Gaming on the go was just the start of Valve’s push to make Steam used in more places. A PC is on the way, as is a controller and a neat portable VR headset.
Ever since PC makers found a way to make the hardware more portable with gaming PCs to go, folks who love to game have found a way to do it in more places. A combination of high-end chips, great screens, and solid controller design come together to make this gear, and while there are clearly a few, none do it quite as well as the Steam Deck, a spot of hardware made by the maker of titles Half-Life and Portal, Valve.
A bit of a clever gamble from the game maker, the Steam Deck brings its game storefront to a piece of hardware designed to run many of the games found on the platform, basically making it possible to take them with you.
Laptops made for gaming aren’t anything new, but they’re still relatively sizeable, offering the high performance hardware needed for gaming in sizes ranging from 13 and 17 inches.
Portable gaming PCs are even more portable, packing that tech into a smaller backpack-friendly space you can take out nearly anywhere, something the Steam Deck help popularised, but it’s not done there.
While you can game on the go with that piece of hardware, Valve will have three new bits of gear next year designed to add Steam easily to your TV and to your head of all places. Quite literally.
The Steam Machine is basically a PC made for Steam, running a semi-custom AMD chip and GPU designed to be more powerful than what’s in the Steam Deck, and armed with 16GB RAM, up to 2TB storage, expansion with a microSD card, and of course, Steam OS.
Valve also notes you can run other apps on the Steam Machine because it’s a PC, and can even install another operating system if you wanted, but the Steam Machine is basically a Steam Box: it’s a PC with a more powerful incarnation of the tech in the Steam Deck, faster WiFi, an HDMI 2.0 port supporting 4K, USB-C, Ethernet, and even a light strip for status updates that you can also turn off.
It also includes a wireless adapter built in for another piece of Steam hardware on the way, the Steam Controller, a literal wireless (and wired) controller that works with anything able to run Steam.
If you can play Steam games on your Steam Deck, you can use it there. If you play Steam titles on the Steam Machine, you can also use it there.
And if you grab Steam’s ‘big picture” mode and run it from an Apple TV to another laptop in your home, you should be able to sync it up and use it for that, as well, or even just the PC or Mac in your life running Steam.
It’s a controller. It’s exactly what you expect it to be.
Perhaps the most impressive spot of Steam tech on the way is for your head, coming in the Steam Frame.
A virtual reality headset, the Steam Frame will use a Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 processor like phones, but instead of Android, opts for SteamOS, just like the Steam Deck.
The hardware is designed to be lightweight, weighing 440 grams when the headset strap, speaker, and rear battery are all connected, with the specs including 16GB RAM, either 256GB or 1TB storage, and two 2160×2160 LCDs (one per eye), with cameras both on the inside and outside covering eye tracking (inside), and space and hand tracking (outside).
Two VR controllers are a part of the package, and while you’ll need those for VR games from Steam, you’ll also be able to play non-VR regular games on the headset, as well, making them seem bigger with your own personal screen of sorts.
If anything, the two that grab us are the Steam Machine and the Steam Frame, the former because buying a dedicated games PC can be difficult, while the latter is intriguing because VR gaming to go can’t be found in many options, and Steam already offers several titles. Plus Valve has proven it can build solid games hardware, so it could just nail the template for portable VR.
Sadly, there’s no word on pricing for any of these, but Australia is on the cards for release, as well as the US, Canada, UK, and Europe, with an expectation of early 2026 for the release cycle.
