After Epic revealed its plan for Unreal Engine 6, CEO Tim Sweeney said in an interview that Valve should stop requiring developers from disclosing if they used AI in making their game. The Epic chief executive made the statement to PC Gamer as he was talking about the use of AI tools in game development. The upcoming version of Unreal Engine 6 will come with AI integrations, which will supposedly make it easier for programmers, developers, and everyone else working in the gaming industry to build games. However, the use of AI tools still carries a stigma among players to the point that titles with this disclosure get significantly fewer reviews and are often viewed less favorably.

He says that AI tools are useful for streamlining boring, repetitive, and menial labor, like reviewing code for over an hour to find an error or doing the rigging work required to make a 3D model move realistically. While it was unfortunate that some AI tech companies trained their models on stolen data, the Epic chief executive said that the AI industry has changed and is now moving towards better practices, especially when it comes to training data. He even pointed at Adobe, which he says is ensuring the provenance of the data it used for training its AI. However, PC Gamer pointed out that Epic uses Nano Banana and GPT Image, which do not claim stringent AI training data controls, and that the Unreal Engine’s AI integrations include models such as Gemini, which have been accused of copyright infringement.

“I think the main usage case that we've seen within Epic, and we're seeing developers actually find gainful, is using AI to reduce the drudge work. The software is still architected by software architects, and they're still writing the important parts of code, and artists are still coming up with a creative vision for characters, deciding between concepts,” Sweeney told the publication. He also added, “If you want to launch a game, and get it as widely publicized as possible, you've got to put it on Steam so people can wish list it, and if you want to play it on Steam, then you have to get this Scarlet Letter of AI attached to your product, and now there is a hater community trying to kill the game. I think it's really irresponsible of Valve. They shouldn't do it, because it makes it much, much, much harder for a game developer to have a chance of success.”

The Epic executive has a point here, as AI can indeed be a useful productivity tool if used correctly and ethically. But even if that was the case, Valve still requires developers to add the AI-generated content disclosure, which could have a negative impact on reviews and ratings. While the Steam platform does not require the disclosure of the use of AI-powered tools in the developers’ workflow, they’re required to note it if AI-generated assets appear in the game or in marketing material. This would presumably include assets that have been partially built using AI tools or were based on AI-generated content.

According to market research platform Game Oracle, titles that had the generative AI disclosure received 53% less reviews than the same type of game that did not have it. Furthermore, it’s more likely to get a negative review. However, it also conceded that several other factors could be at play here, like studios substituting creativity and the proper development process with AI tools, resulting in titles that are obviously AI slop.

Sweeney argues that AI is just a tool for productivity that could help game developers create unique content. The AI disclosure warning on Steam games, in theory, should not influence how games are perceived — after all, what should matter to gamers is the experience of playing the game. Unfortunately, the controversies surrounding AI are negatively affecting the reputation of titles that use these tools. When paired with studios that substitute AI for real creativity, it’s understandable why this AI warning has such a negative impact on game titles.

Valve's Steam Machine is launching, finally, with reservations starting today. While the hardware is the same as it was when it was announced late last year, almost nothing else in PC gaming seems the same. There's a massive component shortage. Prices are high on tech in general, and speculation about how the Steam Machine would be priced took over the conversation about the entire launch.

Ahead of the system's launch and reservation queue opening, I talked to Valve engineers Pierre-Loup Griffais and Yazan Aldehayyat to discuss the system: how it was engineered, why Valve made the decisions it did, and how the company came to pricing that starts at $1,049.

"It's definitely the case that you know our original design was based on memory and storage prices from, you know, two years ago or so," said Griffais. "And so we were in a different segment than we were hoping to be, but I think it's more of a reflection of where the market as a whole is than Steam Machine itself, right?"

The engineers didn't dare forecast the reception to the price, nor how that would affect sales. But Griffais suggested that Valve expects anyone who wants the power in a Steam Machine would still have to pay a similar amount in another device, but highlighted what's unique to the Machine — the form factor, how quiet it is, the CEC integration, and the dedicated Bluetooth controller antenna.

I posited the possibility of people going for a console, instead. Even the PlayStation 5 Pro is currently cheaper, at $899. But the two engineers suggested that's not the right comparison.

Griffais said there's more to compare than just specs and price. He suggested that PC gamers would also have to rebuy games they want to play, and that some of them would have to get used to the idea of paying to play games online.

"I think the value of the Steam machine is inherently tied to the value of your Steam library in a lot of ways, right?" Aldehayyat said. "Like, the more games you have on Steam, the more valuable the Steam machine is to you, and the Steam machine makes your existing library even more valuable. So, those two kinds of decisions are very much intertwined. And I think at least early on, we suspect that it's for people who already have a big Steam library… it's just going to make a lot of sense to them."

The lack of subsidies

A lot has been made of the fact that Valve is not subsidizing the hardware, which the company has said would turn the PC into a more closed ecosystem. There has always been an assumption that Valve has subsidized the Steam Deck off of the profits it takes from the sales on the Steam Store.

That's not quite the case, the Valve engineers said."

If you look at like certain SKUs at certain points of time, it might be below or above cost bya small margin," Griffais said. "I think there's some comments that we made around it, you know, being painful and all that early on, that was more about being as close as possible to cost than anything, yeah, same thing [with the Steam Machine], right?"

In fact, Griffais claimed that despite recent cost increases to the Steam Deck OLED due to the component shortage (and, now, the Steam Machine), they're being more aggressive on pricing now than they used to be.

"We understand that the higher price is less accessible to people… and so we're even more aggressive now, trying to be as close as possible to the actual cost of the parts that we're shipping," he added."

But it's important that the Valve hardware is a self-sustained program, it's not subsidized by software sales," Aldehayyat said. "So that's kind of the important piece that we can get across."

8GB of VRAM? 4K support? Really?

As soon as the Steam Machine was announced, enthusiasts honed in on one very specific point on the spec sheet: the semi-custom AMD RDNA3 graphics with 28 CUs and, to many, a sparse 8GB of VRAM.

Griffais said that Valve is "very aware" that it is being "kind of aggressive" with 8GB of VRAM. But the way he talked about it, it seemed that the team was also taking a sort of artistic license with what players want out of a small box like this. He said that the team did calculations that that for "the kind of stuff that you would want to play" 8GB could support the level of detail and performance one would expect out of a small, TV-based system."

The cases where you're running out of VRAM are actually cases that you would not want to be playing on a system like that," he said. "Yeah, it'd be too slow… The cases where you're exercising the VRAM limits are actually cases that you wouldn't want to play as a real user, in my opinion" He admitted however, that it's possible that in the future that some games may need more VRAM to reach the same performance.

Still, on SteamOS, the team has been working to make VRAM more efficient. For starters, the current iteration of SteamOS was really only meant for APUs, but now has logic for discrete GPUs and VRAM. That came with a different set of features to add, like handling VRAM under stress to get the best possible outcome. The team at Valve is still working on it.

In Aldehayyat's opinion, the upgrade cycle for PCs has been "slowing down dramatically," and that they're seeing games come out with a better ability to scale across CPU and GPU generations, and that the PC ecosystem isn't designed with a single fixed performance target in mind.

"So, again, like for us, the metric that we care about is, can you play the games on Steam? Can you play every game on Steam? And we think the Steam machine absolutely can, right now, and we think the longevity for it is actually quite good, given the current reality of the upgrade cycles," Aldehayyat said. "I mean, maybe 10 years ago a device like this wouldn't last as long, wouldn't have the legs to be competitive for as long, but… given what the market is doing right now, and the upgrade cycles, it still has the longevity to be a good device for people for many years to come.”

But that 8GB of VRAM wasn't in isolation on the spec sheet. It also highlighted the idea of playing at 4K at 60 frames per second, provided you have AMD's FSR upscaling technology running. In my testing of the machine, that's possible for some games, but the Steam Machine really feels like a 1080p or 1440p box.

"A big part of that messaging actually came because we found a lot of people who are not as familiar with tuning their gaming settings want to just make sure that it's compatible [with] their 4K TV," Aldehayyat said, pointing out that not everyone understands the difference between render resolution and native TV resolutions. He agreed that 1080p and 1440p are probably the sweet spot.

Despite that messaging, 1080p is set as the default resolution across SteamOS globally out of the box, which Grifafis said was to have the "baseline be on the safe side." Like the Steam Deck and Steam Controller, Valve doesn't provide a ton of instructions when you start, so that's something players will need to figure out, whether they decide to change this on a game-by-game basis or across the system (or at all).

Griffais said the team wants to "make that more visible," though he didn't specify how Valve may do that. He also suggested that because Valve is testing games as part of the verified program, it could have different base resolutions on a per-game basis, like a higher resolution for a low-res indie game or an older game that doesn't need as many resources.

Several components, one big heat sink

Inside the Steam Machine's small frame is a massive heatsink and 120 mm fan that cools almost all of the critical components, including the CPU, GPU, and memory. That decision lets Valve make the smallest box possible, but it's certainly not the easy way of doing things.

One other benefit of not having two separate heatsinks big enough for a worst-case scenario is that the large, single option can be allocated to the CPU and GPU as needed.

"So, if the CPU is not eating up its entire thermal budget, the GPU can use that, or if the GPU is not eating its entire thermal budget, the CPU can share that," Aldehayyat explained.

But covering all of the components is difficult. Ideally, you want the smallest gap possible between a thermal module and a CPU or a GPU.

"In reality, things vary; the CPU is tall, and the GPU is taller, and the motherboard bows and the thermal module has tolerances, so actually getting the design to have enough compliance in the right places to accommodate all those tolerances was by far the hardest challenge we had to overcome," he said. "But by overcoming it, I think we ended up at the most compact design, cost-effective design. It's also the quietest."

Having one heatsink also allows for one fan, which Valve spins at lower rotations per minute to keep the system nearly silent.

The design requires just a single screw to access the components — a Torx T9 bit. Valve will partner with iFixit again on repair guides, and also plans to have them sell replacement parts, including the many daughterboards that attach to the mainboard under the heatsink, such as the ports.

The SSD is easily accessible, beneath the power supply. But if you want to access the other major replaceable part — the memory SO-DIMMS — you'll have to take off the whole heatsink.

"I don't say it was impossible, it was just, given the time and engineering resources we have, we just could not come up with a solution that that worked," Aldehayyat said. The SSD is on a flex cable, but they weren't able to do something like that with memory because of signal integrity. Trying to make an access hatch through the power supply, he said, was a safety problem.

Shortages and availability

Valve has opened a randomized reservation system for the Steam Machine. That new portion — the fact that you don't have to be on Steam at a specific time to try to get in the first batch of systems — was built on the back of the existing Steam Deck reservation process. But other console shopping experiences were also an influence.

"My experience trying to buy a PS5 painted a lot of that stuff," Griffais said. "We think the broad strokes of the system are good, but there's still an effect where people are rushing at the door, trying to refresh. Our websites might have problems, and then that seems unfair to people that run into that, right? We want to make sure that there's an even playing field initially, and then work from there.

At the moment, Valve is predicting that the reservation queue will go through the end of the year, with the waitlist picking up spots on canceled orders. But depending on supply, things could change.

“Six months was as far as we were willing to make predictions," Aldehayyat said. "If there's more demand, we are obviously planning to make more."

Memory and storage are by far the biggest choke points in the supply chain, but they're not the only ones. Aldehayyat noted shortages in FR-4 (a material used to make printed circuit boards) as well as some capacitors, stating that that "if this was a normal time, people would be concerned about these things," but that in supply shortages for memory and storage "this just doesn't really crack the top 10 problems."

This led Griffais to think openly about what it means to find more supply right now. Getting supplies from a wide variety of vendors, he said, also means getting a bunch of different prices, suggesting that you could make more in a way where the pricing comes out differently.

"And so we're still trying to figure that out," he said. "If there's ever a bunch of people that want the machine, but the supply is not there on the back end, we'll have to make hard decisions about, okay, what are we doing to secure more supply,” Griffais pondered. “And does it still result [in] the product at this price? Or would we have to rethink that,” he said.

Finally, Griffais admitted, much like the rest of us, that Valve doesn’t know how the hardware shortages will evolve. “Maybe things are going to go back down, and then it's all good, and it can continue to go like that, but maybe not,” he said. “So I guess what we're trying to convey… is that it seems like all bets are off, and we're going to work through it, just [like] the users as well.”

The Steam Machine is finally here, and Valve is aiming to get its small gaming PC into the hands of more gamers and fewer scalpers. While the Machine starts at $1,049 and goes up from there, the company is still expecting intense interest and has limited components.

The company is instituting a new, more randomized reservation system that aims to ensure that bots, people with faster internet connections, and people who "can schedule their life around that moment" aren't prioritized.

Reservations are open now on Steam, and you can sign up for the Steam Machine configuration or bundle that you're interested in anytime before Thursday, June 25th at 10 a.m. PT / 1 p.m. ET. When the sign-up period ends, Valve will randomize the list in order to determine the order. After that time, all new sign-ups will join the end of the waitlist.

Following the randomization, people who signed up will get one of two emails on that day. They will either be added to the reservation queue, and there's a Steam Machine with their name on it, or you’ll be on a waitlist and will be informed when units become available. The waitlist consists of people further down on the list than there are Steam Machines in this production run, and you're waiting for people with reservations to cancel or for future batches.

To sign up, you need a Steam account in good standing, with a purchase made on the platform before April 27, 2026. Only one reservation is allowed per household, with Valve looking at payment methods, shipping addresses, and "other information" to remove duplicates. While the purchase limitation stops scalpers from making new accounts to get on the line, it also may prevent new potential Steam customers from getting into the ecosystem.

You can sign up for multiple configurations, and if you're given a spot for more than one, you'll get a reservation for the "highest end one" and be removed from the other lists. If you sign up for multiple and don't make any lists, you'll be placed on a waitlist for the system you were closest to getting. The lists are also broken down by region: North America, the United Kingdom, the European Union, and Australia.

The week of June 29, Valve will start emailing customers in the reservation queue. They'll get an option to purchase, with 72 hours to buy before Valve skips to the next person in line. The reservation queue is expected to last through the rest of the year, suggesting many waitlist customers will be waiting quite a while.

Pricing and a lack of subsidies

The Steam Machine comes in four configurations: 512GB, a 512GB bundle with a Steam Controller, 2TB (including two extra faceplates, a wooden one and a red one, pictured above), and a 2TB bundle with a Steam Controller. Here are the prices:

The company said increases in the cost of components led to these prices. "The overall effect is that our original goal for the price of Steam Machine is no longer viable," the blog reads. "So the prices we're sharing today reflect the state of the world for manufacturing; or, more accurately, it reflects the price [of] the components as we've secured them over the past 6 months."

The company added that they couldn't source some components at all, which reduced the number of systems available at launch.

Valve said it's not subsidizing the Steam Machine because it goes against its belief in the "openness of the PC ecosystem."

"When companies sell their hardware under cost for competitive advantage, or buy exclusive content for it, they're doing that to build a more closed system, one where you don't get to choose what software you want to use," the blog reads. "We don't want that for PC hardware, and we don't think you should want it either. You shouldn't feel like you have to buy Valve hardware; you should be able to view it as just one option alongside all the devices for playing games, and select the one that makes sense for you."

Previously, Valve had said there would be no subsidy, but suggested it was because it was competing with PCs and because of the engineering work the company had done.

For those who can't get a Steam Machine or want to use other hardware, Valve says it's working on getting SteamOS to work on more hardware. Beginning with SteamOS 3.8, Valve says you will be able to put the OS together with a DIY rig, though for now, it only supports AMD GPUs.

For a long time, the best gaming PCs were relegated to desks. Under the TV has long been the realm of the console, even if some, myself included, have hooked midtowers up to their living room screens. Valve's Steam Machine is an attempt to bridge that gap, letting people who play games on their rigs and on their handhelds also play comfortably on the couch.

The hardware isn't brand new. Like the Steam Deck, Valve has turned to AMD for semi-custom chips using some older technologies. In the case of newer, intensive games, this makes the Steam Machine a 1080p or 1440p computer, though it can support 4K on older games and in some cases with FSR.

But the Steam Machine is pricier than many had hoped, coming in at $1,049 for the 512GB version and, in our review unit, a $1,428, 2TB bundle that includes two faceplates and a Steam Controller. That's largely a result of the current state of the component market, but it will leave a lot more people asking if the Steam Machine (can or should) fill their needs, given the cost.

Design of the Steam Machine

The Steam Machine really looks less like a gaming PC than a mini PC. It's a black box that, at 5.98 x 6.14 x 6.39 inches including the system's feet, can fit discreetly on a TV stand or a desk.

The one part that really stands out is the integrated LED strip with 17 addressable RGB LEDs, which can share the Machine's system status or be customized to your liking. For instance, you can see the strip appear like a light bar when you download updates, and you can choose from solid colors, rainbows, or animations, like breathing. You can even control each of the 17 lights individually for a truly chaotic look. My preference was mostly to keep it off entirely for a minimalist effect.

The front of the Steam Machine is effectively a faceplate, which pops on and off with magnets. Valve ships two extras with the 2TB version: a fuzzy cloth-like red plate, and one with dark wood, which went well with my furniture. The company has also committed to releasing files for people to 3D print their own. (They have a good track record of this, having recently released CAD files for the Steam Controller and its puck.) It doesn't, however, have plans to sell the wooden and red plates separately.

Located at the base of the system are the front ports: a pair of USB Type-A 3.2 Gen 2 ports, a microSD card slot, and the power button.

The rest of the ports are on the rear: DisplayPort 1.4 and HDMI 2.0, the AC power connector, an Ethernet jack, two USB-A 2.0 ports, and a USB-C 3.2 Gen 2 port. (Despite not being officially labeled HDMI 2.1, the HDMI port does support 4K at 120 Hz, and has some other niceties, like HDMI-CEC to turn on televisions).

Also on the rear is the exhaust for the 120 mm fan attached to the heatsink that cools the APU. It's much more obvious than the intake, which is behind the front panel and draws air in from the sides. That fan is truly whisper-quiet. Even while benchmarking, I barely even heard it, and I had to pay attention and move my head near the system to notice anything at all.

Steam Machine Specifications

You can decide whether you believe the Steam Machine is a PC or a console. In Valve's eyes, it's a PC, and the spec list certainly looks like one. On paper, it's easy enough to see the significant jump from what Valve uses in its other gaming system, the Steam Deck, simply by nature of moving from Zen 2 to Zen 4 and RDNA 2 to RDNA 3.

The processor is a semi-custom AMD Zen 4 chip with six cores and 12 threads, going up to 4.8 GHz with a 30W TDP. Meanwhile, the integrated graphics are also semi-custom, using AMD's RDNA 3 with 28 compute units, going up to a maximum sustained clock speed of 2.45 GHz and a 110W TDP. The big number people are thinking about here is the 8GB GDDR6 RAM, which many enthusiasts feel is no longer enough to play some games above 1080p, let alone future-proof a system.

