Valve’s Steam Machines: Gabe Newell’s quest to reinvent PC gaming

Valve won’t talk about a Steam Deck 2. It probably wants to keep the attention on its just-announced living room console, comfy new controller, and Arm-based headset instead. But now that the company is preparing to sell an Arm headset, one that can even run Android apps, there’s an obvious question. Is Arm a one-off experiment for Valve, or might it power future SteamOS hardware?

Valve software engineer Pierre-Loup Griffais makes it sound like the sky’s the limit. I don’t want to oversell what he said — he was excited about the potential, not any specific devices, and you’ll see that in more context when we publish the interview later this week.

You can think of the just-announced Steam Frame as a wireless VR headset for your PC, or a Steam Deck for your face. But another way to think about it is that Valve is finally entering the mobile realm. The Frame doesn’t just run Windows games on its Arm-based Qualcomm Snapdragon chip — Valve will now support and encourage developers to bring their Android apps to Steam as well.

It’ll try to make some of them first-class citizens, too, Valve engineer Jeremy Selan tells The Verge. “From the user’s perspective, our preference is that they don’t even have to think about it, they just have their titles on Steam, they download them and hit play.”

Valve has just announced its biggest hardware push that it’s arguably ever made — a living room game console called the Steam Machine, a headset called the Steam Frame, and the long-awaited sequel to its Steam Controller it hinted about three years back.

But Valve won’t say the first word about its next gaming handheld, the Steam Deck 2.

Valve is about to challenge the Xbox and PlayStation on their home turf. Ten years to the month after Valve’s original Steam Machines went on sale, the company is announcing… the Steam Machine.

I flew to Valve’s headquarters to try the company’s new PC-based game console, alongside a brand-new Steam Controller and the new Steam Frame gaming headset. It’s the culmination of Valve’s hardware and software efforts over the last decade, and it looks a lot like the leaks that have been coming out over the past year.

If I told you that Valve could make a play to dethrone the Sony PlayStation and Microsoft Xbox in your living room this next year while simultaneously challenging the Meta Quest as the gamer’s VR headset of choice, would you believe me? Because Valve may have a lot of SteamOS hardware on the way.

If there’s fire where we currently see smoke, Valve is currently preparing a wireless VR headset codename Deckard, a pair of trackable wands codename Roy, a Steam Controller 2 gamepad codename Ibex, and a codename Fremont living room console too. (That last one now looks likelier than it did yesterday.) And Valve has also now seemingly revealed plans for partners to create third-party SteamOS hardware too.

Valve once dreamt of building Linux-based game consoles called Steam Machines. They flopped — but the dream eventually became reality as the handheld Steam Deck instead. Now, a particularly noteworthy Steam Deck enthusiast is reviving the idea of a console-sized Steam Box, one with his own retro gaming twist.

Rodrigo Sedano is the founder of EmuDeck, a program beloved by the Steam Deck community. It automatically installs, configures, and enhances emulators for Nintendo, Sega, Sony, and other retro consoles so they work beautifully on Valve’s handheld.

Why am I sad that a tiny black puck which streamed games over a Wi-Fi network will soon disappear from shelves around the world? Because too few people experienced the magic that the Steam Link affords.

Over the past couple years, it seemed like PC gaming juggernaut Valve couldn’t give away the gadget fast enough, charging as little as $2.50 for the $50 gadget on sale. That’s probably why the company is quietly discontinuing the device today, though the company will continue support. (Valve says the Steam Link is already selling out around the world, and when it’s gone, it’s gone.)

Valve’s new console-aping Steam Machines could be hampered by the performance of the company’s Linux-based SteamOS operating system compared to Windows gaming. An Ars Technica analysis published Friday morning highlighted considerable performance gaps between SteamOS and Windows on a computer running both operating systems, gaps that persisted across both AAA ports and games built on Valve’s own Source engine. The operating systems performed similarly in benchmark tool Geekbench 3, but tests involving Middle-Earth: Shadow of Mordor and Metro: Last Light Redux yielded frames per second gaps that ranged from 21 to 58 percent.

