Phoronix article: https://www.phoronix.com/news/Steam-Machines-Frame-2026
Also listed here: https://store.steampowered.com/sale/hardware
Valve has already sent support for the new Steam Controller upstream: https://www.phoronix.com/news/New-Steam-Controller-SDL
Ah yes, the gabecube
Me in 2001 with a stuffed nose:
Steam Deck was the Gabe Gear, this is the Gabecube, all we need now is a smaller Steam Deck - the Gabe Boy.
Well, you do have the Gabe Virtual Boy.
They really need to sell these in Walmart next to the Playstation. It’ll be the year of the Linux desktop!
I am European but no. That would increase the price and i believe valve wants to sell as cheap as possible.
The announcement did not include Copilot? No mention of 300 useless AI features being shoved down our throats??!
It’s wild how by virtue of the fact that Valve isn’t a publicly traded company beholden to shareholders, the same Valve which has a history of putting out half-baked goods and which has an always-on DRM client called Steam, seems poised to surpass most of its competitors both in the user privacy and hardware hardware spaces with just straightforward products. They have a product to sell, and that’s it. They don’t need to micro-optimize for bullshit like seemingly every other large tech company does.
It feels like just yesterday that VR was the big hype tech.
VR is so fucking cool tho
To be 100% honest, I like Bitcoin and LLMs too. Could use some pigouvian taxes though.
BTC is neat and I do have some, but I didn’t get into LLMs, no use case for me at this point. But I think VR is in a completely different bucket. VR was so fucking awesome for my partner and myself to chill out in with our friends in 2020 when we couldn’t go out and see peeps. It’s also easily the best most fun form of exercise.
VR has actual staying power though. It genuinely adds a lot to a game or a simulation. VRchat especially is like a deeply emotional thing to folks who don’t feel like they belong in their real bodies and can exist in VR a more true representation of themself
That’s because they make an insane amount of money by taking 30% of every sale on their platform, which nearly everyone uses because they’re a near monopoly and the alternatives are terrible. Around $3.5 Million per employee, nearly 5x the next highest company, which is Facebook at around $780,000 per employee.
I should note that 30% is incredibly standard in the industry, and Valve offers a LOT more for that 30% than literally any other digital publisher. Physical publishers take substantially more, and the only digital store that offers less is EGS, which is simultaneously absolute dogshite and also has been trying very, very hard to astroturd the ‘30%’ thing for ages.
Nintendo, Sony, and Apple all take 30%. I think MS does as well, but don’t quote me on that one.
don’t forget google. that applies to all paid apps, in app purchases and donations on the play store, not only for games. google also forbids you from showing any other donation option on your website if you link to it from your app.
I’m going to be honest, I have no idea how I forgot google. They also definitely take 30%.
Can confirm; my app was removed from the Play Store due to a donation link to my PayPal. Absolutely insane.
Fwiw, GOG has no DRM for their titles (its own niche space, not competition). Not sure if they charge 30% too, but even in such case they’re giving you more because of the lack of DRM.
Steam is quite virtuous, they gave us Proton. But is far from being based.
GOG has no DRM, but they also don’t offer the same kind of services, like workshop, updates, cloud sync, etc.
Not trying to say they’re worse or anything, I love GOG, but it’s really kind of comparing apples to oranges here.
GoG also sold the modern hitman games which have DRM.
There are also many games on Steam that are DRM free, you may need to use the Steam Client to download them (but possibly also Steam CMD) but then you can copy the files off as a backup and run them without Steam
Can confirm. Serious Sam Classics are copy and paste-easy to share
It’s fucking wild. Like, I love Steam, don’t get me wrong, but holy shit just suck less (edit: than other stores do) and charge less (edit: of devs) and you could gobble up a lot of that market share. But none of them do.
Notably Epic charges less than 30% (something like 12% IIRC) to try to get more of that market. They even give away games. But their app is still inferior so it gets less use.
Because Epic doesn’t care about end users and won’t add necessary end user features like reviews.