The system is powered by a 300W power supply, smaller than both the one in the Xbox Series X and the PlayStation 5.

Like the Steam Deck OLED, Valve has integrated a discrete Bluetooth antenna alongside the Wi-Fi 6E connection, which should help with latency. There's also a built-in antenna for the Steam Controller.

The Steam Machine starts with a 512GB SSD, but a more expensive option (the one we're testing) comes with 2TB. For further storage, you can add a microSD card (or swap out the SSD entirely).

Gaming and Graphics on the Steam Machine

If you're coming from the Steam Deck, the Steam Machine is a powerful upgrade. If you compare it to other gaming PCs on the market, you'll see that its GPU's aging technology is far from the most powerful option on the market.

First, let's put this GPU into context. Based on testing, we found that the Machine's graphics card would land somewhere towards the bottom of our GPU benchmarks hierarchy. To figure this out, we put together a Linux machine running Bazzite, with an AMD Ryzen 5 7600X and 16GB of DDR5-5600, memory along with both the Radeon RX 6600 — the bottom GPU on our list — and the RX 7600, which is the next AMD-branded step up.

In the Unigine Superposition (1080p Extreme) and GravityMark benchmarks, both of which run natively on Linux, the Steam Machine's graphics ran in between those two Radeons. Using our Cyberpunk 2077 configuration for raster testing desktop graphics cards, the same happened, with the Steam Machine producing 79.98 frames per second, behind the 7600X at 85.48 FPS. This is capable gaming performance, but bottom-rung compared to modern desktop GPUs.

I spent some time playing Resident Evil Requiem on the system. With the resolution set to 2560 x 1440 without any upscaling or advanced features like hair strands, the game ran largely smoothly through the Cedarbook Apartments section, as Leon sneaks past zombies, takes on a violent boss, and escapes through the other side of the building, though there were a few hiccups as he first entered the dark building. The game typically ran between 60 and 70 FPS, though there were some drops to around 20 FPS during the environmental transition, which were extremely noticeable. Here are my recordings from MangoHud, showing how the game ran:

On SoulCalibur 6, the game ran great at 4K, hitting the game's 60 FPS frame limit with maximum graphics settings as I progressed through Arcade mode as Siegfried. Granted, that game came out in 2018 and isn't super intensive, but people have all kinds of games like that in their Steam libraries, and they should play well.

Games that barely run on the Steam Deck, like Black Myth: Wukong, can be made to easily run on the Steam Machine. It's just clear that Valve isn't aiming for people looking for the highest-end performance on every game.

In my time playing around on the Machine, I did notice some crashes and slowdowns, often (but not always!) related to changing settings. One time, this led to the entire Steam Machine crashing and leaving artifacting on-screen when it booted back up. (Another reboot fixed this.)

Some of this may be due to the fact that some games see the Steam Machine as a Steam Deck. You can turn off that auto-detection, which helped to a degree. Valve says it is updating its APIs ahead of availability to avoid these kinds of problems.

One way we tested the Steam Machine was in comparison to the Steam Deck. On paper alone, it's no surprise that the Machine blows the Deck away, but we wanted to see exactly what kind of gains you could get when moving a game from the handheld to the desktop. Here, we tested at our typical handheld settings, though we ran the Steam Deck at native 800p while the Steam Machine was tested at 1080p, 1440p, and 4K.

When I tested, I found that most games would only run at 1080p, unless I went into game settings and changed the maximum display resolution to 4K. Valve reps told me that "1080p is the system default game resolution on Steam Machine to ensure a good gameplay experience out of the box," but you can change it on a global level in Settings > Display, or, like I did, on a per-game basis.

What this reveals is a vision of SteamOS that is significantly stronger than we've ever seen, playing most of our test games at 4K better than the Steam Deck can at 800p, including Forza Horizon 6 and Red Dead Redemption 2. But again — that's at settings designed for the Deck. And it also proved that not all games can run at 4K on the Steam Machine, including Cyberpunk 2077 on the Steam Deck preset. If you were someone plugging your Steam Deck into a dock and outputting that to your TV, you would get a better experience on the same settings.

You'll see some things missing. Shadow of the Tomb Raider, one of our go-to systems-testing games, wouldn't allow the game to run above 60 FPS, even with V-Sync off. That game was tested exclusively at higher settings, where that wasn't an issue.

When comparing to prebuilt PCs, we chose the CyberPowerPC Gamer Xtreme and Acer Nitro 60 that we tested last year. These were two of the last sanely-priced systems we saw before the component crisis got really bad, priced at $1,099.99 and $1,599.99, respectively. The CyberPowerPC boasted an Intel Core Ultra 5 225F and Nvidia GeForce RTX 5060, while the Acer had a Core i7-14700F and RTX 5070. Each offered 32GB of RAM. Notably, you can't find these systems at these prices now, which simply highlights the type of problem Valve had in pricing the Steam Machine. (The newer Acer Nitro 65 is over $2,000.)

For the most part, those larger boxes with desktop-class GPUs significantly outperformed the Steam Machine without any upscaling, FSR, DLSS, or similar technologies. Most importantly, the highest-end settings were playable on those machines. But those boxes are also significantly larger and have room to fit power-hungry components – and they cost a lot more now.

Valve definitely has size on its side. If you want something smaller than a mini-ITX build that comes with SteamOS installed, this is for you. But on paper, if you have nearly any GPU from the last three to four years, you already have a faster machine. And given that the Steam Machine starts at $1,049, that matters a lot.

When testing using our prebuilt desktop methodologies, which include some aspirational settings, it is clear why Valve says you need FSR to get 4K at 60 FPS. Based on the aging hardware alone, it should be clear that you won't be playing games at their top settings. But FSR can certainly help the Steam Machine along.

For example, on Red Dead Redemption 2 at medium settings, the Machine played the game at 20 FPS at 4K. But with FSR 2.0 in Performance mode, it reached 60 FPS.

On Forza Horizon 6's Ultra settings, the game ran at 30 FPS at 4K, but turning on FSR 3.1.5 Performance nabbed an extra 10 FPS.

Still, Cyberpunk 2077 was unplayable on Ray Tracing Ultra even at 1080p. Here, FSR 3.0 performance made it technically playable (up to 41 FPS from 15 FPS), but given the latency that could introduce, I wouldn't try it. (You can play this game on the Machine though — see the Steam Deck comparison above.)

If 60 FPS is your goal, the Steam Machine isn't a 4K machine, and I'm not sure Valve should have advertised it as one. It's much more suited for 1080p or 1440p gaming with appropriately middling-to-high settings, depending on what you're playing.

Upgradeability of the Steam Machine

The only exposed screws on the Steam Machine are on the rear. The two captive Torx T9 screws are in the top corners of the machine, so at least you don't have to worry about losing them. From there, a small pry tool pushed into in two purposeful-looking indents on the bottom lifts the back cover right off.

From in there, you'll see some studs coming in from the bottom. If you look closely at the feet, you'll see they have the same Torx indents in the center of the rubber, and that they're actually screws. This is way better than how some devices require you to remove adhesive to take off screws that are under feet. It's a neat trick that shows Valve had repairability in mind.

Back inside, two more T9 screws hold the fan assembly to the chassis. With these out, you can remove the internals in one massive piece.

From here, you'll be able to see all the ports on small daughterboards, as well as the antennas for the Wi-Fi and Bluetooth. But the real jewel is at the bottom: an easily accessible M.2 SSD slot mounted below the power supply. Ours came with a 2TB drive, which is fairly roomy, but this may become a must-have upgrade for 512GB Steam Machine owners if storage prices ever come down. And this drive is also held in with the same Torx screw, so you can use one screwdriver to make that swap.

Getting to the memory is far more involved and is more of a repairability compromise than we typically like to see. You need to remove the giant heatsink, which cools all of the components with the single fan, in order to get to the DDR5 SO-DIMMS. Given how tightly packed the Steam Machine is, with many cables and ribbon cables to daughterboards throughout the outside of the heatsink and PSU, that's a complex order that takes time and more risk than I think many Steam Machine owners may want to take. But given that the daughterboards are there, you should be able to replace broken ports, even if you have to do it in groups. Valve tells me it will partner with iFixit on repair manuals, similar to the Steam Deck.

Productivity Performance on the Steam Machine

The semi-custom, six-core/12-thread Zen 4 chip in the Steam Machine can hold its own against some current mobile chips.

The closest modern chip we had a record for is the AMD Ryzen AI 7 445, which has the same core count (with four Zen 5c cores and two Zen 5 cores), with a max boost clock of 4.5 GHz and a configurable TDP of 15-54 W. Valve's chip has 30W, but the GPU is discrete and isn't included here.

The Ryzen AI 7 445 ("Gorgon Point") in the Acer Swift Go 16 AI was marginally faster in single-core performance, but significantly faster in multi-core performance. On Handbrake, the Gorgon Point chip was 23 seconds faster than the Steam Machine, which completed the task in 6:33.

In our charts, you can also see comparisons to Intel's Panther Lake Core Ultra 7 355, a weaker chip than Valve's, and the Core Ultra X7 388H, which was stronger (but in far more expensive systems). Apple's M5, under air in the MacBook Pro, was the fastest of the bunch on both tests.

SteamOS and KDE Plasma Desktop

If you've used a Steam Deck before, everything on the Steam Machine will feel familiar. SteamOS 3 is the same here as it is on the handheld, just running on more powerful hardware. If you haven't used a Steam Deck before, but have used Steam's Big Picture Mode on a PC, you'll still be mostly at home, as the interface is very similar.

SteamOS continues to be Valve's primary advantage over the largely Windows-based ecosystem of gaming PCs. It's easily handled entirely with a controller. If you've used SteamOS on the Steam Deck, you might want to consider the Steam Controller, as you'll have all of the same buttons to navigate the operating system (and that's before you get into the fact that gameplay will feel similar).

Valve has adopted the Verified program from the Steam Deck to the Steam Machine. In Valve's documentation, it states that you need to hit 30 FPS at 1080p to be verified, which is pretty low stakes. Games that already run on Steam Deck should be shoe-ins, while the stronger hardware should enable more games to run on the Machine and earn the badge.

If you want a more typical desktop PC experience — perhaps you're playing at a desk – you can use the KDE Plasma desktop. While I suspect most people will never enter the desktop mode, Valve has added some significant updates here over the years, and I appreciate that you can use your computer as a computer. If you like to tinker and install extra software that isn't available through Steam, it's a great option.

Still, not all games run on Steam. While you can add most games to Steam through the "Add a Non-Steam Game to My Library" flow, not all work well. Some launchers have unofficial versions you can run through Linux, like the open-source Heroic Games launcher that will run Epic Games and GOG.

I wish that Valve offered a way to dual-boot Windows and SteamOS on both the Machine and the Steam Deck for these edge cases. The company said it would back when it announced the first Deck. With a 2TB drive, there is plenty of room.

"While Steam Deck is fully capable of dual-boot, the SteamOS installer that provides a dual-boot wizard isn't ready yet," Valve's page on Windows resources reads. "This will ship alongside SteamOS 3 once it's complete."

The Steam Machine is part of an ecosystem

There is a point in using the Steam Machine where I saw it as more of a platform. It was no surprise that the Steam Deck was built around playing games on a Valve platform, even if you can install other OSes. But with the Steam Machine in play, there's a fuller picture: playing your Steam games on the go, uploading the save to Steam Cloud, plopping yourself on the couch, turning on your Steam Machine, and resuming the same game, running locally, with the same controls thanks to the Steam Controller.

Perhaps one of the coolest things you can do is move your SD card from device to device. If you have an SD card in your Steam Deck, you can move it to your Steam Machine, and the games will be immediately playable. (Or, if you prefer, you could quickly move the games to the internal SSD.)

There are plenty of parts you can sub in there: You can play Steam on any handheld, or come home to your own custom-built rig, or use another controller. Despite its hardware, Steam still supports a ton of devices and ways to play.

But if you do have Valve's hardware, it starts to feel like an ecosystem on the level with Apple's, just focused exclusively on gaming. You get some benefits there — sleep and wake work just as well on this desktop as it does on Valve's handhelds. SteamOS is the best version of Steam's Big Picture mode out there. And this is way smaller than most DIY PCs. If you're all in on Valve, this is the way to go. But if you want more power and future-proofing, subbing in a more powerful PC will last you longer in the long run.

One thing that has been notable about the Steam Deck is Valve's commitment to updates. There have been a ton, adding features, squashing bugs, and making it more stable. In fact, that history is the one thing that makes me feel reasonably confident that the bugs I have seen will eventually be fixed.

Of course, Steam doesn't have every single game. Some won't run on SteamOS because of anti-cheat issues with Linux. Others simply have compatibility problems. Valve does have a method for running non-Steam games through Steam, but some, notably Epic Games' Fortnite, don't play well with it. You can install Windows or other launchers via Linux, but you will lose some of the ease the ecosystem offers. Valve offers minimal support for Windows, but at least it's something.

Steam Machine Configurations and Warranty

There are four configurations of the Steam Machine. First, there are two models of the computer; Both of them are identical with the exception of the storage. We reviewed the more expensive $1,349 version with a 2TB NVMe SSD and two extra faceplates, and bundling it with the Steam Controller brought it to $1,428.

The base model is a cheaper $1,049 option with a 512GB SSD. Bundling that with a Controller brings you to $1,128.

512GB isn't huge for a gaming system. Valve's spec sheet highlights that no matter which option you get, it comes with a high-speed microSD card slot. Luckily, the SSD is easy to access (See upgradeability above).

The $1,049 starting price is higher than consoles, including the more powerful PlayStation 5 Pro ($899) with 2TB of storage. A base PS5 Digital Edition is $599 with 825GB of storage. An all-digital Xbox Series X starts at $599.99. If you're looking for a living room solution to play games and don't care specifically about settings and your Steam library, those consoles are a better value.

In Asia, the Steam Machine will be sold through Valve's partner, Komodo, which also sells the Steam Deck. It will be available in Japan, Taiwan, and Hong Kong, but will not be sold in South Korea.

If you're buying this for a Steam library, you could also put Steam on any other computer and run it in Big Picture Mode. And given that supply is tight, that may be a better option for those willing to consider alternatives.

When we put together a parts list to estimate what a custom build looks like to match the Steam Machine, including a Ryzen 5 7600X, Radeon RX 7600, 16GB of DDR5-5600 RAM, a Gigabyte B650M Gaming Plus WiFi Micro ATX AM5 Motherboard, a 650W PSU, a case, cooler, and 1TB of storage, we hit $1,048.83. While our build gets you double the storage of the base Steam Machine, it doesn't get you the small case, dedicated Bluetooth or Steam Controller antennas, or super quiet operation. So if you're only comparing the Machine to other PCs, the price isn't terrible — it’s just the market, in general, that is.

Valve sells the Steam Machine with a one-year warranty.

Bottom Line

Valve's Steam Machine is a complicated little box. It was clearly designed for a simpler time, when components were plentiful, and it would be a somewhat affordable desktop that could be a more powerful option for Steam Deck owners to play their Steam games at home.

But it's not a simple time. The Steam Machine is still cute, still has a good selection of ports, still has an easily upgradeable SSD, and, most importantly, still runs SteamOS and gets all of the benefits that come with it. If you were docking your Steam Deck to the TV and wanted more performance, this will get you there, once Valve irons out the last of the bugs.

If you're just looking to get into gaming, a base-level PlayStation 5 or Xbox Series X is a better deal. You can buy one and a Nintendo Switch 2 and spend less than the Steam Machine.

You can also get many of the benefits of the Steam Machine on other devices. If you have an effective gaming PC or laptop, Steam Big Picture Mode will do most of the work there. Valve is also working to bring SteamOS to more machines, though currently it's only working on Radeon GPUs.

But if you want something small for your living room that plays years of Steam titles and maybe even has a cute little wooden faceplate, the Steam Machine is for you, but you should go in understanding its limitations.

A curious new game titled Congratulations On Your Purchase recently appeared on PC digital marketplaces priced at $999. Its main claim to fame is that it is proudly “the most expensive game on Steam.” Buyers who purchase, download, and run this title will enjoy “a first-person luxury experience set inside a palace.” Perhaps most importantly, though, they will collect a ‘golden ticket’ Steam Achievement showing “you are now one of us” with the $999 proudly displayed at its center. It might be a cynical exercise in tapping into those compelled into conspicuous consumption, or it might be satire.

While Congratulations On Your Purchase asks for premium money, viewing the promotional video and screenshots doesn’t really give us palatial, luxury, exclusive vibes. It is more like being transported into a game credits screen where one is being congratulated for completing a Nintendo 64 game. The minimum system requirements of a GTX 1060 or RX 580 definitely seem like overkill for this 3D walking simulator ‘adventure.’

However, the gameplay, which can last about 10 minutes if you stretch it out, isn’t the point. “The most expensive game on Steam. A palace, a red carpet, paparazzi, and a wall where you leave your name — visible to every owner who comes after you. Ten minutes,” reads the Steam sales pitch – which may be AI-generated according to the small print. “The price is not a mistake. It is the point.”

Further insight into how the devs hope to get their hooks into the target audience to reel in $999 a pop is provided by the Steam page. “You paid for this. Not accidentally. Not on impulse. You saw the price. You read the description. And then you bought it anyway. Welcome.”

Towards the end of the Steam page sales pitch, the devs add a paragraph on the philosophical value of this kind of purchase. Of course, the answer isn’t discouraging towards the level of expense. Rather, the choice of how, when, and where to spend your cash is claimed to be “philosophically speaking, unanswerable.”

While Congratulations On Your Purchase may also be satirical, it can be added to your Steam Cart, purchased, and thus might raise a nice bit of pocket money for the devs at Minimum Viable Prestige and the publishers Worth It Studio. Visiting the game's associated website at www.steamelite.zone seems to confirm there have been two buyers, so far, leaving two personalized messages on the Congratulations On Your Purchase wall. We'd also grumble that this Steam game isn't even original in its satire/cynicism, as it shares much in common with the $999 Apple iOS app from the noughties dubbed I Am Rich.

Our conclusion is that you should definitely spend your money elsewhere this Amazon Prime Day week.

A developer has created a Chromium browser-based tool that turns Valve's second-gen Steam Controller into a self-propelled RC car, steering it across a flat surface in real-time with no app or driver installed. The page connects to the controller over WebHID, a browser standard for talking directly to USB and Bluetooth devices, and moves it by pulsing the gamepad's rumble motors. The Steam Controller first went on sale for $99 in early May and promptly sold out.

The tool utilizes the controller’s rumble motors, which, at the right frequency, cause the entire chassis to vibrate and creep across the surface in a chosen direction. The browser handles “steering” by varying the pulses sent to each gamepad stick, so leaning the output toward one motor turns the controller as it crawls. It’s the same type of vibration-driven locomotion that powers cheap “bristlebot” toys.

As for connecting to the Steam Controller, WebHID grants low-level hardware access from the webpage once the user approves the controller via the browser’s device picker, so the entire setup runs inside a single tab with nothing to download. WebHID is only supported in Chromium browsers, such as Chrome and Edge, and not Safari or Firefox.

Naturally, the site comes with some small print that explains that the service is offered “as-is” with no warranty, and warns that driving the controller across the ground scrapes it and wears it down over time. It recommends flat, smooth surfaces that keep the gamepad moving and reduce abrasion.

The community has been hard at work tinkering with the second-gen controller since its May launch. Valve released the Steam Controller’s CAD files under a Creative Commons license shortly after launch, explicitly inviting users to design their own accessories. The gamepad pairs dual trackpads, gyro controls, and grip buttons, a mix of inputs Valve walked through in its developer interview with Tom's Hardware, and that range of hardware has drawn a wave of experiments since units reached buyers.

The repurposed rumble motors here have also been a sore spot for the controller. The firmware quirks caused the rumble to behave erratically or cut out entirely in some games, a problem Valve has been working to patch. Demand has stayed high enough that resellers listed units above $300 after the launch stock sold out, and Valve has since opened a reservation system to push back against scalping bots.

In a June 18 update, Valve said that “initial demand exceeded our expectations,” but that it has “no plans to stop making Steam Controller.” Those now joining the reservation queue will be given one of three timeframes — September 2026, December 2026, or 2027 — for when they can expect to receive an order email with an option to purchase.

Attackers have spent the past several months smuggling malware into Steam through animated desktop wallpapers, hijacking the accounts of victims who install them and then using those stolen accounts to upload more infected files. That’s according to Kaspersky researchers Maxim Starodubov and Denis Brylev, who recently authored a report published on Securelist. Per the report, the malware campaign has been running since late last year and focuses on gamers in China, pushing everything from credential stealers to crypto miners and ransomware. Kaspersky found dozens of malicious packages, some downloaded tens of thousands of times before removal.

The culprit is Wallpaper Engine, a $4.99 live wallpaper tool that ranks among Steam's most-used non-game titles, with 93,000 to 114,000 concurrent users and nearly a million reviews. The app supports four wallpaper types, and one of them, the "application wallpaper," is a standalone executable Windows program that runs as the desktop background. That also makes it a pathway for third-party code to execute on a user's machine, which is exactly what attackers exploited.

Kaspersky observed two delivery methods. In some packages, the malicious EXE files, DLLs, or scripts sat directly alongside the legitimate wallpaper files. In others, the payload was tucked inside a password-protected archive, with the password either embedded in the archive name or in a JSON config file, allowing a script to open it automatically. Applying the wallpaper triggered the payload.

In a sample examined last December, the researchers managed to boot a functional desktop game while discreetly dropping a DarkKomet backdoor named Synaptics.exe and a tampered system library, AggregatorHost.dll. That library locates the running Steam app, hunts for account credentials, hijacks the live session, and ships the data to a command-and-control server. Control of an active session lets the attackers post fresh malicious wallpapers under the victim's name, which is why the campaign keeps regenerating after takedowns.

Kaspersky placed 89% of malicious download attempts in China, followed by Russia at 5.5% and smaller shares in Singapore, Hong Kong, Germany, Vietnam, India, and Canada. That concentration aligns with the wider Wallpaper Engine user base, which skews heavily toward China. Payloads spanned the DarkKomet backdoor, the Lumma and Vidar infostealers, the RenEngine loader, miners, and ransomware, a spread the researchers attributed to multiple independent groups piling onto the same technique rather than a lone threat actor or group.

This follows a run of malware reaching players through Valve's storefront over the past few years. A compromised Slay the Spire mod was distributed through the Workshop on Christmas Day 2023, the Chemia Early Access game shipped with three malware strains in July last year, and the BlockBlasters title drained roughly $150,000 from players in the following September. As of March, the FBI was seeking victims of infected Steam games dating back to 2024.

A Reddit user has demonstrated that SteamOS, Valve's Arch-based gaming operating system built around AMD silicon, can boot and run on an Intel Arc B580 discrete graphics card. Posting in the r/SteamOS subreddit as SaperPL, they documented the feat this week, pairing the Arc B580 with a Ryzen 5 5600 processor and getting Valve's full gaming-mode interface running on the card. The catch is that reaching that point took a Radeon card, a workaround for a broken installer, and a motherboard setting that nearly sank performance along the way.

The opening exists because recent SteamOS beta builds quietly widened hardware coverage. Valve's changelog for the beta cites improved compatibility with recent Intel and AMD platforms, language clearly aimed at the wave of Intel-powered handhelds rather than desktop Arc cards. However, because the underlying Linux graphics driver is shared, the same Mesa stack that targets Intel handheld chips also recognizes a desktop Arc GPU. SaperPL's system reported the card as Mesa Intel Arc B580 Graphics (BMG G21) on Mesa 26.1.2, running SteamOS 3.9.

Getting there was not exactly plug-and-play. According to the post, newer SteamOS images that supposedly already include Intel Arc support failed during setup. These images did not boot into the older live desktop-style installer with install, update, and recovery options. Instead, they started installing directly to the drive, then failed when the system tried to connect to the network and pull its first update. SaperPL says the same problem occurred even when testing with a Radeon RX 9060 XT, suggesting the issue was not limited to the Arc B580 itself.

The workaround was suitably PC-gaming messy. SaperPL installed an older “repair-main” SteamOS build using the Radeon card, pulled the required updates, and then swapped in the Intel Arc B580. After that, SteamOS booted on the Intel GPU and ran from the Main channel. The poster also noted that users without a spare Radeon card may be able to follow a Steam Community workaround to bypass the installer’s update failure directly, although that still leaves the process firmly in enthusiast territory.

The first performance results were mixed. SaperPL tested 14 games, including Cyberpunk 2077, Helldivers 2, Marvel’s Spider-Man: Miles Morales, Indiana Jones and the Great Circle, Toxic Commando, Hades, Rocket League, and others shown in the SteamOS library screenshot. The interface itself appeared to behave well, with the poster saying the Steam library and store navigation worked smoothly, even while downloads continued in the background. Gamescope also reportedly worked similarly to Radeon, apart from a VRR bug on FreeSync displays with HDR that caused occasional flickering.

Frame rates were another story. Indiana Jones and Toxic Commando were initially barely above 20 FPS at 1080p on the lowest settings, while Helldivers 2, Cyberpunk 2077, and Spider-Man: Miles Morales fell far below comparable Windows benchmark videos. The poster’s monitoring suggested the CPU was not the main problem, with the GPU often sitting around 80% to 90% usage while the Ryzen 5 5600 hovered between roughly 30% and 50%.

The biggest culprit turned out to be a familiar one for Intel Arc users: Resizable BAR. SaperPL later updated the post to say that ReBAR had been disabled on the Asus B450 Strix motherboard after a CPU change. Once enabled, Cyberpunk 2077 and Spider-Man appeared to perform as expected, while Indiana Jones and Toxic Commando improved significantly, though still not fully matching Windows reference results.

That detail matters because Intel Arc GPUs are unusually sensitive to Resizable BAR. Without it, the CPU cannot efficiently access the GPU’s full memory space, which can lead to severe performance drops. In this case, it made the difference between “SteamOS on Arc is broken” and “SteamOS on Arc is early, but actually running.” Even on Windows, leaving ReBAR off will severely impact Arc performance.

Commenters also pointed to another likely limitation: kernel support. Intel’s Arc drivers on Linux have improved considerably, but the newest performance work often depends on recent kernel and Mesa versions. If SteamOS’ Main channel is still behind the very latest Linux graphics stack, Arc performance may remain below what the same card can do under Windows or faster-moving Linux distributions.

For now, this is more proof of concept than a consumer-ready feature. Valve has not turned SteamOS into a general desktop gaming OS with clean support for every GPU, and the install path shown here is still too awkward for normal users. But the result is interesting. SteamOS running on an Intel Arc B580 suggests Valve's hardware net is widening, whether intentionally for desktop GPUs or indirectly through work on Intel-powered handhelds.

That could matter for future SteamOS machines. AMD remains the obvious fit for Valve’s gaming hardware today, but Intel has been pushing harder on Linux graphics support, and low-profile Arc cards could become attractive for small living-room builds if the driver stack matures.

AMD’s Radeon RX 9070 XT graphics card has finally penetrated the Steam Survey video card user-share table. The complete set of new-generation RDNA 4 graphics cards data from AMD is now nestled within the Steam gamer popularity tables, with the performance-leading RX 9070 XT highest placed at position 25. AMD took the wraps off the RX 9070 XT and regular RX 9070 at a special event in Feb 2025, with availability starting from March 2025. The RX 9060 XT was a Computex 2025 (~end of May) launch. So the charting of the family has been a long time coming.

Valve doesn’t publicly state a minimum share threshold for inclusion in the results table, but whatever formula lies behind it, the numbers must have climbed sufficiently by May 2026 for the complete Radeon RX 9000 family to now make the grade. Notably, with its newfound data, the RX 9070 XT's 1.35% share sits just a shade behind the RTX 5080, which has 1.52%.

Green Team context and AMD’s leading mystery GPU

Nvidia dominates the Steam GPUs chart, as you may expect. The current leader of the Steam GPUs pack is the time-tested Nvidia GeForce RTX 3060 with a 4.02% share according to the newest survey. Positions two and three are the laptop (3.99%) and desktop (3.74%) versions of the RTX 4060, so some would call this Ada Lovelace GPU the real champion of champions.

Currently, the highest placed Red Team GPU is the nebulous ‘AMD Radeon Graphics’ at position 13 and 1.89% share. Some observers reckon this Steam entry impacts the tally of named models, as the Steam Client miscategorizes discrete models for some reason, perhaps due to some iGPU + GPU combos. There are also two other instances of ‘AMD Radeon(TM) Graphics’ in the table, muddying the waters.

At position 39, the RX 9060 XT has made its debut with a reported 0.72% share of Steam users gaming on this mid-ranger. The stats don’t differentiate between the 8GB and 16GB variants of this card.

We have to go all the way down to position 90 to see the Radeon RX 9070 non-XT graphics card. It has a user share of 0.18% according to the figures. For some reason, this efficiency king among GPUs has been present in the Steam Survey much longer than its brethren. We mentioned it popping up with just a 0.16% market share at the start of this year. The revised 0.18% figure doesn’t show spectacular growth, despite some of the praise heaped on this SKU. However, since the pricing of our current best-pick all-around enthusiast graphics card, the RX 9070 XT, can be so close, it’s probably not surprising that the non-XT is overshadowed.

AMD recently launched the RX 9070 GRE worldwide. This 12GB variant of the RX 9070 has been available for months in the Far East, but we aren’t surprised it hasn’t entered the Steam Survey yet (if it will ever make it).

Valve is bringing an end to one of Steam's longest-running payment options. On its official Steam support page, the company has confirmed that it will be discontinuing Steam gift cards by the end of 2026. It will no longer be restocking physical gift cards at retail stores and expects existing stock to wrap up by the end of the year. Customers with existing Steam gift cards will continue to be eligible to redeem them at any time, subject to applicable local laws.

For those interested in grabbing one of the last remaining physical Steam gift cards, several retailers should still have them in stock, including Best Buy. Users who prefer gifting Steam Wallet funds will still be able to purchase and send digital Steam gift cards directly through Steam, meaning the gifting option itself isn't going away, only the physical retail cards are being phased out.

• Buy Steam gift card from Best Buy

According to Valve, ever since the launch of physical Steam gift cards in 2012, scammers have increasingly used them to defraud unsuspecting victims. Over the years, the company has taken several measures to combat the problem, including working with retailers and law enforcement agencies, adding warnings to gift cards, restricting redemption to the currency of a user's Steam Wallet, and even removing cards from sale in regions where suspicious activity was detected.

Unfortunately, scammers have continued to adapt despite these safeguards. "As we have continued to put more and more restrictions in place, scammers have adapted. They continue to have an impact on Steam customers and other unsuspecting individuals. So we've made the difficult decision to end the Steam Gift Card program at retail stores," the company notes.

Valve's decision comes just a few weeks after it introduced a reservation-based system for its newly launched Steam Controller to combat scalpers and automated bots. The $99 controller sold out almost immediately after pre-orders opened, with some units quickly appearing on eBay for as much as $300. In response, Valve restricted reservations to eligible Steam accounts with a purchase history and good standing, helping ensure genuine customers received priority over resellers.

Valve released the Steam Hardware Survey for May 2026, revealing insight into PC gaming trends and patterns that define the industry. As always, we have data on how much RAM people have, what GPUs are the most popular, etc., but perhaps the most interesting bit of info is the CPU usage. AMD has now reached 46.06% share on Steam across all platforms, with almost 45% of Windows PCs using AMD processors.

The exact number for Windows is 44.97%, so we're counting that as 45% for AMD, while Intel is at 55.02% for the month of May. Compared to April, that's a 0.79% drop for the Blue Team, while also a 0.79% gain for the Red Team. Compared to the start of the year, in January, AMD only held 43.34% of the share while Intel accounted for 56.64%, so the patterns either way are being reinforced.

AMD keeps climbing the charts while Intel's lead is on a steady decline. It still has the biggest slice of the pie because of the sheer legacy left behind, and since AMD only became competitive in 2017. That was the year the first mainstream Ryzen chips came out and challenged Intel for the throne.

AMD planted the seeds of the Zen architecture during its darkest years, and that multi-year gamble has borne fruit to the point that the data now reflects it. To be clear, Intel is also very competitive these days, especially on the mobile front with Panther Lake and with the upcoming Nova Lake family set to take a true generational leap for desktop.

Most recently, the advent of 3D V-Cache has helped AMD secure the gaming segment with chips that consistently outperform other offerings. The company has released several X3D variants of its existing CPUs for both current and older generations, such as the newly announced 10th Anniversary Edition of the 5800X3D, the chip that started it all. On the other hand, we have the 9950X3D2 with extra cache stacked underneath both its 8-core CCDs for the first time in Ryzen history.

Funnily enough, AMD has also reached a similar 46% share of the server x86 CPU market thanks to its EPYC lineup, which is about to get refreshed with Venice this year and Verano in 2027. L

Valve's Steam Deck OLED is seeing a massive price increase. Widely considered one of the best handheld gaming PCs since its launch in 2023, the 512GB model is now $789, while the 1TB version is $949. Those are $240 and $300 increases, respectively.

In a blog post, Valve wrote that the price increases are "due to rising memory and storage costs."

"Steam Deck itself hasn't changed; these new prices reflect the current state of component costs and other global logistical challenges across the industry as a whole," the post reads.

The 512GB Steam Deck OLED was previously $549, while the 1TB upgrade was $649. As low-end gaming laptops have dried up, these were seen as a great value. But back in February, the handheld started going out of stock due to those same component shortages.

In this light, the Lenovo Legion Go 2, which we reviewed at $1,349.99, and Asus ROG Xbox Ally X, at $999.99, don't seem quite as outrageous anymore. The entry-level Asus ROG Xbox Ally, despite some performance issues and technical problems, may look more attractive than ever if it keeps its $599.99 price.

Memory and storage have also wreaked havoc with Valve's plans to launch its upcoming Steam Machine PC and Stream Frame VR headset. Those were delayed from the first quarter of 2026 into a murkier time. This price hike also suggests that those systems, which use newer technologies, will be even more expensive. Valve did launch its Steam Controller earlier this month.

The Steam Deck OLED follows a pattern of years-old machines getting price hikes as their manufacturers deal with the current component landscape. Microsoft increased the standard Xbox Series X to $649, while Sony's PlayStation 5 recently jumped to $649.99 for the base model and $899 for the PS5 Pro. In September, Nintendo will raise the price of the Nintendo Switch 2 by $50 in September. (If you're doing the math, yes, a 1TB Steam Deck costs more than a PlayStation 5 Pro.)

The Steam Deck OLED's prior pricing had previously led the market, leading us to question the expense of some Windows-based alternatives. We'll have to see if this price holds, but if it does, it may reorganize the entire value proposition of this product category in the first place.

California lawmakers may be backing away from a controversial age-verification requirement bill that alarmed Linux and open-source developers earlier this year, after a new amendment bill proposed exempting most open-source operating systems from the state’s upcoming Digital Age Assurance Act. In practice, that would likely exempt most mainstream Linux distributions — including Debian, Fedora, Ubuntu, Arch Linux, and Mint — from compliance requirements scheduled to take effect on January 1, 2027.

Assembly Bill 1856 (AB 1856), currently moving through California’s legislature ahead of committee reviews in June, would amend the state’s earlier age-assurance law by excluding software distributed under licenses that allow users to “copy, redistribute, and modify the software.”

The proposed amendment specifically states: “Operating system provider” does not mean a person or entity that distributes an operating system or application under license terms that permit a recipient to copy, redistribute, and modify the software.

The amendment follows months of backlash after California passed the original Assembly Bill 1043 (AB 1043), formally known as the Digital Age Assurance Act, in late 2025. The law sought to shift online age verification away from individual websites and apps and down to the operating-system level instead.

Under the original law, operating systems would be required to request a user’s age or birth date during device setup, then expose an “age bracket signal” to apps and app stores. The law, which defined brackets such as “under 13,” “13–15,” “16–17,” and “18+,” immediately raised questions about how such requirements would apply to decentralized, open-source software ecosystems.

Unlike Apple’s iOS or Google’s Android, most Linux distributions are not centrally controlled commercial platforms. Many are community-run projects maintained by volunteers, often without user accounts, telemetry systems, or even formal corporate ownership structures. Critics argued the law’s wording was so broad that it could technically force open-source operating systems to become age-verification platforms.

Privacy advocates, including the Electronic Frontier Foundation, criticized the legislation as invasive and warned it could create infrastructure for broader identity tracking online. Linux developers also questioned how California could realistically enforce such requirements on infinitely forkable open-source software projects.

The controversy became particularly heated after reports suggested platforms like SteamOS could still fall under the law due to their ties to proprietary application ecosystems. Valve’s Linux-based gaming platform ships with the proprietary Steam storefront and client, potentially placing it closer to Apple’s App Store or Google Play from a regulatory standpoint.

AB 1856 does not repeal the original Digital Age Assurance Act. Instead, it narrows the definition of who qualifies as an “operating system provider” under the law. Commercial platforms with proprietary app ecosystems could remain subject to California’s age-assurance requirements even if most open-source Linux distributions are ultimately exempted.

