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

For the last couple weeks, I’ve been in an extremely lucky position: I’ve been spending a lot of time playing games on Valve’s Steam Machine.

We gave the Steam Machine a 6, and I don’t disagree with my colleague Sean Hollister’s review. But even though I already own a PS5 and an Xbox Series X, and even though I’ve experienced the Steam Machine’s drawbacks for myself, I would spend the $1,049 to buy one right now.

Dbrand is the company that shipped a product that told Nintendo’s legal team to “go fuck yourself,” and the company that had a second set of lawyer-dodging PS5 plates ready when Sony threatened to sue over the originals. But on June 29th, the company finally ate some serious humble pie, canceling its Portal-themed Companion Cube external shell for the Steam Machine after Valve lawyered up.

I couldn’t believe it. Surely Dbrand had to have seen this coming. There must be a plan B, right?

Dbrand announced Monday that it’s refunding everyone who bought its Steam Machine Companion Cube, which it said it made “without a license from Valve.” Dbrand announced the Portal-themed Steam Machine accessory in November and took preorders for it last Monday. But a few days later, the product had disappeared from the company’s website and the teaser video promoting it had been made private after Valve contacted the company.

Dbrand says that the Companion Cube became “the second-fastest selling product in our 15-year history, behind only the Switch 2 Killswitch” after it opened preorders on June 22nd. However, Valve’s legal team reached out to Dbrand and “requested we take down the product and launch film immediately. This was entirely within their rights, and they were direct, fair, and respectful throughout.”

The Steam Machine is here, with a base price of $1,049. Yes, that’s nearly twice the price of a PS5, but what you’re buying here isn’t a console but a full-on PC — and a tiny one at that. Valve says it’s selling the Steam Machine basically at cost. So we asked ourselves: What would it cost to build something like the Steam Machine yourself?

You can’t literally build the same thing. The quiet 6-inch cube Valve has created isn’t reproducible off the shelf. The base model Steam Machine includes 512GB of storage and goes up to $1,349 for 2TB of storage and two additional faceplates. Across both models, the Steam Machine sports 16GB of DDR5 RAM, a custom six-core AMD mobile processor with Zen 4 architecture, and another custom AMD chip for its GPU that runs RDNA 3 and comes with 8GB of VRAM. The whole thing sits on a custom motherboard with a custom cooler that takes up nearly the whole inside of the case.

This is not a review of the MSI Claw 8 EX AI Plus, the first gaming handheld available with Intel’s new Arc G3 Extreme handheld gaming chip. Now that my colleague Sean Hollister is done reviewing the Steam Machine, I’ll let him go deep on the new Claw at some point in the future. This article, instead, is my first impressions of the new MSI Claw as someone who primarily plays games on a Steam Deck OLED. Sean called the Claw the “next-gen handheld,” and I wanted to find out: Would it be a worthwhile upgrade for Deck fans like me? Could it possibly be worth the eye-watering $1,799 price?

For me, the Claw has a high bar to clear. The $789 Steam Deck OLED is my favorite handheld — maybe my favorite gadget — since the original Nintendo Switch. It’s comfortable to hold, has a great-looking display, and has a good enough battery to survive pretty much any evening of gaming for me. It lets me play the vast majority of my Steam library wherever I want. But the Deck isn’t great for every game I own; top-of-the-line AAA games occasionally play poorly, with muddy graphics, bad frame rates, or both. I will suffer through those drawbacks for many games, but every once in a while, I turn to my PS5 for titles that don’t work well on the Deck.

MSI’s Intel-powered Claw gaming handhelds have so far mostly been Windows machines, meaning that anyone who picks one up has to deal with the crusty experience that is Windows on a handheld gaming PC. But now, both Valve and Intel tell The Verge that they’re working with each other, and people like YouTuber ETA Prime are already having good experiences with SteamOS on Intel.

Valve’s recently launched SteamOS 3.8 update spells out that Valve has added “initial firmware for upcoming Intel handhelds” and controller support for some MSI Claw devices, including last year’s well-received 8 AI Plus. ETA Prime actually got a beta of SteamOS 3.8 running on that machine, and while he said it’s “not perfect,” it appears that everything works pretty well, for the most part. A user on Reddit was also able to get SteamOS booted up on an Intel Arc B580 desktop GPU.

Valve’s Steam Machine finally has a price: a whopping $1,049 for the 512GB configuration or $1,349 for the 2TB version. And those are without bundled controllers, which drive up the cost more.

The prices are so high in part because Valve isn’t subsidizing the hardware, and the company has already indicated that the component crisis forced it to reconsider its initial pricing plans. In an interview with the YouTube channel Gamers Nexus, Valve engineers discussed the reality of sourcing RAM in 2026, with take-it-or-leave-it prices as memory and other components remain in short supply, from only a few vendors like Samsung, Micron, and SK Hynix.

It’s no secret that just about every aspect of video games is getting more expensive. Game consoles are getting regular price hikes, PC components are spiking in cost, and the golden age of affordable handhelds is over, all largely due to the global RAM shortage, which has had a similarly costly impact on PC gaming, including portable devices like the Steam Deck. This all led to some trepidation around the Steam Machine, Valve’s latest attempt to bring the breadth and openness of PC gaming into a form factor designed for your living room. The fact that the device was delayed in February due specifically to the memory crisis only exacerbated this feeling. Now, Valve has finally revealed the Steam Machine’s price tag. And while it may not be quite as expensive as some feared, it’s definitely not cheap, pointing to an increasingly costly future for the console space.

First, here are the details. The most basic Steam Machine, with 512GB of memory, costs $1,049, and bundled with a Steam Controller that price jumps to $1,128. If you want the 2TB version it’ll cost you $1,349, or $1,428 with a controller. That’s not necessarily egregious by PC gaming standards, but the Steam Machine isn’t just competing with other gaming PCs. It’s a device specifically designed to create a console-like experience, and even in the increasingly expensive world of gaming consoles, the Steam Machine costs quite a bit more than its closest competition, up through the higher-end options. A 2TB Xbox Series X now costs $729.99, while a PS5 Pro is $899.99. The cheapest of the bunch, a Switch 2, will be $499.99 starting in September.

The Steam Machine is a cool little console that’s about as powerful as a PlayStation 5, according to my colleague Sean Hollister’s in-depth review. But one area where it lags behind is with its earlier version of AMD FSR upscaler: It’s just not as good as it should be. Yes, it can sharpen low-res graphics to make games look higher-res, but the PS5 (and especially the PS5 Pro) render a clearer image in motion with some games we compared.

That’s not great news for the Steam Machine, especially since it’s launching at $1,049 for the 512GB version — a higher price than anyone hoped for. But there is some hope that games on the console will look somewhat better in the future. Valve’s Pierre-Loup Griffais told The Verge that it’s working with AMD to bring FSR 4, its latest bag of upscaling and performance-improving tools, to the Steam Machine.

The Steam Machine is here, but getting one is a little complicated. Valve is taking preorders using a reservation system, which is intended to make the process more fair and harder for bots to exploit. However, it’s a bit different than the $5 reservations Valve used for the Steam Deck.

Starting today, you can sign up for a chance to reserve the Steam Machine, choosing from four different options: