The Steam Machine helped grow the popularity of Linux gaming, including installations of Bazzite and other gaming-oriented Linux distributions. Valve seemingly doesn't want to stop its open-source development efforts anytime soon, and is now working on a port of the Mesa Radeon Vulkan driver (RADV) to Windows; It's already running Counter-Strike 2, according to developers at Collabora.

As cross-platform development is rather tricky, Valve opted to get a port of RADV to Windows going by way of sponsoring contractors at Collabora. In its blog post, Collabora explained the several hoops it had to jump through to accomplish this task.

With Windows 10 and WDDM 2.0, Microsoft improved the split between graphics drivers' userspace code (the vast majority of the driver itself) and the kernel-level portion that actually talks to the graphics card. This presented the opportunity to hook RADV to the AMD kernel card driver. That's easier said than done, however, as communication between those parts often carries non-standardized data that RADV needs to understand. And to understand the "conversation," it needs to be recorded and analyzed.

An earlier 2024 effort by Faith Ekstrand yielded a basic-but-valuable utility for logging WDDM 2.0 calls and reverse-engineering them to produce a basic RADV implementation. Out of both debugging necessity and as a development tool, Collabora built and expanded upon Ekstrand's work, improving the logger to the point where it can now fully analyze any Vulkan application that runs with AMD's official driver and dump all the data passing to the kernel.

After a lot of work getting to grips with how the AMD driver interacts with the kernel driver, including but not limited to reverse-engineering obscure data structures, the team made progress, and Windows RADV is now able to run some games, including Counter-Strike 2.

Despite the ongoing effort, Collabora explains that since user- and kernel-space driver are a matched pair, changes to those aren't guaranteed to be backwards-compatible, meaning that even a fully functional RADV could break at any point. For that reason, Collobora is requesting that AMD, Microsoft, or both provide a documented interface to the kernel driver or an intermediary compatibility layer.

AMD graphics driver development on Linux has coalesced around the Mesa Vulkan stack, with both company and community devs contributing to the RADV project. Over in the Windows world, the only option is AMD's proprietary driver, which can cause a lot of headaches when developing cross-platform games and applications.

AMD's Vulkan driver for Windows has developed a reputation for instability. Meanwhile, Linux RADV is generally praised for its stability and performance, sometimes running faster than the AMD Windows driver, especially on older cards. With a rapid development schedule, it also generally sees fixes and speed upticks often.

If at some point using RADV on Windows becomes viable, you'd be getting an arguably more stable, mature driver with active development. Games' graphical issues could become far easier to debug and patch thanks to the open nature of RADV, and studios developing with Linux in mind can target the one platform instead of two with different behaviors. Any developer or company can contribute to the project, too.

Furthermore, this lets Valve improve Windows compatibility layers, and any optimizations can be carried over to both operating systems. All told, this is likely one of the several moving parts to improve Linux — thus the Steam Deck, Steam Machine, and upcoming hardware — as a viable gaming platform. Even a future notion of gamers installing RADV on Windows to get a performance or stability boost isn't too far-fetched.

Additionally, RADV on Windows would also help keep discontinued cards usable, and given pricing right now, that certainly would be a good thing.

Steam Machine fans who weren’t lucky enough to get a chance to buy the console on its first drop will have to wait until as late as December 2026 to get it. Valve said in its update that the reservation queue varies between products and regions, meaning Valve is already going through the waitlist for some versions of the consoles in select areas. However, it seems that others would have to wait longer if they chose a particularly popular trim of the Steam Machine in a region where there are many buyers, too.

“We’re fulfilling orders on a daily basis, sending out emails to reservation holders with the option to purchase in the order in which they landed on the list post-randomization. We expect everyone in the reservation queue will have the option to purchase by the end of this year,” Valve said in its update. It also added, “With each reservation queue and corresponding waitlist being per-product, per-region, they can move at different speeds based on demand. This means for some products in some regions, we've reached the end of the reservation queue and have started inviting folks from the waitlist.”

That means users who reserved the Steam Machine but haven’t had the chance to buy them yet can expect to get their hands on one before the new year. While this means that all the original reservations will finally be fulfilled in 2026, it doesn’t offer much comfort for those who want to have a new gaming PC console just in time for the holiday season.

Valve lets you 3D-print your own Steam Machine case, face plates

Users who haven’t received their Steam Machine yet (or even those who didn’t order one) could 3D-print their own shell for the console in the meantime. That’s because the company just released the CAD files for the “Gabe Cube” on GitHub in STP format. This lets you create your own face plates and case based on Valve’s own designs, ensuring that the cases or skins you create yourself will exactly match the PC console.

We’ve already seen some manufacturers offer custom plates and skins for the Steam Machine, although Dbrand had to drop the Portal 2-inspired Companion Cube after Valve threatened to sue the company for copyright infringement. With the release of these files, you can 3D-print or create your own skin (even your own Companion Cube skin) without worrying about getting sued as long as you follow the CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 license that Valve put on the PC console. ‘

If you’re brave enough, you can even make your own case for the Steam Machine and transfer the innards to that custom one you build. Pierre-Loup Griffais, one of the Valve engineers who gave us in-depth details on the Steam Machine, warned that doing so might void your warranty, though.

“Your Steam Machine is yours, and you have the right to do with it what you want,” Griffais said on the GitHub post. “That said, we highly recommend you leave it to professionals. Any damage you do will not be covered by your warranty – but more importantly, you might break your Steam Machine, or even get hurt! Be careful, and have fun.”

A PC gamer has created and demonstrated a handy Steam Game Cartridge system. Over on PCMR, Jibril-sama introduced the system, which blends the old-school console convenience of cartridges with Steam’s awesome and agreeably flexible games library. Ingeniously, it upcycles a bundle of old SATA SSDs into Steam-ready game cartridges using a disk mount detect and execute script on the software side and a SATA dock on the hardware side. Icing on this already tasty cake is provided by Jibril-sama’s colorfully encased and custom-labeled Steam Game Cartridges. Nice.

Steam Game Cartridges from r/pcmasterrace

“Got a couple of used 2.5" SSDs for cheap so I decided to make a Game Cartridge system,” the Redditor casually informs the PCMR masses in the post embedded above. “Games are actually on those SSDs with a script to auto-navigate Steam to the game's page. Auto-starting the game right away is also possible.”

Further comments by the OP explain that all the drives bought for this project were 128GB in capacity, and €7 a piece ($8). That’s not bad in the current RAM and NAND crunch, and keeps these files off your built-in primary storage. As many readers will know, PC game libraries can easily grow to hog a lot of storage.

We reached out to Jibril-sama for some more background info about how the Steam Game Cartridge system is designed to work with as little user friction as possible. They informed us that the system in the video runs Linux and Valve’s Steam URL Protocol is leveraged to navigate to the game's page or launch the game.

“All it needs is a systemd template to check for a script on the SSD and launch it. And a udev rule to trigger the system,” Jibril-sama told Tom’s Hardware. “So basically: Plug in SSD -> udev rule sees the event -> triggers the systemd daemon -> systemd daemon looks into the SSD and finds the script -> execute the script.”

Commenters on PCMR have overwhelmingly welcomed the Steam Game Cartridge future teased by this system. Some want to see the system extended to include GOG game libraries. Others query how the system handles the inevitable hefty multi-gigabyte updates that are pushed (even to older games) from time to time. Jibril-sama told Tom’s Hardware that they didn’t plan to deal with updates often, as they didn’t use cartridges for ‘live service’ titles, and they are mostly used for the “games that I want to replay once in a while.” If and when updates have been flagged, “I just let Steam handle the updates and wait a bit before I can play,” they added.

I’ve had repeated firsthand experience with Steam Games libraries being fussy when moving across different PCs, so stretching the library system this way could reveal cracks and wrinkles as more games are tested. We shall see.

Hopefully, fuller implementation guides, scripts, and resources to help others purchase or 3D print their own Steam Game Cartridge shells will be shared in due course.

We're enduring a particularly hot summer in the northern hemisphere, so it is understandable if powerful, pint-sized PCs are getting relatively toasty during long gaming sessions. However, Valve has confirmed that the Steam Machine's red light bar warning is bugged and being triggered prematurely. Redditor Pure-Outcome-5977 shared a Steam Support message that appears to confirm that a BIOS fix is on the way to raise the temperature and throttling red light warning threshold for the CPU/GPU from 95/90 to 100/100 degrees Celsius.

Update Regarding Red Light During Gameplay from r/steammachine

There appears to be a little miscommunication going on between the Redditor and Steam Support. Pure-Outcome-5977’s red warning light was coming on with system monitor tools showing the CPU was at 81°C and the GPU at 71°C. So the red light bar warning trigger temperatures of 95/90°C seem to be bugged. Thus, they got an answer to a slightly different issue than the one they raised.

“After discussing with our engineers, there is a known issue with the current BIOS that results in the red LED lights displaying much earlier than they should,” admits the Steam Support person in the message screenshot. “The issue is just with when the lights are set to come on. The Steam Machine itself is within normal operating temperature for the CPU/GPU, which they confirmed from your screenshots. For your awareness, the Steam machine will start throttling performance at 100C for CPU/GPU and will shut down to protect itself if temperatures rise past that.”

Importantly, this premature red warning light is just a temporary wrinkle that will be fixed soon via a BIOS update, adds Steam / Valve. After the update, red light warnings will only be seen after hitting a threshold of “100/100C for CPU/GPU instead of 95/90 for CPU/GPU that is currently happening,” concluded the official support message.

The nearest desktop alternative to the Steam Machine’s CPU, something like the Ryzen 5 7500F, has a TDP of 65W and a max operating temperature of 95°C. However, Valve uses a custom mobile-tuned 30W CPU, which is configured to throttle at 100°C and self-protect shutdown if temperatures continue to rise, hitting 105°C.

We don’t have a set date for the arrival of the new Steam Machine BIOS, but “soon” should be good enough for most users.

The Steam Machine’s light bar has previously been in media focus, being central to stories about the device suffering from a ‘Red Line of Death’ (RLOD). Happily, the pronouncement of death in that case was also premature. RLOD Steam Machines can be reanimated Lazarus-like by following a simple and officially described CMOS reset procedure (read more via the above link).

Gamers who find themselves “limited” by SteamOS capabilities can now more confidently install Windows on their Steam hardware. Valve just released the Steam Hardware - Windows Resources page on Steam, which contains Windows drivers for the Steam Deck LCD, Steam Deck OLED, and Steam Machine. This means that those who want to replace the stock SteamOS with Windows 11 on their devices can now do so more easily, and they don’t have to hunt around the internet for drivers just to ensure that all the parts and components on their console will play nicely with Windows.

The drivers on the page include those for the APU, graphics, SD Card reader, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and Audio, depending on which Steam hardware you’re driving. However, Valve said, “We are providing these resources as is and are unfortunately unable to offer 'Windows on Steam Hardware' support. If you get stuck and need a way back to the default SteamOS, please follow these recovery instructions.”

This is the main reason why Valve refuses to subsidize the Steam Machine — since owners can essentially do whatever they want to the living room PC console, selling one does not automatically guarantee that the company will make back any discounts it offers through game sales. This is why even though the Steam Machine is highly rated for Steam Deck users who want to upgrade to a more powerful device, its relatively high price puts it at a disadvantage compared to competitors like the PS5 or Xbox.

Many gamers would likely prefer SteamOS over Windows, especially as it offers far less bloat than Microsoft’s operating system. Valve is in fact working on SteamOS to make it more compatible with a general release and allow it to be installed on hardware that features Intel CPUs/GPUs and Nvidia GPUs. But because many anti-cheat apps still aren’t compatible with Linux (hence, SteamOS), installing Windows on Steam hardware is currently the only way that gamers can enjoy titles that require them.

It’s unfortunate that SteamOS doesn’t have any dual-boot capabilities at the moment, as that would give gamers the best of both worlds — use Windows and accept the performance hit if they want to play games that require specialized anti-cheat apps and then switch to SteamOS for all the other titles they enjoy. Valve said that it’s already working on this capability, but hasn’t given a fixed timeline for when it will arrive.

Late last week, we reported on a brand-new Steam Machine getting bricked during an update, and refusing to budge from a state freshly dubbed the ‘Red Line of Death’ (RLOD). The issue stirred fear in tech enthusiasts' hearts, still scarred by the notorious Red Ring of Death (RROD) from the Xbox 360 era. But we have some good news today, as Valve’s official account on Reddit has responded to provide step-by-step instructions to get any affected Steam Machine up and running again by clearing the CMOS.

Thankfully, the pronouncement of death was definitely premature in this unresponsive Steam Machine case, and easily fixed. It wasn’t dead, it was resting, or probably pining for the fjords. It just needed to have its CMOS setting thoroughly cleared, that's all.

SteamHWFeedback directly answered the distress call of OP me_hill on Reddit. A five-step recipe to recover Steam Machines with RLOD was provided to the beleaguered gamer. However, me_hill’s own flailing machine-reset procedure had already done the trick – inspired by numerous user comments on the thread.

It is good to have an official solution to the initially scary RLOD, though. For the sake of exactitude, we have pasted Valve’s official RLOD fixing steps below, verbatim.

If you're encountering this issue, please try the following:

• Unplug the Machine, then press the power button a few times. This ensures any stored energy in the PSU gets discharged. You may see the power indicator LED blip a moment.
• Plug the Machine back in. Note if your power LED glows (breathing pattern) white or not. If yes, please submit a Steam Support ticket and tag me, or send me a chat request with the ID.
• Hold the power button down for ~6s. You should see the power indicator LED (dot) flash momentarily. Release the power button when you do.
• The power indicator LED will start to cycle some color codes. These are designed to allow you to select various options for recovery/troubleshooting purposes. When the LED turns green, short-press the power button. This should perform a full "CMOS reset."
• On the next boot, you should see the RGB bar as blue - it may take a bit longer to boot due to a memory re-training.

There’d only been two public pleas by Steam Machine users about RLOD so far, as far as we can see. Perhaps several more users resolved these issues themselves, without any social media interaction, so it is difficult to know the scale of similar experiences. Nevertheless, we are relieved to learn that these symptoms are easily fixed and users can get back up and running on their coveted new gaming hardware pretty quickly – with the benefit of an officially sanctioned cure direct from Valve.

Ahead of our review of the Steam Machine, we sat down with Valve engineers Pierre-Loup Griffais and Yazan Aldehayyat to talk about the compact SteamOS PC. We discussed the pricing, the design process at Valve, component shortages (how could you not?), and even Windows support. 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: I think I'd be remiss if I didn't talk about the elephant in the room, which of course is pricing. The Steam Machine starts at $1,049 in the U.S. for the 512GB option. How do you think that price is going to hit, and how do you think it reflects the vision of the Steam machine when you were building it?

Pierre-Loup Griffais, engineer, Valve: I think we'd be hard-pressed to make predictions on how exactly the market's going to respond to it. I think it's very different than what it looked like last year. And so in terms of what appetite people have to buy a gaming PC at a certain price, everyone's going to have a different opinion on whether it's a good value or whether the product makes sense for them. So I don't know if we're hazarding any predictions there.

But it's definitely the case that our original design, of course, was based on memory and storage prices from two years ago or so, 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? So, I think if you're looking at building a PC from parts, either comparable horsepower or more horsepower, you know, you're probably looking at a similar price point here. At least that would be our expectation, right? That if you're, if you're looking at a trade-off of, "I want something that's about as powerful," you're still looking at a price that's roughly what we're offering there. And then you have all the things that you can't really build, like the form factor, the quietness, the CEC integration, the dedicated Bluetooth antenna for controller support. All that stuff is not really something that you can put in your own gaming PC and are still strong reasons that people might want to get the Steam Machine.