It’s cool that Epic wants to pay developers more, but the way they disregard the consumer makes the platform non-viable
company: “I want what steam is making and more” shareholders: “brilliant”
“I want what steam is making but I’m not willing to improve service OR charge less!”
Most other competitors charge less than steam, but steam has a clause which prevents devs from putting their games cheaper elsewhere. This is the real big shitty move made by valve, otherwise they do mostly everything right. I hope someone challenges this clause in a court of law someday, it looks very monopolistic to me
Except that is a thing only for selling steam keys outside steam. There are no price parity clauses.
https://partner.steamgames.com/doc/features/keys
Also here is a gamedev saying that they’ll sell their game for a cheaper price on EGS: https://twitter.com/HeardOfTheStory/status/1700066610302603405
https://store.epicgames.com/en-US/p/heard-of-the-story-ff3758
https://store.steampowered.com/app/1881940/Heard_of_the_Story/
If what you saying was actually the case I am 120% sure Tim Sweeney would be all over it lol.
Lastly, there was ALREADY a case like that (Valve vs. Wolfire). The courts couldn’t find anything regarding Wolfire’s claims and then dismissed the case.
Ho ok, my bad, I completely misunderstood the issue then. It seems reasonable to impose a price equivalence on steam key
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Around $3.5 Million per employee, nearly 5x the next highest company, which is Facebook at around $780,000 per employee.
that’s a bullshit metric only useful to incite hatred. why the fuck do you want to say that valve is “this many times worse than facebook!”? it is obviously false.
only thing this proves is that they have relatively few employees. which also probably means that most of them do real work instead of being overloaded with managers
The numbers just show that they are 8x as efficient. I only referenced Facebook because they’re the next closest company for comparison.
I never said they were worse than Facebook. That’s your assumption, reading what you want, not what’s actually being said.
Their efficiency is largely due to their flat organizing structure. They have no real hierarchy to speak of.
Which is also one of the reasons so few new things get done, and why they (until now) haven’t been able to count to 3.
To get anything done you either have to be able to do it entirely by yourself which is unlikely, or get enough others organized and on board to make it happen.
What? Valve released CS2 like last year? They do stuff all the time. They have like three games they’re actively maintaining while making HL3 and three new pieces of tech? This is a wild, unfounded take and feels ideologically bound.
That was 2023, and one of very few things made not to specifically promote their hardware or as a cheap spinoff of existing IP. And define “actively maintaining”, because general bug fixes for decade old multi-player games and managing item marketplaces doesn’t require much manpower.
Going further back there’s Aperture Desk Job which was a tech demo for the Steam Deck in 2022. Then an extended cut version of Artifact originally meant as a sequel in 2021, which is a Dota 2 card game, but still remains unfinished, so effectively abandoned. Then Half Life: Alyx in 2020 which 90% of gamers can’t play because it’s VR only, and clearly made to further promote their VR hardware. Dota Warlords in 2020 which was originally a community game mode. The original Artifact in 2018, which had abandoned iOS and Android ports. The Lab in 2016 which was made to promote the launch of the HTC Vive. A zombie CS spinoff in 2014, Dota 2 in 2013, CS:Go in 2012, Portal 2 in 2011, and Left 4 Dead 2 in 2009.
If you remove the spinoff and niche stuff from the list you get game releases in 2023, 2020 (arguable since it’s VR only and thus inherently niche), 2013, 2012, 2011, 2009.
That’s a pretty big gap of not much for the last decade game-wise. Its been previously documented and published that Valve has issues getting games developed because of the flat organization structure. Articles like this.
The VR headset is going to be standalone??
That’s pretty nuts right?
even more nuts is that it will support pc games via FEX, an emulation layer that runs x86 windows games on ARM in Linux
In addition to streaming from your battlestation
Crazy…
But does it have a crazy price?
Im guessing Vive prices. Id be suprised at less than 1k, but no word on it yet.
Valve said they expect it to be cheaper than the Index, so it shouldn’t be more than 1k
Frankly it all three are logical next steps. With the way windows is going, valve needs to decouple it’s store from the windows dependency. The deck was the tester, now we get the not so cheep next generation
I mean, that was the goal of the original steam machines from 2012 or whatever
Any ideas on Linux support?