The timing of the analysis isn’t ideal for Valve. The company’s first set of Steam Machines and peripherals were officially made available for purchase last week, including machines from Alienware, Zotac, and Cyberpower. If there’s a sizable gap in performance between SteamOS and Windows, it’s hard to argue against spending a little bit more on machines with comparable internals that run Windows instead.

The first wave of Valve’s Steam Machine gaming PCs are now on sale. The company just announced the official launch of Steam Machines from a handful of manufacturers, along with the unusual Steam Controller and the Steam Link home streaming box. Right now, Valve is advertising three Steam Machines from Alienware, Zotac, and Cyberpower; they range from $499 to $1,499. The Steam Controller and Steam Link both sell for $49 apiece.

The Steam Machine concept has been years in the making, and it’s seen some delays and false starts along the way. The confusion is partly because “Steam Machine” is more a label for console-like gaming PCs than a discrete product. Along with the controller, Steam Machines are largely defined by Steam OS, a Linux-based operating system that any manufacturer can adopt, whether it’s making a super-cheap machine or a top-of-the-line gaming powerhouse. Preorders finally opened this summer, with a limited number of customers getting their devices in mid-October before the official release.

If you’ve been wanting to get Steam games into your living room — and don’t want to wait for Valve’s official Steam OS— Alienware is now ready to take your money. Interested buyers can now pre-order the Alienware Alpha console, which starts at $549. That’ll get you an Intel Core i3 processor, 4GB of RAM, 500GB of storage, and a custom Nvidia-based graphics card with 2GB of dedicated memory. Alienware is also selling a number of other configurations with more memory, hard drive space, and faster processors.

What’s most notable about the Alpha, however, is what isn’t included — instead of using Valve’s Linux-based Steam OS and the Steam controller, the Alpha is essentially a standard Windows 8.1 PC. After Valve announced that it would delay the Steam OS and controller to 2015, Alienware decided to design its own user interface on top of Windows rather than delay its console. The goal of that custom interface is to provide users a way to get right into Steam’s “big picture” mode without having to mess around in Windows or use a keyboard and mouse.

Valve, the company behind Portal, Half-Life, and digital video game download service Steam, has delayed the launch of its first pieces of hardware, pushing the release window of its Steam Machines and Steam controller from 2014 to 2015. In a post on Steam, Valve’s Eric Hope suggested the release dates were pushed back to allow the company to work on the controller, after live playtests with wireless prototypes generated a “ton of useful feedback.” While Hope said that feedback means Valve will be able to make its Steam controller “a lot better,” it’s also keeping the team behind the project “pretty busy making all those improvements.”

Valve’s Steam controller, first announced in 2013, is the result of more than two years of research and design by the video game company. In its current form, the controller sports two touchpads on its front, in place the analog sticks present on most modern console controllers. Using the touchpads offers players very precise control over their games, but as The Verge reported last November, the experience isn’t immediately intuitive for people weaned on analog stick or keyboard and mouse control.

We knew Valve’s Steam Controller would be undergoing some changes, and now the company is offering a more detailed look at its revised gamepad. The touchscreen seen on the original model has indeed been scrapped entirely in favor of four separate directional buttons on the left side and four face buttons on the right. They’re labeled X, Y, A, and B — just like Microsoft’s Xbox controller — and Valve’s buttons also share the same arrangement and color scheme. Similar to the Xbox One, Valve’s latest iteration of the Steam Controller features a logo that glows white when powered on. That round button is centered between two smaller ones labeled with icons for stop and play.

“These analog buttons are offered in addition to the touch pads featured in the original prototypes,” Valve said in a statement. The design of this latest version seems to have been finalized only recently; Valve says it’s in the process of assembling demo units that it will bring to the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco next week. “We’re excited to get some feedback from our customers on these latest changes,” the company said. That suggests that Valve may not be done tweaking the Steam Controller as it prepares for a huge push in the living room with SteamOS.

