The Vergecast - Is the Steam Machine worth the wait?

Episode Date: June 22, 2026

Valve has been trying to crack the living room for more than a decade, and the new Steam Machine is its best attempt yet. It's a little bit PC, a little bit console, and a lot pricy — starting at $1,049, it had a lot to live up to. The Verge’s Sean Hollister has been testing the device, and shares his findings on whether the Steam Machine can hang with PlayStation and Xbox. He also explains why, despite a never-ending list of challenges, Valve is still trying to make this device work. Further reading: ⁠The Steam Machine is the most ambitious game console I’ve ever played⁠ Subscribe to The Verge for unlimited access to theverge.com, subscriber-exclusive newsletters, and our ad-free podcast feed. We love hearing from you! Email your questions and thoughts to [e-mail] or call us at 866-VERGE11. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Welcome to the Virgcast, the flagship podcast of Ray Tracing. I'm your friend David Pierce, and today on the show, we're talking about the Steam Machine. After months of waiting, the Virgin's Sean Hollister finally got his hands on Valve's new living room game console. He's been testing it. He's been playing games. He's going to come on and tell us all about how he feels and whether this is the next big thing in PC gaming. I'm very excited about it, if I'm being honest. The Steam controller seems to be great. I sort of accidentally built a big library of Steam games over the years,

and I do too much of my gaming right now on a Switch 2. It's probably time to upgrade. We're going to get into all of that in just a minute. But first, here's everything else happening at The Verge today. This is 90 seconds on the Verge for Monday, June 22nd, 2026. Instagram just announced a bunch of new features specifically aimed at people who watch Instagram on their television, which I assume is currently no one.

There are new introspace channels you can watch. You can watch stories and reels. And Instagram even says it's test. testing longer form content, episodic series, and even things like live streaming on TVs. The context here is that YouTube has been growing like crazy on bigger screens over the last few years, and Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube are all so desperately copying each other's features that they're just rapidly becoming the exact same scroll-y video app, and I find it exhausting. The Phone Maker Nothing canceled an upcoming device, which would have been a follow-up to the CMF Phone Pro 2.

Nothing's co-founder said that, quote, with memory prices where they are right now, we can't build a phone that feels like a genuine step forward at a price that makes sense for CMF. Yikes. This is bad news for CMF fans, sure, but it's also a sign of things to come. We've talked a lot about the rising price of gadgets over the years, but as prices go up, a whole class of these lower-priced gadgets, in particular cheap phones that billions of people rely on, are just being priced out of existence. And finally, all your vibe-coded projects might be a total security disaster.

All of mine, too, don't worry, and everyone else's. Vervege contributor, Yail Grower, has the story of all the ways AI coding agents can screw up and all of the ways that can leave your data exposed. Claude code is fun. Don't get me wrong. Just be careful out there. You can read more about all of this at the verge.com. That's 90 seconds on the verge for Monday, June 22nd. Support for the show comes from Service Now. AI is moving fast across the enterprise, but without visibility, it's just chaos. different tools, different models, different teams using AI in completely different ways.

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All right, let's talk Steam Machines. The Virginie Sean Hollister is here. Hi, Sean. Hi. Tell me what games you've been playing the most over the last few days. You've been reviewing the Steam Machine. What are the first and second games you go to to review the Steam Machine? I always try to test systems like this with Indiana Jones in the Great Circle because this is really demanding.

And it can play on there. And from 12 feet away on my couch, it's a pretty good experience. I'm whip cracking some Nazis. It's great. That's very exciting. That's a good first one to start with it, because I also feel like Indiana Jones has reached the Assassin's Creed level of like you can almost certainly play it on anything that plays games.

It's just sort of everywhere now. It's great. And then, of course, I had to do a little bit of portal because everybody loves portal. This is a valve product we're talking about. I want to start at the beginning a little bit with the Steam Machine because the fact that this exists is sort of fascinating to me, We first talked about the steam machine in November, and I would be lying to you if I said I didn't half expect it to have been canceled by now

because of Ramageddon and the rising cost of supply chain things, and everything is just getting harder for something like the steam machine. Are you a little surprised that this thing has actually shipped to you and is inside of your house right now? A little bit. I would say that the overarching valve strategy is they build things, that they want to exist for themselves, and they're totally fine if they're going to be trickling this out

to early adopters for the next two to three years, which I'm afraid they might have to, because supplies are going to be low for this thing. We've been tracking their shipments overseas, and they don't have that many tons of steam machines going over the ocean. And so I kind of love that in one way, because it means that by the time this reaches lots of people, like the steam deck took months, maybe a year,

to reach the people who wanted it, it'll hopefully be done. It'll hopefully feel like a game console experience where you just fire up your game and it works and it's beautiful. It is not quite that today. So tell me about that experience, actually, because my sort of most immediate big picture question for you is just fundamentally why this thing exists.

And I think as much as I've come to understand, it's what you just said about the particulars of the experience of, sitting down on your couch and playing video games. Seems to be the whole driving force behind why this exists. Can you just talk that out a little bit for me? The Steam deck was, you like the idea of games that just work. You shied away from PC because games don't necessarily just work. But what if you could have your games everywhere with you, like an Nintendo Switch,

and those PC games kind of just work? And a lot of people were like, I am a PC gamer now and I didn't realize it, or I'm coming back to PCs after years. This is that for your TV. So you're a console gamer, or you're a, you know, somebody who was loose, used to think they were a PC gamer, you don't have time for that anymore. You don't want to mess with settings. You take this box, you stick it under your TV, and it should be like the experience of a PlayStation. In this case, it has about the power of a PlayStation 5, but you are technically loading PC games, this catalog, this back catalog going back decades and decades of PC games.

You can run them on your cache, and you do not need to plug a mouse or keyboard into this box. if you do not want to, you can just use a controller. You can use the steam controller if you want to have touch beds. You can use a random Bluetooth controller that you buy from MateBit Doe or whoever for $30 a bit on Amazon. It all should work. And it all does work up until you reach some weird bugs that they haven't quite ironed out yet. Okay.

Still, it all does mostly work. Strikes me as a pretty big achievement for something like this. Like, you and I have spent a lot of time on this show talking about the, way that Windows just continues to fail as a gaming platform in a whole variety of ways, right? It's too resource intensive. It's too complicated. It just is not the thing that PC gamers need. There's so much baggage. Despite the fact that it is literally what PC gamers need, right? So it seems like it seems like Valve has to a large extent solve some of these problems. But the thing that is so fascinating to me is that this is the second time Valve has tried to do this. It first tried

over a decade ago. Yeah. And it super didn't work. And Valve changed nothing about its strategy and now it kind of worked. They changed one super important thing about the strategy. One M-thing.

And that is this. In 2012, 2013, 2015, by the time they actually shipped the thing, I have a controller. Their idea was, we will build the hardware and they will come.

And they was developers building Linux games. They thought, if they'd just built the hardware. All of a sudden, people would turn around and build games for Linux. That's just a straightforward console idea. Right. You're just being Nintendo at that point. You make a console. You make games for our console. Exactly. And they couldn't get the partners to do that. And the partners that they did have were not to be trusted to get the thing out

there. And they screwed up the controller timing. And it took the hardware was ready. The controller wasn't ready. The OS wasn't right. Etc. Etcetera. Developers were not going to build games for that. The grand thing that they have changed. The amazing insight. is they don't need Windows, but they do need Windows games. So you are literally playing Windows games, 90% of the time when you're running a Steam deck, when you're running them on a Steam machine.

They are the same games. Developers don't need to modify them, but they're going through this layer. They're going through Proton, which is built on Wine. We've talked about this before. Nowadays, many operating systems are using layers like this. Your Mac can play and run apps that were designed for Intel Silicon

on its arm chip because of a translation layer. This is not quite the same thing, but it's got similarities to that. We're going to see the same thing happen with phones that are playing, Steam games soon. You can already do this

if you know the right software, download, game native, game hub. And now we're putting this on this TV box where they've got a chip in it that is roughly the power of the PS5, give or take. And unfortunately, if you are running games

that were literally designed for the PS5 and then brought to Windows on it, Because Sony optimized those for the PS5, they look a little bit better on the PS5 sometimes than they do on the Steam Machine. The PS5 is six years old. The Steam Machine is brand new. You're playing games at roughly the same performance,

and you're paying about twice the price to get the Steam Machine instead of your PS5. But you get that back catalog of decades of games that the PS5 does not have, and the thing is literally a PC too. Several Verge editors right now are dual booting Linux

or straight up running Linux as their desktop operating system that they do work on. I am dual booting it too. I now have Bazite and Windows on my desktop PC. I'll tell you what, I took this little box,