Freedman: Some of that definitely tracks. I've been going through our database, and things that were around the price point of the Steam Machine now are not the price of the current Steam machine anymore.

Yazan Aldehayyat, engineer, Valve: Yes, yes.

Valve speaks on Steam Machine compared to traditional consoles

Freedman: You're very much calling the Steam machine a PC. You haven't been calling it a console. Do you see that as a totally different audience, because the PlayStation 5 Pro is $899 right now, which is higher than it used to be? Do you see that as a competitor inside Valve, or are you looking at this like this is specifically a PC for a PC audience for people who already have Steam libraries?

Griffais: Yeah, I think it's a pretty different offering, right? I feel like if you're playing on PC, you're not looking at something like a console system and comparing just the price and the specs, because you have a bunch of games on PC, and you would have to buy those games on the other platform, or you would have to factor in whatever subscription cost there is to play online. There's a lot of factors there where it's not really apples to apples, right? And so I think it's an offering for folks that want to play on PC by definition or have some use for a PC that's around that powerful, it's probably quite a different decision than figuring out if something like a console is for you. There's a lot of trade-offs there.

Aldehayyat: I think the value of the Steam Machine is inherently tied to the value of your Steam library in a lot of ways. 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, for sure, we suspect that it's for people who already have a big Steam library. The Steam Machine is just going to make a lot of sense to them.

Griffais: Yeah, and folks also have a lot of stuff on PC that's not necessarily on Steam, right? Like, there's a lot of different libraries on different stores, there's downloaded games, there's MMOs, all this stuff is also there, right, including productivity apps. There's some desktop use you can do with it. So, I guess the value of it is a little bit harder to express than just, like, you have that price and you have that library.

Freedman: Do you see Steam Machine as a possible entry point for someone who's just getting into Steam, or would you sort of advise those people to be starting elsewhere?

Griffais: For sure. Yeah, I think it could be. Usually, I guess it's hard for us to reason around what someone that's not on PC might or might not do, just because we're not really used to talking to those users. But I think we've seen some people use something like Steam Deck as an entry point for PC, and it seems to have worked for a bunch of people. I would think that Steam Machine is the same between the verification program and the SteamOS experience, that, you know, whose sole aim is to basically get out of the way, so that you can get to your games as easily as possible. I think that it's a good kind of niche for that.

Aldehayyat: I think it's like just to emphasize that point, it's we think it's a good entryway in big part because of how easy it is to set up and play games, right, like if somebody who's curious about PC gaming, and you're interested in getting into it, but you're a little intimidated by all the information that you need to know to build your own PC, or tinker with drivers, or whatever. The Steam Machine could be a really compelling offering for you, because then you can play those games with a lot less work, and maybe after you really get into it, you decide to build your own PC, and that's cool, that's great, that's awesome. But if you're a little bit intimidated, or maybe you're a PC gamer. Your life got a lot busier, you don't have as much time, that could be another way for you to get back into it. So the ease of use is something that we really cared a lot about was really important to us.

Griffais: We've heard that a lot for Steam Deck. People that are like, "I used to play on PC, I might have games on Steam, I might not, but I used to be a PC gamer, and you know, I have a family now, I have kids or something. I've been wanting to get back into it, but it seems complicated, or a time sink, or something." A bunch of people seemed to have found Steam Deck as a good way to address that, and I expect it might be the same.

Freedman: I mean, I can tell you, I have a toddler. I just finished Resident Evil Requiem, and I played the majority of it on a Steam Deck, because I was able to do it after her bedtime in a place in our apartment, far away from her room.

Aldehayyat: Great.

Griffais: First-person or third-person with Grace?

Freedman: For Grace, first-person. So I've got one more price question, and we'll get on to some engineering stuff.

Subsidizing hardware & the VRAM conundrum

Freedman: So you're not subsidizing the Steam Machine, which Valve said would make the PC a more closed platform, I guess maybe more similar to some consoles. but it's been said a lot that Valve subsidized the Steam Deck. I'm not sure I've actually found any definitive sources that say that. Did Valve subsidize the Steam Deck?

Griffais: Not really. If you look at certain SKUs at certain points of time, you know, it might be below or above cost by a small margin. 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. Same thing here, right? If you look at where we thought Steam Machine was going to be in terms of pricing, and where we are now, and where Steam Deck used to be, and what it is now, you know, as we've had to announce some price changes recently, we're actually quite a bit more aggressive now, because we understand that the higher price is less accessible to people.

I guess we're able to be very aggressive with margin, right? 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 up.

Aldehayyat: But it's important that the Valve hardware is a self-sustained program; it's not subsidized by software sales, so that's kind of the piece to get across.

Freedman: So, on the hardware, one big worry back from the announcement was some of the hardware choices, which aren't, for lack of a better term, current gen, either in terms of AMD's technologies or in some cases compared to other modern graphics cards. The GPU specifically has 8GB of VRAM. How is Valve handling this internally, both your feedback and what you're doing with SteamOS?

Griffais: So there's a few aspects to that. One comes down to the system design when we picked the parts for it, and the GPU, and the amount of memory that was going to be available for the GPU specifically. I think we are very aware that, you know, eight gigs is kind of aggressive and could be kind of in the middle of what you would need there. But we made a lot of calculations on "what are you able to play with things like that?" and our conclusion was that for the stuff that you would want to play, and the level of details, and everything that you would want for that level of performance, you won't be in the spots where you're running out of VRAM.

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. It'd be too slow. It's possible that there's some games in the future where that calculus is going to be a little bit different, right? Like, they take more VRAM at the same performance or something. But right now I think we're doing pretty good there. 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. But that being said, between the Steam Deck release and now, we have done a ton of work on SteamOS to teach it about discrete VRAM.

We only used to support APUs, where we didn't have that problem — we had a whole other set of different memory management problems instead — and then improve the handling of VRAM under stress, under load conditions, and trying to get to the best outcome. So we're still rolling out updates there, but I think in practice the experiences improved rapidly around those cases. And we're continuing to do a bunch of work there.

Aldehayyat: I also want to just say that everybody sees that upgrade cycle for PCs have been slowing down dramatically. And more importantly, the new games coming out are able to scale generations of CPUs and GPUs a lot more gracefully than they used to. So, again, 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. 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 where we at now, even as of today, it can play your Steam library pretty well, and 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.I think that one of the great things about the PC ecosystem is that games are not designed with a fixed performance target, they're able to come up and down, and you can tune them to be a great experience on a variety of hardware,

Griffais: And in a way, things like Steam Deck, and the new-ish, you know, segment of growing PC handhelds has been helping with that too, because people have scalability more in mind, I think. And there's been, there's been games, you know, that have made adjustments to have you know different level details or different presets for lower-end configs that I think you know that same effect will happen in the future and will pay dividends for all of PC as well. You have people that you know are probably playing on old laptops and things like that that maybe don't have to upgrade as much now because the developers, you know, have more scalability in mind, which is, I think, a good development for everyone.

4K capable, 1080p optimized

Freedman: I found that you know you can largely get playable frame rates on this thing. I mean, I'm someone willing to turn down settings.

But there was the 4K with FSR comment that had turned some heads initially in my testing. I found that's largely true, that you know, if you're willing to turn some settings down, you can get somewhere around 4K 60 with FSR. But why call it 4K capable, as opposed to really marketing it as a really solid 1080p or 1440p machine, rather than using FSR in the measurements, which kind of depends on which version of FSR the game is using?

Aldehayyat: 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. So, basically, it's just our way of telling people that yes, if you have a 4K TV, you'll be able to use your Steam Machine with it. Not everybody understands the difference between render resolution and your TV resolution, so yes, for a lot of games, rendering a 1080p or 1440p is definitely the sweet spot, but we kind of wanted to make sure people understand that it still can work with your 4K TV, and you have the ability to upscale your content to that resolution, basically.

Griffais: And I think generally it's broadly true for the catalog as a whole, right? For sure, if you're looking at the current segment of games and what's coming out, then that's going to be what's stressing it out the most in terms of performance. Steam has a lot of games that extend decades into the past, as well. There's a ton of games that are playing that are coming out right now that are going to play just fine at 4K native on the Machine. There's there's a wide variety of different performance targets that games have, but in general, I think there's a ton of good experiences that you can have at 4K natively on the Machine. But for sure, for things that are coming out, or more recent games, I would personally probably pick, you know, 1080p render resolution, or 1440p, depending on how scalable it is.

Freedman: Speaking of 1080p, I noticed early on in the testing that 1080p seems to be the default resolution set across SteamOS on the Steam Machine. I was actually kind of surprised by it. I was going through, first on a per-game basis, boosting it up, so I could, you know, test multiple resolutions on my monitor. And I think very much like the sort of like the Steam Controller, there's not a huge on-ramp, not a lot of hand-holding on how to work this type of thing, so is there going to be any sort of messaging or sort of tutorials from Valve elsewhere that explain how to adjust these settings so you can get exactly what you're looking for?

Griffais: Yeah, I think we want to make that more visible and make it pretty obvious to folks that know what it is that this is happening. There's also different work that I think we want to do around that system. Another one is that when we're testing the games, we can also flag them for different default resolutions. So for an indie game or a game that's a little bit lower spec, or an old game, we should have the ability to say that game is actually just fine at 4K, or you know, other resolutions, so that you don't have to go change that setting. A

The thing we're trying to avoid is that some games, the way that they detect settings, you know, is all different. Games do that very differently, right? And it's possible for some games to start at 4K very high ray tracing. And the experience with that is not great. You don't want to start a game and have that sort of experience as a user, especially when you're trying to get to a point where most people can run a game and expect, you know, to be able to play it and not tinker with it. So we're trying to make sure the baseline is on the safe side, where you're going to have a fine experience. But for the folks that want more detail, more definition, they can access those settings, and they know what they're doing, right?

So I think that it could definitely use a little bit more visibility, so that you are very aware of what the OS is doing behind the scenes, and very aware of how you can go change that setting in a way that right now maybe is not as visible as it could be.

The verified program deepens

Freedman: Speaking of all this, there's the verified program. I mean, obviously, the verified program made it very clear if you could play something on Deck. On Steam Machine, assuming you turn off that 1080p flag, you get into more resolutions, more potential settings that are supported, really, just more options and games all around, because you have more powerful hardware. So, when something is verified on the Steam machine, is that specifically verified at 1080p, or is it going to be more like a modular thing where you explain where it's verified?

Griffais: The only thing that we want to make sure that a verified game gets at is that by default it's above 1080p 30, right? So that's really what we're shooting for, and again, it's all about the default experience, because I think all those things that you said are broadly true for the Deck as well. Like you can actually load up a game on deck, uncheck the resolution settings, set it to 4K, and set very high ray tracing. Look into all that stuff, and we're not trying to have the verified system tell you, like, hey, if you do that, then you need to change the settings to X and Y to get to a certain frame rate. We're just saying, oh, you're changing settings — at that point, you're outside of the realm of what the verified system is designed to do, because it's for those users that are not really doing that., and we expect the same to be true for the Machine Similarly as the deck, I think we'll see an effect where more and more games also pick settings that were intended for the Machine as time goes, as developers are putting those presets in, which will further make the default experience match the expectations of those users that are working from the verified system.

Freedman: I very clearly remember, I think one of those was Cyberpunk 2077. That was the first game where I saw that they had a Steam Deck setting. I was like, "Well, I know which one to pick."

Griffais: And, of course, most users never had to pick that, because it was selected by default, right? And if someone can have played the game and never seen that settings menu, that's a win in our book, right? But we also want to make sure that people that want to tinker with that can also do that, and every step of the way, we're messaging to developers, like, hey, even if you know you're running on a Steam Deck, even if you know you're running on a Steam Machine, do not disable settings, do not hide settings, that's not what people want to see. There's a lot of users that you might not be aware of that are all going to have very different opinions on what settings make sense on the device that you're playing, and we're really trying to make sure that you know the SteamOS experience upholds that core principle of PC gaming.

Freedman: I know that quite a handful of places have resources online — all they do is go through Steam Deck settings, tinker, and try to make it the best they can.

Hardware design, repairability and limitations

Freedman: So, I want to move this a bit more towards the hardware design. So every major component is cooled by one big heat sink with the 120 millimeter fan. I'm curious, how did you choose that kind of design? What are the benefits of that?

Aldehayyat: There's actually a couple of reasons. I mean, obviously, the first thing is that it's the most compact design you could come up with, right? Like, if you have one thermal module, then you know you could make the device as small as possible. So that was the number one sort of factor that made us go into that path. But the other thing that is interesting about this is that if you have two separate thermal modules, then each one has to be designed for the absolute worst case for each one, so you end up with a combined volume that is larger than the device is ever going to be. But if you have one, then it can share, basically, right? 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. So that's one of the advantages, is that your ability to kind of allocate thermal headroom back and forth between the CPU and the GPU, and all that kind of stuff, independently.

To be clear, it was very, very challenging to make that design work, because when you're trying to touch off of different things, tolerances really eat you up, so you have to come up with, because you know, good thermal module design requires you to have the absolute minimum gap between whatever you're trying to cool and the thermal module itself, and the GPU die to the thermal module, the CPU die to the thermal module, they both have to basically have the smallest gap possible. Nut then in reality, like things vary and 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. But by overcoming it, I think we ended up at the most compact design, cost-effective design.

Griffais: It's also the quietest. Having one big module lets us have a big fan, which then can spin lower and, or, you know, lower RPMs. So we're pretty happy to have been able to make that work, because it turned out really good in terms of the ratio between how quiet it is and its normal performance.

Freedman: I opened it up to take a look, and I was able to take the whole thing out of the case with a single Torx T9 screwdriver. I don't think this was built with the idea that a ton of people were going to open it, but was repairability like a serious consideration of the design?

Aldehayyat: I mean, yeah, absolutely. We care about repairability a lot, and we tried our best to make the device as repairable as possible while still making it compact. I mean, those two things, generally speaking, fight each other. The more compact something is, the harder it is to take apart. So, we think we found a good balance. It's just kind of part of our philosophy, right? We think it's your device, so you get to do whatever you want with it. We definitely did not put any artificial barriers for people to do this, but we actually go a step further and try our best to make it as easy as possible. There's limitations to that, but things like the fact that the SSD is on the FPC that loops around to make the SSD accessible, that was not by accident, nor was it the easiest way to do this. We could have buried it under the thermal module, and that would be actually way easier, but we chose not to do that. It's just kind of a part of our philosophy, even though it's not necessarily the easiest or cheapest way to do things, we still think it's the right way to do things.

Griffais: Yeah, there's a few things that we generally try to have. You know, we can't hit them all the time, but I think we've, we've done, you know, a pretty good job of it ever since Steam Deck OLED, especially, making sure that, all screws use the same type, that they're machine screws, so you can take them apart and put them back without damaging some plastic or some wood receiver there. Also labeling stuff, right? Like, there's a lot of labels on the little connectors on the boards that we could easily have removed in production, but it's actually really useful; We're also taking them apart, right? It's useful for us, but I think you know, we definitely are not intending that most people will open this, like you say, but we want to make sure the people who do are not going to run into barriers.

Freedman: Yeah, I mean, there's an awful lot of Steam Deck mods. I'm sure a lot of those same types of people will be very interested in this. So a lot of the ports — this is probably by the design of making it so compact — they're attached via daughter boards and ribbon cables. Will those components be made available either for tinkerers or repair shops?