Valve is a notoriously private game publisher, and in January it hosted a private event. At Steam Dev Days, the company gathered developers to talk about its strategy for the company’s Linux-based Steam Machine game consoles, virtual reality headgear, in-game economies, and game development, all with no journalists in attendance. While some news trickled out in the form of tweets, including when we can expect Alienware’s Steam Machine to arrive and that the Steam Controller is due for another revision, we weren’t able to get the full picture. Now, however, the entiretry of Steam Dev Days is on YouTube for your viewing pleasure.

Valve has uploaded video of all the sessions, and you can find PowerPoint and PDF slidedecks at this link. If you want to know what Valve is working on, here’s your chance to hear it directly from the company.

With the right hardware setup, you may no longer need to sit in front of your gaming machine. With a PlayStation Vita, you can play PS4 anywhere in your house. With an Nvidia Shield, you can do the same with a Windows gaming PC. But what if you don’t want to buy a multiple-hundred dollar handheld game system to play Tomb Raider in bed? Valve is building a game streaming solution right into its free Steam game platform, so you can sling games from your beefy desktop PC to laptops as thin as a MacBook Air. Late last week, Valve invited a host of new users into the Steam In-Home Streaming beta, and we made it in. Read on for our first impressions.

The first, most striking thing about Steam In-Home Streaming is how little setup it requires. You don’t even need to be in front of both computers to pair them together. As long as both computers are signed into your Steam account and connected to the same network, you’ll automatically have access to any game or program in either computer’s Steam library. That means you can stream Windows games to a Mac or Linux machine, and Valve is planning to add support for the reverse, too. If you’ve got a copy of a game that works on both operating systems, you can pick whether to stream it or run it locally, or even start installing it on the remote computer. You can even launch some non-Steam apps, like Adobe Photoshop and Media Player Classic, if you add them to Steam. They don’t properly display their menu bars, though.

The Steam Controller is going to change. According to two game developers tweeting from Valve’s Steam Dev Days developer summit, Valve has decided to remove the controller’s central touchscreen. While it sounds like the gamepad’s twin trackpads will remain intact, the touchscreen was deemed redundant and possibly even distracting from games, as Valve wants players looking at the television instead of their hands. That doesn’t mean there won’t be customizable controls in the center of the gamepad, though. Players will simply use a feature that Valve’s calling “ghost mode.”

We saw an early demo of “ghost mode” at Valve’s headquarters a few months ago, and it’s fairly simple: when you move your thumb on the Steam Controller’s touchpad, you can see a ghostly image of your thumb on your TV screen as well, and you can press virtual buttons placed there.

Alienware has perhaps the most exciting Steam Machine coming to market, and now we know when it will arrive. According to a tweet from Dave Oshry, a video game marketing exec attending Valve’s Steam Dev Days developer summit, the company just announced that Alienware’s Steam Machine will launch in the September timeframe. That’s quite a ways away.

While we don’t know the exact specs of Alienware’s box, it is quite small at just three inches tall and eight inches on a side, and it aims to compete with next-gen game consoles in both specs and price. We tried a system that Alienware said was representative of the final machine in terms of performance, and its Intel CPU and Nvidia discrete GPU seemed capable of handling current PC games at 1080p. Valve certainly believes in the machine “This machine is the one that we think is actually going to serve the most customers and make the most Steam users happy,” Valve designer Greg Coomer told us late last year.

Building your own Steam Box just got a heck of a lot easier, because the SteamOS operating system isn’t limited to Nvidia GPUs anymore. As of the latest SteamOS release, both Intel and AMD graphics are supported. Mind you, SteamOS is still very much in beta, and the Linux video drivers are in a beta state as well, so don’t expect too much. AMD specifically mentions that there are some screen-tearing issues, and that things can slow down when the SteamOS overlay and games are running simultaneously. Valve engineer John Vert writes that the company is still working with Intel and AMD to fix a number of these issues.