I plugged in literally everything that was plugged into my desktop PC, my monitors, my speakers, my headset, my mouse keyboard, all that stuff. And it just worked.

Wow. On this box and all of a sudden I was doing work on the steam machine instead of doing it on my Windows PC. So you talk about $1,049 for this little box

if it doubles as a PC for you too I think it's worth the money. If it doesn't, I don't know. That's super interesting. And even whether this thing is expensive as a gaming device depends on whether you perceive it to be a console for your living room

or a gaming PC, right? Tell me about this thing actually as a piece of hardware. Like, as a spec it out for me like a gaming PC. How does it hold up? Okay, so this is a six-core AMD Zen4 processor. It's a lot like an AMD-Risen 5, 8540U, which if you've no idea what those alphanumerics mean, it's like a mid-range laptop processor,

which is more powerful, newer technology, than the CPU that's in the PS5. It has an RDNA3 GPU, which should have more power technically than what's in the PS5, but it's only got eight gigs of GDR6 V-RM. People have been mad about this since the announcement, right? Eight gigs of V-RAM was like the people had pitchforks

that said eight gigs of V-Ram about the steam machines. They did. And you can't, unfortunately, do a direct comparison to this GPU to basically anything else in the market because the only time AMD has shipped a GPU quite like this is an external GPU. It's like an external box that you would plug into a laptop. But if you know what those are,

it's around on RX 7600, 7700, like M or XT, somewhere in that realm. And so what you get out of that, because of that 8 gig by V RAM, you can get this thing playing games on your 4K screen, but you're talking about upscaling, super resolution upscaling from basically 1080P. If you think of this as a 1080P console that can output a 4K image, that's the way to think about this. And there'll be some games, like on the original PS5, where you're running at lower resolution than that internally. So Alan Wake, you know, that might be 847P

is the number of vertical lines you'd get instead of getting your 1080 instead of getting your 4K. So it's very similar to the PS5 there. But if you take that PS5 image and that Steam Machine image and you look at them side by side in like Sony optimized games, Sony has techniques like checkerboard rendering where it can make things look a little bit crisper than they would be. Otherwise, If I look at Cyberpump 2077, it looks better on the PS5 than it does in the steam machine. If I look at Horizon Zero Dawn, it's a bit of a toss-up. If I look at Returnal, Returnal looks better on the steam machine to me. I can get more resolution out of the steam machine there.

So on balance, roughly PS5-ish graphics-wise. I feel like that's a comparison. A lot of people can probably hold in their head. That seems useful. But that PS5 digital edition, that PS5 digital edition was 400. and now it costs $600, and this costs $10.49. Yeah. The price has been the big unknown about this thing for a very long time. Tell me your first reaction when they told you what the price was going to be just a few days ago.

My first reaction was actually, that's not as bad as I thought. Same. Actually, I was fully prepared for them to be like starts at $14.99 and goes up from there. I feel like they could charge what they want to for this out of the gate, because it's early adopters that are going to be getting this. It's going to be people who are really, they really want the steam machine, they want the new hardware,

they want to have the thing that nobody else is going to have, they want to experience it in beta. My headline on my, or my deck, on my original steam deck review, was early access memories because it felt like it was a handheld in early access.

It was fun to be there in early access. People are going to feel that way about this thing, too. They're going to be printing, you know, new face plates for it. It comes with like these ones out of the box and that wooden one back there. I wanted a 3D print something.

I didn't get quite done in time for the Frugast. They're going to be super into this. And they could charge a lot. But what they told me, what Pierre Lou Grafay and Laurence Eang told me, the developers that the, perhaps let's call them the lead developers of this system. It's a team effort, but they're kind of public faces over at Valve. What they told me is they are selling this at cost. I mean, you can get a broad stroke understanding of it by looking at what RAM and storage

cost now versus what. They cost it back then. The cost of the product is basically the cost of the components and what it takes to make it. For instance, Steam Deck, we recently had to change our price, not because Steam Deck changed, but because the price that it costs to actually make Steam Deck with those same components change. If you're looking at something like the Steam Deck and the Steam Machine where we were envisioning it and where we are now, I would say that the new price is actually much more aggressive on that. So we're trying to make it as fair as possible there.

this whole industry has kind of transitioned to a model where you don't know what the cost is going to be ahead of time. COVID kind of paved the way for that a little bit. The price that, you know, we might get more parts to make it, but the price might be double what it is today, right? And so at that point, we have to make the calculus of like, oh, should we still build machines with this, right? And like, at what cost? And so we're thinking through all that right now. At some point, we were not even convinced we could build, you know, any significant quantity. So I think we ended up in, I guess, a pretty happy spot overall.

Oh, yeah. I mean, well, it is still pretty aggressive for us to hit this price. So even though it's more than we wanted it to be, like, we're happy that it can be this at the very least. So this is very much like a Razors and Blades model, right? That this company is confident that it will sell enough games to make not making money on the console worth it over time. I think so. They wouldn't tell you that, though. They always say it's about the learnings.

They're like, I don't know what to believe. Like, of the... Learnings don't pay the bills, you know what I mean? Of the people I have talked to who say things like this, I would say I believe them 10% more than I would believe anybody else. That's fair. Because Valve just makes so much money per capita that they can afford to throw ridiculous amounts of money at projects that they think will give them learnings down the road.

do I believe it 100% I do not but they do learn a lot from this and I do believe that there is some small part of Val that's like I want this to exist in the world we want this to exist we want to play this we want this in our homes and we're happy to sell a few more to our devout fans along the way yeah I mean I think that approach is

one that has worked extremely well for Valve over the years right like the steam deck was very much that especially at the beginning and that has turned into something pretty powerful and very popular for a lot of people. But you'd say Razor and Blades model, and that makes me think that they should subsidize

this, right? Like Sony used to do with the PlayStation, like Microsoft used to do with the Xbox, Microsoft says it's not going to do that anymore. And they are not doing this. They are most definitely not doing this. They don't seem to be bundling a new half-life with it either as an exclusive. They say they're religiously

against these things. They do not want to do that. And I think that's Maybe a little bit of a shame, because if this were priced less, it could be the console, too, not just the PC for your living. Interesting. Yeah, part of me has been wondering if knowing what we know now about what this stuff costs, I'm so sure that when they initially specped this thing out, it was not supposed to cost anywhere near $1,049. I know they wouldn't tell you what price they wanted it to be. Boy, am I sure it was not $1049. But I also, at this point, given what we know about the market, I'm not at all surprised by the idea that some of the parts of this box is 1049.

Like that actually sort of tracks. But part of me wonders, okay, we know it's going to be over $1,000. Let's bump it up another couple hundred bucks and make this thing like stupendously powerful. If they accidentally sort of made the wrong price performance tradeoff in trying to make the right performance price tradeoff two years ago or whatever it was. Obviously, it's hindsight, it's complicated to know, but like, if this thing were vastly more powerful and $1,500, would it be that much less compelling to a lot of people who are already willing to pay over $1,000 for it?

I don't know. If they could bump up the price $100 and have 12 gigafee ram instead of $8, then it would not struggle so much to do 1440P 4K stuff the way it does. It'll play lots of 4K on older games. It'll look great. It's just when you get to the games that are really RAM intensive, and they're starting to be that way. Indiana Jones, Alan Wake, too.

You start to run into things. There's actually a bug that I guess I was one of the reviewers helped discover during the review period, where when it was running out of V-RAM, when you were hitting that ceiling, it would spontaneously reboot. It would crash. It would do all kinds of crazy stuff.