They talked about streaming VR games from the SteamOS based steam machine to it.
So with that I’d assume we’re finally getting some much needed progress to SteamVR on linux.
Yeah, this is what I’m most looking forward to in the immediate sense tbh. It’ll be nice to play HLA without crashing every time it loads a new level as it currrently does for me in SteamVR (Monado doesn’t have this issue, but I can’t use my left-handed controls without Steam input :-|)
pretty sure it’s SteamOS, an Arch Linux derivative, on a fairly popular Snapdragon platform. probably not too difficult to hack on it.
It days right in the marketing text that the headset is “a PC” which to me implies full SteamOS distro with no limitations on installing a different OS, if you can get the many hardware drivers to work.
My understanding from the video is that the headset will run SteamOS itself.
The headset itself is running linux and it is meant to be used with the steam machine, which also runs on linux.
There are a lot of specs missing from what the streets were hoping for from the holy grail of VR headsets, but I’m starting to believe that they are not going for that. It seems they want to win in the mid-range market competing directly with Meta. Honestly, “Quest 3 without Meta” is already very compelling. I guess it’s not all down to how competitively they decide to price it. “Cheaper than Index” is already good news for my wallet at least.
”Quest 3 without Meta” is what I’ve been dreaming about. I feel like Steam Frame could be my entry to the VR space, if the price is decent.
I believe the cost of Meta devices is also subsidized by surveillance capitalism, so if this costs more, doesn’t spy on you, and lets you do whatever you want with your own hardware, then it’s worth voting with your wallet. If Valve somehow is able to price this similarly to a Quest 3 while having better specs and without exploiting their customers like Meta does, then all hail the great and mighty Gabe.
Personal privacy is always worth the cost. The ‘subsidies’ can go away anytime, so better to not be locked into an expensive spyware platform to begin with.
I don’t see it in the hardware design, but from a software perspective the groundwork is there for modularity. Offloading the core compute to the PC frees up onboard processing to run peripherals like full color front cameras (onboard are black and white / IR) and more advance proximity detection, hell hook up lidar and go nuts with full body tracking.
That said, all of that would depend on decent I/O. 2x USB4 ports would go a long way.
https://youtu.be/dU3ru09HTng?si=PieCP6UcXKjk_Q0w
Welp, looky there, an expansion port right on the bridge of the headset with PCIE compatibility.
I don’t like the look of this controller… I’m still gonna get one. Everything else I love.
Especially that SteamOS is apparently going to become available on ARM devices.
Arch linux ARM (the base of such steam os) has existed for a while now. Not to diminish Valve efforts, just putting in some context.
I’m running it on my raspi but it seems like the repos have been frozen for a while now?
Fex works for most games now! This is amazing.
And now there are arm systems that are powerful enough to compete with consoles easily (consoles probably already using ARM?)
Same, but at least it feels like the focus was on usability rather than looks. Keep it humble, Steam!
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It’s most probably gonna be around $1k, I saw someone say they expect it to be $900, but nothing concrete yet
Valve engineers told GamersNexus that it should be priced no more than the index, but they did not specify which kit or package of the index. So yeah, anywhere from 700 to 900 dollars probably.
I’d jump on a steam deck with updated hardware, too bad it looks like it will be staying the same
Edit:
Yeeaaaahhhh it’s going to be a while, they want a great performance jump without sacrificing battery life
I think they’ve been waiting for what I’ve been predicting for a while. They’re going to make the next steam deck ARM based so they can make it potentially smaller or at least better battery life. Since the new frame is ARM, I think it’s everything but confirmed now. Since they said they want the new steam deck to be a significant step up they’re probably now waiting for certain components to go down in price so it can be more powerful than the OG but not be too expensive.
Hopefully the Frames can compete with the Meta Quest in both price/performance. It will be good to have relatively affordable VR headset not made by Facebook.
@[email protected] @[email protected] it would certainly be good for it to be relatively affordable but they’re really not promising it will at the moment since they only said aiming it to be cheaper than an Index.