Aldehayyat: Yeah, so similar to how we did it with the Steam Deck, we're going to work with iFixit to make the parts available. We're going to basically try and make as many parts available as possible. I don't know for sure the full list of components that will be available, but I believe all the FPCs, daughter boards, and ports will be available through iFixit. I'm not sure which ones they decide to sell, or whatever. But yeah, our goal is to make those parts available as widely as possible.

Freedman: Is it any more difficult to make those parts available because of just the general component shortage, or are you stacked up on those ones?

Griffais: It's actually easier because they're on daughter boards, right? If that stuff wasn't the main board, then you'd be in trouble because there's some soldered-down memory, the VRAM, right, is the only soldered-down; the system RAM isn't, it's SO-DIMMs. If anything, it's a little easier for things like ports, and yes,

Aldehayyat: Believe it or not, right now, even things like the FR4, like the raw PCB material, it has shortages. But it just so happens that the memory shortage is way worse, so yeah, it's not really a major challenge to make those parts available at this point.

Freedman: And I'm assuming if you work with iFixit, that also means I'll be publishing maintenance manuals of some sort, right?

Aldehayyat: Yes, we're going to partner with them too, and they're going to create a lot of the repair manuals, replacement parts instructions, and things like that.

Freedman: Because opening it is super simple, but getting to the RAM, to the SO-DIMMs, that's got a lot of ribbon cables.

Aldehayyat: Yeah, we're aware of that, and I'll be honest, it is something that we really wanted to improve, and we tried to make the RAM more accessible, but there was just no real way to. 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 worked. With the SSD, we were able to put on the flex and just read it around. With memory, you just can't do that because of signal integrity reasons. And trying to make an access hatch through the power supply just wasn't possible for safety reasons. So there's really no way. We couldn't come up with a solution, but maybe in the future we can come up with something,

Reckoning with hardware shortages and pricing

Freedman: I know in the blog post it says that there were some components you were barely able to source at all. Outside of memory, which components have been the most difficult to get for the Steam Machine?

Aldehayyat: Storage, obviously,

Freedman: You mentioned PCB, PCB materials.

Aldehayyat: Yeah. I mean, honestly, it's a little shocking right now. There are some shortages in plastics. There are some shortages in FR4, some capacitors. But all of those kind of pale in comparison to the memory and storage shortage. If this was a normal time, people would be concerned about these things, but given the memory and the supply shortage, this just doesn't really crack the top ten of problems. It's just kind of to show that really everything is constrained, but the memory and shortage overtake all of them. So that's really the primary focus.

Freedman: And the other interesting thing I found in sort of sourcing and building a design is that the blog post suggests you started sourcing parts somewhere in 2022, which suggests you've been at the Steam Machine for a few years. Are you able to talk about the general timeline of product development for the Steam Machine?

Griffais: The process starts very early. I mean, in terms of specific time frames, it's a little hard, you know, just because our memory is fried from working hard on trying to ship this thing. But you know, the design process, I think, probably started like three years ago, or so, when we were building machines from parts, trying to get at the right performance target. And then we started progressively moving to the next step, building it up as, like, a whole all-in-one thing, and then refining the form factor and all that. But from that point on, you're already starting to test the waters and getting in touch with suppliers, making sure that you're going to have multiple suppliers for the things that you're sure you're going to have, so it's definitely a long pipeline. But I would say plans for full-scale production of the object that you're looking at now is probably like a year or so.

Aldehayyat: I also think that the research and development, I guess we take more seriously here at Valve, and potentially some other places. Things don't go from "here's a presentation for a device," and then we start planning to make it. We first start by making some prototypes to convince ourselves that this actually makes sense, and there's an actual research phase that it's like, "OK, here are the technologies that we need to prove out, here are some prototypes we need, we think we need to make to make us believe that this device makes sense." There was never, during that phase, there was never really a plan to make a product. It was just kind of like gathering information, doing prototyping of critical technologies, proving them out, stuff like that, so that takes a while. And then after you do all that, you decide, OK, we want to make this thing happen. Let's start actually doing the development part of that, then that takes a year and a half, or something like that. So, depending on which, how you want to count things, it could have been three, four, five years, it could have been a year and a half, you know. But I would say it's just that we're constantly investigating different things, so it's kind of hard to put a timeline on it.

Griffais: For us, working on these things is very incremental and very gradual. So, in a sense, this all started 15 years ago when we got into hardware, because Steam Machine is actually one of the first things we worked on. The work on SteamOS that we started back then, you can draw a straight line through from that to where we are now: the work on inputs, even you know, the work on Steam Machine with OEMs, they taught us a bunch of stuff that we're leveraging right now. We're always trying to make sure that when we build something, we can reuse it in the future, and we don't have to start from scratch. And so, even back then, everything we were doing with SteamOS is fully represented in the current experience, and we're just building from here.

Windows support incoming

Freedman: Is Windows support still the same on Steam Deck? Will you be issuing new drivers?

Griffais: That's our goal. Right now, we're still working on certain drivers, you know, around Bluetooth and stuff, but that's definitely our goal. And we've been talking to AMD about the best way for users to get the graphics drivers as well, because I think it's pretty important that they can get at the latest fixes.

Aldehayyat: Yeah, but the model will be very similar to the way the Steam Deck Windows drivers work. It's going to take us a little bit of time after launch to get all the drivers lined up, but the general process of us publishing the drivers on our website will probably be the same.

Freedman: Is Valve still working on dual boot with Windows 11? I mean, the Windows resources page I just mentioned, it says the Steam Deck is capable, the OS installer wasn't ready yet.

Griffais: So it's something we're working towards. We don't have dual boot, an easy dual boot wizard plumbed right now. There's a few ways that you go about it, but right now, most of them include some manual steps where you repartition your disks and resize stuff by hand. We want to make that process easier in the future. But the thing that we're doing right now with SteamOS is we want to make sure that if someone builds a PC like a Steam machine, so something that has an AMD discrete GPU, and then whatever other parts they pick, they can choose whatever segment of GPU they want.

We're going to have a SteamOS USB install drive that they can just install SteamOS onto, so that they can have basically the same experience as the Steam Machine. It's pretty similar to how you would re-image a Steam Deck. But we want to make sure that if you're building from parts, that you have that option. So, we'll also be making that available at the same time.

Freedman: Will that mean at the same time as the Windows drivers, or—

Griffais: Just the product launch.

There's already SteamOS images out there that will work there, but we just want to make sure that we have one that has all the latest OS components that we're shipping at launch with Steam Machine, so that everything is ready from the get-go for that sort of experience.

Valve's new reservation system

Freedman: The reservation system you're using, I think it's the most radical one I've ever seen from Valve. I totally get why you're doing it. How'd you come up with that internally?

Griffais: Just lots of discussion. The reservation system that we originally came up with for the Steam Deck was also born of the same sort of discussion. We're talking about, "OK, here's the situation: how many units we have, what the user experience is going to be on purchase. Working back from that, how can we improve the user experience?" We see a lot of users stressed out about trying to secure supply for other products. We just see what's happening in the wild, and how people are frustrated with, like, not knowing where to get something, or having to periodically just recheck online retailers, trying to figure out.

I mean, my experience trying to buy PS5 kind of painted a lot of that stuff, in a sense. But the current iteration on the reservation system here, was just similar. We worked from, OK, 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. So, yeah, it's all I think based on discussions and user feedback.

Freedman: The blog post says that the people who get on the reservation queue, separate from the waitlist, could last through the end of the year. Is that all the first production run?

Griffais: We're constantly producing and trying to secure additional parts and stuff. There's not really discrete, you know, different runs and different segments, so it's a very linear thing. But for sure, depending on how many people sign up, it might extend into time frames that we're not really even sure of, because supply is so interesting.

Aldehayyat: It was just six months, as far as we were willing to make a prediction. As Pierre-Loup said, if there's more demand, we obviously are planning to make more, and so maybe there'll be another waitlist or something. But six months, we felt, is the appropriate amount of time to kind of put a cap on the waitlist, essentially,

Griffais: The interesting and I guess hard thing is that getting supply right now also means getting a wide variety of different prices, right? So it's possible that you would be able to make more, but in a way that the pricing ends up being different. And so we're still trying to figure that out, because 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 what are we doing to secure more supply, and does it still result with the product at this price, or would we have to rethink that.

Because we don't really know how the situation is going to continue to evolve. You know, 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, and so I guess what we're trying to convey with this blog post is that it seems like all bets are off, and we're going to work through it just with the users as well.

[Interview ends]

An unlucky gamer has taken to Reddit after their brand-new Steam Machine was hit with a "red line of death" after just 20 minutes of use. u/me_hill posted on the r/steammachine subreddit, saying that they played No Man’s Sky for just five minutes and then updated the machine before it bricked itself. Unfortunately, it doesn’t seem that the Redditor could do much to troubleshoot the issue. The Steam website says that their particular issue, which is marked by the right half of the LED bar turning into a breathing red light paired with a solid red light on the indicator LED, indicates GPU failure, a possibly fatal issue harkening back to the Xbox 360's Red Ring of Death.

Well, the Steam Machine was pretty cool for the 20 minutes that it worked from r/steammachine

Valve was only able to produce a limited number of Steam Machine units for its initial run, which is why it had to resort to a randomized queue to deter scalpers. While the company did not say how many consoles it had available, it’s likely still in the thousands (if not tens of thousands), meaning there’s some chance that it will ship units that will fail within the first year. For now, it seems that this Redditor’s post is an isolated incident and it’s unclear what caused the failure. u/me_hill said that they already put in a ticket to Steam support, but they haven’t updated yet on whether the company has responded already.

The Steam Machine is one of the most anticipated console releases in the past few years, which has been delayed for several months. It was also released at a relatively high price of $,1049, making it even more expensive than the PlayStation 5 Pro, as Valve cannot afford to subsidize the hardware with video game sales. It was initially thought that the living room PC console would launch at around $750, but as the company announced it amid a memory shortage, its engineers said that the company had to increase the price by around the same level that the Steam Deck experienced in May 2026.

This is certainly a disappointment for u/me_hill, who probably initially felt quite lucky as they were one of the selected few given the privilege of buying the first batch of Steam Machines. In an ironic twist of fate, they were also incredibly unlucky to become one of the first victims of the “red line of death,” an early nickname for the failure and a nod to the “red ring of death” that indicated a critical hardware failure on the Xbox 360 launched around 20 years ago. Nevertheless, other Redditors commented that this is par for the course for customers who buy the first run of a product, with the Redditor themselves saying, “That’s early adoption, I guess.”

We’re hoping that Valve can address this issue for u/me_hill as soon as possible, and that they don’t have to wait months before they can get their hands on a replacement unit, despite its limited stock. In the meantime, they’ll have to settle with their existing equipment (or maybe even get one of the best budget gaming laptops instead) while they’re waiting for their Steam Machine to be fixed.

When the Steam Machine was first unveiled, aesthetic customization was one of its biggest talking points beyond the hardware itself. At the time, Dbrand showed off a case modeled after the iconic Weighted Companion Cube from Portal 2 and later sold it for $99 — all without ever asking Valve permission for the use of its IP. Therefore, as expected, the case is now gone, and every order will be subsequently refunded.

RIP Companion Cube from r/dbrand

This is pretty characteristic of Dbrand, a company that prides itself on its edgy corporate branding where it often doesn't care about playing by the rules. That's fine as long as the rule-breaking is limited to cursing out your customers on social media, but it doesn't work when you violate copyright law. If anything, Valve was generous with allowing Dbrand to get away with selling the case for this long without repercussions.

That's precisely the takeaway from the company's official statement (embedded above) where it calls Valve "direct, fair, and respectful throughout." Valve's legal team reached out to Dbrand and asked it to shut down the entire operation; halt sales immediately and take down the sales page and all promotional content. Dbrand complied and even extended a hand for an official collaboration, but Valve turned down the offer.

The popular skin manufacturer has previously found itself in similar hot waters with Sony and Nintendo. You may remember the famous "Darkplates" saga where the company similarly took advantage of an open customization feature and started selling faceplates for the newly-launched PS5. On the other hand, it also sold unofficial Zelda skins for the Switch OLED, literally called "Clone of the Kingdom."

It's one thing to produce accessories with original designs, but it's a completely different thing to use said company's IP as the design, regardless of the engineering efforts behind it. That's why the Darkplates eventually came back, but the Zelda skin can't. And it's also why a Portal 2-themed case can't realistically exist without asking the company who owns Portal. Valve had to draw a line somewhere to protect its IP and avoid creating precedence for future litigation.

Anyhow, this machoistic corporate strategy has worked wonders for Dbrand's online following, but even the fans called out this move as comically stupid. Beyond the copyright violation, the chance of an official partnership is now gone, too. Dbrand said the Companion Cube case became its second-fastest selling product ever, implying things would've certainly worked out had Dbrand approached Valve ahead of time.

Meta PCs has announced preorders for Steamroller, the first prebuilt gaming PC running on SteamOS. The system features standard PC components that are broadly similar to those offered by Valve in the base variant of the Steam Machine. Priced at $1,299, the Steamroller is available for preorder now, with shipping set to begin on July 3, 2026. Buyers can also opt for an extended warranty, with two-year and three-year plans available for $180 and $240, respectively.

The Steamroller uses the Jonsbo D32, a well-ventilated m-ATX chassis with an AMD Ryzen 9600X, which is a 6-core, 12-thread CPU capable of boosting up to 5.4 GHz. Meta PCs mentions that the B650M/B650M Wi-Fi m-ATX motherboard will vary in brand and styling, meaning not all Steamroller PCs are alike, though they shouldn’t vary in terms of performance. For graphics, the system comes with AMD’s last-gen Radeon RX 7600 based on the RDNA 3 architecture with 8GB of GDDR6 memory. The system also includes 16GB of DDR5 RAM at 5600 MT/s, a 1TB NVMe M.2 SSD, a 240mm AIO liquid cooler, and a 650W Gold power supply unit.

In terms of hardware, the Steamroller seems competitive with Valve's new Steam Machine. Since it includes standard PC components, one also gains the ability to upgrade almost any component in the future, unlike the Steam Machine, which only allows you to swap the RAM and storage. That said, the Steam Machine is more compact, measuring at 152 × 162 × 156 mm (6.0 × 6.4 × 6.1 inches), justifying its console/living room PC purpose.

Another aspect to consider is practicality. The Steam Machine supports HDMI CEC, a protocol that allows it to communicate and control compatible devices such as your TV and soundbar. This allows you to power on the Steam Machine and your TV simultaneously, and even switch to the correct input, without leaving your couch or reaching for a remote. Unfortunately, HDMI CEC is not supported on most PCs, including the Steamroller. The Steam Machine also features standby and quick resume functionality, which allows you to put the system to sleep and jump back into your game almost instantly.

The Steamroller is essentially aimed at potential customers who want a gaming PC running on SteamOS with the flexibility of standard PC hardware. While it may lack some of the living room-focused features available on the Steam Machine, it makes up for them by offering a system that is easier to upgrade and repair, while also offering a way to experience SteamOS without assembling an entire system.

With widespread disappointment regarding the availability and pricing of Valve’s Steam Machine, influencers and creators have been mixing up ‘alternatives’ of various shapes and sizes. However, we think the Terk Box v1.1 looks like the closest alternative yet in design and spirit. The work, as spotted by Hackaday, appears to be a collaboration between Jacob Terkelsen, an ex-Tom's Hardware contributor currently working for AMD, and a 3D printing and SFF PCs enthusiast who goes by the handle of 3DCatt.

