se, though it’s far from Valve’s first crack at a gamepad+mouse friendly combo – I still have a Steam Link Controller kicking around here somewhere – and it’s launching into a very competitive market. I get the potential utility of that magnetic charging dock, but like any other custom cable, I’m also wary of it and what happens if it’s lost or broken.
As yet Valve hasn’t announced any pricing for any of its new gear, and that too will make a big difference. I wouldn’t expect the Steam Machine or Steam Frame to be “cheap” per se, but in both cases there’s existing competition that will (hopefully) put pressure on them to keep prices relatively low.
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