A few years after successfully expanding the handheld gaming market with the Steam Deck, Valve is trying its hand at a console-like experience again.
Valve announced several new hardware products yesterday, one of which is simply called the Steam Machine. It’s actually Valve’s second attempt at such an idea (the first being about a decade ago), but the conditions feel a bit more right this time around, especially with the future of Xbox being a bit uncertain. The Steam Machine is, essentially, a console version of a Steam Deck: It runs the same software, SteamOS, and will play games from your Steam library while plugged into a TV, like a console.
There is some bad news, though: We don’t have a price or release date for it yet. Stay tuned for that.
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The main difference between this and a Deck, of course, is that the Steam Machine will be far more powerful. According to Valve, it’s six times more powerful than the Steam Deck. Here are the specs Valve released for the Steam Machine:
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CPU: Semi-custom AMD Zen 4 6C / 12T
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GPU: Semi-Custom AMD RDNA3 28CUs, 2.45GHz max sustained clock, 110W TDP
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16GB DDR5 + 8GB GDDR6 VRAM
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Two storage options: 512GB SSD and 2TB SSD
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2x USB-A ports on the front
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2x USB-A ports on the back
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1x USB-C port on the back
Valve is promising visuals and performance in the neighborhood of 4K and 60 frames per second with this device. It’s hard to say yet how it will compare to the PlayStation 5 or Xbox Series X in terms of power, but it will almost certainly be at least in the same ballpark, given that those devices launched five years ago. Of course, it also has the advantage of being able to play a massive library of PC games spanning multiple decades.
It might be a while before it’s out, but there are plenty of reasons to get excited now.
