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What does the STEAM MACHINE mean for traditional PC gaming?

- Phil Iwaniuk

Valve's making a games console. The company that was famed for making Half-Life games might be speaking about its newly revealed Steam Machine as a mini-PC, but let's call a console a console when we see one. All the selling points about it - the expected low pricing, the bundled controller, the SteamOS UI making everything as user-friendly as possible - are all the tenets that discerned games consoles from PCs for the past four decades.

As a quick recap, it's specced to outperform the company's own Steam Deck handheld device, offering about six times the graphical heft. It's built around a six-core, 12-thread AMD Zen 4 CPU and a semi-bespoke version of AMD's RDNA 3 GPU, with some bits turned off and just 8GB of VRAM. All that points to the sort of pricing that'll go toe-to-toe with Sony and Microsoft's boxes of gaming gubbins, at an MSRP which PCG estimates will be between $450-$600 (£350-£450).

OBVIOUS POSITIVES

There are obvious positives to this, if our napkin mathematics and wild assumptions are correct. In an economic landscape in which buying a tub of butter comes with an option to pay in instalments, bringing a vaguely affordable gaming device to market sounds like a good idea.

If that device takes away the intrinsic faff of PC gaming's vagaries, to all but the most uncompromising stalwarts that probably represents progress too. Here's the scary bit, though: it also completely upsets the apple cart when it comes to defining what PC gaming even is. Starting with the long-standing principle that unlike each corner of the console market, no one company 'owns' PC gaming.

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