California Assembly Member Buffy Wicks introduced the amendment on February 11, 2026. However, the open-source exemption language appeared in later revisions that began drawing attention across Linux and privacy communities. The latest version is dated May 18, 2026, and as of May 19, 2026, the bill was read a second time and ordered to third reading.

Gamers receive hope once again that Valve’s long-delayed Steam Machine is moving forward towards a launch and not ending on the chopping block. The Khronos Group, which created the Vulkan graphics API standard, and is its developer and maintainer, has just listed the AMD Steam Machine as the latest entry in its list of conformant products. While this is in no way, shape, or form a confirmation that the console is arriving soon, it’s still a step in the right direction. It indicates that Valve is still actively working on the console despite the setbacks driven by insane memory and storage prices.

This certification does not mean that all Vulkan games will play well on the console — instead, it only says that the future Valve console complies with all the standards set by the body. In other words, the hardware, operating system, and drivers behave as expected with Vulkan, giving developers peace of mind that the entire stack would work consistently. The console’s inclusion in the list does not indicate performance or game compatibility, though.

Valve announced the Steam Machine along with the Steam Controller and the Steam Frame in November 2025. This has got many fans excited, especially as the Steam Deck brought SteamOS to a level of polish and compatibility that allowed users to play a big chunk of their Steam libraries on the handheld console. Unfortunately, this was also the time the memory and storage prices started to spiral out of control. Because of this, the Steam Machine runs the risk of becoming too expensive and moving out of reach of its target customers, especially as Valve is adamant that it will not subsidize its hardware.

Even though Valve announced the three gadgets simultaneously, the console, controller, and VR headset weren’t intended to launch simultaneously. So, even though the Steam Machine was delayed several times, the company saw no reason to hold back the Steam Controller. Fans could finally get their hands on the $99 accessory after it launched in late April, with Tom’s Hardware giving it four out of five stars in its review.

The gaming giant still hasn’t announced an official release date for its latest console, but we hope that the company can secure an affordable memory and storage supplier sooner. That way, it can deliver Steam Machine before the end of the year at a price that most gamers can afford.

Valve just released the CAD files for the Steam Controller and the Puck, which is used to charge and connect the controller to your PC. According to the Steam Community blog post, the STP and STL files are publicly available under a Creative Commons license on GitLab, making it easier to modify and create 3D printed accessories for both gadgets. A few reference files also note off-limits areas, as placing anything there will interfere with normal operations (such as the antenna and magnetic connectors).

Just like the Steam Machine, Valve envisions the Steam Controller to be endlessly customizable, at least in its physical look. Even though the Steam Machine doesn’t have a definite launch date yet, especially as it has been seemingly pushed back multiple times due to the AI-driven memory chip crisis, we’ve already seen a couple of accessories designed to customize the look of the living room PC console.

These 3D CAD files are available under a CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 International license, meaning anyone who uses them is free to share their creations provided they attribute the original creator, use them solely for non-commercial purposes, and distribute their creations under the same or a compatible license. We can already envision some of the possibilities enabled by these files, including 3D-printed smartphone holders, charging bases, table hooks, and more. But if you plan to sell your creations, you must secure a different license from Valve, as Creative Commons doesn’t cover that use case.

This isn’t the first time that Valve has released the 3D CAD files of their hardware. The Steam Deck arrived on store shelves on February 25, 2022, but the company released its official CAD files a couple of weeks earlier. This resulted in a vibrant community of 3D printed accessories for the Steam Deck on Printables, allowing gamers and enthusiasts to experiment with various builds to improve and customize their gaming experience.

Hopefully, Valve does the same for the Steam Machine, releasing the 3D files for the console a couple of weeks before its release. Many gamers were excited for its expected release in early 2026, but the RAMageddon has forced the company to push back its launch to “first half of 2026” and then to “this year.” If and when Valve releases the 3D CAD files for the Steam Machine, it’s likely the much-anticipated console will finally arrive within a couple of weeks, give or take a few days.

When we reviewed the Steam Controller, we had the chance to sit down with Valve and talk about our experiences using it and ask questions about it.

We talked with Valve programmer Pierre-Loup Griffais and Steve Cardinali, a mechanical engineer on the Steam Controller team, to talk more about the controller's design, the fact that it works only with Steam, and to learn more about how the company is dealing with latency, among many other topics. We published excerpts from this interview in a story alongside the review. Here, we're presenting the full transcript of our conversation.

This transcript has been lightly edited for clarity.

Andrew E. Freedman, Tom's Hardware: So I've been playing around with the Steam Controller. I have questions about why you made some of the choices you did. I also have some questions about the Steam philosophy behind the controller. So I want to get into all those. I think the first thing is, why is now the time to make a controller again? The Xbox controller is widely seen as the default. The PlayStation controller has better PC support than ever. I was just plugging it in for some comparisons and had a whole bunch of PC drivers. Why is now the time for Valve and Steam to get back into the controller game?

Pierre-Loup Griffais, Valve programmer: Yeah, actually, on the PlayStation side, we've been working closely with Sony to enable that stuff and make it work as well as possible out of the box. So we expect the situation to be pretty good there.

In terms of our controller, I think that if you look at efforts like the Steam Machine and the Steam Controller, they're more or less all coming from the same spot, which is we had a bunch of Steam Deck users that were using their Steam Deck in all kinds of different ways, and some of these ways included docking on a TV, right? We got some feedback that while they really appreciated having the same exact experience with respect to like the UI and being able to get in and out of their games quickly and all that, docking a Deck meant missing some of the inputs, right? Like leaving some inputs behind, because you're leaving the Deck on the dock. And so I think the Steam Controller is a great experience for that. You have all the same inputs that you're familiar with. It's pretty much the exact same layout as the Deck, with a bunch of improvements on it, but also just for PC as a whole.

I think the Deck was a great data point on that input scheme working really well to both work for games designed with controllers and games designed without and, you know, take control of your desktop and use a bunch of PC apps and all that. So that stuff's been looking really good. And so making a controller, you know, as a standalone version of those same inputs, I think, is a logical next step there.

Freedman: One thing I was very surprised about when I first plugged the Steam Controller in, was that the setup flow really is pretty minimal, right? Update your firmware, here's how to enter Big Picture Mode, and off you go. And I think in many ways, to get the most out of the controller, it had me digging deeper in Steam Input than I think I admittedly ever have before. Did you ever consider having more sorts of teaching moments about Steam Input for newer users? Or did you just kind of kind of assume people would sort of dig in as needed?

Steve Cardinali, mechanical engineer on the Steam Controller team: You know, we wanted it to be out of the box, easy to use for people who maybe just want a controller that works like a controller and how they would expect, so that you're seeing that element there, of course. And a lot of thought went into that process. But on top of that, in developing this controller, and along with the original Steam controller in the Steam Deck. A lot of work has gone in Steam Input, like you're saying. And there's a lot, a lot there. And one of the things that the controller team is working on right now is actually a couple rounds of how-to tutorials on like how to set up your track pads in these certain ways, and the ways that we find work best; how to set up gyro; different input mappings' and layouts that we have found success with to get people started to get exposed to Steam Input and all the power it has behind it without being too overwhelming.

Griffais: It's really important to us that if you don't want to deal with any of that stuff, you don't have to, right? That the surface level experience gets you controller compatibility in games that are meant for controllers without any sort of tinkering. So the Steam Input stuff is there if you want it, but we don't want it to be a required element to just experience the baseline functionality there.

Freedman: Was there ever consideration for instance, the way Steam Deck had a game, I'm blanking on the name.

Griffais: Aperture Desk Job.

Freedman: Right. Was something like that ever a consideration for people who hadn't used the Steam Deck before or maybe might be considering this for the first time on a desktop or eventually, a Steam Machine? "Hey, here's how you get used to the input."

Griffais: Actually, I think that — and this might still be a conversation that's ongoing — but there were some conversations here about making Desk Job work well with the controller as well, because 99% of what you get through Desk Job is actually controller functionality. There is one step, I think, where it teaches you to use the touchscreen on the deck and maybe a microphone, and so I think we were thinking about making some adjustments so that it could be used just with the Steam Controller on a PC to teach you the same elements around motion controls, trackpads and all that that, you know, it walks you through. I'm not sure where those discussions are, but I think that was in the cards at some point.

Freedman: That's really interesting. So speaking of features and functionality, I happen to be playing a lot of Resident Evil 9 on my Steam Deck, and transitioning to the Controller felt very much like playing on my Steam Deck. I'm pretty sure that's the goal. When you were deciding to make a controller out of the Steam Deck, how do you decide which features from other controllers and the Steam Deck to include?

You have some from a lot of what you might consider more "basic" controllers, right? You know, your face buttons, things like rumble. Then you have things that you might consider from "elite" style controllers, for lack of a better term, right? Back buttons, gyro. So how did you decide that "OK, we're going to do back buttons, but we're not going to do replaceable thumb sticks, or we're not going to do replaceable back paddles." Where do you sort of decide?

Cardinali: Sure, yeah. For the controller, at least, it was, I wouldn't say, straightforward, but we had the guiding principle of Steam Deck users who get this controller, it should feel very similar. And it shouldn't be like a bunch of new stuff in their face that they have to then go and to the Input layout configurator and change settings, right? We wanted it to be natural. You're playing a game on your Steam Deck, and you go sit on your couch. You play it on Controller, it feels similar. So that helped us kind of keep the feature set down to what we had in Steam Deck.

The one main thing that kind of crept in that you probably have noticed or heard about is the Grip Sense. We're always trying to highlight new ways that you can play mouse and keyboard games — like competitive mouse and keyboard games — with a controller. The original Steam Controller did a great job of that, and then we carried over those trackpads and gyro over to this new controller. But as the gyro community becomes more and more prevalent, they do all sorts of things to enable and disable gyro for ratcheting. And we wanted to put something in there for them, for that community, to make sure this supports them in a competitive style as well. So that one kind of snuck in there, because we feel like that's an important feature for those kinds of games. Everything else is like. We didn't want to overburden the product with too much additional cost, or weight, or battery consumption. We wanted it to be a great controller for everybody. So we tried to really focus in on what we thought was the core, important feature set with this, you know, extra bonus in there.

Griffais: Yeah, some of these questions apply to the design of the Steam Deck too, right? Like, how did some of these inputs get in there? And what did not get in there? I think, like Steve said, every time we look at an input, we're conscious of overburdening the user. Like, having too many inputs is really not something that we want to see. And you know, the cost, the weights, everything comes into play there, But for for the back buttons in particular, I think we saw pretty early, including the first Steam Controller, that we had a bunch of players that felt limited in what they could do while manipulating the camera. And we thought it was really important to have all the functions in the game still available while you're fine-tuning the camera. We saw a bunch of users use claw grip to counteract that, right, where you're using your thumb and your index fingers to still have access to the diamond buttons, even though you're fine-tuning the stick. And we thought back buttons was a really good solution to that. So on the Steam Deck, you know, the four of them tested really well, and they weren't too invasive, right? Like, they're disabled by default. They're just part of the grip. You don't really have to think about it.

Freedman: Right.

Griffais: Grip sense is a similar thing, right? Like, it's, it's in because it doesn't really change how you have to approach the controller if you don't really use it. And so it's, it's this easy, additive thing that doesn't perturb things that way. It and is, is really, easy for us to — well, I mean, it's not that easy. There's a lot of considerations there. But it was doable, I guess, to put it in while retaining the whole feature set and not compromising the rest of the, you know, the core principles around the controller there, which are, first and foremost, have all the inputs that you would expect from regular controllers in the place that your fingers expected. Which is something that was really important for us on the Deck as well. So that the diamond buttons, the bumper trigger, the analog sticks all kind of fall into place, and then all the extra inputs are there if you need them, just like the software features for configurability.

All-new TMR sticks

Freedman: The other big addition you didn't mention is the TMR joysticks. That didn't make it into the Steam Deck or the Steam Deck OLED. So why was the controller the right place to start?

Griffais: I think the answer there is that we tried seeing if the TMR sticks would work in the Deck, right? And it was a little bit early for that. I think the technology was nascent, and the vendors there were, you know, new into the market, but we tried to see if it would have made sense for the Deck, for the Deck OLED, and, you know, we were looking at it. And so, I think, in the Steam Controller timeframe, it was just ready enough that it made sense. But I think we've seen the value around it from the get go, we tried to make it work pretty hard.

Freedman: Were there any sort of technical discussions on using TMR versus Hall effect when you're designing it?

Cardinali: You know, it primarily came down to which version of the technology we were most comfortable with using, which felt most mature and ready for us to use. But, you know, TMR, it has all the same pros as Hall effect, but the extra benefit it has is that it has lower power consumption. So that's like a huge benefit for why we went down that path, right? We don't have to eat as much battery life when using these new sticks.

Freedman: Why not put a headphone jack for passthrough audio on the controller? You're on the couch, you might want to be chatting. Why not? Why leave that one off?

Griffais: It's a hard one. I mean, it's just very, very hard to productize, like in terms of the audio bandwidth and the additional cost and complexity in the system design. I think it's something we evaluated, and then we looked at all these other features, and we focused on that instead. No, it's not to say that we don't see the value there. So it's more than it didn't make the cut this time around. Because, you know, the other things were more important when it came down to prioritization.

Connectivity

Freedman: Let's talk about the Puck. I have never seen a dock for a controller that wasn't huge before, right? It's always a big stand. So at what point did it come about that you were going to turn a 2.4 GHz wireless solution into a charger? Because it's made it hard for me to get the best battery life, because it's so easy for me to just take it and put it down and walk away and think, "Oh, I put it in the natural spot."

Cardinali: Yeah, well, we did our job then, right? [Griffais laughs] I mean, that was, that's honestly primarily one of the reasons, right? We knew we wanted a proprietary wireless connection, just to make sure that we had a robust, low-latency connection, and we can control the end-to-end conversation so that we can guarantee performance. But it's a hard thing to ask customers to have a little dongle and, like, plug it in somewhere. And then a lot of people solve that problem by having a dock, which adds extra value, but from our perspective, we wanted to minimize the burden to the desk. Right? Your desk base, some people have small desks. A big dock can take up a lot of space.

And the Puck itself — We know there's an active community of makers that use our products, and we have people internal [sic] who have designed and printed their own little mounts that hold the puck as a full dock. And we expect people to do stuff like that with this, and keeping it small allows people to do that without kind of over-prescribing how they design it and use it around it. And then it has the added benefit that it has this nice, satisfying little click when you put it over, it snaps into place. You don't have to worry about plugging it in. It kind of came about just because we knew we needed that connection. We were trying to solve problem with getting away from your PC, as well, with wireless interference. Just kind of popped up out of all those. How do we make this a good user experience.

Freedman: Speaking of connection, you recommend Bluetooth 5 or higher. How did you combat latency here? And you have a 250 Hz polling rate. We are seeing some things go up to 8,000 Hz. For me, I can't tell the difference. How do you settle on what type of connection to use to reduce latency?

Griffais: In terms of what we're working back from, it's very much the actual experience, right? So we're looking at the polling rates of the internal components and what they're actually able to report their updated data. Every component there that has analog data or digital buttons, has different performance characteristics when it comes to how quickly you can poll them from the MCU [microcontroller unit] and the trackpad, and the analog triggers. And analog sticks are all going to have different characteristics. But we wanted to make sure that we weren't leaving anything on the table where the transport, like getting the data to the PC would actually, you know, gatekeep, limit. any of the core potential of those parts. So that's kind of how we picked our core update right there, which I think, you know, is pretty high-performance. There's a lot of updates there.

But then, when we look at the transport, we think we got to a pretty good place with Bluetooth, right? Where Bluetooth, if you have one controller connected, the performance is actually pretty comparable to what you would get over our direct link using the Puck, right? But as soon as you add more controllers into the picture, that's where the limits of Bluetooth start showing up. So if you have two controllers over Bluetooth, the latency is actually doubled, and then it keeps going like that, right to the point that it becomes very noticeable, even for people that are not looking for that kind of stuff. So the custom protocol there, when you use our Puck, lets you have up to four controllers on one puck with no latency hit, which we're really excited by. But at the end of the day, the latency we're working back from is the core performance of the actual parts in the in the controller.

The Steam Ecosystem

Freedman: I want to ask more about the philosophy of the controller within the Steam ecosystem. The controller only works through Steam, right, on Windows, on macOS, if you're not in Steam, it's seen as a USB mouse. I plugged it into a PlayStation and it's seen as a USB mouse. Why not have it so that it works more widely outside of Steam even if Steam would actually still be the best place to use it?

Griffais:, I guess there's a couple dimensions to that. I guess one thing that I must point out before continuing this answer is that on Linux, we have made a built-in driver that is actually in the Linux kernel that lets you have gamepad functionality without needing Steam running. So it's kind of a baseline level of support. There's no analog to other platforms right now. So like, like you said, on Windows, macOS, or any other computer or computer-shaped object, it's going to be in default operation of, you know, being a USB mouse and keyboard composite device where you can use it to mouse around, to use arrow keys, escape, enter. You know, have basic control over your device there.

But the the main thing to keep in mind is that to be a controller, like a PlayStation controller on PlayStation or an Xbox controller on a Windows PC, you have to go through the driver framework for those controllers, and the licensing program for those controllers. Essentially, if you want to work out of the box as a PlayStation controller, you have to be a PlayStation controller, right? And so there's a bunch of stuff in a Steam controller that is kind of its own thing. And so there's not really a set precedent for having custom controllers with extra inputs that are not just aliasing buttons over standard controllers, or just doing things that don't require, you know, those extra software features to be registered using the standard driver. So then you'd end up in a spot where you have, you know, maybe a button to switch modes, where you're either in PlayStation mode, or you're in the full mode. And then, you know, the burden of trying to, like, the complexity of trying to navigate that and added cost to have those different mode of operations, and the added parts would, we think, not be worth it for the end user there.

That being said, we're pretty happy we're with where the ecosystem is. Adding games to Steam is pretty easy. We keep making it easier and easier on SteamOS, you can just right-click any installed app and say, "add to Steam." And then from that point on, you're good to go. You can assign a custom configuration to it, and it's pretty easy on other operating systems as well. So I think getting the full feature set there is possible on the whole catalog, even non-Steam games and standalone apps outside of Steam. But for sure, it comes with the kind of trade-offs when it comes to first-time setup that you enumerated.

Freedman: One of the first things I felt like I had to do once I had used the Steam Controller in Steam was that I gotta play Fortnite with it. Because that's very famously only available in one place in the PC ecosystem. And I was able to do that, but one of — I think it was one of the joysticks wasn't working as expected. Has there ever been a thought of, like, can we get this working at a baseline on other launchers, or is that just like so far down the pipe, because you can add other games to Steam?