They seem to have fixed that. One day after I reported, they're like, hey, tell me if this is fixed, please. And it was, thankfully. Feel like you're being told to, wave a magic AI wand and everything will just get better? Sure, AI can chat and summarize. But what about big business problems?

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Creator destroys the show that argues. They've always been the same thing from the Box Media Podcast Network and the Wisdom is coming. New episodes drop weekly on YouTube and your favorite podcast app. Tell me about the out-of-box experience with this thing because I think, again, if you're a valve and the goal here is to make something that runs like a Windows gaming PC, but doesn't feel like you're sitting on your couch operating a Windows PC, that the very first, like, 10 minutes of the experience feels like it would tell me an awful lot about how Valve succeeded or failed on that front. So what is the sort of initial steam machine experience like?

Unfortunately, the initial steam experience we tried is not the final experience. I'm hoping that they ship the final experience by the time you're watching this video, listening to this podcast, because I need to try it again. But how it is during the review period is you turn on your controller, it's not prepared, like a PS5 controller, Xbox controller would be you plug it in, you do this little dance where it's going to update the controller, and then you unplug it, and then you're setting up your Wi-Fi, and then it's plug it back in again so you compare it to the internal antenna,

and you start downloading a game, and when you launch the game, it's still downloading dependencies, because that's to download some proton and some Steamworks. They advertise that you could stick in an SD cart full of games from your Steam deck, and you could just play them. And you can after you download the proton dependencies and so on again. So it should really ship with all this out of the box. Then again, I have some tolerance for things have to download when you first boot the thing. Like, that's everybody's experience with all of these now.

Yeah. Everything has some giant system download when you first turn it on, and it sucks. But that feels like just kind of the state of things. They're fixing some of this. And then the Windows state of things, of course. If this was a Windows box, when you used to do a first-time setup on a Windows box, you're sitting there for like 45 minutes. Oh, yeah, it's awful.

Yeah. As it's downloading, like, it seems like the entire operating system. Again, it's not really. It's slip streaming some things in, but it's a lot. And then you have to navigate the screen, and then you have to set up your, you can set up Steam Big Picture Mode on a Windows box so that you launch into it every time, but you have to set that up. And on the Valve machine, I mean, you're there in a controllable interface with

your controller with your game pad. You just scroll it across the screen. My kid can figure it out. She wouldn't like the waiting part of waiting for this stuff to download, but she could do it herself. I mean, that's a big win. And I will say as a piece of hardware sitting underneath your TV, I'm just looking at the one behind you, it's pretty innocuous.

Like, it certainly does not look like you put a giant gaming PC underneath your television. That's a win all on its own. It's roughly the size of the game cube. Let me pull them both out. I'll give you a look. Sean just reached back and yanked two things out of the wall. I totally yanked it while it was running. It was running portal on the CRT.

So this is the steam machine right here. And then, and now we have a game cube right next to it. So this is the game cube and the steam machine. They are roughly, roughly the same size. The steam machine's a little bit taller. And of course, the game cube has that carry handle. So, yeah. And you can change these face plates.

On the steam machine, the steam machine starts with a black one, not this walnut color. So there's the black one up here instead. It does pick up fingerprints. This finish picks up a lot of fingerprints, but it's going to be under your TV. So I'm not thinking that's a huge deal. Okay.

Yeah, I mean, the size of it is pretty nice. Like, I'm just so used to this new run of consoles, particularly the PS5, which is just preposterously huge. Oh, yeah. And so anything that actually will sit underneath my television, big victory. More important. this fan, they designed the whole unit around the fan. Giant fan goes all the way through the

system, through these big grates on the other side. And this is so cool and quiet. And the frame rate is so stable. Yeah, it's not going to run everything at 4K. But I'm running a game and I'm like, if the game is, you know, 60 FPS average, it might be 52 FPS low. And that's like, if you've got a variable refresh rate TV, that means it is smooth all the time. It also means that if I want to pump up the graphics a little bit, if I don't need that 60 FPS average, if I'm like, I could do 45 FPS, 48 FPS. If that is the average and the low is like 42, that experience, that 1440P Indiana Jones, that is smooth if you have a variable refresh rate TV.