If you are a 3D printer owner, you can grab the source files for the Terk Box v1.1 direct from Printables.com. There you will find a parts list, which details the various screws, riser cables, and numerous other parts you will need. The .STL source files are all there, too, of course, under a Creative Commons license.

Specific component brands don’t seem to be suggested by the makers, which is probably due to the set of standards embraced by the various PC parts makers. However, we do note in the user comments some people may have had a hard time fitting their GPU. 3DCatt says the max length that will fit is “about 180mm long.” That isn’t all, though, as the recommended PCIe riser cable wasn’t long enough for some, depending on the GPU model. AMD’s Terkelsen chipped in that the build was suitable for his RTX 5060 LP graphics card, but he requested more room for a front 140mm case fan, among a few other tweaks.

The current revision of the Terk Box measures 167 x 168 x 225mm. That may be close enough to the official machine (152 x 162 x 156mm) to justify the extra effort of doing this instead of finding an off-the-peg compact Mini ITX case. Some of the compromises with the Terk Box v1.1 appear to be the fussiness with GPU choice we mentioned above, and the less-than-ideal positioning of the CPU socket in relation to the PSU. However, both 3DCatt and Terkelsen have hinted at refinements on the way to v1.2.

Since they have already strayed from the cubic confines of Valve’s actual Steam Machine, I feel they shouldn’t feel too shackled to the design they currently have. I’ll be watching further developments with interest.

In summary, this is a design much closer in stature and spirit to the original Valve effort, but it is definitely a work in progress. With the various component constraints, the DIY price for this won’t be the most compelling, either. Readers who are 3D printing and PC DIY aficionados, and we must have a few of those, might be able to contribute to the project with suggestions, tweaks, and remixes.

Despite Valve’s efforts to prevent scalpers from taking advantage of the Steam Machine’s limited supply, there are still a few opportunists out there who are taking the risk of selling the pre-order slot that they have won. A quick search for “Steam Machine” on eBay would pull up results for pre-order slots sold at a significant premium above Valve’s own $1,049 retail price.

We see various listings for the 512GB version selling between $1,363.70 to $2,800 — a 30% to 167% premium. Scalper prices for the 2TB version are far more egregious, with listings priced between $2,399 and $2,899, making it 93% to 140% more expensive than buying it directly from the Steam Store.

Valve has already anticipated this event, especially given the massive interest in the Steam Machine and limited supply. This has happened multiple times before, especially with the arrival of the PlayStation 5 and every Nvidia GPU launch since the 30 series. To avoid frustration among legitimate gamers who couldn’t score a console during the first run of pre-orders but see several listings from third-party sellers with excruciatingly tall markups, Valve set up a randomized reservation system to make buying the Steam Machine as fair as possible.

“A launch that starts at a specific day and time tends to reward bots, people with fast internet connections, talented gaming fingers for quick F5/refresh reactions, and those who can schedule their life around that moment. By accepting reservation signups over the course of a few days, without any incentive to be first, we're hoping to take away some of that friction,” the company said on the Steam Machine FAQ section. “The longer timeframe also allows us to do some extra validation on the signups to make sure they're real accounts, with only one per household.”

There are some stringent requirements before a Steam account can be considered for the privilege of buying a Steam Machine. This includes: a Steam account in good standing, a Steam purchase on or before April 27, 2026, and only one Steam Machine per household. These criteria will make it quite difficult for professional scalpers to scoop up multiple Steam Machine units and sell them at a premium on the used market. Despite that, it seems a few people are willing to trade their slot for cash and have put their reservations up for sale on eBay.

If you weren’t lucky enough to secure a Steam Machine reservation, you might get tempted to pick one up from these scalpers. However, we strongly advise against that, as you’re taking several risks. For one, there is no guarantee that the seller you’re talking to is legitimate. Even though they may have 100% rating, it’s quite easy to game the system to achieve this. You might end up getting scammed out of your hard-earned cash, especially if they ask for payment first before shipping the item.

While being among the first to get a Steam Machine might bring a good feeling, you shouldn’t let FOMO dictate your spending decisions. In fact, it might even be better to wait a little longer because the first batch of Steam Machines will only have one 16GB stick of RAM, meaning it won’t have the advantages of dual-channel memory. While there’s no guarantee that future releases will use two 8GB sticks instead, Valve said this may change.

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 has confirmed that the first batch of Steam Machines will only come with a single stick of 16GB RAM, limiting the device to single-channel memory. The company confirmed this in a correction to Gamers Nexus (GN), after its engineers initially said that Steam Machines could either come with a single 16GB stick or two 8GB sticks. “We misspoke here,” Valve wrote in its email to the media channel. “All units will actually have one 16GB stick of RAM.”

Tests have shown that using single-channel memory can reduce performance by about 9% to 13% compared to dual-channel memory, meaning gamers will feel the difference, especially in 1% lows. This is especially hard on the Steam Machine, which uses already aging hardware — a semi-custom AMD Zen 4 CPU and RDNA3 graphics with only 8GB of GDDR6 VRAM. Note that AMD launched Zen 5 in 2024, while the RDNA4 GPUs dropped in early 2025. We also already have details for Zen 6 CPUs and have heard rumors that RDNA5 GPUs will arrive next year.

However, the company probably made this decision to keep the costs for the Steam Machine as low as possible. The device’s $1,049 base price is already steeper than what many are willing to pay for — an estimated $300+ price increase from the $700 to $750 target price that Valve presumably targeted. While its engineers did not confirm these numbers, they also said that the Steam Machine would have gotten a “probably similar” price hike to the one the Steam Deck experienced recently. Nevertheless, there is hope that later batches will have dual-channel memory, with Valve telling GN that there is a chance of this happening in the future.

This is another blow to the much-awaited living room PC console that is supposed to finally give PC gamers a chance to enjoy their Steam library with a console-like experience. Valve originally announced the Steam Machine and the Steam Controller in November last year, which was also around the same time that memory chips have started to be in short supply due to the massive demand from AI hyperscalers. The device was originally slated to launch in the first quarter of 2026, but the ongoing memory crisis forced Valve to hold off until it finally released the console this summer.

Although having only a single stick of RAM is a disadvantage to any system, more optimistic gamers can consider this a boon as they could easily upgrade the console to 32GB if they have an extra matching 16GB DDR5-5600 SODIMM stick lying around at home (or are willing to spend extra to buy one). Upgrading the console’s RAM is a rather involved affair, though, requiring you to remove a lot of components and sub-boards just to reach the RAM slots. But if you’re the adventurous kind and could score a good deal on laptop RAM, this might be a viable solution to getting more performance out of your Steam Machine.

The Steam Machine was finally released on Monday, and many gamers were disappointed with its $1,049 starting price, which doesn’t include a Steam Controller (you have to pay an extra $79 to bundle one). Unfortunately, Valve’s hands were tied in this due to the current RAMpocalypse, where even the cheapest RAM kits now cost four times as much as before. While engineers Pierre-Loup Griffais and Yazan Aldehayyat said that they cannot give a hard number for the console’s original price point, they told IGN in an interview that it would have experienced a “probably similar” price increase to the one the Steam Deck got in May 2026.

Given that the Steam Deck 512GB and 1TB experienced a price increase of around 45%, it stands to reason that the Steam Machine would have received the same hike if it were already in the market. So, if we extrapolate the numbers, the Steam Machine would’ve been originally priced at around $729.91. The 1TB Steam Deck’s price jumped by 46.22%, but we can’t just apply that increase to the higher-tier Steam Machine because it has double the storage capacity. But if we check our SSD price tracker, the price difference between the cheapest 1TB and 2TB SSDs was just at $28 when they were at their lowest. If we add this to the 1TB "version" of the living room PC console, then we can safely estimate that Valve’s target price for the 2TB Steam Machine is around $950-$1,000.

The Steam Machine is still more expensive than the PlayStation 5 Pro, even at its original prices, because Valve refuses to subsidize its hardware sales with the sales on the Steam store. After all, the Steam Machine has an open hardware philosophy, allowing buyers to do what they want with the console. You can install Windows 11 on it and just stick with PC Game Pass to play your games on the console, meaning Valve will make zero dollars on game purchases from you.

This stark price difference could make the Steam Machine unpalatable to console gamers who are interested in switching to PC gaming through the living room PC console. After all, several tests reveal that the PlayStation outperforms the Steam Machine in several titles (although the Valve hardware still performed well enough). But the advantage that gamers are paying for in the Steam Machine is the abilities of a desktop PC (you can pretty much install anything you want on it without going through the Steam store and you don’t have to subscribe for online play), combined with the convenience of a living room console (like HDMI-CEC and the ability to switch the console on or off from the controller). Interested gamers will also likely have a library of titles ready to play.

Hopefully, the Steam Machine’s price will come down once the memory supply finally stabilizes, but it will probably be years before this happens, if at all. Valve’s new gaming console is quite a niche product — it’s built for PC gamers with an extensive Steam library who want to play games on their living room couch or while lying in bed without going through the hassle of building an SFF PC. But if you prefer playing games on your desk or already have a substantial game library on your PlayStation, you’re probably better off sticking with your current hardware.

While the coming availability of the Steam Machine is stealing headlines about Valve, the company quietly announced that it’s also working on SteamOS to give it wider compatibility. Pierre-Loup Griffais, one of the engineers Tom’s Hardware talked with to dig into the details of the upcoming console, told The Verge that the company is collaborating with Nvidia “very closely” to develop support for Team Green GPUs. Additionally, he mentioned the possibility of dual-booting SteamOS with Windows or other operating systems in the future. The measures would allow users to build their own DIY Steam Machines in future.

SteamOS 3.0 was built from the ground up for the Steam Deck, which uses AMD hardware. For years now, enterprising users could install the operating system on other systems that feature Team Red hardware. However, if you use parts from other brands like Intel and Nvidia, you’re going to run into a lot of complications. One enthusiast made SteamOS work with an Intel Arc B580 desktop GPU, but it required a lot of advanced steps and troubleshooting that would certainly turn off more casual users.

Valve released the latest version of the gaming operating system, SteamOS 3.8.10, just last week, and it comes with compatibility updates for Intel and AMD platforms, including upcoming Intel-powered handhelds. While support for Nvidia graphics cards isn’t expected to arrive this year, Graiffais told The Verge that “it’s certainly something that we’re working on in the background.” He also mentioned a SteamOS installer that would make it easier for users to wipe an existing operating system and replace it with SteamOS. While it cannot partition a drive for dual-booting yet, Pierre-Loup hinted that the feature might eventually arrive in the future.

Windows is still the most dominant OS for gaming, and we can see this in the latest Steam survey results, with Windows 11 getting nearly 70% of the market share. However, Linux, especially through SteamOS, is quickly gaining ground. Although it still has a negligible 3.99% share (compared to Windows’ overall 93.85%), it has already overtaken macOS’s 2.16%. This result is likely driven by the popularity of the Steam Deck, despite its recent price hikes, and we expect this to jump even higher once gamers get their hands on the Valve Steam Machine in the coming weeks.

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.

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.

The Steam Machine seems to be everything that the gaming world is talking about right now, partially because PC building took a nosedive thanks to high prices, and also because it's a Valve product. The console/PC hybrid (PConsole, maybe?) remains a highly anticipated product despite rumors of a price hike. The release is now set in stone and imminent, as Valve has officially confirmed the summer 2026 launch window and expanded its Verified program to include Machine and Frame alongside the Deck.

"Today we are expanding the Verified program to include Steam Machine and Steam Frame, both of which are shipping this summer," the company stated. The news should ease the worries of many an expecting gamer, given today's constant worries about AI servers slurping every RAM and NAND chip on the face of the earth, as well as Valve's own statements about component scarcity delaying the release. Plus, the company always works on its own schedule, so much so that Valve Time is a term.

The release of the Machine has been taking flak, given that while Valve was initially hoping for an estimated $600 to $800 price — in the ballpark of the higher-end consoles — the rumored pricing is climbing around or over $1000. This fact is somewhat corroborated by a February statement from a Valve executive who, like most anyone in the world, stated the price revision was due to the AI-driven component shortage.

No manufacturer can escape that particular black hole, as even the PlayStation 5 Pro is currently going for $899. Paying a slice more for seemingly superior hardware and a gigantic library of cheap games arguably makes more financial sense if you're a frequent gamer.

Steam Verified is a developer-focused program where game makers ensure that their titles are capable of running on the Deck (meaning they'll run fine under Linux), that the UI elements and text are readable at standard resolutions, and that sensible default graphics settings are used. The baseline performance target was 30 FPS at 1280x800 resolution for the Deck, and now 30 FPS at 1920x1080p for the Machine.

Since those latter figures are bound to cause some confusion, it should be double-noted that they're a baseline — the Machine is advertised as capable of 4K, 60 FPS gameplay with the use of upscaling, or in other words, business as usual. The specifications bear this out, as the CPU therein is a six-core unit with a 30 W TDP target, and the GPU is an RDNA3 design with 28 CUs, a 2.45 GHz clock speed, and a 110 W TDP. For comparison's sake, the entire Steam Deck has a 15 W maximum TDP. The rest of the Verified recommendations for the Machine are exactly the same as the Deck's.

Despite price hikes, Steam hardware remains popular. Just recently, the Steam Deck instantly ran out of stock even after its price was bumped up to $789 and $949, depending on the version. Given that zeitgeist and the general thirst for new hardware, it looks like the Machine will do just fine. We just hope that Valve makes enough of them and does its best to prevent scalping.

Epic Games' outspoken CEO Tim Sweeney has taken to X to criticize Valve over its recent price hike of the Steam Deck. Valve raised the prices ofits handheld this week, with the 1TB model now costing $949. Even though many consoles have seen their prices jump by $50 to $100 in recent months, this is still nothing compared to the extra $240 to $300 that Valve slapped on the Steam Deck. The increases have been driven by the memory and chip shortages stemming from the AI infrastructure build-out, but Sweeney wasted no time criticizing Valve on X for the much higher price increases it applied.

While his post initially mentioned the significant rise in component costs, which everyone is suffering from, he eventually ended it with “severe disruptions in the component parts supply chain for megayachts” in an apparent potshot at Valve CEO Gabe Newell’s penchant for superyachts. While Newell's Valve is behind some of the most notable game franchises in history, including Half-Life, Portal, Left 4 Dead, and Counter-Strike, he also has a love for massive sea-going vessels. Luxury Launches reports that he owns six vessels, including the 365-foot (111-m) superyacht Leviathan that he took delivery of in 2025, totaling around a billion dollars in value (and not counting the millions he’s spending on maintenance, crews, and other costs). He uses the vessels privately, but also for marine research and ocean exploration.

Valve’s hardware is generally designed to compete against gaming PCs and does not face off with dedicated gaming consoles that have their hardware costs subsidized by sales of gaming titles. So, if we compare the 512GB Steam Deck’s $789 against the Lenovo Legion Go 2 and the Asus ROG Xbox Ally, you’d find that it’s still within the same price range.

As for the rumored Steam Machine, the company hasn’t announced the living room PC console’s price yet, but Valve said that it won’t subsidize it to make its price closer to the PlayStation or Xbox. Instead, it will be priced similarly to other gaming PC builds — and with memory and storage chip prices the way they are right now, it's possible the Steam Machine may be priced at or above $1,000. But, at the very least, you’d own the hardware you buy, and you can freely replace SteamOS with another operating system should you want to do so.

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.

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.