Griffais: It's definitely something we think about, and we get feedback along those lines. I think right now, we are trying to make it as easy as possible to get it working through Steam, including adding other things through Steam. But it's possible, you know, in the future, it's something we'll look at with a different approach there. But I guess we're limited in what we can do with things like core operating system drivers and such, right?

Like Xbox controllers have built-in support within Windows itself. PlayStation controllers have a driver that they work with Microsoft on. So it's, you know, it would be quite a bit of a different method of supporting it to try and go with those ways. I think we'd rather just make it as easy as possible to get it added to Steam so you can benefit from that functionality without needing any sort of kernel driver that would potentially, down the line, cause system instability or things like that.

Like we're really, we're really happy with not having a kernel driver, because it comes with the onus of not messing it up, right? And so right now, the current method of supporting the controller is pretty safe.

Launching before the Steam Machine and Steam Frame

Freedman: The Steam Controller is launching ahead of the Steam Machine and the Steam Frame? How has that changed launch for you? It kind of feels from history that people are used to controllers launching alongside consoles. That there should be a specialized box that it controls. Obviously, it works great on other things. I've used it on a Steam Deck. I've been using it on my rig. But how has that changed the launch and how you're looking at messaging with the controller?

Cardinali: I was gonna say it really hasn't. Because from the get go, the controller wasn't just something we saw as only a Steam Machine controller, right? It is, first and foremost, a PC controller. It's going to work great with your Steam Machine. It's going to work great with your Steam Deck, but on your Windows, or wherever you have Steam, it'll work great as a Steam Controller. And essentially, you know, we had, we had thought at some point maybe they would launch together, depending on how the timing lined up. But it was never a constraint internally that it's something we had to do, because we saw them truly as two separate products that work well together, but they're their own things.

Griffais: We expect a vast majority of users will be on PC, right? There's so many people there that might be in demand for a controller. And so I think that was always our priority from the get-go.

Griffais: You can definitely draw a line between the first Steam Controller and this one in terms of development features and philosophy. Like you said, though, the first Steam Controller was more of a peripheral for PCs to play PC games, whereas this controller is more a normal controller, first and foremost, And then it adds some of the same features that let you play PC games with the first Steam controller. So a lot of it is actually working back from the feedback that we got on the first Steam Controller, where people appreciated the features that let them play their PC games, the mouse controls and all that. But they, instead of, switching between a Steam Controller when they're playing PC-only games and an Xbox controller, they wanted something that did both.

And so when we designed the controls of the Steam Deck, we very much were implementing that feedback and made sure, like we were saying before, to have a standard controller, you know, and with all of its inputs in all the spots that your hand would expect it. And so that was a that was a pretty core design principle there that followed us from the legacy of the first Steam controller. So all the extra features are there, but also, you know, the knowledge of the desire that people just want a device that does all of those things.

Ergonomics

Freedman: One thing that surprises me about this, given how many things are packed into it, how do you work to make it feel good in the hand? I mean, it's very it's ergonomic for what it is. I expected, after an extended period of time, I would find issue with, "oh, you know, you have, the touchpads down here," or, you know, where the back buttons are, anything like that. How do you sort of fit all that into something so ergonomic?

Cardinali: A lot of prototypes, a lot of prototypes. Like, we spent an entire year for this controller just thinking about ergonomics, and how do we take the Steam Deck inputs and put them in a controller in a way that's comfortable, doesn't feel too big in people's hands, especially people with small hands, and feels good in people with big hands, right? A lot of internal testing, we brought in external people to come get their hands on functional prototypes. I mean in terms of functional prototypes, before we even, like, locked the ergonomic design, we probably made 30-plus functional controllers that people could play games with.

Many of them were just different iterations on the trackpad alignment and, like, the direction orientation. The first inception. They were just square, and just like, aligned with the system, like it is in the Steam Deck, versus "clocked and canted," as we lovingly call them now. That took a lot of work to land there and a lot of testing, because with something with this many inputs, you really have to spend time and do the due diligence to make sure that it's going to be comfortable for the majority of people.

Griffais: Yeah, just like the Steam Deck, ergo was pretty much at the top of the priorities list when we're designing things. So things like making sure it's comfortable, definitely above, you know, the cosmetics around it, right? So we got the feedback a ton that Steam Deck looks bulky and uncomfortable, but then once you hold it, it feels great, right? Then, I think that's very much a result of that. Unfortunately, we didn't find a way to make it feel great and also look great. But you know, there's, there's always next one.

Component shortages & tariffs

Freedman: There's been a lot of questions about the rest of the Steam hardware lineup because of things like component shortages and tariffs. How has that affected the Steam Controller? Has that affected the $99 pricing or the timing of its release?

Griffais: Yeah, it has definitely, it's definitely affected it. I think [that] our price reflects the reality of building the product and getting it to customers at the real cost that we can make it with the reality of today's economics and, you know, dynamics. So for sure, there is things like tariffs included, depending on the region and so on.

But that being said, like for something like a controller, the current conditions, with all the memory shortages and all that, don't really affect it that much, it would have been way worse during Covid. Like during Covid, there was a microcontroller shortage, the same kind of microcontrollers that you use in a controller like that. But that's really not a problem right now. So I would say for the controller itself, it's more things like import duties and shipping costs rising because of current conditions that would affect it. So it's not as much as it would, you know, a big PC product with lots of memory in it, but it's definitely affecting it.

Freedman: And you guys definitely have experience shipping PC products during Covid.

Griffais: Unfortunately, yeah. I mean, it seems like whenever we decide to launch a product or some kind of worldwide, global condition trying to prevent us from doing so, but we've been persisting.

Freedman: Given the current situation in which you've built and priced the controller, was there anything — any features — that you had to consider taking out of the controller to make it price-efficient?

Cardinalli: I mean, those conversations happened way earlier on in development of the program, so nothing that kind of came about in the past, call it year, really affected any final feature decision, right? Those were made way earlier.

[Interview ends]

After months of waiting, Valve has released its first piece of hardware since the Steam Deck OLED: the Steam Controller, a gamepad that takes the versatile mix of inputs from the best handheld gaming PC and lets you play games on your TV using any device that runs Steam.That includes gaming PCs, Macs, Steam Decks, and, one day, the Steam Machine and Steam Frame.

But the Steam Controller is releasing ahead of the latter two devices, and into a market where Xbox controllers dominate gaming on the couch. Even Sony's DualSense controllers have great support on a PC. But, according to Valve, they don't match what you can do on the Steam Deck, and they say people want that.

The Steam Controller came from the fact that Steam Deck users were using their handhelds in a variety of ways, including docking on a TV. Those people couldn't have the same inputs as they do on the Steam Deck. Valve programmer Pierre-Loup Griffais told Tom's Hardware that the controller, and its ability to play all sorts of games designed for a keyboard and mouse on a controller, made for a "logical next step."

Building the Controller

"We got some feedback that while they really appreciated having the same exact experience with respect to the UI and being able to get in and out of their games quickly and all, that docking a Deck meant missing some of the inputs, right?" said Griffais. "And so I think the Steam Controller is a great experience for that. You have all the same inputs that you're familiar with. It's pretty much the exact same layout as the Deck, with a bunch of improvements on it, but also just for, you know, just PC as a whole. "

Among other controllers, like what you get from Xbox and PlayStation, the Steam Controller sits in a sort of middle ground. It has more features than a standard Xbox controller, for instance, but doesn't have the physical customizability — think replaceable thumbsticks and hair-trigger locks — like a more expensive Xbox Elite Controller or PlayStation DualSense Edge.

"We wanted it to be natural," Steve Cardinali, a mechanical engineer on the Controller team, told Tom's Hardware. "You're playing a game on your Steam Deck, and you go sit on your couch, you play it on Controller, it feels similar."

That, he said, kept the feature set largely down to what is on the Steam Deck, minus the addition of Grip Sense, which can detect when you're holding the controller and effectively be used as a virtual button. Cradinali said that was added for the growing number of gyro users in competitive games, who need a tool for "ratcheting," or activating, disabling, or toggling gyro for motion controls.

"That one kind of snuck in there, because we feel like that's an important feature for those kinds of games, he added. "We didn't want to overburden the product with too much additional cost or weight or battery consumption. We wanted it to be a great controller for everybody."

The one other big new feature are the TMR (Tunneling Magnetoresistance) joysticks, which help prevent drift. Griffais said that while they considered that for the Steam Deck, the technology was "nascent." Now, it's more mature.One feature from the Steam Deck is missing from the Controller — a headphone jack, which you can find on other gamepads, letting you chat with your friends from your couch and a wired headset."It's just very, very hard to productize, like in terms of the audio bandwidth and the additional cost and complexity in the system design," Griffais said." I think it's something we evaluated, and then we looked at all these other features and we focused on that instead. No, it's not to say that we don't see the value there. So it's more that it didn't make the cut this time around."

The Controller Puck: Respecting your desk

The Steam Controller comes with a small puck, which serves dual roles as a 2.4 GHz wireless connection and a docking station to charge the system. I'm very used to seeing simple USB dongles or massive USB controller docks. Valve's proprietary connection allows for up to four controllers to be connected to one dock.

According to Cardinalli, it's "a hard thing to ask" people to deal with a dongle (heard, I only have so many USB ports) or a large dock, which takes up a lot of desk space. The combination of the two minimizes the desk space while also easily charging the controller.

"And then it has the added benefit that it has this nice, satisfying little click when you put it over, it snaps into place, Cardinali said. "You don't have to, like, worry about plugging it in."

He also highlighted the community of makers who have built add-ons for the Steam Deck. He fully expects people with 3D printers to build fuller docks, and says that the smaller size doesn't prescribe what kind of designs can be thought up.

Steam Input and the learning curve

If you're expecting Valve to teach you how to use the Controller, think again. Steam will push you to update your Controller and the associated Puck, a 2.4 GHz dongle and charging dock, and advise you to use the Steam button to go into Big Picture mode. After that, you're on your own, and it mostly works like an Xbox controller. There's no game, like Aperture Desk Job, for the Steam Deck, to school you on more advanced features.

The back buttons, gyroscope, and new Grip Sense feature, which detects where you touch the controller, are all built into Steam Input. But as Cardinali pointed out, the main controller features largely work without customization.

"We wanted it to be out of the box, easy to use for people who maybe just want a controller that works like a controller and how they would expect, so that you're seeing that element there, of course," he said. "And a lot of thought went into that process."

"It's really important to us that if you don't want to deal with any of that stuff… that the surface-level experience gets you controller compatibility in games that are meant for controllers without any sort of tinkering," added Griffais. "So the steam input stuff is there if you want it, but we don't want it to be a required element to just experience the baseline functionality there."

The Steam Controller team is working on a series of tutorials on setting up some of those functions, including customizing the touchpads, setting up gyro and other input methods, to get people exposed to Steam Input and its functionality "without being too overwhelming."

Griffais did suggest that there have been conversations within Valve about adapting Aperture Desk Job to the Steam Controller in some fashion, but couldn't guarantee it would happen. The game does feature parts that teach you how to use the Steam Deck's touchscreen and microphone, beyond the otherwise similar controls.

All roads lead to Steam

The Steam Controller is designed for devices that use Steam. It works with Windowsand with Macs, but Steam has to be running. Otherwise, it's seen as a hybrid mouse/keyboard input device. (Even on a PlayStation, it's seen as a mouse. The exception is Linux, where Valve has a driver in the kernel with gamepad functionality).

That's not to say you can't play games purchased outside of Steam — you can add most titles to Steam using the "Add a Non-Steam Game to My Library" option.

But wouldn't letting the Controller work out of the box with more devices and without Steam better follow Valve's PC gaming ethos? Griffais said there are other considerations.

"We're limited in what we can do with things like core operating system drivers and such, right?" he said. "Xbox controllers have built-in support within Windows itself. PlayStation controllers have a driver that they work with Microsoft on."

He said that Valve would rather put it all in Steam, to not need a kernel driver, which could potentially add system instability."

We're really happy with not having a kernel driver, because it comes with the onus of not messing it up, right?" he said. "And so right now, the current method of supporting the controller is pretty safe."

Releasing the Steam Controller now

It seems that every time in modern history that Valve tries to release hardware, there's a global issue fighting them. The Steam Deck came out amidst the worst of the Covid-19 pandemic. The Steam Machine and Steam Frame are delayed due to the chip shortage. Though the Steam Controller is releasing separately, today's economics still affected the $99 gamepad.

"Our price reflects the reality of building the product and getting it to customers," Griffais said, adding that tariffs are a factor, depending on the region.

(The Steam Deck will cost $99 in the U.S.; $149 CAD in Canada; €99 in the European Union; £85 in the UK; $149 AUD in Australia; and 419 złoty in Poland.

But the memory shortages, which are affecting Valve's other hardware, like the existing Steam Deck OLED, don't affect the controller as much, he said, adding that "it would have been way worse during Covid" due to the microcontroller shortage at the time.

But today's economics and market dynamics didn't have an effect on the controller as it's shipping.

"I mean, those conversations happened way earlier on in development of the program, so nothing that kind of came about in the past, call it year, really affected any final feature decision, right?" Cardinali said. "Those were made way earlier."

The Steam Controller will be available to add to your Steam Cart on Monday, May 4. For more, see our Steam Controller review.

A hardware reviewer accidentally broke the embargo for the Steam Controller, revealing its $99 MSRP. The original video has since been taken down from YouTube, but one enthusiast was quick to record the video and share it on X via Streamable. The video is just about four minutes long, with the reviewer saying that the dual trackpads are the standout feature of this controller. They shared the Steam Controller’s price near the end of the video, saying, “It’s not cheap, but it’s only $25 more than a PS5 controller.”

Valve originally announced the Steam Controller in late 2025, alongside the new Steam Machine and Steam Frame VR headset. These were initially slated for an early 2026 launch, but the current chip crisis has forced the company to change the release date from “early 2026” to “first half of 2026” to “this year.” Some enthusiasts are losing hope that the living room PC console will actually arrive because of unreasonable memory prices pushing the cost for the Steam Machine to unreasonable levels. This is especially true as Valve says that it won’t subsidize the hardware, unlike other console makers such as Sony and Nintendo.

It seems that the same is true for the Steam Controller, which is significantly more expensive at $99. By comparison, the basic Xbox Wireless Controller has an MSRP of $64.99, while the DualSense controller for the Sony PlayStation 5 only costs $74.99. Even the Pro Controller for the Nintendo Switch and Switch 2 are only priced at $79.99 and $89.99 respectively. This makes the Steam Controller one of the more expensive options when it comes to basic controllers, although it’s still half the MSRP of premium options like the Xbox Elite Series 2 and DualSense Edge.

Nevertheless, the dual touchpads on the Steam Controller make it quite a unique controller among the many options available out there. This feature makes it easier to use with a PC-like interface, which is quite useful especially as the Steam Machine is basically just a mini-PC running SteamOS. You can also use it with other operating systems, like Windows, macOS, Android, and iOS, although it will never beat the utility of a mouse and keyboard, especially for specific genres like FPS and MOBA.

Valve hasn’t announced an official release date for any of its new hardware yet. Nevertheless, this accidental review video release gives us hope that the Steam devices are arriving sooner, rather than later, and that their prices remain within reasonable range.

It is easy to get sucked into Steam Sale fever and end up buying more games than you have the time or the inclination to play. However, it is still surprising to see that at least 120 people have collections with 20,000 or more games, according to SteamDB’s latest figures. Number one on the leaderboard is Sonix, with a Steam game collection of 43,085 Steam games worth nearly $750,000 at today’s prices.

We guess many readers will be familiar with the experience of a digital games library growing into astronomical numbers. But personal three or four-figure game collections are relatively small when you see what the Steam whales are up to.

Three Steam gamers have over 40,000 games in their bulging entertainment libraries. That’s a huge number of games. Last September, we reported on Sonix becoming the first to earn the 40K badge; now, they are one of three to earn that ‘honor.’

So, what of the other 120 folks who have 20,000 or more games in their collection? Number 120, Cheltan, is a Japanese user who has been on Steam for over 17 years. Their 20,005-strong collection is worth $148,596 at today’s prices. Surely they got a lot of the titles in the sales, though, with an average paid game price of $7.47.

Cheltan’s game-playing stats are interesting, but not unusual for this kind of user. For example, they have 'only' played 8,732 out of the 21,938 games they have access to on Steam (paid and free titles). Their average playtime is 4.7 hours, and the average price per hour of gaming fun is $0.92.

The last time we looked at these colossal Steam game collections, we estimated that playing through a 40,000-game collection would take seven full years, nonstop. At a more reasonable 8-hours-per-day workload, make that 21 years. Moreover, if it takes just a single minute to purchase a game, and ‘working’ 8-hour days again, one would need three months to build such a library.

Buying games twice because they are a bargain

Many gamers will admit they have hundreds or thousands of games in their libraries and probably can’t remember most of them. I have 140 games, Steam informs me, but I know I have bought the same game twice occasionally, after seeing an irresistible sale somewhere and purchasing it before realizing. Remember, PC gaming bargains can be had directly and via bundles, third-party sales and offers, and more. Using a third-party key store means you aren't saved from purchasing duplicates by the Steam checkout system.

Steam is the most popular marketplace for games on PC, and Valve keeps adding new features to make it even better. One of the reasons behind Steam's prevalence is its pricing — how some games cost less in certain regions, and how often they're discounted in sales. Now, it seems like Valve is adding a 30-day price history right inside the store to let you track any recent changes and get the best deal possible.

Backend changes show multiple new strings in Steam's codebase that refer to price tracking, in particular, if a game is the cheapest it has been in the past 30 days. This data should show up in the buy box, next to the price and 'Add to Cart' options. There can be up to three different columns showing the typical price, the 30-day low, and the current price, based on which you can decide whether it's the right time to buy it.

We can infer all of this because this feature is technically not new; it's been available in the EU since 2023, but not every country in the region. By law, the EU Omnibus Directive mandates that all storefronts show the recent price of a product to safeguard consumers from fake discounts. For instance, a developer could raise the price from $20 to $60 for one day, then immediately "drop" it to $30 and claim it was 50% off.

Comment from r/Steam

Showing the price history for the previous month ensures stuff like this doesn't happen or, at least, the buyer is aware of it. That being said, even outside of the EU, Steam users have been able to track prices through third-party tools like SteamDB that offer a much more comprehensive outlook. You can check the all-time price history on SteamDB, along with regional prices (averaged against USD) for any game.

Since Valve is now considering adding support for price history in Steam natively, it will only help make more informed purchasing decisions, even if SteamDB offers better tracking otherwise. In other news, Valve is also reportedly developing "SteamGPT," its very own AI bot for customer support that might even be able to interface with CS2's anti-cheat. Clearly, it takes a lot for Steam to remain at the top, even if rival marketplaces are trying to become more competitive.

