Steam Machines have returned: all the news about Valve’s new hardware universe

A blog post from Valve on Friday initially seemed to throw cold water on the idea that the Steam Machine, Steam Frame, and Steam Controller would arrive in 2026 at all. But Valve tells The Verge it did not mean to suggest that — and that all three pieces of hardware will indeed ship this year, despite challenges from the ongoing memory shortage.

Earlier today, Valve wrote that “we hope to ship in 2026,” which sounded like a downgrade from Valve’s earlier promises. As recently as last month, the company explicitly said it had not changed its plans to ship all three new hardware products “in the first half of the year,” even though that itself was a change from its original goal of “early 2026” or “Q1 2026.” Today, it seemed like the company was quietly delaying the product yet again, and Valve didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.

When Valve first announced its impressive-looking Steam Machine, Steam Frame, and Steam Controller hardware in November, the company said the products would begin shipping in early 2026. Some journalists were told “Q1 2026” specifically. But because of the ongoing memory and storage crunch, that launch has been delayed to sometime in the first half of this year, and Valve says it will reset expectations for how much they will cost “as soon as possible.”

“We planned on being able to share specific pricing and launch dates by now,” Valve says in a new post. “But the memory and storage shortages you’ve likely heard about across the industry have rapidly increased since then. 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).”

It’s a big deal that Valve is making a game console. But I’m beginning to think the Steam Machine may end up a footnote in gaming history. What if Valve could bring PC games not just to its own living room consoles, but also to the Arm chips that billions of people have in their phones? What if you no longer had to wait for game developers to do the hard work of porting PC games to your phone, Mac, or other Arm hardware, because games built for desktop PCs could just work?

If you wrote off the Steam Frame as yet another VR headset few will want to wear, I guarantee you’re not alone. But the Steam Frame isn’t just a headset; it’s a Trojan horse that contains the tech gamers need to play Steam games on the next Samsung Galaxy, the next Google Pixel, perhaps Arm gaming notebooks to come.

Valve is making a game console that might take on Sony and Microsoft. It’s also making a gaming headset to compete with Meta. These are big, ambitious, and messy efforts, and we have lots of questions. So do you!

We’ve gotten a lot of questions about Valve’s huge 2026 hardware push and entry into the console wars, and we’re compiling the answers we’ve got so far. Some of them are direct answers to your subscriber questions in our AMA; thank you for paying our salaries!

The morning of Monday, October 27th, I started my workweek by asking my colleagues at The Verge for advice on buying a gaming PC. I wanted a small, portable, and semi-powerful machine that could easily sit beneath my living room TV and occasionally move over to my desk to play games or even use for work. My dream was to find something as easy to use as the Steam Deck, which has become my primary gaming device due to its simplicity and massive catalog of PC games.

Just two days later, I walked into Valve’s headquarters and was introduced to the new Steam Machine, a gaming PC and console hybrid. It checked basically every box I was looking for.

The Steam Deck changed the way I buy and play games. Just like how the Nintendo Switch blew me away with how it let me play the latest and greatest Nintendo games on the go and on a TV, the Steam Deck has drawn me in with how it offers a vast catalog of PC games that I can play portably or on a big screen. And with the Steam Deck’s microSD card slot, I can add a lot more storage just by tossing in a tiny memory card, meaning I can bring even more games around with me on the device.

But with its new Steam Machine PC and Steam Frame VR headset, Valve is about to make any microSD cards you use with the Steam Deck even more useful. Like the Steam Deck, both of those devices also run Valve’s Linux-based SteamOS operating system, and both have microSD card slots, too. So if the microSD card you’ve plugged into your Steam Deck is formatted for SteamOS, any games you’ve stored on it will be immediately visible by the Steam Machine and Steam Frame as well.

When I tried Half-Life: Alyx streaming from a PC to Valve’s new Steam Frame VR headset, I was blown away; thanks to the Frame’s dedicated wireless adapter and a cool trick Valve calls “foveated streaming,” I didn’t detect any latency as I explored an industrial building and fought some head crabs.

But the Frame also has an Arm chip inside, meaning it can run games locally. While I didn’t get to test playing Half-Life: Alyx that way, based on comments Valve gave to other publications, it seems like Valve is optimistic that it might be able to make the game run well when played standalone.

Dbrand did the thing: it announced a Portal Companion Cube skin for Valve’s boxy new Steam Machine, allowing you to turn the new PC / console hybrid into a facsimile of gaming’s most loyal sidekick.

The Companion Cube skin is limited edition, and will release some time in 2026, though we don’t know if it will launch alongside the Steam Machine itself, which is targeting early 2026. There’s no price yet either.

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.