Valve has released Proton 11.0-Beta1, but this perhaps inconsequential-sounding test version comes with something revolutionary – support for Arm Linux devices. It isn’t mainstream yet; it is a beta version, of course, but folks have already shown off the Steam UI running on a Nintendo Switch. So, Steam gaming support on more open gaming devices from brands like Retroid, AYN, and Ayaneo should be far easier.

Steam Linux ARM64 beta on Switch

— @aagaming.me (@aagaming.me.bsky.social) 2026-04-17T11:10:52.424Z

Steam Linux ARM64 beta running on Ubuntu Linux Noble Numbat on Nintendo’s popular handheld.

AAGaming, which posted the Steam on Switch demo on BlueSky, embedded above, says they have shared “a working copy of proton arm + steamrt arm that you can drop right into conpatibilitytools.d to play games with this client.”

You can find the official Proton 11.0-Beta1 release on Valve’s Proton GitHub, alongside some release notes. The key change, as far as Arm gamers are concerned, is flagged in a section under the heading ARM64 Builds. Not much is said, but handheld gaming enthusiasts on social media have been quick to realize the implications. The newly bundled FEX 2604 can enable Steam’s built-in x86 Windows to ARM Linux gaming compatibility on your Arm Linux device.

This new Arm Linux compatibility for Steam is thought to have been implemented now to prepare for the Arm-powered Steam Frame gaming headset, which we went hands-on with last November. That headset was described as a ‘streaming-first device’ but packs very respectable Arm mobile hardware, such as a Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 backed with 16GB LPDDR5X.

During our Steam Frame hands-on, we also learned about FEX bringing Steam games to Arm and running locally. In our demo, we saw the x86 version of Hades 2 running standalone with respectable performance at 1400p. The Valve rep clarified, “It’s actually running on Linux, running on Arm,” at the time. So, now we are seeing this ability surfacing in public betas, and already being used to get Steam OS and games running on alternative Arm hardware.

Valve is building a ‘Verified’ style list for the Steam Frame Arm hardware, much like its efforts seen on Steam Deck. Thus, users will know which games will run well locally and which they might prefer to stream from their gaming PCs.

Not interested in Arm? There's more...

In addition to the juicy Arm/Linux compatibility news, the new Proton 11 Beta includes goodies for existing Steam OS gamers. There’s a host of new certified playable titles for users, such as titles from the Resident Evil and Dino Crisis stables, plus Warhammer: Vermintide 2, SHOGUN: Total War, Breath of Fire IV, and more.

Numerous bug fixes are implemented in the release, too. For example, Valve has fixed Steam Overlay not working correctly with many EA games, and got the intro video playback in Crimson Desert to work properly.

Getting Proton 11 is easier if you already have a Steam OS device like the Deck. Just search for the update in the Steam Library.

VRAM usage has become an increasingly unavoidable issue in games as they grow more graphically intensive over time. Pushing the visual fidelity requires more assets to be stored in VRAM, which makes it harder for cards with 8GB (or less) memory to run games smoothly. For Linux at least, Natalie Vock has just proposed a new solution that alleviates this issue, providing a notable performance boost for games by optimizing VRAM usage.

Vock is part of Valve's Linux graphics driver team; she's developed new kernel patches and two specific utilities to address the VRAM usage issue. These fixes basically talk to the OS and let it know that the game currently running in the foreground gets to call dibs on the VRAM. If the VRAM starts to fill up, any VRAM consumed by background tasks needs to spill over into system RAM before the game does.

Previously, whenever a game consumed too much VRAM, Linux would move its data (evict it) to system memory to prevent crashes. This is because, generally speaking, the Linux kernel doesn't have a clear idea of which program to prioritize; it might evict the game to allocate VRAM to a background browser window. When this happens, you'll experience inconsistent frame pacing and stutters in-game.

Vock tested Cyberpunk 2077 with an 8GB GPU and saw 1.37GB of memory spilling into the GTT, which stands for Graphics Translation Table and is responsible for telling the GPU to look for something in system RAM. The game was only consuming around 6GB of VRAM; despite having an 8GB pool, it could have maximized instead. Vock's fixes specifically target this via new patches proposed to the Linux kernel.

The main solution she developed is called dmemcg-booster (Device Memory Control Groups), which tells Linux what program needs to be "protected" at any given moment, meaning it can't be evicted from the VRAM and thrown into the GTT. If a background task requires VRAM, it will be the one forced to move to slower system memory to ensure the game keeps running without interruption.

This is more about optimizing VRAM usage than outright reducing it. If you had a 12 GB card, for instance, you'd never notice the drawbacks of just 8 GB of VRAM because there's enough buffer for poorly prioritized background programs. Now, even a GPU with less VRAM can run at its full potential. Case in point: with the fixes applied, Cyberpunk 2077 started using almost 7.4GB of VRAM, and GTT dropped to just 650MB.

The other component is called plasma-foreground-booster, and it can automatically tell KDE which window is in front so that it can prioritize VRAM usage for that window. These patches are currently being integrated into CatchyOS and are awaiting merge into the main Linux kernel. You can download and use these patches yourself inside any distro, but keep in mind they'll only work on AMD GPUs because Nvidia drivers have closed-source memory management.

After delaying its upcoming gaming console due to the ongoing memory crisis, Valve has yet to confirm a concrete release date for the Steam Machine. That said, it seems that the software groundwork is already in motion. The company recently rolled out a major update for SteamOS with version 3.8.0, which brings “initial support for upcoming Steam Machine hardware.” While that doesn’t reveal much about the hardware or its launch timeline, it does offer some reassurance that the final product is likely on track for a release later this year.

The latest SteamOS 3.8.0 update is currently in a preview state, meaning that you will have to opt-in for the update by heading to Settings>System and changing the System Update Channel from Stable to “Preview.” As per the official patch notes, users can expect a host of new features and improvements on existing devices, including the Steam Deck (LCD/OLED) as well as third-party handheld consoles that support SteamOS.

Some of the key highlights include an updated graphics driver for improved overall performance and stability, a new setting to allow using Bluetooth headset mics, and enhanced support for screen recording and streaming tools like OBS and Discord. Valve has also done some significant work when it comes to controllers, as the update offers reduced handheld controller input latency and improved support for a number of devices, including the OneXPlayer F1 series, GPD Win 5, GPD Win Mini, Anbernic Win600, OrangePi NEO, and Lenovo Legion Go. Additionally, the update brings controller support for OneXPlayer X1 series and the Lenovo Legion Go 2.

Desktop Mode also sees a significant upgrade, including improved scaling on TVs, support for external HDR and VRR displays, and per-display scaling options. These are particularly interesting as they could be crucial for the upcoming Steam Machine. Valve has also refined window handling for games running via Proton and ensured that keyboard layouts and language settings now sync with Game Mode.

Some notable system-level improvements, particularly for Steam Deck users, include a new “Memory Power Down” option, which should help reduce power consumption during idle states, thereby improving battery life. There’s also preliminary support for system hibernation, which has been a long-requested feature allowing the device to save its state to storage and completely power off, leading to better battery preservation compared to Sleep mode. Additionally, Bluetooth Wake has been re-enabled for the Steam Deck LCD, allowing users to wake the device using a controller.

Valve announced its second-generation Steam Machine in late 2025, with gamers and enthusiasts looking forward to the console PC’s arrival. Unfortunately, the entire world is also gripped by a memory and storage chip shortage driven by the AI infrastructure build-up, with prices spiraling out of control. Because of this, the company has been delaying the release of the Steam Machine, with the Steam Year In Review 2025 noting that it will ship the device this year.

The company initially said that it would deliver the consoles in the first quarter of 2026, with AMD CEO Lisa Su saying during its Q4 2025 earnings call that “Valve is on track to begin shipping its AMD-powered Steam Machine early this year.” However, Valve announced a day later that it’s delaying the device’s release to the first half of the year and is also reconsidering its pricing.

According to the company’s latest post, it has overcome some of the challenges that were brought about by using SteamOS with the Proton compatibility layer, and that the Steam Machine will help it realize its dream of a “gaming-first living room experience” and “an open platform for customers.” However, it also said that “there have been challenges with memory and storage shortages,” but it said that it “will be shipping all three products this year.” The company still hasn’t given any specifics, though, allowing it to be flexible when it releases the Steam Machine and at what price.

While we still don’t know the Steam Machine’s MSRP, it’s been noted that it will likely be more expensive than competing consoles like the PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X|S. Valve said it won’t subsidize the console's cost, unlike Microsoft and Sony, which sell their consoles at a loss and make up the difference in game title sales. This won’t be an option for Valve, though, especially since the Steam Machine is essentially a mini-PC that buyers can modify themselves. There have been estimates that the 1TB version could hit more than $1,000, especially as memory and storage chip prices continue to rise.

The Steam Deck is just one of the many victims of chip shortages driven by the AI infrastructure buildout. RAM prices have jumped by 500%, and we’ve seen some SSDs nearly triple in cost — because of this, some analysts are predicting that the entry-level PC market will disappear by 2028. Hopefully, Valve can find a solution to its memory and storage woes, allowing it to deliver a console at the right price sooner, rather than later.

Valve has announced on the Steam Deck page that there is limited supply for the handheld console in some areas, with all three models on the site marked as “Out of stock”. The company said on the store page that the “Steam Deck OLED may be out-of-stock intermittently in some regions due to memory and storage shortages.” This is bad news for gamers, especially as the Steam Deck is one of the best handheld gaming PCs on the market.

The Steam Deck OLED is the latest victim of the AI boom, with data centers and AI hyperscalers using up the global supply of memory and storage chips. The Steam Deck LCD model was the first to go in Valve’s handheld lineup, with the company discontinuing the most affordable model in late 2025. Although it did not give a reason for axing the $399 handheld, one of the plausible explanations for the move is that the 256GB is no longer profitable because of the skyrocketing prices of NAND chips.

RAM prices are expected to continue rising this year, meaning the situation will likely go from bad to worse. Valve isn’t the only company to increase prices, cut production, or run out of stock — Apple admitted that it’s chasing memory supply and that the shortage would have a greater impact on its Q2 earnings. Even the most expensive Mac Studio units with 512GB of Unified Memory are on backorder for up to 6 weeks because of demand from OpenClaw users.

This is also a bad sign for the Steam Machine, which was expected to arrive during the first quarter of 2026, but has since been delayed by the company. Valve also said that it will not subsidize the living room PC console and that it’s expected to be priced competitively against entry-level gaming PCs. But with RAM, GPU, and SSD costs rising nearly every week, it seems that the console will break the $1,000 mark.

We first saw signs of the chip shortage affecting the Steam Deck last week, but this is the first time that Valve has acknowledged the lack of memory and storage chip supply. We hope that the company can find an alternative source for these chips so that it can resume orders and deliveries of its popular handheld. But if the shortage continues, gamers may have no choice but to go for the more expensive Asus ROG Xbox Ally X or Lenovo Legion Go 2 if they want a new gaming device right now.

The Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer (ENIAC) was first unveiled to the public today in 1946. Constructed and operated at the The Moore School of Electrical Engineering at the University of Pennsylvania, ENIAC became a huge milestone in computing as “the first general-purpose electronic computer.” ENIAC was massive in stature, a Goliath in power consumption, and unassailable in compute power at launch. However, in 2026, its 18,000 vacuum tube-powered performance seems laughable compared to even the lowliest throwaway consumer electronics.

ENIAC’s performance

While we can no longer marvel at ENIAC’s compute prowess, it was around 1,000x faster than its nearest rivals in the mid 1940s. ENIAC could perform around 5,000 calculations per second, allowing humans to tap into math at electronic speed for the first time.

This first general-purpose electronic computer was used to perform a variety of tasks. However, as ENIAC was funded by the U.S. military, some of its best-known compute tasks include calculating artillery trajectories.

“The ballistics calculation that previously took 12 hours on a hand calculator could be done in just 30 seconds,” notes the Penn Engineering blog. ENIAC was also used in H-bomb calculations, ballistic missile and rocket calculations, for weather prediction experiments, and more.

Programming ENIAC was done via a combination of plugboard wiring and a trio of portable function tables, each bristling with 1,200 ten-way switches. So, mapping a problem to run on ENIAC was a far from trivial task, which usually took highly trained teams several weeks, plus extensive testing, verification, and debugging.

ENIAC specifications

Though its architecture is rather different from that of a modern computer, it is interesting to look at the construction and component specs that formed the ENIAC.

In terms of its physical presence and build, an ENIAC Top Trumps card might be an ace… It featured 8,000 vacuum tubes, 70,000 resistors, 10,000 capacitors, and 500,000 soldered joints, with dedicated power lines delivering 150kW of electricity. Naturally, ENIAC was huge and heavy, too. The Penn Engineering blog says that it occupied a 30 x 50 foot room and weighed 30 tons.

Composed of 40 panels in a U-shape, some of the original ENIAC is still to be found situated on the ground floor of the Moore Building. Students nowadays sit in the shadow of this beastly relic's Cycling Unit, the Master Programmer Unit, a Function Table, an Accumulator, and Digit Trays. Surely, an inspiring presence.

ENIAC needed a lot of maintenance, with several of its vacuum tubes burning out each day. Wikipedia sources estimate it was “nonfunctional about half the time.” Though things improved over time, as engineers became more used to ENIAC’s characteristics.

ENIAC's legacy

The ENIAC was officially retired on October 2, 1955. By that time, its binary stored-program architectural successor, EDVAC, was operational. Also in the early 1950s, the UNIVAC I was introduced, and IBM broke onto the scene with its mass market systems and FORTRAN programming. Computers advanced into the IBM PC age in the early 80s, and this came about “all thanks to the ENIAC,” Penn Engineering cheekily asserts.

When Valve unveiled the Steam Machine and Steam Frame in November 2025, many expected them to arrive during the first quarter of 2026, even though the company hadn’t given a specific date yet. However, it seems that this is no longer the case, as Valve said on its blog that the current memory shortage is forcing it push back the planned launch schedule and look at the pricing for the living room PC console.

“When we announced these products in November, we planned on being able to share specific pricing and launch dates by now. But the memory and storage shortages you've likely heard about across the industry have rapidly increased since then,” Valve said on the Steam Hardware blog. “The limited availability and growing prices of these critical components mean we must revisit our exact shipping schedule and pricing (especially around Steam Machine and Steam Frame).”

Still, the company says that it plans to ship all three products — the Steam Machine, Steam Frame, and Steam Controller — during the first half of the year. However, it also said that it is “being mindful of how quickly the circumstances around both of those things can change.” The current memory shortage, driven by AI data centers’ massive demand for HBM, is pushing many PC makers to the edge, with both manufacturers and system integrators announcing price hikes to deal with the situation.

Furthermore, smaller industry players without deep pockets would likely have a hard time acquiring chips from the big three manufacturers, with one memory chip maker rep saying that, “relationships with memory suppliers matter in a crunch.” And while Valve’s Steam Deck single-handedly revived the handheld PC gaming market, it’s still a relatively niche manufacturer compared to traditional PC makers like Asus and Dell (which have already announced massive price hikes).

The company has previously said that it won’t subsidize the consoles and that it’s priced close to an entry-level PC. Before the chaos of the memory shortage, this meant it would’ve cost around $550 to $600. But with the price of DRAM and NAND skyrocketing, especially affecting RAM kits, SSDs, and discrete GPUs, we’re no longer sure if this would still be possible. There have been leaks showing the Steam Machine priced at more than $1,000 for the 1TB version, but this came from a third-party retailer and not directly from Valve.