Steam will start gathering FPS data based on your hardware, allowing the company to potentially build a baseline and estimate game framerates based on your PC’s specifications. The company said in its last client update that the feature is currently in Beta, and that it will “focus on devices running SteamOS.” We’re unsure yet when this will drop for the general public and when we’ll see the results on the Store pages of various titles on the platform. However, this is an interesting data point, especially if it’s accurate, as it can give users a worthwhile estimate of how smoothly a game would run, especially on devices with borderline hardware, like a console or gaming laptop.

Xbox already has a feature that tells you whether a game should play well on your device, but it’s not super accurate. For example, it says that Call of Duty: Modern Warfare III “Should perform great on your device,” on a gaming laptop running an Intel Core i7-10870H paired with an RTX 3060 and 32GB of RAM. While this technically falls under the recommended specifications for the game, in my personal use it runs at a rather cinematic framerate and load times are atrocious, leading to a rather disappointing experience. But if Steam can show an accurate FPS estimate on game titles, this would let gamers know what to expect and even help with making purchase decisions.

While this is a particularly useful option for PC gamers, Steam says that it will focus on SteamOS devices for Beta testing. This is likely because there’s a smaller number of configurations for the operating system, which is primarily used by handhelds like the Steam Deck and the Lenovo Legion Go S, versus desktop and laptop PCs, which practically have an infinite number of specifications. This might also be useful for gamers who intend to purchase a Steam Machine — although Steam’s console PC has been delayed several times, many still hope that it will launch later this year.

Of course, the feature is still in the Beta testing stage, so we are yet to see if this will get a general roll out and display estimated FPS numbers based on your hardware. More importantly, Steam must prove that its numbers will be accurate. After all, it would be disappointing if you bought a title because the Steam launcher suggested that it would have a playable FPS only to show an unstable and low framerate when you’re already playing the game.

The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) has seemingly launched, or at least made public, a new investigation into malware-ridden fake games on Steam. Anyone who installed and played one of these games between 2024 and 2026 was likely affected, and the FBI is urging them to come forward. Victims of these malware-embedded titles will help with the investigation and be kept completely confidential.

There are several games part of this list, including Chemia, Dashverse / DashFPS, Lampy, Lunara, PirateFi, Tokenova, and BlockBasters. Most of these have their own dedicated stories from the time they were released, and stole victim info and compromised their accounts. BlockBasters is the most high-profile mention here as the game exfiltrated $32,000 worth of cancer donations from a streamer last year.

Moreover, pretty much all of these games — and likely more that the FBI didn't explicitly name — are crypto scams that drain your wallets once launched. Most people are logged into every website on their browser, which only makes the perpetrator's job easier as the automated attack ransacks everything. Even your Steam account will be hijacked, and you might lose access to your library.

The frequency of these thieving games has only gone up in the past few years despite Valve's efforts to regularly combat them. It's likely that the influx of new releases overpowers the vetting system, letting a few bad apples through. In some cases, subsequent updates or patches introduce the malware, letting the base game pass Steam's checks. That's why it's important to provide any relevant info that can help the authorities catch and/or prosecute these criminals under federal law.

You can fill out the "Seeking Victim Information" form on the FBI's website if you've been affected. If you know someone else who was targeted by these fake, malicious Steam games, then send an email to Steam_Malware@fbi.gov. In any case, the process is entirely voluntary, but if you choose to step up, you might be followed up with later based on your responses.

Steam just released its Client Beta patch notes, and it’s adding a major new feature designed to make game reviews better. According to the company announcement, users will now have the ability to include their system specifications in any new or updated review they write. This would make it easier for potential game buyers looking at reviews to see how the reviewer’s hardware might have influenced their feedback.

At the moment, the only way you can see the specs of a reviewer’s system is if they intentionally add it into the review or into their profile. However, only a few people do that, so if a reviewer criticizes or praises a game, especially based on its performance, you’re unsure if you’ll get the same experience. But if you can see the specs of the reviewer’s system, you can then gauge if the issue they encountered is truly a problem with the game or if it’s only caused by a mismatch with their system and the minimum specifications listed on Steam.

Alternatively, a person saying that the game runs smoothly and without any problems might be running an AMD Ryzen 7 9800X3D, which offers devastating gaming performance, that’s paired with a powerful (and definitely expensive) MSI RTX 5090 Lightning Z. This is especially true in some modern AAA titles like Indiana Jones and the Great Circle, which demands a ray-tracing GPU and an Intel Core i7-10700K for its minimum requirements. So, if you’re only driving a modest AMD Ryzen 5 5500 and an old GTX graphics card, then your experience will be completely different from what you read.

It’s unclear if Steam will automatically get your specifications, like how it extracts data for the Steam Hardware Survey, or if gamers will need to manually input their components into their profile. The former would make it far easier to implement this feature, although this would definitely raise some privacy concerns regarding the client. On the other hand, the latter could be problematic, as users could lie and skew the data. But whichever route Valve takes, this is an optional feature, and you can keep it turned off if you don’t want the world to know that you’re keeping a monster PC stowed in your basement.

The latest Steam Hardware Survey is out, and an AMD RDNA4 architecture GPU has charted in the PC Video Card Usage tables. Despite AMD’s fanfared deprioritization of flagship GPUs to follow the mass market, the Radeon RX 9000 family's entry into the chart has been a long time coming. Moreover, the RDNA4 Radeon has appeared with more of a whimper than a bang, turning up with just a 0.16% market share, still less than Nvidia's 2014 GeForce GT 730.

Your eyes don’t deceive – AMD’s only Steam Hardware Survey (SHWS) charted card is the RX 9070 non-XT. Does this show that AMD’s cheaper, slightly lower-tier model may be a sleeper hit for its amazing efficiency? I have a plain vanilla RX 9070 in my personal desktop, and am very pleased with its quiet, cool performance, so praise of this SKU might show a little bias.

Interestingly, though, AMD’s RX 9070 XT did indeed hit the SHWS in the December 2025 data, at 0.22%. It has now disappeared from view (under the 0.15% threshold for charting).

It has been approaching a year since the first RX 9000 graphics cards became available. We reviewed the RX 9070 XT and RX 9070 back in early March 2025. These 16GB VRAM cards were praised for strong mainstream performance at good MSRPs, with worthwhile improvements in AI and ray tracing performance. AMD released its RX 9060 XT (8 and 16GB VRAM) models in June last year, and also saw largely positive feedback (for the 16GB version, anyway).

It is worth repeating that, despite AMD’s mass market strategy and general positivity in reviews and on discussion forums, people are still buying into the GeForce ecosystem by default.

While we are kind of celebrating the first RDNA4 card charting in the Steam usage database with its 0.16% placing, the last-gen RTX 4060 gained 0.46% share. Moreover, the biggest gainer of the month was, predictably, the RTX 5060 with an increase of 0.72% in market share. If we sort the chart by gains in the last month, the RX 9070 rises from near the bottom of the chart to 6^th place. Which isn’t so bad.

16GB VRAM adoption spurt

Another change that seems remarkable in the last month is the observed increase in Steam gamers backing GPUs with 16GB of VRAM. As per the numbers shown, those gaming on 16GB GPUs went up an impressive 5.85% in January 2026. Meanwhile, 12GB VRAM became 4.01% less prevalent, and 8GB VRAM, 3.11% less common.

So, 16GB of VRAM looks set to move into second place in the graphics card memory charts, as early as February’s results. Unless there is another inflection or bump in the trends...

Last but not least, please remember that the SHWS figures aren’t definitive, as the disappearance of the RX 9070 XT shows. They are just an indicator of trends among active Steam gamers, snapshotted that month. Sometimes big events in the Steam marketplace, like a country being added to the survey, can nudge the results more than usual, and the way the charts are compiled is quite opaque. Other factors, like seasonality and big game releases, can also impact the data.

An anonymous blog claims that the Steam client continues to broadcast your log-on and log-off times, even if you set your status as “Invisible” or “Offline.” According to the Xmrcat blog, “Setting yourself to ‘Offline’ is basically a UI illusion. You might appear offline to the world, but the backend Connection Manager (CM) continues broadcasting your live activity to the socket. This leak bypasses everything, even ‘Private Profile’ settings. It essentially hands your friends a real-time log of exactly when you sleep and wake up, making your privacy settings effectively useless.”

According to the report, the Steam client apparently broadcasts raw Unix timestamps to all the friends you added on the platform every time your status changes, even if you turned on your privacy settings to hide your information. The only difference with going “Invisible” or “Offline” is that the client on your friends’ PCs and devices will put your profile under the “Offline” list, so they cannot see you, but the client still knows when you last logged in or out.

This might not be an issue for the average user, but those who know their way around programming and development could potentially extract the information from Steam’s backend. It’s possible to intercept the ClientPersonaStaste protobuf message payload, which will potentially reveal your sleep cycle or gaming habits, allowing someone else to track your behavior without your knowledge.

The anonymous user said that they raised the issue, only to be brushed off by the company. “I sent this to Valve on HackerOne,” wrote Xmrcat. “I showed them how I could reconstruct a target’s daily sleep cycles despite them being ‘invisible’ for weeks.” Unfortunately, the ticket was closed as “Informative,” and they were told that the packets are only sent to your friends on Steam, so they’re presuming a pre-existing relationship of trust between the two parties.

However, many people add people they do not personally know on Steam as friends, which means this issue could concern some users.

Valve has released the Steam Hardware Survey for December 2025, with the results showing AMD slowly creeping towards Intel’s supremacy in the gaming space. Team Red broke the 40% threshold in the third quarter of 2025, and in just a matter of four months, it gained an additional 7% over Intel (55.47% in the last survey of 2025) with the biggest jump happening in December, where AMD jumped by 4.66% to 47.27%. This happened despite the current memory shortage, with pricing for memory modules like DDR5 reached record highs.

AMD dropped support for DDR4 RAM with the introduction of the AM5 platform, so Ryzen 7000 and 9000 chips can only work with DDR5 memory. On the other hand, Intel’s Raptor Lake Refresh, which outperforms the newer Arrow Lake chips in gaming, support both DDR4 and DDR5. Nevertheless, it seems that gamers still prefer the older Zen 3 CPUs from AMD to deal with the memory shortage, with the Ryzen 5 5800X and 5800XT among the top selling processors on Amazon over the holiday period. Even AMD’s legacy 5800X3D, which you can no longer find new, is booming in the used market, with some examples already selling for more than a brand-new 9800X3D.

This goes to show how Team Red has upended the gaming market, especially as many gamers are enamored by the massive 3D V-cache found in X3D chips. Some of them also remember the horrors of Intel’s instability issue from 2024, which likely contributed to Team Blue’s fall from its 77% Steam Hardware share from just five years ago.

System RAM continues to grow despite challenges

Another surprise in the latest Steam survey is the amount of user-installed system memory continues to increase despite the on-going shortage. RAM prices have surged by more than 100% in recent months as AI’s insatiable demand for memory is biting into the consumer space. This has led to Micron shuttering Crucial, its consumer and enthusiast brand, to focus on HBM and enterprise customers.

The number of user's with 32GB or more RAM jumps in the latest survey. The new "standard" 32GB gained a massive 2.11%, with 39.07% of Steam gamers surveyed rocking it. This nearly puts it on par with 16GB, which has 40.14% of all users. It’s likely that this change was fuelled by the increasing trend in RAM pricing, which probably pushed gamers who were still holding back to finally bite the bullet and buy that RAM upgrade before prices got even worse.

It will be interesting to see how Steam gamers react to the memory crisis over the coming months. While the Steam Hardware Survey is by not a scientific one by any means, it’s still a good indication of what direction the gaming market is taking, especially in these uncertain times.

'Twas the festive season but Santa didn't know how
to deal with the new RAM apocalypse, now!
Who could've predicted this horrid event
in which memory costs rose 500 percent?

He didn't expect this holiday twist —
It's memory-intensive to create his list!
Even Crucial got killed in this big AI boom.
(This boom smells as funky as Zotac's perfume).

But he still had some systems lying around.
Surely one of them would have to be sound!
He had an XPS, Optiplex — oh, what the hell?
Which one is which? They're all just a Dell.

So instead, he switched to an Apple Silicon Mac
and played Cyberpunk to forget the setback.
Then he jumped to a Windows 10 system he'd moved to Linux
and entered his password: 123456.

❄️❄️❄️

But none of these systems made the list the right way.
They all fell like Steam on Silksong's launch day.
So he figured he'd do these holidays with a twist:
He'd simply put everyone onto his list.

Compiling this data would take quite a while.
Santa had what Torvalds called "random turd files."
He found several old lists made in Microsoft Word
and even more data he had stored on a bird.

To collate the data, he had the elves convene,
using prototypes of the new Steam Machine,
and old rigs he updated with a bit of skill,
and a few lucky builds that he found at Goodwill.

Now that the rigs were doing the heavy lifting,
It was time for Santa to put his mind to gifting.
Like 3D-printed loafers that are beyond description
And some great Tom's Hardware Premium subscriptions!

❄️❄️❄️

Gold RTX 5090's would be all the rage.
There were VPNs for people verifying their age.
Elves made hair clips out of old M1 Pros,
And for Intel, a new permanent CEO.

There were non-binary RAM kits on sale at some shops,
and 5070 Ti's with all of their ROPs.
Nintendo Switch 2s without stapled screens,
and TSMC sneakers that go great with your jeans.

"Hey Santa!" cried one elf, looking over his shoulder.
"Why are all these anime girls in your temp folder?"
Santa explained that his JPGs weren't a crime,
But blamed them on a bug in XPG Prime.

With that unfortunate question answered,
He called Rudolph, and Comet, and Dancer, and Prancer.
"Can you stop by the store and try to obtain
some new Xboxes before the price rises again?"

❄️❄️❄️

Then Mrs. Claus came downstairs in shock.
"Santa, look what I found under stockings and socks!"
He felt his jaw drop like it was full of rocks —
It was a whole bunch of RAM he had never unboxed!

Santa couldn't help it — he let out a snort.
Like RDNA 1 and 2, he could have more support!
But he and his crew were saving the day,
with existing computers, the old-fashioned way.

And Santa and friends were all having a ball.
It was the best holiday lead-up that he could Recall.
He might even have extra time to clean up his house
to smell fresher than Asus's aromatic mouse.

It took all of Santa's brains and all the elves' might,
But they had a list, and had gifts, and were ready for flight.
To ensure they had the fuel to get this year's trip right,
They stopped by a Denny's for some Breakfast Bytes.

No matter what you’re celebrating this year,
Hanukkah, Kwanzaa, or Christmas with cheer;
We at Tom’s Hardware wish you the best.
We’ll be at our benches, running our tests.

🎅🎄🎁☃️❄️ 🎅🎄🎁☃️❄️ 🎅🎄🎁☃️❄️

The Tom’s Hardware staff first published a holiday poem in 2014 on Christmas Eve. It was updated a little bit and published again each year at the same time. The poem was given a complete overhaul in 2018 and has been rewritten with new stories and references every year since. For more holiday fun, see the versions from 2019, 2020, 2021, 2022, 2023, and 2024.

Valve has begun the final phase of its plan to end Steam support for 32-bit versions of Windows, with a December Steam client update that changes how the platform runs on modern systems. As of this week, the Steam client on Windows 10 64-bit and Windows 11 is now itself a 64-bit application, while users on 32-bit Windows are left on a shrinking compatibility branch that will stop receiving updates on January 1, 2026.

This follows an announcement by Valve in September stating that Steam would no longer support 32-bit versions of Windows as of 2026. The client update marks the first time Steam has been fully 64-bit on Windows rather than a 32-bit application running atop a 64-bit operating system.

Steam will continue to work for users still running 32-bit Windows instillations, but Valve has made it clear that the platform will be frozen in place after the cut-off. That means no client updates, no security fixes, and no guarantee that future game updates or backend changes will remain compatible. Valve has also stated that customer support for those systems will end simultaneously. Just under 95% of Steam users are on a Windows-based system, compared to 3.2% on Linux and 2% on Mac OSX.

Given that a 32-bit OS handles less data and is limited to around 4GB of RAM, the number of affected users is tiny. Steam’s most recent Hardware Survey shows Windows 11 64-bit accounting for roughly 66% of Windows systems, with Windows 10 64-bit in second place at just under 30%. Older Windows releases now register at fractions of a percent, and Valve has previously said that 32-bit Windows installations represent around 0.01% of active Steam systems.

It is also important to highlight a distinction that Valve has repeatedly emphasized: That the end of support applies to 32-bit versions of Windows, not to 32-bit games. Titles built as 32-bit executables will continue to run on 64-bit Windows through Steam as they do today.

Today, many systems running 32-bit Windows are powered by 64-bit capable CPUs and can be moved to a 64-bit Windows install with a clean OS reinstall. Systems built around older, truly 32-bit processors, however, will not have that option and will effectively be at the end of the road for Steam. The update also aligns with broader changes across the Windows ecosystem, such as recent Steam client releases that have added reporting for Secure Boot, reinforcing the platform’s gradual move toward modern Windows requirements.

While Steam may no longer support Windows 7, Windows 8, and Windows 8.1, the passionate community keeps gaming thriving on older PCs. Eazy Black (via The Bob Pony) has managed to unofficially bring the latest Steam Client Beta (December 4, 2025 build) to these beloved, unsupported systems.

The backport works best on 64-bit versions of Windows 7 with Service Pack 1 (SP1) and Windows 8.x. You'll need to have your operating system up to date for the backports to work correctly. But if you prefer to limit Windows updates, The Bob Pony suggests installing at least KB976932, KB2999226, and KB3080149 or KB4474419 to help keep things running smoothly.

You can find the 230MB installer on the w7revived.chefkiss.dev website. Additionally, The Bob Pony offers mirror downloads, which you can check out in the tweet below. While backports are a fantastic way to enjoy the latest Steam features and enhancements, please keep in mind that they are unofficial solutions. Responsibility for any issues that may arise with your system lies with you since Steam stopped supporting Windows 7 and Windows 8.x in January of 2024.

While Windows 7 has been a fantastic operating system, progress marches on. You’ll notice that Windows 7 gamers on Steam are now quite rare, with only 0.05% according to the latest hardware survey. This operating system is nearing the end of its journey, so there's not much anyone can do about it.

Meanwhile, Windows 11, which has received much criticism, continues to gain popularity and now holds a 69.2% share. Since Microsoft recently ended support for Windows 10, many gamers are bitterly switching over to Windows 11. Currently, only 30.66% of Steam users still use Windows 10, which is a 2.17% decrease from last month. That's the last of the gamers who are still holding out on upgrading.

PC gaming boasts a wonderful community, full of passionate enthusiasts who keep Steam gaming alive for legacy Windows systems. As Steam continues to update its client regularly, it might only be a matter of time before we see fewer backports, or perhaps a day will come when Steam makes it impossible to backport anything at all. Many of these enthusiasts are balancing real lives, and their efforts to create these backports are truly acts of love.

