The morning of Monday, October 27th, I started my workweek by asking my colleagues at The Verge for advice on buying a gaming PC. I wanted a small, portable, and semi-powerful machine that could easily sit beneath my living room TV and occasionally move over to my desk to play games or even use for work. My dream was to find something as easy to use as the Steam Deck, which has become my primary gaming device due to its simplicity and massive catalog of PC games.
Just two days later, I walked into Valve’s headquarters and was introduced to the new Steam Machine, a gaming PC and console hybrid. It checked basically every box I was looking for.
The Steam Machine is a 6-inch cube that will comfortably fit into my small entertainment center in the corner of my living room and on my small office desk I’ve squeezed into the bedroom. Valve says its AMD GPU is more than six times as powerful than the Steam Deck, which should be great for me since most of my gaming time is spent playing less graphically intensive indies. It runs SteamOS, which I already love on a big screen when docking my Steam Deck.
There are some fun perks for the gadget nerd in me, too. The Steam Machine has a customizable LED bar that Valve says will be able to show you things like the status of downloads, which sounds perfect if I want to keep an eye on when I can play my next game while watching a show on a different TV input. It supports Valve’s customizable new Steam Controller and has a dedicated antenna that offers a low-latency connection for up to four of the gamepads. And because the Steam Machine is a Linux PC, I can also do whatever the heck I want with it — I’m even thinking about installing Windows so I can dual-boot and play games that aren’t on Linux due to anti-cheat, like Fortnite.
Best of all, the Steam Machine should just work with my quickly growing collection of Steam games. The Steam Deck has totally converted me to the benefits of the Steam ecosystem, like a huge catalog of games to play, a library that follows me across devices and platforms, and cloud saves and multiplayer that aren’t gated behind a monthly fee. And because, like the Steam Deck, the Steam Machine has a microSD card slot, I’ll be able to save games to a microSD card and swap them between the two devices, almost like a souped-up game cartridge.
Prior to seeing the Steam Machine, I was weighing choices like using the Framework Desktop (promising, and a handle is an option!), getting a good gaming laptop (the most portable, but potentially very expensive), or just sourcing parts and building the PC myself (intimidating for a Verge reporter me, a DIY newb). But these options aren’t as compelling as a first-party Steam Machine: I want something that is great for TV gaming, as reliable as my Steam Deck, and requires minimal fuss on my end — with an active toddler running around the house, time is a major commodity!
With the Steam Deck, Valve made PC gaming much more palatable to console crowds by (mostly) being something that just works. Verified games don’t need much fiddling to play great, many less-optimized games can be playable with graphics tweaks or by customizing your controls, and table stakes like a functional UI and reliable sleep and wake are all there. And it’s all wrapped up in a comfortable, ergonomic handheld. If Valve can bring that same console-like experience to a living room device, it would open up the best of PC gaming to even more people.
Valve is set to launch the Steam Machine sometime next year. It hasn’t said how much it will cost, but instead of shopping for Black Friday deals on some kind of other gaming PC, I think I’m going to save that money for the Steam Machine instead.
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