Out of Valve's three hardware announcements made on Wednesday, the Steam Machine was undoubtedly the one that got people the most excited. Sure, Valve already tried and failed ten years ago, but the successful hardware launches of the Valve Index and, especially, the Steam Deck have proven Gabe Newell's company can do hardware really well.
One of the main changes compared to the previous Steam Machine iteration is that it will feature a large selection of games. However, Valve also needs to make sure the device has competitive pricing while still delivering decent performance. In that regard, in a video interview with Adam Savage, Hardware Engineer Yazan Aldehayyat claimed the new console-like platform is comparable to or better than 70% of the user rigs registered in the Steam survey.
Well, there's looking at it from two different directions, right? The first one is that it needs to have enough performance to play all your Steam games. That was really important to us. We want it to be a pretty simple experience. You don't have to worry about, oh, I play these games. I don't know if it has enough performance to play these games. That was the first hurdle: we needed to make sure that there's enough performance in the Steam Machine that you don't have to worry about that.
But we also kind of wanted to target more of an entry-level device. We understand that affordability is really important, right? The price point definitely plays a huge factor into what performance level we're trying to target. Essentially, we kind of used those two directions to triangulate what we think makes the most sense. Another thing that we actually looked at is just the Steam hardware survey. Basically, that just gives us a good benchmark of where people's home devices are at in terms of performance, and the Steam Machine is equal or better than 70% of what people have at home. That's also another way to think about it where we kind of arrive at that performance level.
Still, based on the specs revealed so far, the hardware's performance could fall between that of the Xbox Series S and PlayStation 5, so don't expect anything extraordinary, especially given the 8 GB VRAM. In the video interview, Aldehayyat also confirmed that Valve did not bother to tune any of the silicon, using an 'off-the-shelf' chip. They did, however, customize the 'firmware and software bits' so that the Steam Machine would be optimized for the SteamOS environment.
With the platform slated to launch in early 2026, it shouldn't be too long before Valve provides more details, such as the final price.
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