Most folks in tech enthusiast circles have heard of - or own - a Steam Deck and have possibly even installed SteamOS-based Linux distributions like Bazzite or Chimera. The small but growing backlash against Windows 11's strict hardware requirements and forced upgrades may have become evident in the latest Steam Hardware & Software Survey, which shows an all-time high of 3.20% for Linux.

That figure is a 0.15% rise in just one month, quite an impressive figure once you consider that for years on end, Steam Linux usage was under or barely over 1%. The launch of the Steam Deck in 2022 naturally increased that figure, but the gaming community seems be rallying around SteamOS derivatives, as the OS family had a 1.9% share in 2023, 3.05% in 2025, and now 3.20% as of this writing.

Although the Steam Deck is a worthy product on its own, it's not hard to imagine that Linux's rise is partly justified by Windows 11's shenanigans, like machine-breaking updates, a notification- and pop-up-riddled user experience, forced integration of Copilot and OneDrive, and, of course, the forced upgrade from Windows 10.

Over on the hardware side, AMD processors continue their steady march against Intel. AMD now commands 43.56% of the gaming processor market, versus 56.44% for Team Blue. Save for one month, Intel's CPU share has been steadily dropping for nearly one year straight and shows no signs of stopping.

The CPU core breakdowns also tell an interesting story. Over the past month alone, CPUs with 8 physical cores or higher saw a combined 1.18% uptick (under Windows, at least), meaning that gamers are buying or upgrading their machines at a pretty rapid clip, and potentially that folks are opting mostly for AMD systems.

As for gaming graphics cards, some surprising developments have arisen. The RTX 5070 is now the most common Blackwell GPU among the systems surveyed, posting a 0.33% gain to hit 2.12% of the overall pool. That's about as many users as those of the RTX 5060 and RTX 5060 Ti put together, which isn't the development we were expecting given the apparent pace of RTX 5060 adoption.

The RTX 5060 grew its share by 0.30% to hit 1.54% of systems surveyed. Meanwhile, the RTX 5070 Ti put up a 0.19% share increase to hit 1.09% of the pool, while the RTX 5080 grew its numbers by 0.14% to hit 0.96%.

Meanwhile, AMD's RDNA 4 cards remain notably absent as distinct data points in the survey. Whether this is a reporting issue on Valve's side or AMD's is unclear, but nine months into the life of RDNA 4, we'd expect at least token representation of these products in Valve's results. If it's not a technical issue, the implications for AMD's graphics division remain troubling.

While the Steam Hardware Survey isn't a rigorous examination of the market, it remains interesting to see how the broader market is responding to 2025's hardware launches. We'll continue to see what its tea leaves portend for gaming in 2026 as time rolls on. Be sure to check out the survey results for yourself.

Valve, the owner of the Steam platform and maker of the Steam Deck, is one of the most efficient companies in the world. Research firm Alinea Analytics' head of market analysis posted on X that the Steam platform alone has already made $16.2 billion in revenue, with some suggesting that the company as a whole will hit $17 billion in 2025. The company employee count between 2012 and 2021 averaged around 350 people, according to some estimates. This means that the gaming company is making almost $50 million per employee.

Note that these values are estimates based on research firms and leaked data, since Valve is a private company and not compelled to release any data about its operations. Nevertheless, the numbers track with previous information.

Wolfire, an independent game studio that sued Valve in 2021, said that the company had around 360 employees, as noted by The Verge. For comparison, in the same year, Microsoft said that the game company had an estimated revenue of $6.5 billion, meaning it's roughly bringing in $18 million+ per head.

Those figures would still be double the amount that the employees of other leading companies are making. According to Visual Capitalist, a healthcare company called McKesson is the Revenue per Employee leader, but we see it 'only' raked in $8.2 million per employee. Tech company employees are even less impactful on revenue, with Apple making $2.4 million per employee and Meta (Facebook’s parent company) bringing in only $1.9 million per employee.

Valve itself is aware of this. It’s publicly available Handbook for New Employees [PDF], first printed in 2012, states, “Our profitability per employee is higher than that of Google or Amazon or Microsoft, and we believe strongly that the right thing to do in that case is to put a maximum amount of money back into each employee’s pocket.” The company claims it has one of the best compensation packages in the industry, and we can see this in the leaked data shared by The Verge, which shows that Valve spent nearly $450 million on employee salaries, with a weighted average of more than $1.3 million per employee.

The company likely achieved this because it’s a completely privately owned corporation, beholden to neither stockholders nor private equity. So, its owners, such as Gabe Newell himself, plus some other partners, can focus on the long-term viability of the company instead of pushing it to maximize returns at the expense of gamers and publishers. It also has a unique, flat company structure, where everyone works as team members and there are no managers or C-suite executives.

Although no company is perfect (Valve was one of the first to popularise loot boxes in PC gaming), it has arguably done a lot for the gaming community and the industry as a whole. Aside from its iconic titles, like Counter-Strike, Dota 2, and Left 4 Dead, it also revolutionized how we buy games through Steam and opened the world to many smaller developers. The company also revived the handheld gaming industry when it dropped the Steam Deck in 2022, and we’re looking forward to the upcoming Steam Machine, expected to arrive in 2026.

Dbrand and Jsaux Gaming, two companies known for making accessories for consoles and other gaming devices, have just announced custom covers and skins for the Steam Machine. Valve revealed the Steam Machine earlier this month, and the device's specifications and form factor have got everyone excited. Beyond that, the company also said it comes with a replaceable faceplate, allowing just about anyone to customize it however they see fit. To give people an idea, it showed off an example with a classic wood-grain cover and another with a built-in e-ink display, although Valve said these are merely concepts and won’t be available from the company.

Because of Steam’s popularity and the hype of the Steam Machine’s launch, a couple of companies have teased their own custom covers and even complete skins for the gaming PC. Dbrand, known for its skins and cases for the Switch 2, Steam Deck, and more, announced the Steam Machine Companion Cube. Although Dbrand hasn’t released any details for this skin yet, we can see on its page that it looks like the Weighted Companion Cube from Portal, complete even with the heart icons all around its sides. On the other hand, Jsaux Gaming teased two screens for the Steam Machine on its official Subreddit — one with an e-ink display and another showing what appears to be an LCD panel.

While you might find these offerings interesting, you really don’t have to rely on these companies if you want to customize your own Steam Machine. That’s because Valve said it will release design files, allowing anyone with a 3D printer to use their creativity to make their own covers and other customizations. Valve also isn’t limiting Steam Machine modifications to the case. The device can take an M.2 2280 SSD, allowing you to expand storage beyond the default 512GB or 2TB. You can even upgrade the 16GB SODIMM on it, but it will be a little bit involved since you need to remove some parts to access it. Aside from that, it isn’t locked down on the software side, so you can reformat the device and install a different operating system if you choose to.

All this, plus the massive Steam library, is making it quite a popular device even before it has arrived. Unfortunately, Valve hasn’t announced pricing or availability yet, especially amid the ongoing upheaval in the memory market driven by massive AI demand. But, if it’s priced just right, it’s fair to say that the Steam Machine will be an enormous hit, and that there’s going to be a market for custom accessories for it.

The viability of Linux as a gaming platform has come on leaps and bounds in recent years due to the sterling work of WINE and Proton developers, among others, and interest in hardware like the Steam Deck. However, the most recent stats from ProtonDB (via Boiling Steam) highlight that we are edging towards a magnificent milestone. The latest distilled data shows that almost 90% of Windows games now run on Linux.

Having nine in ten Windows games accessible in a new Linux install is quite an achievement. The milestone comes as we see computer users flocking to other platforms during the transition from the Windows 10 to 11 eras. Of course, the underlying data isn’t quite so simple as the headline stat. There are different degrees of compatibility gamers must consider when checking if their favorite Windows games work on Linux distros like Mint, Zorin, Bazzite, or even SteamOS.

The above chart relies on Boiling Steam’s five definitions of playability, but these aren’t a million miles from the Steam Deck ratings Valve dishes out. The main difference seems to be that Boiling Steam doesn’t seem to care whether Steam Deck performance is a gaming-limiting factor. So, in a way, its ratings are perhaps more useful to desktop and laptop PC users who typically have systems that easily outpace a Steam Deck.

Boiling Steam platinum (green) rank denotes games that run perfectly, out of the box. Gold (light green) requires just minor tweaks. Silver (yellow) games are playable but have some imperfections. Borked (dark red) games simply refuse to launch. Lastly, Bronze (red) titles exist in the murky water between silver and borked.

Looking at the chart trends, we see an encouraging growth in the number of new releases that are platinum (green) rated, and a thinning down of the red/dark red zone. Developers will, of course, benefit from more hardware being able to play their games with few if any wrinkles, so there must be an incentive to spend at least a little time checking a new Windows game on Linux, or the Steam Deck specifically.

On the flip side, there are some popular titles that don’t look like they will be becoming Linux-friendly anytime soon. The well-known compatibility issues with various anti-cheat technology platforms look set to persist, for now. Moreover, Boiling Steam notes that other devs just seem to be averse to non-Windows gamers. There is quite a bit that can be done with those non-intentionally stubborn games, though. We’d recommend researching community-driven Linux compatibility tips and tweaks for your favorite games.

There was a time not too long ago when Steam stood as the undisputed guardian of the PC gaming community, where every player would jog to get the latest titles, or eagerly wait for industry-best sales. Those days are largely over now, with the advent of competing marketplaces like Epic Games Store, and GOG. Steam is still the top dog, but it's no longer the only one, and it looks like a new player is now joining the race. Chinese tech firm ByteDance — parent company of TikTok — is mapping out its own Steam competitor called "GameTop," according to IT Home (machine translation).

Localized job postings for the marketplace reveal that it's supposed to cater to "overseas markets" which would suggest a global push into distribution and publishing, expanding beyond just Beijing. At the moment, no other store can truly stand up to Steam, but with the right resources and execution, the barrier to entry can be lowered. Especially when you consider that Steam isn't doing too hot right now, with controversy after controversy staining its once-Teflon-coated reputation.

This move would align with the internal restructuring ByteDance's gaming wing went through this past year, under new leader Zhang Yunfan, who pivoted from a "big-budget, aggressive" expansion strategy into a more pragmatic approach that refines operations, focusing on efficiency. ByteDance wants to go all in on game publishing, and GameTop seems to be the big bet the company's hinging on, if the reports are to be believed.

As seen above, job listings for the new platform in China (machine translation) further corroborate this narrative, with the company looking for recruits to "drive user acquisition, activation, retention, and re-engagement." GameTop will apparently be the most equipped Steam competitor till date with profiling systems, badges, points, etc., alongside other social features and AI-assisted creator tools — such as UGC — that would give it a decent head start, compared to companies like Epic who still lag behind.

Funnily enough, there's already an app Google's Play Store named GameTop which offers mini-games, social channels, and some video sharing capabilities, which does sound similar to what ByteDance is building, but there's little chance that these two are connected behind the scenes because the publishing company isn't part of ByteDance. Considering GameTop eventually does come to the Play Store, it could prop up an interesting copyright battle, if anything.

ByteDance is already a major player in the Chinese gaming industry and has made somewhat of a mark outside of it as well. It's certainly no Tencent (who owns 40% of Epic Games), but it has pursued several acquisitions over the past few years, which have slowed down now to channel resources elsewhere. Hence, only time will tell if GameTop sticks the landing and offer an antithesis to Steam, or wither away like many others before it that tried.

Battlefield 6 has been an enormous success for EA from the day it was announced. Ever since Call of Duty essentially shot itself in the foot with the Black Ops 7 reveal, Battlefield became the community's saving grace, all the way from the beta to, now, its launch. It's been such a hit that Alinea Analytics is reporting the military shooter has already sold more than 6.5 million copies across PC and console, generating over $350 million in revenue, which would be franchise-best figures for EA. And indeed, shortly after we hit publish on this story, EA published its own press release officially pushing the number over the 7 million copies mark.

Those kind of sales push it comfortably into COD territory, and way beyond what any of the previous Battlefields were able to achieve. The series has never really had a golden egg, so to speak, because even Battlefield 1 — the title that put it back on the map — was more of a rediscovery rather than something players were actively seeking as an antidote to the COD machine. With Battlefield 2042, EA failed to capitalize on the growing momentum, but everything seems to have lined up miraculously this time.

Battlefield 6 is available on PC, PS5, and Xbox Series - out of the three, PC leads the charts by a long margin, accounting for 56.7% of all sales, helping EA to over $220 million in revenue with 3.5M+ copies sold. PlayStation follows next with 23.7% of the pie, with Xbox coming in last at 19.6%, but keep in mind that there are fewer Xbox Series owners in general, so the sales are still relatively very healthy. Across the board, it seems that everyone is enjoying Battlefield 6, and the daily active users (DAU) figures are further evidence of that.

On PC, according to the analytics, 2.3–2.5 million active users have been playing the game daily since launch. By contrast, around 1 million PlayStation users have returned each day, but we don't have numbers for Xbox. The main takeaway here is that gamers seem to be coming back for some more Battlefield 6 on the daily, propping up a shockingly flat DAU curve for a multiplayer game. Around 45% of PC players for BF6 never even touched BF 2042, showing how this game has become a refuge from the burnout of repetitive or uninteresting military shooters.

To nobody's surprise, Battlefield 6 has launched to one of the most impressive rollouts in gaming history. Just hours after release, the AAA military shooter achieved third place on Steam's most-played games chart today, achieving a peak concurrent player count of 747,000 (so far) on Steam alone.

X poster Kami claims Battlefield 6 has already broken a player count record, and is the most played "full-priced" shooter of all time (although we haven't been able to fact-check that claim just yet).

Battlefield 6 is the 14th most-played game on Steam so far, boasting a peak concurrent player count just shy of Baldur's Gate 3's 875,000 all-time equivalent and Hogwarts Legacy's 879,000. Battlefield 6's peak concurrent player count (at time of writing) is also 220,000 players greater than the open beta's all-time peak of 520,000+.

Again, these numbers only account for Steam. It's easy to forget that Battlefield 6 is also available through the EA app and the Epic Games Store, in addition to Xbox Series X/S and PlayStation 5. It's essentially guaranteed that Battlefield 6's player numbers will exceed the millions on the PC platform alone across all three storefronts.

It's clear that Battlefield 6 represents a return to form for the franchise, and people are loving the game through and through. Battlefield 6 is the first Battlefield title to utilize EA's public Battlefield Labs playtesting, which allows real players to participate in the game's development — similar to Star Citizen. We saw the fruits of this playtesting in the Battlefield 6 open beta, which was one of the most (if not the) most successful open betas of any shooter game in history, with surprisingly few bugs.

Battlefield Labs also steered Battlefield 6's gameplay in the direction that players wanted. This includes the game's back-to-basics military theme, the removal of specialists (as seen in Battlefield 2042), and gameplay mechanics that are largely inspired by Battlefield Bad Company 2 and Battlefield 3.

Battlefield 6 has also proven to be a back-to-basics game in the PC graphics department. The game is the first AAA title in years designed to run at high frame rates at native resolution. This is backed up by the game's modest system requirements, making it super accessible even to gamers on 5-year-old mid-range hardware. Furthermore, the developers have also not developed any ray-tracing graphics for the game; instead, they have focused all their development time on improving the game's graphics for performance.

We are just hours into Battlefield 6's release. If we take into account the concurrent player count patterns from the open beta, we will likely we will see concurrent player numbers higher than 747,000 by the weekend.

Valve has been known to be working on a new virtual reality headset for at least four years now, as a follow-up to the mildly successful Valve Index, which launched in 2019. In 2021, we first learned that it was codenamed Deckard, and now, reports state that this new device is potentially very close to its release. According to Upload VR, Valve's Deckard headset has entered mass production, intending to ship up to 400,000–600,000 units annually.

The news comes Chinese analyst firm, XR Research Institute, which claims that the next-gen headset is actually launching this year, with production lines already filled. Upload VR reports that the Steam Deck has sold around 5 million units so far, while Meta's popular Quest 2 VR headset shipped 20 million units. This could be a sign that Valve has grand designs for its next hardware release to land well with customers, with the supply to match it.

Just last month, a new trademark filing for "Steam Frame" was spotted online, which matched the entry found in SteamVR code, soft-confirming that as the official name for Deckard. Popular Valve leaker Brad Lynch also hinted that there are two SKUs in development: Deckard DV1 and Deckard DV2, saying that the "DV" moniker is used for products in the final stages of development at Valve, right before public release.

New controllers

It is notoriously easy to own more games than you have time to play on Steam. However, a Steam gamer in China has taken this phenomenon to the extreme. On Tuesday, SonixLegend became the first person to gain a Steam ‘Game Collector’ badge for owning 40,000 games. Obviously still on the lookout for their next favorite title, the needle has moved up to 40,031 at the time of writing, according to SteamDB (h/t Polygon).

SonixLegend’s achievement hasn’t happened overnight. This particular user has been building up their game collection on Steam for over 15 years.

Imagine all the payments processing, code copying and pasting, and agreeing to T&Cs time that would be required to hoard 40,000 Steam games. If SonixLegend could go through these steps in a swift minute per game, they would need a full month (with no rest) to add 40,000 games to a library. If ‘working’ 8-hour days on this endeavor, you’d be looking at three solid months of your life taken up to build this library.

As for actually playing through that enormous collection, Polygon estimates that it would take SonixLegend “seven years of non-stop playtime” to work through and get value out of this enormous game collection. Again, at a more ‘reasonable’ 8 hours per day, you’d have to triple that timescale. Underlining the fact that SonixLegend is a ‘normal’ gamer, though (not a bot or some such), are stats that show they are really keen on some of the games in their collection. Alien Swarm (released 2010) has been played through for over 550 hours. Moreover, 35 other titles have been completed ‘perfectly.’

Two other SonixLegend stats stand out, which must make them a certified Steam-nut. First, we must highlight the potential cost of building this collection. According to SteamDB, the huge digital collection is worth nearly $640,000 at today’s prices, but SonixLegend must follow the sales, as they seem to have spent ‘just’ $248,810 on these digital goodies. Secondly, this Steam Devotee “technically owns over 97,000 titles in their account,” notes Polygon, but apparently Valve doesn’t count its PC games store's ‘shovelware.’

Despite the humongous state of their collection, we are sure SonixLegend is still looking forward to the next Steam Sale…

Ever since the release of Windows 11, if you're a PC gamer, you've definitely heard the term "Secure Boot." It's required to play a myriad of different games these days — mainly competitive shooters — and serves as one part of the two-punch security knockout consisting of TPM and Secure Boot. These features help keep your system protected from bad actors, and now Valve has just made it super convenient to check whether you're ahead of the curve. In the latest Steam beta, you can easily see your Secure Boot status in the settings.