Wish I didnt have to wear glasses, otherwise I’d use my Index alot more.
Inserts?
Considering that Quest is sold at a loss and tries to make money forcing you to buy games, I don’t think it’s likely
It will be priced as it isnt locking you into a ecosystem like meta, so it will be of course a bit more pricey. ( rumors say roughly 1200$ )
Any educated guesses, or layman guesses, about the price?
My layman guess is 600-800, the low price being same price as the top end steam deck on release
From what I understand the Steam Machine performance is somewhere between Series S and Series X. I don’t think it will cost more than a Series X.
Maybe 600.
The Machine will apparently be about the price of “an entry level PC”.
The Frame will “not cost more than the Index”.
For the cube I expect 1k USD minimum.
I don’t see that being the case, it’s relatively low end silicon, with meh levels of RAM and very poor levels of VRAM.
Seems to me like they’re targeting a lower price point, which I think is a good idea if they want to take market share from Microsoft.
Yeah, I was very surprised to see the only upgrade is a generous storage from 512 GiB to 2 TiB… I would rather build my own PC, spend a little extra, cover other needs I have (zfs pool for videos), and get a good GPU that I can always replace for a newer one in a few years… But of course, that’s just me. That new GPU could easily cost as much as the Steam Machine itself, hehe. Of course, it would be way more powerful…
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As a Mac user with an Xbox, this thing looks like a breath of fresh air! My Xbox (Series X) is still running well, so I continue to use it, but I kinda want this Steam cube thing, if the price is right. I don’t want to buy any more products from Microsoft, and while I tolerate Xbox, I do not like Windows. (I tolerate it at work because I have to, but I’d prefer not to have to mess with it.) I could hang with Linux if I wanted to go down that road, but it looks like this will be a suitable alternative for gaming… if the price is right.
I’m in a similar boat. I have both PS5 and series X. Consoles are getting enshittified at an increasing pace. I welcome valve improving Linux compatibility as they invest more in their devices. I don’t think I’ll be getting Sony or Microsoft’s next consoles.
Same. I have a PS5 and a switch, both that I hardly use now.
There isn’t really any point in comparing this to a games console. There would be no real point valve developing a console because pretty much all of the games on their platform expect to run on a PC so they’d end up having to emulate keyboard inputs as a lot of their library won’t really work with a controller in any logical sense, so they might as well just make a PC.
Have you, uh, seen steam input and the new controller with the touch pads? It sounds like you haven’t…
FEX is the most exciting thing for me!
Right? It’s a huge bridge between x86 and ARM, it just opened up a potentially huge market for lower power consumption gaming devices. You could have like a Gameboy that runs silksong or something.
But what about the steam carrots and broccoli?
Or the Steam(ed) Dumpling.
Or the steamed hams
2026 Year of the Linux desktop?
Surely this will bring over a lot of people to Linux
Year of the Linux living room
Glad Valve is making a console but that’s an ugly fucking controller
It does look very chonky, and not very aesthetically pleasing.
However, as a heavy user of the steam deck over the past year, I am super excited. The track pads and the extra inputs on the steam deck give so much flexibility to play games that otherwise wouldn’t work well with controller at all. I’m just hoping it feels better (or at least not worse) than the steam deck in terms of ergonomics. I plan on getting one for my desktop PC.
I give 0% of shit how it looks, all I care about it ease of use and performance. Track pads at your finger tips takes getting used to, but it’s a game changer for any game that isn’t classically easy to play with a controller.
If a game isn’t easy to play with a controller then I’m probably just not going to play it with a controller to begin with honestly, track pads or no. If I have to mess with stuff in desktop mode on my steam deck then I use the pads but otherwise, I haven’t really found them useful.
To each their own, but you don’t really need to mess with stuff.
For me, a game like fallout 3 or NV where I prefer fps style controls but don’t care enough to sit at my pc to play, the steam controllers track pads are perfect.
I do get it though, it takes practice.
Ok but HL3 wen
You just added 3 more years to its release
It’s at least 6 years now.