At the moment, the final price of the Steam Machine is still up in the air. However, we still expect it to land in retailers sooner rather than later. After all, AMD CEO Dr. Lisa Su said during the company’s earnings call that “from a product standpoint, Valve is on track to be shipping its AMD-powered Steam Machine early this year.” So, hopefully, we’ll just have to wait a few more weeks or months before we finally know the retail price of the much-awaited PC console and it becomes available from our favorite store.

Valve has said that developers don’t need to worry about getting the Steam Machine Verified badge on their titles, confirming that there will be "fewer constraints" for developers compared to Steam Deck Verification, given its more potent hardware. Valve designer Lawrence Yang told Game Developer, “One easy rule of thumb is that if your title is Verified on Steam Deck, it will be Verified on Steam Machine.” The company announced the Steam Machine, which is a mini PC designed for living room gaming, in November 2025, and has got fans and gamers excited for its arrival. Even though Valve has yet to say how much it will cost, the company is aiming to price it at a “great value” and should be comparable to entry-level gaming builds.

Despite being marketed towards entry-level gaming, the Steam Machine is more powerful than the Steam Deck, owing to its larger form factor and more robust hardware. Aside from the massive fan and heat sink, the device will feature a 6-core AMD Zen 4 x86 processor that runs up to 4.8 GHz with a 30-watt TDP, a semi-custom AMD RDNA3 28CU graphics card with 8GB GDDR6 VRAM and a TDP of up to 110 watts, 16GB DDR5 SO-DIMMs, and a 300-watt internal power supply. On the other hand, the Steam Deck’s specifications are much more modest, accounting for the fact that it needs to run off a battery.

Because of this, if a Steam Deck can comfortably run a title, then it makes sense for the Steam Machine, with its much more capable hardware, to be able to run it, too.

The Steam Controller Puck offers “It just works” levels of reliability to gamers

Aside from making it easier for game developers to build games for both the Steam Deck and the Steam Machine, Valve is also trying to make it easier for gamers to start playing on the Steam Machine. Instead of using Bluetooth or wired USB-C, the company opted for a puck that you also use for charging the Steam Controller.

“While Bluetooth is a great wireless connection method, we found in our testing that people’s home wireless environments and PC Bluetooth capabilities are highly variable,” Valve engineer Steve Carinali told Game Developer. “Another problem we set out to solve was the fact that dedicated wireless receivers that are plugged directly into the back of a PC near other USB ports can create interference issues. Adding the charging capability encourages people to leave the puck in a place where it’s likely to have minimal interference while providing a really easy charging experience.”

This is brilliant engineering and design on the side of Valve, where it utilizes technology similar to Logitech’s Lightspeed wireless receiver. However, instead of just letting gamers stick it to a USB port in the back of the console or PC, where there’s a lot of interference and thus reducing its effectiveness, the company included a USB cable that will let you place it nearly anywhere. And to ensure that you don’t just chuck the puck in the back of your living room console or under your desk, the engineering team also used it as the charging base, so that it will likely be placed in an accessible, clutter-free area.

These innovations are just some of the reasons why Valve is one of the most-loved companies in the gaming industry. And while many are apprehensive about the pricing of the upcoming Steam Machine because of the ongoing memory crisis, we’re still excited for it to finally become available. That way, we can finally get a plug-and-play PC gaming experience in our living rooms.

Valve just announced that it will discontinue the $399 256GB LCD Steam Deck, making the most affordable option the $549 512GB OLED model. You can see the announcement when you visit the Steam Deck page on Steam, with the company adding a simple note underneath the Choose Your Steam Deck section.

Valve says, “We are no longer producing the Steam Deck LCD 256GB model. Once sold out, it will no longer be available.” With the purchase button under the LCD model grayed out and marked as “Out of stock,” it’s safe to say that we’d no longer be able to purchase the best budget handheld gaming PC of 2025 brand new, although there’s still a chance that you can score a refurbished version down the road.

The company did not explain why it’s ending the production of one of its most popular Steam Deck models, so we can only guess as to why they’re doing that. One plausible theory is that the 256GB model is no longer profitable due to the ongoing RAM crisis. A Kingston rep said NAND prices for kits have more than tripled since the start of the year, forcing memory module manufacturers to raise prices as their costs rise. More than that, the problem is expected to get worse in 2026, as memory chip makers hedge their bets against an AI bubble.

Others say that the company is clearing up inventory in preparation for new products. Valve just announced the new Steam Machine, Steam Controller, and Steam Frame 3D headset. However, these are totally different device categories, so it’s unlikely that their manufacturing lines would’ve affected Steam Deck production. It’s also doubtful that Valve is preparing for a second-generation handheld gaming console, especially since it previously said it won’t release a new model unless chipmakers have introduced chips with significant architectural improvements.

The discontinuation of the $399 Steam Deck is a disaster for budget gamers, especially as it’s one of the most affordable mainstream handheld consoles available on the market. A quick look around for competing consoles shows that the base Asus ROG Ally starts at $489.99 at Best Buy, while the entry-level Lenovo Legion Go S is priced at $589.99 on Amazon. So, if you want to get a Steam Deck for Christmas, you have no choice but to shell out an extra $150 for the OLED model.

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.

Valve unveiled its new batch of hardware for 2026 yesterday, including a new Steam Machine, Steam Controller, and even the Steam Frame VR headset. One particularly beloved device was missing from the pack, though, and that's the Steam Deck. Now, Valve has confirmed that the Steam Deck 2 is still probably years away, noting it is waiting for a major leap in silicon to deliver the performance jump it deserves.

Launched three years ago, the Steam Deck has received only one major upgrade, the OLED variant, with many left seeking a little more juice out of this handheld. Unfortunately, the wait won't be cut any shorter as Valve has just made its priorities clear — it envisions the Steam Deck 2 as a true next-gen leap, not an iterative upgrade. Pierre-Loup Griffais, a software engineer at Valve and the lead developer behind SteamOS, spoke to IGN, clarifying, "The thing we're making sure of is that it's a worthwhile enough performance upgrade to make sense as a standalone product."

Even if you take into account the current PC handheld landscape, the Steam Deck has fallen quite a bit behind when it comes to performance. It's a testament to Valve's optimization through Proton that SteamOS can run so many Deck-verified titles, but its age is showing with some demanding AAA blockbusters, which also affect battery life.

Either extending battery endurance while maintaining similar performance or prioritizing improved frame rates while maintaining the same battery life is not enough. For Valve, the Steam Deck 2 has to provide significant jumps across both aspects with no compromise. And right now, the silicon that exists (despite various advances) is simply not up to the task, according to Griffais.

“We're not interested in getting to a point where it's 20 or 30 or even 50% more performance at the same battery life. We want something a little bit more demarcated than that. So we've been working back from silicon advancements and architectural improvements, and I think we have a pretty good idea of what the next version of Steam Deck is going to be, but right now there's no offerings in that landscape, in the SoC landscape, that we think would truly be a next-gen performance Steam Deck,” he told IGN.

To jog your memory, the Steam Deck shipped with AMD's Z1 Extreme chip, which has since been succeeded by the Z2 Extreme — as found in the ROG Xbox Ally X — offering remarkable improvements in low-wattage scenarios and respectable bumps at higher TDPs. But apparently, something like the Z2E isn't sufficient for Valve, and it's betting on upcoming silicon to address even more shortcomings.

AMD does have high-performance Strix Halo APUs at the moment, the top-end model offers 40 RDNA 3.5 CUs, matching RTX 4060 laptop performance. That's a massive jump available to harvest right away, and even if it's efficient, it's certainly not cheap, and a Steam Deck successor cannot compromise on accessibility.

Therefore, perhaps the next lineup from AMD is what brings Strix Halo numbers to the masses, at which point Valve might opt for it in the Steam Deck 2. These comments echo prior sentiment from the company, such as last year when it said Steam Decks won't have annual releases, and even before that, in 2023, when Valve confirmed the next Steam Deck is at least 2-3 years away, though the timeline likely shifted a bit when Valve's new PC-centric hardware came into the picture.

Not quite four years on from the industry-bending success of the Steam Deck, Valve is back with its most ambitious collection of gaming hardware yet. Today, the pioneering PC gaming company is taking the wraps off the Arm-powered wireless Steam Frame gaming headset, a new Steam Controller that takes its design cues from the Steam Deck, and something I never would have guessed, given its past failures: a new compact, cube-shaped Steam Machine gaming desktop, rocking some more semi-custom AMD silicon.

Valve invited us to its headquarters for some early hands-on time with all this new hardware, and I came away mostly impressed. These are big swings for a company that has a tiny number of employees compared to competitors like Epic Games or Microsoft.

But after the huge success of the Steam Deck (and its many pricier copycats), Valve has firmly established itself on the hardware front. Its controller and Linux-powered gaming desktop have a good shot at success if the price is right (Valve isn’t talking pricing on any of its new hardware yet).

For those more interested in traditional PC gaming, we’re breaking the cube-shaped Steam Machine and new Steam Controller out into its own story. We’ll dig into the new headset in detail below, because as much as we love desktops and controllers, the Steam Frame headset is both the most interesting and complex of its new devices, and the one that might be the hardest sell.

But the company’s secret weapon might be one of its simplest features, which applies to both the Steam Frame headset and the Steam Machine: the ability to pull the microSD card from your Steam Deck and insert it into either of the company’s new SteamOS machines and get instant access to your library and saved games. We’ll have to see how well that trick works once we get review hardware, but it sounds like a great way to get gamers to further buy into your hardware ecosystem and your game store.

Steam Frame: Arm meets SteamOS in a feature-packed gaming headset meant for more than VR

The Steam Frame headset, formerly known in leaks as its codename, Deckard, is the real wildcard in Valve's new lineup, as well as the most complex. Aside from, perhaps, Valve's own Half-Life Alyx, compelling, high-production AAA VR games haven't materialized, despite a decade of hardware pushes from Valve, HTC, and most notably Meta.

Valve's solution? The Steam Frame (and its controllers) are designed to play VR titles, as well as traditional PC and mobile games in a resizable in-headset window that actually felt like a big-screen experience during my hands-on time with the headset. Valve engineers told me the company thinks of the Steam Frame less as a VR headset and more as “a new way to play your entire Steam library.” The Frame can do this both by streaming titles wirelessly from your PC, or running them internally on its built-in Arm-based Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 chip.

This is all a major change from Valve's previous headset, the Valve Index. That headset, released in 2019, was purely for VR gaming, used base stations for tracking, and required attaching to a computer to play.

With the Steam Frame, streaming from a PC is one option, but the company uses the Fex (officially stylized as FEX) software emulation layer that brings SteamOS to the Arm instruction set, which certainly has implications beyond this device. But I’m very curious how much running Windows titles via Proton and Fex is going to affect battery life and performance.

Steam Frame Specs

Controllers and comfort

Valve had to design its Steam Frame controllers to handle traditional games alongside those that involve head and controller tracking. In short, in addition to the thumbsticks and triggers, there’s a D-pad to the left controller and ABXY buttons on the right, as well as a second set of finger triggers. This is a major difference from Valve's previous VR controllers for its Index headset, which each included an A button, B button, thumb stick, gyroscope, and advanced finger tracking.

In short demos, this seemed to work fine, but I am not sure I’d want to play something like a platformer or other gamepad-focused title for long periods with a separated D-pad and button setup. That said, lots of Switch players have been doing that for years.

Comfort of a headset is going to vary between individuals, and I didn’t spend hours using the Steam Frame, so I’m not ready to fully pass judgment yet. But the headset was fairly easy to put on and adjust the IPD (via a knob between the lenses), it never felt heavy in my demos, and I didn’t experience nearly as much lens fogging as I have with previous VR headsets. But the latter might have more to do with the climate control in Valve’s offices than the headset itself. Like so many other aspects of the Steam Frame, the fit feels good at first blush, but I’d need to spend a lot more time with it on my head to tell just how good it is.

At the very least, the Steam Frame’s 440 gram weight (including the battery, padding, and straps) is less than the 515-gram Meta Quest 3.

A “streaming-first” headset

Valve’s engineers emphasized that the company sees the Steam Frame as a “wireless streaming-first device.” So while the headset (specifically, the Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 chip it runs on, which was a flagship smartphone processor back in 2024) technically supports Wi-Fi 7, for gaming that’s streamed from your desktop or laptop, the company includes a dedicated Wi-Fi 6E dongle with the headset. That dongle uses the 6GHz band for game streaming, while the 5GHz band handles Wi-Fi communication duties, like downloads and multiplayer communication, and chat.

To improve streaming further, Valve is also offering up some new (but familiar) streaming tech. Foveated rendering — essentially saving compute resources by using eye tracking to render only the center of what you are looking at in the greatest detail — has been a staple of VR for nearly a decade now. But with the Steam Frame, Valve is taking that concept and applying it to game streaming, calling it Foveated Streaming, and pointing out that this isn’t something developers need to get involved with.

"The game just renders the full field of view, like it normally would,” said Valve’s Jeremy Selan. “The games don't have to do anything to take advantage of the technology."

In my brief time playing Half-Life: Alyx on the Steam Frame at Valve’s headquarters, performance was flawless, and the controllers were intuitive. But, of course, we need to spend more time with the headset in settings that aren’t Valve’s HQ to pass judgment on how well the Steam Frame is at streaming titles from a PC.

Fex brings Steam games to Arm

But that’s not the only way the Steam Frame can game. The company also showed off the x86 version of Hades 2 running standalone (as in not streaming from a PC) on the Steam Frame. And the game ran just fine and looked good at what Valve reps told me was 1400p in a window inside the headset, which I could actually resize to something that filled a large part of my field of view.

“The magic trick is that the game doesn’t know it’s running on an Arm chip,” designer Lawrence Yang told me. The game may be designed for a Windows PC, but “it’s actually running on Linux, running on Arm.”

That happens thanks to Fex, which is an emulation layer, so that will almost certainly mean increased power consumption / shorter battery life. Valve isn’t saying anything about battery life yet (except for the 40-hour per AA controller claim), as they continue to work on the software for now. But like the Steam Deck, this means your gaming time on the Steam Frame is going to vary dramatically, depending on whether you’re streaming from a PC or playing something directly on the device.

And the headset definitely felt like it was working harder when running games on the Arm chip rather than streaming. The only time I actively noticed the Steam Frame’s fan whirring was when playing the second game that Valve had me test on the headset itself, the VR title Ghost Town. It was very noticeable, but that was likely at least in part because the part of the game I was playing, exploring a small ship at sea, was pretty quiet.

You can see the fan, heatpipe, and other internals in this clear version that Valve had made solely to show off the internal layout. There is definitely a lot of hardware inside a fairly small headset.

This level of fan noise wouldn’t be problematic for me when playing an action title or something with steady music, but it did slightly spoil the immersion in this one game. Hopefully, that’s more the exception than the norm.

Adding your own headphones or earbuds might help with fan noise, but the speakers in the Steam Frame are part of the head strap mechanism. This was good for listening to Valve’s engineers while I ran through demos, and sound generally felt fine when gaming, it’s not the kind of isolating audio that you might want to be truly immersed in your game world.

Valve’s software developer, Jeremy Selan, tried to assuage some of my fears about what Fex might do to battery life, saying the device uses Vulkan, that many games now are natively Vulkan, and that as soon as the game engine makes API calls, they start running in on “natively compiled Arm processing code.”

Similarly, on the CPU side, Selan says it’s mostly things like the user interactions themselves (what happens when you pull a trigger or hit a jump button) that go through the Fex layer. He says there is about a 10-20% performance hit with the emulation, but that it only applies to specific aspects of the code.

“When we set out, we didn’t know quite how far this would get,” said Selan. “But on games like Hades 2, where we are seeing 1440p at 90 Hz, while running the full VR stack. We’re really very happy with it.”

Streaming or Local gaming?

As for which games you'll want to (or have to) run streaming from a PC to the Steam Frame, versus playing locally, Valve says all games (VR and non-VR) can be streamed to the headset from a PC. And similar to the Hades 2 demo, non-VR games will run in a resizable window.

For games installed and running on the headset itself, Valve tells me there will be a "Verified" game program similar to what already exists for the Steam Deck, where the company is going to test titles in the Steam catalog and provide guidance. The company's goal is for the Steam Frame experience to be as frictionless as possible, so that people can focus on playing their Steam titles. But obviously there needs to be some distinction between games that you'll need to be near your gaming PC to play, and games you've installed natively and can play while you're at home or traveling with your headset.

More software tweaks to come

Selan also says the Valve team is working on a way to pre-cache the CPU shaders, in a similar way that the company already pre-caches GPU shaders ahead of time on the Steam Deck. This should further reduce the overhead of the Fex emulation layer, but it’s not shipping yet.

That all sounds good, but Hades 2, which happily runs on the Nintendo Switch, obviously isn’t the most demanding title. Again, I’m quite curious to see how the promised “new way to play your entire Steam library” holds up when we get review units – as well as what battery life is like. Obviously, I don’t expect the Steam Frame with a smartphone chip to run games like a dedicated gaming rig, but Borderlands 4 is a recent addition to my Steam library, and it can bring my RTX 4090 to its knees.

“From the partner’s perspective, we’re trying to minimize the effort to get their software on this device,” said Selan, wrapping up my Steam Frame session.”And from a customer’s perspective, they shouldn’t have to think about anything. They’re just going to hit play.

”We’ll learn more about how smooth the streaming and native experience is, as well as battery life and how much the Steam Frame costs, as we get closer to launch, which Valve representatives said should be early next year.

Valve rattled the gaming industry in 2022 with the launch of the Steam Deck, letting you take your PC games anywhere with an easy-to-use operating system. Now, the company is taking its learnings from that device and bringing them to your living room in a new gaming PC, the Steam Machine.

Tom's Hardware visited Valve's offices in Bellevue, Washington to talk to the developers behind this new PC and get an early look at the hardware.

This is a system meant for living room play, armed with a new semi-custom AMD Zen 4 CPU and AMD RDNA 3 GPU, and it runs SteamOS just like the Steam Deck. In many ways, it's effectively a Steam-based console. Valve claims that this system is six times more powerful than the Steam Deck, though, so it should be a better couch experience than using the Steam Deck Dock and playing games at low resolution. The company suggests that the Steam Machine can play games in 4K and 60 frames per second, with the caveat that you'll have to rely on AMD's FSR upscaling.

The Steam Machine hardware

The PC measures 6.39 x 6.14 x 5.98 inches — almost a cube (without the computer's feet, it's 5.83 inches tall). Most of the computer is on the bottom of the box, with the majority of the space inside taken up by a substantial heatsink and fan. The front of the system features a customizable light bar that you can personalize to indicate system status, such as when it is booting up, downloading games, or updating.

"It's mostly a heatsink, because we know that the living room environment is very challenging from a thermal standpoint, from an air flow standpoint," a Valve developer told Tom's Hardware. "So, to sort of make it as quiet as possible and as cool as possible, this is where we need to be."

The heatsink is truly massive. With the top and sides removed, the Steam Machine looks similar to a denser version of Noctua’s NH-P1 air cooler, with similar dimensions and denser fins, and a couple of heatpipes poking out of the edges. Hopefully, it proves nearly as quiet as that fanless cooler.

The front of the Steam Machine is magnetic, which is designed for easy cleaning. The default is black, but Valve reps said the company will be releasing files for people with 3D printers to come up with their own designs. At their headquarters, Steam had a few custom options it designed, including a very classy woodgrain look and a Team Fortress 2 design.

There was also an e-ink front that displayed system stats in real-time, but it wasn’t working when we were in the demo room. Regardless, the company said it doesn't have plans to sell any designs other than the plain front. So if you want something other than basic black, be prepared to make your own.

The Steam Machine’s CPU is based on 6 AMD Zen 4 cores, runs up to 4.8 GHz, and has a 30W TDP. The GPU uses AMD's RDNA 3 cores and features 28 compute units, 8GB of GDDR6 VRAM, and a 2.45 GHz max sustained clock.

The processor and GPU are two distinct chips on the same motherboard, which Valve says allows for the best-size device, along with the best thermal performance. Valve did explore a separate add-in board GPU at one point, but we were told that "the compromises that we have to make on size and thermals and cost didn't really pan out."

The CPU is paired with 16GB of DDR5. And while the company is using traditional SODIMMs, it's a bit more complicated to reach them with the heatsink in the way. Technically, you can upgrade it, but with some RF shielding and an attempt to keep the memory as close as possible to the CPU for signal integrity, it might be a bit of work.

There's an integrated 300W power supply. Valve says the GPU uses 110W (though one Valve rep gave a range of 110W - 130W, stating that "we're still kind of fine-tuning that") while the CPU goes up to 30 watts. The CPU peaks at 4.8 GHz.

Valve will sell two configurations of the Steam Machine, and the only difference will be storage. You can get either a 512GB SSD or a 2TB SSD. Either way, Valve is using an M.2 2230 SSD in the system, though there is room to support an M.2 2280 if you decide to upgrade or replace the drive.

There is another way to expand storage. Just like on the Steam Deck, you can use a microSD card. If you remove the microSD card and place it in a Steam Deck or a Stream Frame, your library will come with you, ready to go in other devices.

"For most people, you never have to be seeing [the SSD] at all," said Valve hardware engineer Yazan Aldehayyat. "[An] SD card is your best way to expand your storage, but if you really want to, you can. It's your device."

In addition, there are distinct Wi-Fi and Bluetooth antennas to help prevent signal issues. If you're using Valve's new Steam Controller, a connection puck is built into the device, allowing for up to four Steam Controllers with no loss in Bluetooth performance. (You are, of course, welcome to connect a mouse and keyboard or use other controllers).

The system supports two displays via HDMI and DisplayPort on the rear. If you add a DisplayPort hub to the rear or use daisy-chaining, the system should be able to support more monitors. While Valve says the HDMI port supports 4K at 120 Hz, it's labeled as HDMI 2.0, not HDMI 2.1, because it doesn't currently use some software features of HDMI 2.1, such as like DSC and ALLM, which Valve says "we are currently working on and hope to rectify in the future."

The Steam Controller

With the new computer, Valve also has a new controller, the Steam Controller. This will be sold in an optional bundle with the Steam Machine, as well as on its own. Beyond the Steam Machine, the Controller works with anything that runs Steam, including Windows, Mac and Linux PCs, PC gaming handhelds, the Steam Frame, and Steam Deck. If you use Steam Link, iOS and Android devices should work, too.

The controller features two joysticks, ABXY buttons, and a D-Pad in a layout similar to PlayStation's DualSense controller, in that the joysticks are parallel. The extra buttons, including Steam, menu, view, and quick access menu buttons, are also there, along with two trackpads for haptic feedback. The touchpads are on a slight angle up — it's not drastic — and are tilted slightly sideways to address the way your thumbs meet to move them.

"They're clocked and canted, and that is just because based on a ton of experimentation, and probably 30 different orientations of these trackpads, we found that this angle is the most comfortable for the most users when they're playing," Valve’s Steve Cardinali said.

The joysticks are using TMR (Tunneling Magnetoresistance) joysticks, which should help reduce stick drift. Valve also said that because these joysticks are so responsive, it could reduce the deadzone on the controllers by more than half.

There are also standard L/R triggers and L/R bumpers, along with four assignable grip buttons, just like on the Steam Deck. Effectively, this whole controller is the Steam Deck controls in a console-style controller.

The other inputs, though, are more unique. There's a 6-axis gyroscope and what Valve calls "Capacitive grip sense," which means the controller can tell that you're holding it. We demoed the Controller in Balatro, lifting fingers off of the controller to activate the gyroscope, making moves, and then placing our fingers back down.

There are four motors in the controller: two in the grips and another two specifically for the trackpads.

You can connect the Steam Controller to devices in three different ways. The primary option is the Steam Controller Puck, which comes pre-paired with the controller. (If you're using a Steam Machine, there's an internal puck inside). The Puck, which plugs into a USB port, uses a proprietary wireless connection that Valve claims is more stable than Bluetooth, and can connect to four controllers. Of course, standard Bluetooth is also an option, as is directly attaching to a computer with a USB cable.

The Steam Controller Puck can also charge the controller. There are pogo pins on the puck that you can connect to the Controller in order to charge it when you're not playing games. You can also charge the device over USB.

Valve estimates that you'll get 35 hours or more of playtime on the Steam Controller's rechargeable battery.

Tom's Hardware Managing editor Matt Safford said that the controller felt comfortable in his brief demo time, though he spent more time cycling through the various modes than settling on a specific one. Quickly using the gyroscope to move the cursor after removing a couple of fingers from the grip did instantly feel intuitive. More time, he said, will tell how he feels about the touchpads, given his muscle memory and proclivity for the FPS genre is based on a keyboard and mouse.

The controller didn't feel overly bulky, nor heavy or light. The plastic used in the construction generally felt fine, neither overly cheap or particularly premium. It feels similar to a Steam Deck.

What about pricing and availability?

Valve hasn't provided pricing or an exact release date for the Steam Machine or Steam Controller just yet, though we were told to expect the hardware early next year. Some of that uncertainty is because of a volatile market for computer components.

"The market is kind of weird right now," a Valve rep told us. "You know, memory prices are going up like right as we speak. Right now, depending on who you ask, they might tell you the GDDR we're using is not a thing next year, right? So, like, there's a lot of things that we're still trying to figure it out. But, uh, of course, our goal is to be ready, and we think we're doing a pretty good job of that.”

That being said, we were told that the company is aiming for a "great value" on "the entry level side of things." But Valve's developers also mentioned that the Steam Machine, being packed with features, makes pricing a bit of a "balancing act" in an attempt to find a sweet spot. But we won't find out pricing until closer to launch.

What's in a name?

The Steam Machine moniker does come with some baggage. That was also the name of a series of small desktop computers released in 2015 running on a previous version of the Linux-based SteamOS. At the time, SteamOS only ran games that worked natively on Linux. And the Steam Machines, which were made by companies like Alienware, Zotac, and Origin, didn't perform as well as Windows-based competitors with similar hardware. At the time, Valve chose not to make its own computer, though it did make a controller.

That controller, also dubbed the Steam Controller, featured a single touchpad in lieu of the right control stick. While some praised it for its flexibility across game genres, the controller eventually went on a firesale in 2019, with Valve selling them at $5 a pop to clear inventory.

Valve's hardware developers told us they've learned from the original Steam Machines, and that they don't want game developers to have to do work to get their games working for the device unless it's additive to take advantage of SteamOS or Steam Machine features.

With newer hardware, better game compatibility, and the Steam Deck as a strong proof of concept, it sure seems from a brief hands-on that the Steam Machine has a better chance this time around.

Valve pushed a "small" update to Counter-Strike 2 yesterday that mostly consisted of minor optimization tweaks, along with changes to how hard it is to acquire certain skins in-game. A lot of you will be familiar with how Counter-Strike's market works — it's player-to-player, meaning anyone with a rare item can sell it to another person for real money. These transactions often land in the hundreds of thousands range for the most desirable items, with an AK-47 skin even crossing the $1 million mark recently. Therefore, a sudden change dismantling the entire economy could not be foreseen.

[PSA] INTERNATIONAL LIST OF SUICIDE HOTLINES *LOVE YOURSELF, IT’S GOING TO BE OKAY* from r/csgomarketforum

It's like an industry of its own, where many seasoned players have made their homes, collecting cosmetics that are speculated to appreciate in value over time for profit. There are several tiers for these, with the highest "Gold" category reserved exclusively for knives and gloves. Previously, only random lootboxes (cases) could get you these coveted items, but now, you can trade five "Covert" items (one tier below) to obtain one Gold-tier knife or glove, making it significantly less difficult, and, by extension, valuable.

For the average player, this is anything but a welcome change, especially if you're someone new to the game; it lowers the barrier of entry and even makes skin trading less intimidating for the inexperienced. The issue arises with the sharks at the top of the chain, who've invested millions of dollars in the market, treating it like any other exchange that carries commodities. They woke up to a significant chunk of cash wiped from their portfolios overnight, which, whatever you think about virtual items, is startling.

According to Price Empire, the skin market peaked at over $6.08 billion right before the update was announced, then fell to a low of $3.08 billion, erasing roughly $3 billion in real-world money. For finance and crypto bros, this might not be a big deal, and there's community dialogue suggesting mass hysteria has blown this ordeal out of proportion, much as it does in the stock market. That said, numerous notable figures in the space have publicly expressed their concerns and even exited the market.

There is no real way to tell whether the skins economy will fully recover from the crash. After all, these are virtual items that, unlike crypto that can be used to pay for things in reality, hold no real value outside of Counter-Strike. In fact, Valve has often been accused of failing to regulate the market, allowing rampant gambling to flourish, and of decade-long complaints about cosmetics becoming too expensive for casuals — so such a stringent change could be a sign of things to come.

The truth is that these items were never truly "yours" to begin with; Valve makes that pretty clear in the terms and conditions, which state that any content or service purchased from Steam is licensed to you, not owned. At the end of the day, we can all argue whether Counter-Strike cosmetics fall under that jurisdiction, but, on the surface, they're just in-game items that are ultimately controlled by Valve. Now, how much you trust the company to do the "right thing," well, we'll leave that up to you.

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…

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?"

Linux developers have managed to get Steam running on RISC-V-powered platforms. Moreover, some big-name games like The Witcher 3 and Crysis are now playable (h/t GamingOnLinux). Please note, this achievement isn’t due to something as momentous as the Steam Client being ported to the RISC-V architecture. Rather, the Steam client and some games can run on RISC-V due to the increasing quality of the felix86 emulation project.

The Felix86 blog mentions that the emulator has just started delivering playable AAA Windows games, so this is a major breakthrough for the project. Additionally, the devs praise the ‘user-friendliness’ of Felix86, making it quick and easy to get running with your games. Other notable improvements have come to AppImage support and file system emulation.

GamingOnLinux got some tastier, fresher morsels in an email sent by the developers. “We even got the Linux Steam client working, which means games that have Steam DRM can be played on RISC-V with felix86,” wrote a jubilant developer.

If you want to read more and keep up to date with this project’s latest developments, keep an eye on the Felix86 GitHub page, too.

RISC-V, the underdog already powering billions of devices

RISC-V is something of an underdog in the processor architecture race in 2025, but there are glimmers of light, with increasing amounts of sparks. In November 2023, we covered forecasts that there would be more than 16 billion RISC-V-powered devices in the wild by 2030. More recently, we have seen reports that Nvidia will get on the RISC-V train, and China is pushing the adoption of the open-source ISA.

The biggest success for RISC-V, so far, has been its adoption by embedded systems and IoT gadgets, so these chips are already in billions of devices, with little fanfare. Now this platform is edging more into the view of enthusiasts and tinkerers with projects like the DC-ROMA, Milk-V Megrez board, and even Framework, looking for some RISC-V action.