If you open Steam and go to "Help" in the menu bar and click on "System Information," you'll be bombarded with a bunch of stats about your PC. Just scroll down till you see the "Operating System" heading, and you should see a list item for Secure Boot, telling you if it's enabled. This makes it easier for gamers who get inundated with information to ensure they're not excluded. While you're there, you'll see your TPM status as well, which is the other big security feature of Windows 11 and a requirement for (official) compatibility with the OS.

TPM stands for Trusted Platform Module, and it's a little hardware block that's cordoned off from the rest of the system because it houses ultra-sensitive cryptographic keys. It works hand-in-hand with Secure Boot to check if anything has changed since the last known good boot. It does that by recording hashes at each stage of every boot run to tally against, which is just one secret, along with many others (like BitLocker encryption keys) that are stored away in this chip. TPM is a requirement in most modern online games, just like Secure Boot.

Secure Boot works to ensure that only trusted, signed software runs when your PC starts, in an effort to sift out any shady programs. It's a kernel-level security feature, so it enjoys the highest level of privilege on your system — something that its critics often point toward as a vulnerability. Secure Boot, in essence, is a novel concept and is designed to do what it says: make your boot secure, but sometimes the amount of access it has can raise questions.

It has been 0 days since the Steam marketplace has been used to deliver malware to unsuspecting gamers who download titles from Valve's long-running platform.

Twitch streamer Raivo "RastalandTV" Plavnieks said on Sept. 30 that over $32,000 worth of cryptocurrency—which had been donated to him to help pay for cancer treatments—was stolen after he installed a Steam game called "BlockBlasters" when someone in his stream chat recommended it to him.

"BlockBlasters" debuted on Steam in July and was malware-free until an August 30 update that, according to the independent SteamDB tracker of all things Steam, added the crypto- and credential-stealing malware. That means the game was actively being used to deliver malware for nearly a month before the RastalandTV hack.

BleepingComputer reports that RastalandTV's live hacking prompted security researchers to investigate the game. "ZachXBT" said that more than $150,000 had been stolen from 261 different Steam accounts; the "vx-underground" malware research group said it found evidence that the actual victim count was 478.

Another group of security researchers have published their breakdown of how the malware worked, how they identified the cybercriminals responsible for the operation, and how they disrupted it. (They also included a note to law enforcement saying they have "mountains of technical evidence surrounding individuals in this case" to share.)

Some of the discussion around this incident has focused on the claim that "BlockBlasters" was marked as "Verified" on Steam. To our knowledge, the only "Verified" label applied to games relates to their compatibility with the Steam Deck, which simply means that Valve has confirmed the title will run on the handheld. That doesn't necessarily imply that Valve has assessed the game's contents.

But that in no way negates the fact that Steam, a platform that millions of gamers have come to trust over several decades of operation, delivered malware used to steal hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of cryptocurrency for nearly a month. It took a high-profile, live-streamed incident for something to be done about this operation.

"This is appalling levels of vetting," the researchers who investigated this incident said. "How can you let such brazen malware exist on your platform?"

Valve is dropping support for Steam running on 32-bit versions of Windows, starting January 1, 2026. Steam has been available on Windows for more than two decades and, therefore, was built with 32-bit systems in mind. Today, every modern computer is 64-bit, with compatibility layers built in to support older 32-bit apps. So, even though 32-bit apps have carried forward, there's really no place for 32-bit operating systems anymore — which is why Valve is axing support for them.

It's important to understand the distinction between 32-bit apps and operating systems. Steam itself is 32-bit, partly because it's from that era, but mostly because it doesn't need to be updated to a 64-bit instruction set, given its lightweight nature. A lot of games on Steam are also 32-bit. None of that will be affected by the sunsetting of 32-bit Windows support, since it's only support for the operating system itself that's being phased out. Windows 10 32-bit is the only version Steam currently supports anyways, and Valve says just 0.01% of players are still using it today.

The biggest video game of the year, if not the decade, has arrived on the scene in a major way. Hollow Knight: Silksong, widely considered to be the most anticipated indie video game release of all time, crashed digital storefronts like Steam and the Nintendo eShop on release yesterday, immediately hitting the Steam Charts with the third most concurrent players in the world as a paid, single-player platformer.

Silksong, the sequel to 2017's Hollow Knight, is currently the #3 most-played game on Steam before the West Coast even wakes up. Its peak of 535,213 players, achieved 3 hours after release, is enough to make it the 18th highest all-time peak on Steam, ahead of game franchises like Call of Duty, Grand Theft Auto, and Fallout. This is made more impressive by the fact that Silksong is an independent release from the three-person development squad Team Cherry, and is a Metroidvania-style platformer.

To get over 500,000 concurrent players, Silksong first needed to be bought by at least 500,000 gamers. This was a challenge for many as Steam, Nintendo eShop, and the PS5 Store all reported widespread outages immediately following Silksong's release at 7:00 am Pacific Daylight Time yesterday. Of course, the 500,000 player count only includes online Steam users, with the Day one player/sales numbers from other platforms still unknown; careful estimates place Silksong well north of 1,000,000 players on its first day.

Silksong has become something of an internet joke in the six years since it was first announced as a DLC to Hollow Knight. The three-man development squad behind the title was extremely secretive about development progress, offering no release date until earlier this year. The game became the most wishlisted title on Steam even as the release was wholly uncertain.

Silksong hopefuls and Hollow Knight fans became somewhat assured that the game would never release, until a May Nintendo livestream revealed a few extra gameplay clips that sparked hope the game would release soon. Yesterday's release date was surprise-announced two weeks ago, causing an indie games wave that led dozens of other indie games to delay their own releases to avoid becoming completely overlooked by Silksong's massive hype.

The hype and goodwill around the game's eventual release are also unprecedented in a modern cynical internet. Users of Reddit's r/Piracy forum, one of the foremost hubs for discussing pirating video games and other media, began encouraging each other to purchase the game rather than pirate it, pointing to its cheap $20 price tag and a desire to support the small dev team.

Silksong's release is the first time I've seen comments on the Piracy subreddit push for people to buy it instead.

— @airbagged.bsky.social (@airbagged.bsky.social.bsky.social) 2025-09-05T12:28:50.865Z

Occasionally, Valve’s Steam Survey data shows we are on the precipice of a major change in the computing landscape. The latest such survey, sharing data collected during August, shows that 32GB of system RAM looks set to become the most popular configuration among Steam gamers in mere months. Drawing lines over graphs, we think the crossover could come before the end of 2025.

There’s been a lot of sound and fury with regard to new graphics cards being ‘stunted’ by anemic levels of VRAM. Perhaps rightfully so, as modern graphics cards don’t have socketed ICs to allow everyday users to add more memory to the board. However, most modern computers, especially desktops and the bulkier gaming laptops, allow owners to boost system RAM using compatible (SO)DIMMs or similar.

Looking at the Steam Survey data we can see that the percentage of users with 16GB of RAM has steadily declined from 43.12 to 41.67% over the last six months. Meanwhile, 32GB users have inexorably grown from 32.85 to 35.42% of the Steam gaming populace.

We’d expect the impetus behind this crossover to be those buying new machines moving up a level, falling DDR5 prices, and the well publicized demands of modern AAA games titles.

RTX 4060 momentum, 1600p screens, and Windows 11

Video card trends are often interesting to see play out in the Steam data. This month, the continued momentum behind the last-gen Nvidia GeForce RTX 4060 may be confounding to some.

If we look at discrete graphics cards on a popular retail site like Newegg, for example, buying an RTX 4060 to add to your desktop doesn’t look very sensible (there’s just two samples in stock at $399 and $499). Meanwhile, you can easily grab an RTX 5060 at the same store under $300, like this Asus Dual or Gigabyte WindForce model.

Instead, we’ll have to assume one or a few alternatives: other world regions still have RTX 4060 stocks in abundance to sell at discount, and/or there’s a pile of RTX 4060 PC systems still being sold, and potentially being discounted at attractive prices.

Valve has started enforcing a new UK-only rule on Steam: If you want to browse or buy “mature” games, you’ll need to put a valid credit card on file. The move comes in response to the UK’s Online Safety Act, which requires platforms to block under-18s from accessing adult content. Steam’s approach is blunt but effective, and, naturally, it’s already causing backlash.

Child protection law with adult consequences

The UK’s Online Safety Act was passed in 2023 under the previous Conservative government, but its enforcement deadlines only kicked in this summer. The UK’s media regulator, Ofcom, directed sites to implement “highly effective” age checks for pornographic, violent, and other adult material. If a platform fails to comply, it could be fined up to 10% of global revenue, or even be blocked in the UK.

Credit cards are one of the approved methods of implementing these age verification checks, since UK banks already verify that cardholders are over 18. Steam has opted to implement this verification method over other, more controversial ones, such as ID checks or liveness scans, meaning that UK users now see a prompt to add a credit card to their account if they wish to browse adult-only titles.

Once a card is stored, the account is treated as verified indefinitely. Valve stresses that this system doesn’t share any new personal data beyond the usual PCI-compliant payment processing. That’s a key distinction from more invasive checks, which other platforms are rolling out.

Still, it’s a narrow path. Not every adult in the UK has a credit card or wants one, with roughly one-third of UK consumers relying on debit cards or alternative payment methods. Valve’s system doesn’t currently accept government IDs or bank-based age checks, meaning legitimate adult players could lose access to entire sections of the store simply because they lack the correct identification.

Valve encourages users to contact their local banks if they encounter this problem, but advises that they can also “open a Steam support ticket” if their bank is unable to resolve the issue.

Privacy overreach

Valve’s latest Steam Client Beta has upped the ante when it comes to GPU monitoring, claiming its in-game overlay now delivers more accurate utilization readings than Windows Task Manager. According to Valve, Task Manager has historically under-reported GPU usage, particularly for games that launch auxiliary processes alongside the main one. Steam’s revamped overlay captures all these processes, trims sampling errors, and aligns its stats more closely with trusted third-party tools like MSI Afterburner.

The reason Task Manager can be inaccurate is that it measures GPU usage on a per-process basis and relies on the GPU driver to report statistics according to the WDDM specification. Games that split work across multiple processes can therefore have portions of their GPU activity missed, and certain workloads can appear less intensive than they actually are. By aggregating usage across all related processes, Steam’s overlay provides a fuller and more precise picture of a game’s GPU demands:

"Net effect should be that in most games it's nearly the same as before, but in certain situations we previously underreported overall GPU utilization and the utilization number will now be higher and should closer match third-party tools like MSI Afterburner."

The quote above has since been removed from the patch notes page because Valve’s confidence didn’t last long under public scrutiny. Just a couple of days later, the beta update introducing this more accurate GPU tracking was quickly pulled from distribution. Now, the patch note reads: "It was later re-released to roll back a GPU utilization monitoring change that needs more testing." The inconsistency here suggests Valve is still validating the feature before pushing it stable, despite the bold messaging upfront.

This update follows earlier expansions to the overlay launched back in June, which introduced frame-level granularity like distinguishing between native frames and those generated by DLSS/FSR, alongside real-time readings of CPU load, RAM usage, clock speeds, and frame timing graphs. Those features have already transformed Steam’s HUD into one of the most comprehensive in-game instruments—effectively matching tools like MangoHud and MSI’s RivaTuner.

Combine that with the recently-added ability to display CPU temperature (on both Windows and Linux), enabled by a trusted CPUID-derived kernel driver, and it becomes clear: Valve is moving aggressively toward making the Steam overlay the central tech monitor for gamers, even if it means wading deeper into system-level access. This kind of behavior is commonplace in business today, where a dominant player will develop a homegrown version of something that was previously offered by a third party, essentially eliminating any need to venture outward.

Steam’s payment system just hit another serious speed bump. Millions of players worldwide are discovering that PayPal is no longer an option at checkout, unless they pay in Euros, British Pounds, Japanese Yen, Australian dollars, Canadian dollars, or U.S. dollars. For everyone else, that convenient one-click PayPal option has vanished with no telling when it will be back.

This change first appeared in early July 2025, initially thought to be a maintenance issue, but it’s only now that Valve has confirmed what’s going on. According to the company, one of PayPal’s acquiring banks decided to stop processing any Steam transactions for certain currencies. The result is a considerable chunk of Steam’s global audience from most countries suddenly restricted to alternative payment methods. Steam itself is suggesting users turn to other payment options or load funds via Steam Wallet codes.

paypal temporarily disabled since? from r/Steam

The scale of the disruption is staggering. Brazil alone has nearly five million Steam users, all of whom can no longer use PayPal. Other affected regions include Poland, Norway, Mexico, Switzerland, and a host of smaller markets, adding millions more. Even EU countries that don’t use the Euro, like Poland with its złoty, are impacted. Previous payment disruptions on Steam have generally been localized or temporary, making this one of the broadest interruptions in years.

Many players initially speculated that the PayPal issue stems from Steam’s recent controversy over adult content, where Mastercard and Visa pressured Valve to remove or de-index certain games. Valve, however, clarified that the problem is currency-specific, not content-specific, in this case. While major currencies remain functional, the majority of the world’s users are left without PayPal.

Steam PayPal unavailable update from r/Steam

After what can only be described as a dream rollout, EA launched the open beta for Battlefield 6 this weekend for only 2 days. Right now, it's sitting at over 500,000 concurrent players with a peak of 521,079 players that it hit just an hour ago. Those are the best numbers for any Battlefield ever, and by far. It's clear the community is loving the game and every step the developers take have been intentioned with increasing the game's quality, including fragmented downloads and modest hardware requirements.

Google has just announced that it will end its Steam for Chromebook Beta program on January 1, 2026, with devices losing access to installed games on that date. According to 9to5Google, you can still install Steam on your Chromebook through the ChromeOS Launcher, but it will show a warning saying that support for the service is ending soon.

“The Steam for Chromebook Beta program will conclude on January 1st, 2026. After this date, games installed as part of the Beta will no longer be available to play on your device,” the warning says. “We appreciate your participation in and contribution to learnings from the beta program, which will inform the future of Chromebook gaming.”

Steam for Chromebook, launched in 2022, was designed to push mainstream gaming on ChromeOS devices. It came in the same year gaming Chromebooks entered the market, alongside the emergence of cloud streaming. Aside from that, Chromebooks support Android apps by default, including the numerous games available on the Google Play Store.

However, despite being in beta since November 2022, Steam for Chromebook never went into stable release. It seems that the service did not gain enough popularity for it to enter mainstream consciousness, even though it only has minimal specification requirements — an Intel Core i3 or an AMD Ryzen 3 CPU paired with 8GB RAM and 128GB of storage. Although these would allow cheaper Chromebooks to run it, they really weren’t good enough for most gamers who want to play the latest titles.

It also had a rather sparse library of just 99 games, while competing against the hundreds of thousands of titles on the Google Play Store. Although these are often designed for mobile devices, some of them offer an experience that rivals AAA PC games. And if you want to play a PC game that isn’t available on Android, GeForce Now lets you stream over 2,300 titles to your Chromebook.

Still, the imminent demise of Steam for Chromebook isn't strictly the end for gaming on Chromebooks. Google is working to combine Android and ChromeOS into one seamless operating system, and as mobile chips, like AMD’s Strix Halo line-up, become more powerful and come with integrated GPUs that can rival discrete graphics cards, it will not make sense for the company to ignore the gamer demographic.

Sometimes getting more than what you asked for is nice. Finding cash in a jacket you haven't worn in a while, getting an extra chicken nugget at the drive-thru, discovering a hidden track on an album — those are all pleasant surprises. This one isn't: A cyber threat intelligence firm called Prodaft revealed that "Chemia," a game previously available via Steam's Early Access program, shipped with three strains of malware.

"Chemia" was described on its Steam page as "a gripping survival crafting game set in a world ravaged by a catastrophic natural disaster," which requires players to "gather resources, craft vital equipment, and navigate this hazardous world if [they] hope to survive." The game wasn't publicly available—Steam users had to request access to the playtest—which makes the fact that it contained malware seem even sleazier.

Prodaft said that "Chemia" shipped with the Fickle Stealer, Vidar Stealer, and HijackLoader malware. The first two are infostealers that look to compromise a victim's cryptocurrency wallets as well as user data from web browsers, password managers, and other apps; the last can be used to deploy other malware in the future.

"Chemia" was still available on Steam the morning of July 25, two days after Prodaft shared its findings, but it was removed sometime during the process of writing this post. The developer was listed as Aether Forge Studios, but I couldn't find any websites, social media profiles, or other online references bearing that name with specific references to "Chemia."

This incident should serve as a helpful reminder not to assume that software is safe simply because it's distributed through a trusted platform like Steam—especially if it's being offered by an unknown developer that otherwise doesn't seem to exist. (Especially if the same name is being used by other groups that don't have clear ties to the game.)

Prodaft shared indicators of compromise (IOCs) related to the versions of Fickle Stealer, Vidar Stealer, and HijackLoader that were embedded in "Chemia" on GitHub. The company included these IOCs as part of a broader collection of materials related to the activity of a group called EncryptHub that has been carrying out "highly sophisticated spear-phishing attacks" since at least June 26, 2024.

Some apps are much more data hungry than you might expect, and sadly this sometimes only becomes apparent when using precious mobile data. A case in point is provided by spacebuggles, a Redditor and Steam gamer who says they “burned through a month of mobile data in 5 minutes.” They weren’t downloading Call of Duty: Modern Warfare or Microsoft Flight Simulator, or anything so ambitious. Their questionable folly was simply “trying to send a sticker in Steam Chat.”

Comments by other Redditors regarding the mobile data overload frequently pointed the finger at animated .GIF data sizes – a popular media format on the Steam platform, along with animated and static .PNGs. These are seemingly the most popular underlying format for animated stickers and are hosted on Steam servers, not a local app cache, then streamed into the flow of the chat when chosen.

While initially some thought the data thieving culprit(s) may be autoplaying game showcase videos on Steam pages, this seems to have been ruled out, at least in spacebuggles’ case. The OP’s assertion about stickers seems to hold water, as does the wild and wanton way Steam store pages can also easily suck 20-30MB each when browsed.

With the crazy amount of data used by seemingly benign browsing, other Redditors mentioned how they were pleased that Steam Chat was farmed out of the main mobile app a couple of years back.

Exacerbating spacebuggles’ issues with Steam Chat wolfing down 700MB of data after a short spell of trying to secure a free sticker, we note that their mobile service provider contract only supplies 600MB of data per month. Spacebuggles seems to be a New Zealand resident on the 2degrees NZ$13 (US$7.77) monthly prepay plan. That deal also includes 100 minutes and unlimited texts for use in New Zealand and Australia.

Why unexpected mobile data usage can hurt