That’s good, because a number of Steam Machines intend to ship with AMD and Intel graphics at launch, including the $499 iBuyPower box, the $499 CyberPowerPC computer, and at least two tiny Brix boxes made by Gigabyte.

Next week, Valve will release a software development kit that gives developers a standard way to implement controls in VR games, the BBC reports. Valve designer Brian Coomer has apparently said that the kit is “days away” and will be released at Steam Dev Days, which start on January 15th. There’s not much more detail given, but the company has already said it plans to reveal a prototype that will show “what affordable Virtual Reality (VR) hardware will be capable of within a couple of years.” Valve has previously worked in partnership with Oculus, whose latest VR headset — a prototype known as Crystal Cove — was announced at CES.

The controller development kit will reportedly come as part of the larger set of software tools for Steam Machines, about a dozen of which have also been revealed this week. Valve has made itself a link between manufacturers and developers, creating a platform that ensures compatibility across a variety of hardware, and it’s well-positioned to do the same for virtual reality controllers, which range from simple gamepads to elaborate circular treadmills. “We’ve been talking to Oculus pretty extensively... about how we can help them with Steam,” Valve told us last year.

Nearly two years ago, we broke the news that Valve was working on its very own game console. The reasons weren’t yet clear. We didn’t yet know that the company wanted to throw off the shackles of Windows with its own Linux-based operating system, or that a host of PC manufacturers would take it seriously enough to build hardware.

Today, the Steam Machines are here. Valve has just announced the first wave of computers that can officially be called Steam Machines at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas.

Valve has been unveiling its SteamOS initiative piece by piece, and at a brief event today it announced an important new detail: which companies will actually be selling Steam Machines. Thirteen partners were announced at the event, including Alienware, Falcon Northwest, and iBuyPower, among other custom PC makers. There’s no word on precisely when the machines will hit the market, but Valve business manager DJ Powers tells us that its hoping to see some on the shelf in the latter half of 2014.

As for whether we’ll see hardware from Valve itself, it isn’t something the company is ruling out — though it is staying typically quiet on the subject. But one thing is for sure: the 300 prototypes that Valve sent out in 2013 aren’t going to be making a further appearance. “That was an exercise to kind of prove the concept and get them in customers’ hands to get real honest feedback,” says Powers. “We don’t have further plans to manufacture more of those boxes and run a bigger beta or sell them.”

While some of the companies adopting Valve’s living room gaming fomula are simply grafting the SteamOS operating system onto powerful Windows PCs, CyberPowerPC has just announced a Steam Machine designed to actually compete with the Xbox One and PlayStation 4 for around the same price point.

Starting at just $499, the new CyberPowerPC Steam Machine A will come with a 3.9GHz AMD A6-6400K processor and AMD Radeon R9 270 discrete graphics, 8GB of RAM and a 500GB hard drive in a new custom case, and come complete with a Steam Controller and SteamOS when it ships in the second half of 2014. It won’t be able to run all your Windows games, of course, but Valve is promsing to announce a raft of content for the Linux-based SteamOS operating system over the course of the year including triple-A games.

Digital Storm was one of the first companies to reveal its Steam Machine — its own take on Valve’s formula for the perfect living room gaming PC. Today, the company’s getting the news out ahead of Valve’s announcement yet again, formally announcing that the new Digital Storm Bolt II will go on sale later this month for $1,899.

The Bolt II dual-boots Windows and SteamOS, and features liquid cooling by default — which allows the company to overclock the Intel Core i5-4670K processor to a speedy 4.2GHz right out of the reasonably small box. While the case features quite a few screws, PC builders will find components relatively easy to remove, with easy access to the hard drive bays, the memory, the graphics card, the slot-loading optical drive, and even the 240mm radiator with its twin cooling fans. There’s also five USB ports and a variety of card readers integrated into the front of the machine.