RISC-V is snappier than the dragon

Starfish Neuroscience, a startup co-founded by Valve CEO Gabe Newell, has published an article revealing the first details of its brain-computer interface (BCI) chip.

The firm proposes a “new class of minimally-invasive, distributed neural interfaces that enable simultaneous access to multiple brain regions.” Moreover, a Starfish BCI could be the first fully wireless, battery-free implant available, if all goes to plan. According to its blog, the startup’s first chips are expected to arrive “in late 2025.” Perhaps the relationship with Newell means related tech will eventually find its way into gaming headsets and controllers.

In its report on the Starfish BCI news, The Verge notes that Newell’s fascination with BCIs began over 10 years ago, and that Valve once considered adding earlobe monitors to its VR headset products. As recently as 2019, Valve also publicly explored BCIs for gaming. Later the same year, Newell incorporated Starfish Neuroscience, and we are now seeing the first fruits as it emerges from stealth.

In its new blog post, Starfish says its BCI has the opportunity to do well thanks to two key features, its minimal size and the eschewing of built-in battery power. In regular use, the Starfish processor will consume just 1.1mW, it says. That contrasts with the Neuralink N1, which uses around 6mW.

• Low power: 1.1 mW total power consumption during normal recording
• Physically small: 2 x 4mm (0.3mm pitch BGA)
• Capable of both recording (spikes and LFP) & stimulation (biphasic pulses)
• 32 electrode sites, 16 simultaneous recording channels at 18.75kHz
• 1 current source for stimulating on arbitrary pairs of electrodes
• Onboard impedance monitoring and stim voltage transient measurement
• Digital onboard data processing and spike detection allows the device to operate via low-bandwidth wireless interfaces.
• Fabricated in TSMC 55nm process

Steam lets you see how much total funds you’ve poured into your account over the years, and many users are shocked to find out how much of their net worth they’ve poured into their accounts. It all started when Reddit user u/HappyMcflappyy shared their Steam Points balance of 3,566,945. Given that you earn 100 points for every dollar spent on the platform, that means they had sunk over $35,000 into games and other apps. But another Redditor replied, saying that the fastest and best way to see how much you’ve allocated throughout the existence of your account is to go to Help > Steam Support > My Account > Data Related to Your Steam Account > External Funds Used.

Just realized I've spent over 35k on Steam from r/Steam

When you go here, the app will ask you to sign in again, as if to confirm if you’re ready to see how invested you are. Once done, you’ll see five categories: ‘TotalSpend’, which is the total amount you’ve put into your Steam account, ‘OldSpend’, which is how much you’ve expended on Steam before April 17, 2015, ‘PWSpend’, which tells you how much you’ve spent on the Perfect World platforms for CS:GO or Dota 2, ‘ChinaSpend’, which is how much you’ve spent in Steam China, and ‘PackageOnlySpend’, which is the total amount for non-transferable purchases — i.e., game purchases for your own library using external funds.

I’ve asked around the Tom’s Hardware team about their Steam spending habits, and most of us spent between a little over $100 to nearly $3,500 on the platform. Personally, I’m on the low side, having only put a little less than $400 into my Steam account. This might seem low, but many of us have also purchased Steam keys from Humble Bundle, GOG, and other platforms. I’m also subscribed to Xbox PC Game Pass, which costs a little over $3 a month in my region. One of my colleagues said that if you bought three AAA games for $70 per year, and you’ve had your Steam account since its inception in 2003, then you would’ve spent $4,620 on it. This is quite a reasonable amount, especially since it’s spread over 22 years.

However, a few other Redditors are a bit more hardcore than we are. We went through the original Reddit thread and saw some real high rollers there. One user replied with ‘19k, yikes’, while another one said, ‘I’m just shy of 15k myself…’. These numbers might seem like massive amounts, but if you buy a $4.50 latte at Starbucks every other day for 22 years, then you’ve spent $17,820 on coffee alone. This might make accounts that are worth $10,000 to $20,000 feel less extravagant.

Unfortunately, Steam accounts cannot be turned into assets, as selling them would violate the Steam Subscriber Agreement. Furthermore, you do not own the games you buy on Steam — you just get a license to play them. And while your Steam account might not account for your net worth, you can instead consider it an entertainment expense that counts as an investment in your mental health and well-being.

Yesterday, Valve made waves when it updated its Steamworks Documentation now to include a dedicated "Advertising on Steam" page, illuminating its anti-advertising-on-Steam stance— GamingOnLinux proceeded to report on this as a new policy. Still, this was just a dedicated page for an existing policy, as noted by SteamDB and later GamingOnLinux when it realized its error.

In any case, making and dropping a dedicated page just for this question communicates the restrictions more clearly and helps ensure that developers don't think they can get away with posting ad-laden, mobile game-esque slop on Steam. While the little regulation on Steam still allows for a lot, the most common freemium models from mobile gaming still are not welcome on the platform.

The official page under "Not Supported" states:

"Developers should not utilize paid advertising as a business model in their game, such as requiring players to watch or otherwise engage with advertising in order to play, or gating gameplay behind advertising. If your game's business model relies on advertising on other platforms, you will need to remove those elements before shipping on Steam. Some options you could consider include switching to a single purchase 'paid app,' or making your game free to play with optional upgrades sold via Microtransactions or Downloadable Content (DLC)."

Other behaviors considered "Not Supported" on Steam include using "advertising as a way to provide value to players, such as giving players a reward for watching or engaging with advertising in their game" or charging "other developers for access to Steam features. These include sale pages, bundles, store pages, franchise pages, etc.".

A limited degree of advertising is still allowed on Steam and listed as "Supported." Still, these all describe your more typical product placements, cross-promotions, and paid ads for games available on Steam outside of Steam. Of course, advertising is a part of any publisher or developer's toolkit— it's just unacceptable as a core tenet of gameplay, as Valve has now made it extra clear by setting aside a dedicated page on the matter.

Previously, this information was relegated to a few brief FAQs on the existing "Pricing" documentation page. The relevant FAQs state:

"Steam does not support paid ads or referral/affiliate revenue from showing ads for other games and/or products or services. If your game's revenue relies on advertising on other platforms, you will need to find a new monetization model in order to release on Steam. Some options you could consider: Switch your game be a single purchase or make it free to play with microtransactions or additional content as DLC" and "Steam does not support models where a customer is blocked and needs to pay to continue playing. If you would like to have a free demo to show off your game, you're welcome to do so. Your demo and full game can share files as well to continue game play. To figure out if a demo is the right thing for your game, please check out the Demos Documentation".

To those who have monitored Valve or used Steam frequently over the years, these policies shouldn't be much of a surprise. Mobile titles with these business models that make their way to Steam inevitably change to either a one-time purchase or a more palatable Free-To-Play model, in line with titles that pioneered that model for PC players, like Valve's own 2007-launched, 2011-turned-live-service, Team Fortress 2.

As noted by GamingOnLinux in its coverage, Valve has also long banned games reliant upon blockchain technologies, including crypto and NFTs, being sold on Steam. Considering how often these ventures (particularly NFTs) end up being outright scams, this is still a very wise policy on their part, but it, of course, does not stop the likes of studios like Ubisoft from self-publishing abhorrent NFT-RPGs, either.

Following a report from GamingOnLinux pointing out that recent rumors of an in-testing Steam Console were simply vapor, an official statement from Valve developer Pierre-Loup Griffais on BlueSky confirmed this to be the case. Griffais clarifies that the pre-release Mesa Vulkan work on AMD's RDNA 4 architecture is perfectly in line with what Valve's been doing since AMD's Vega architecture. While it's true that Valve is indeed testing with and updating software for an upcoming GPU architecture, this does not mean they're suddenly relaunching the Steam Machine initiative.

That blows the dreams of a new Steam Console out of the water, right? At least for the foreseeable future, yes... but let's take a more critical look at Valve's foray into the "console" space and discuss the various possibilities, both for a revived Steam Machine initiative as well as for the Steam Deck 2.

What we know about Valve's hardware plans

The smoking gun for an incoming Steam console was never going to be enablement of some pre-release GPU architecture like AMD's RDNA 4. Consoles — even the likes of the Steam Deck — generally ship with custom hardware based on existing architectures. By the time a console actually releases, the GPU and CPU tech are almost always at least a generation behind the latest hardware. That's because extensive pre-planning is needed to launch platforms like these.

When the Steam Deck launched back in 2022, it used AMD's RDNA 2 architecture that first appeared back in November 2020, putting about a year and a half between the Steam Deck and its original GPU architecture, and 2.5 years between the Steam Deck and the Zen 2 CPU architecture. RDNA 4 is AMD's upcoming desktop architecture, and it would take even more time, effort, and money to roll that into an APU that would be feasible for a handheld.

The current top iGPU solutions use AMD's RDNA 3 and RDNA 3.5 iGPU architectures, and tangible performance gains while running on battery power haven't been exactly forthcoming. Higher performance while plugged in is one thing, but handhelds are very much constrained by their batteries. We only just started getting Ryzen AI HX 300 Series APUs with RDNA 3.5 iGPUs in the past few months.

Another major sign that a Steam Console isn't Valve's priority right now is that the confirmed Steam Deck 2 is "at least two or three years away," and Valve is waiting for greater leaps in hardware capabilities. Consoles typically shoot for a larger generation gap between releases, so while an RDNA 4 iGPU isn't out of the question for the eventual Steam Deck 2, it's not coming out any time soon. It would seem a bit extreme for Valve to be launching three distinct SteamOS hardware platforms in the span of just under seven years.

While RDNA 4 certainly looks tantalizing based on what we know, there's too much we still don't know — like what kind of power consumption it has, how much performance it offers, and how much it will cost. It will take time before we start seeing it in a form factor like a handheld PC.

Peering into the future with our crystal ball

Let's move into the realm of the unknown and the speculation that comes with it, while still remaining rooted in what we do know about PC hardware and how it impacts the (handheld) console market.

Late last year, there were legitimate leaks of new Valve designs for both a brand-new Steam Controller with an overhauled Deck-inspired design and next-gen VR controllers. The Steam Controller being iterated upon may point toward Valve reviving the Steam Link set-top box or the Steam Machine initiative in some manner... but it could also just be for providing parity between Steam Deck handheld and Docked play, especially for users who love making the most of Steam Input's extra features, like touch-sensitive gyro support.

Does this mean a Steam Console is totally outside the realm of possibility? Perhaps not — at the very least, it seems likely that once Steam OS 3 gets a wider release, more manufacturers may adopt it for mini PCs, laptops, handhelds, and the like. Additionally, a larger form factor would make it much easier for Valve to target features like real-time ray-tracing. On the current Deck hardware, RT is only feasible targeting 30 FPS in mostly-rasterized games, with full RT or path-traced games being completely out of the question thanks to both the old hardware and the very low power limits.

For a true generational leap in handheld performance, Valve needs more than RDNA 4 improved RT capabilities. It also needs a GPU architecture that can deliver those RT results at a 25W TDP (ROG Ally, Legion Go, MSI Claw, etc.) or 15W TDP (Steam Deck). With full discrete RDNA 4 mobile GPUs estimated to run somewhere in the range of 80-175W TDP, it's fair to say AMD isn't quite there yet.

But there are ways to get there if desired. RDNA 4 will use TSMC's N4 process node, which has been around for over two years now. The Steam Deck's Van Gogh APU is built on TSMC's now 'ancient' N7 node. Certainly a move to N5 or N4 would help quite a bit. But in a couple of years, the N3 and N2 variants should be more readily available. Smaller nodes tuned for efficiency could be precisely what's needed to make a more compelling chip for a future handheld — if the total die size and price can be kept in check.

Is a Steam Console even necessary, though? Slap a Steam Deck onto a compatible docking station and you already have a much more powerful home console than the Nintendo Switch. If Nintendo has abandoned traditional home consoles, a company like Valve probably also sees more value in a hybrid-handheld approach to its custom hardware that won't as-directly compete with the mainstream consoles and gaming PCs.

Earlier this morning on Twitter, the unofficial but trusted SteamDB took note of Valve removing official partner documentation for Steam Coupons after a long period without them dropping for users at all. While the relevant Steam Support page and non-expired coupons still exist, it seems that Valve is steadily moving toward phasing them out entirely in favor of limiting promotional pricing to sales or publisher key distribution outside of Steam.

Is this a major blow to Steam's user base? Not particularly. Frequent sales and the lack of control over what coupons you get have long made most of them a non-factor outside of particular scenarios. Since coupons were only received randomly through crafting badges or as random developer gifts, the likelihood of them being for something you want is astronomically slim.

Is it a shame that Valve potentially removes the feature instead of making it more interesting or worthwhile? Perhaps, but it's not like Steam is hurting for extra features on top of its basic functionality as a game store and launcher. Losing coupons with platform-wide Steam sales in mind seems like a non-issue unless you're actively looking for something to be mad about.

It's difficult to emphasize how tacked-on the Steam Coupon system has felt since its addition. Common searches for Steam Coupons most frequently point toward users confused about why they exist or how to remove them from their item inventory when they remain unused due to rarely providing a deal the user wants.

So, ultimately, there's no major loss here—it just seems that Valve is performing some maintenance work and eliminating a feature its Steam storefront never actually needed and its users rarely used.

For those of you out there still hoping to get rid of coupons or perhaps even scoop some that may be of value to you, you aren't totally without recourse. Steam Group Coupon Dumpster seems to be where most users go for this kind of thing, but really...are you sure you don't just wanna wait for the next major seasonal sale? Just saying.

Valve has introduced the Steam Deck OLED to its certified refurbished program. Gamers can now buy the OLED variant refurbished directly from Valve at a heavy discount. The refurbished OLED models are 20% less expensive than their vanilla brand-new counterparts.

The 1TB OLED and 512GB Steam Deck OLED models are available with the refurbished program. The 1TB model is priced at $519, and the 512GB at $439. By comparison, buying the new 1TB version costs $649, and the 512GB version costs $549, representing a $120 discount for the 1TB model and a $110 discount for the 512GB model. Valve's pricing means gamers can get the 1TB OLED model for $30 cheaper than the 512GB OLED model brand new.

The only Steam Deck variant that users can buy new that undercuts the refurbished OLED model pricing is the (technically previous generation) 256GB LCD variant, currently sold for $399. Valve sells certified refurbished versions of its LCD Steam Deck, but all three models—the 64GB, 256GB, and 512GB—are out of stock. The 512GB and 64GB LCD models can no longer be bought new.

It is easy to forget that the Steam Deck OLED version is a much more significant upgrade than the name implies. Beyond the apparent upgrade from an LCD to an OLED display, the display alone has been upgraded to a 90Hz refresh rate and a 7.4-inch form factor with HDR support, 400 nits of brightness, and 1000 nits of peak brightness in HDR mode. The LCD version was a 7-inch model that lacked HDR support and peaked at 60Hz, 400 nits of brightness.

Under the hood, changes were also made; the battery got a noticeable upgrade from a 40Whr unit to a 50Whr unit. Valve claims the 50 Whr unit can power the OLED Deck anywhere between 3 to 12 hours, depending on the game. Valve advertises a 2-8 hour battery life for the LCD version. RAM was upgraded on the OLED from 5500MT/s LPDDR5 to higher clocked 6400 MT/s LPDDR5, and the AMD APU saw a process node shrink from 7nm to 6nm.

Refurbished Steam Deck OLEDs are only available in certain regions, including Canada, the EU, the UK, and the US. Refurbished units come with the same one-year warranty as new units. However, it could be longer, depending on your country of residence.