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

Valve says it still plans to ship the Steam Machine in 2026

2026-03-06T18:39:25-05:00

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 its …

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Valve’s Steam Machine has been delayed, and the RAM crisis will impact pricing

2026-02-05T05:37:13-05:00

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 ha …

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Steam Machine today, Steam Phones tomorrow

2025-12-04T10:38:02-05:00

The Steam Controller.

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 ho …

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Steam Machine and Steam Frame: your questions answered

2025-11-18T11:32:22-05:00

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!

So, let's start with…

What is a Steam Machine?

The Steam Machine is a specific living room gaming PC coming out in early 2026. It's not your typical Windows PC. The 6-inc …

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The Steam Machine feels like the TV gaming PC I’ve always wanted

2025-11-18T08:53:42-05:00

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 fo …

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Valve is making microSD cards the next game cartridges

2025-11-13T20:02:51-05:00

The microSD card slot on Valve’s new Steam Frame VR headset.

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 Ste …

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Valve wants Half-Life: Alyx to work well standalone on Steam Frame

2025-11-13T15:37:07-05:00

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.

"Half-Life: Alyx is a great experience when streamed …

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Dbrand is turning the Steam Machine into a Companion Cube

2025-11-19T10:10:35-05:00

Dbrand warns: “The Companion Cube cannot feel pain. Or speak. If it tells you otherwise, we urge you to ignore it."

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.

Dbrand CEO Adam Ijaz told The Verge that the Cube is a shell that attaches to the Steam Machine's own chassis, and that it's been designed not to block any air intakes or the rear exhaust. The design is still being refined to work a …

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The Steam Frame has two speakers on each side of your face for vibration cancellation

2025-11-12T19:32:23-05:00

In its new Steam Frame VR headset, Valve put dual audio drivers on each side in the included head strap. That puts the audio near your ears while you're wearing it, and in my brief time trying the device at Valve's headquarters recently, I thought the sound was just fine. But the choice to have those dual drivers also helps reduce audio vibrations, which helps the headset with tracking while you're playing games in VR, Valve hardware engineer Jeremy Selan tells The Verge.

The Frame, like many other VR headsets, uses outward-facing cameras built into the main part of the headset for tracking. However, audio with good bass "induces vibrations …

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Valve’s new VR streaming trick won’t just work with its own headset

2025-11-12T19:35:12-05:00

Valve's new streaming-first VR headset - the Steam Frame - employs a clever trick to help make game streaming feel as low-latency as possible. It's called foveated streaming, and it means the headset requests a higher-quality image for the content that's right in front of your eyes while lowering the resolution of your peripheral vision to reduce bandwidth and processing demands.

The headset relies on a couple pieces of hardware to make that happen. The first is a dedicated wireless streaming adapter that sends games from a PC to the headset. The second is a pair of eye-tracking cameras inside the headset that follow where you're looking. …

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