GABE CUBE

Exploring Valve's STEAM MACHINE and its potential impact on the future of PC gaming

- By Jacob Ridley

Built by Valve, powered by SteamOS, the new Steam Machine is a compact gaming PC. One trying to make good on a promise Valve made a long time ago. With prototype Steam Machines heading out to reviewers back in 2013, including us, the company had grand plans for reinventing what constitutes a gaming PC around its new creation, a Linux-based operating system called SteamOS. Years on, and following a few failed partner launches that you can read all about in our retrospective of their demise, the project was more or less doomed. By 2018, Valve pulled the plug.

Or did it? Valve never stopped working on SteamOS, plugging away until it landed on the successful formula launched inside the Steam Deck in 2022. Following this success, Valve feels ready to take a second punt at a system with more firepower.

"We finally have all the software and the hardware bits to make the original vision a reality," Yazan Aldehayyat, a Valve engineer working on the Steam Machine, says during my visit to Valve HQ. It's the right time because users are already making Steam Machines happen, putting a recovery image of SteamOS onto a range of devices or using their Steam Deck while docked: "Our customers kind of beat us to it."

The Steam Machine will be released at some point in 2026. We don't know how much it will cost yet, but with older, mid-range components and Valve's own success with the budget-friendly Steam Deck, I'm hopeful for a convincing price tag here. There's a big gap in the market for a genuinely affordable gaming PC, and I'm hoping this is the machine to plug it. Plus, the smaller 512GB option should be a decent amount cheaper than the 2TB model.

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