It feels really good. The overarching takeaway here is it is a console level, console, right? Like pretty easy to use, pretty good gameplay, but you're not sort of blowing anything out of the water. And I guess the case here, if you're a Valve, is it's all of that with access to your Steam library of all of the games that you've already bought. Right? So I feel like if I'm, if I'm already a Steam person and I'm already deep into this space, this becomes very compelling because like re-buying the six games

I play most is already going to make up the cost difference. But I'm particularly curious for someone who is just coming relatively fresh to this space. I don't have a giant library of games.

I don't want a high-end gaming PC. That is not a thing I'm interested in. I just want a thing where I can sit down on my couch and play games. Can the steam machine hang in that competition right now? It can for now.

Right now, when I reviewed the PS5 Pro, I'm like PS5 versus PS5 Pro, the PS5 Pro has so much more horsepower. The games look so much better if you're three feet away. If you are 12 feet away on your couch, I do not notice an important difference between the PS5 and the PS5 Pro. I also do not notice an important difference

at 12 feet away between the Steam Machine and the PS5 Pro. It's hanging with them, unless you're doing something like ray tracing, which this one's kinds of sucks at, but not a lot of PS5 games are using a lot of ray tracing anyway. So when you're in that experience, yeah, but the PS5 is also from 2020.

It is six years old. This is just coming out now. How long is it going to be before we have a PS6, Xbox, you know, the next Xbox, how long is it going to be before that next wave of consoles come out? In that way, the RAM crisis is actually helping Valve a little bit here, because what the grapevine says is Sony and Microsoft are going to buy their time, rethink their strategy, possibly delay a year or two. So the steam machine has a little bit of time to hang, the same way the steam deck had some time to hang.

Steam deck was not as powerful as other handhelds, not as powerful as consoles. It was $400 for an entry-level Steam deck when you could buy a PS5 for $400. Is it worth spending for much less graphical horsepower if you get to take it with you? is the Steam Deck value proposition. Is it worth spending so much more for the same graphical horsepower, but now it's under your TV, it's also a PC,

it has access to all these games, the PS5 doesn't have. That's the Steam Machine value proposition. Right. And I think you're right about the timing because I think about, it wasn't that long ago that Microsoft was talking about

how basically no one is going to be able to afford Project Helix the next upcoming Xbox, that they're already preparing people for this thing is going to be prohibitively expensive, to the point where we maybe have to rethink our entire strategy of how games work

because consoles are going to be so expensive that most people are not going to want them. Which brings me to one of the things I've been thinking about a lot with this, right? Part of the Steam Machine Playbook, at least back in the day, was for it to be kind of an ecosystem, right? That Valve didn't want to be the only company

making this kind of PC slash console. Is that still in the roadmap for Valve? They still say that. And as a matter of fact, as part of this announcement, They are saying, maybe not very forcefully, but they're saying lightly, that if you want to put SteamOS on your desktop PC,

if you finally want to put desktop PC parts against it, you can do that now as long as you have an AMD GPU. I think you can do it if you have an Intel GPU, too, not Nvidia yet. Okay, so you can hack and touch your way into a steam machine, basically, is the idea. You can't. If you know what you're doing, it's not something where they're going to help you do the dual boot or the installer necessarily yet. It's something where you're going to have to free up space on your own drive

wipe it or start with brand new hardware, but you can do this if you want to. You've been able to do this. It hasn't worked very well with Intel GPS. Still does not work with Nvidia GPUs. Intel is kind of a new addition fairly recently that it seems like it's getting there. But they've done the work for years now

to get all the controllers and peripherals and stuff. You can imagine if you have any kind of game pad, mouse, keyboard, I plugged an optical drive into this. I can play a Blu-ray on this by plugging and Blu-ray drive into it. It does all the stuff. It will work on here. and it's just a matter of GPU.

And so not Invidia yet. They are not saying it super, super forcefully yet. It's kind of like if you want to go ahead and experiment kind of thing. Okay. They maintain tight control over who can ship a box with preloaded steam

and preloaded Steam OS. Manufacturers cannot just go do this. They need to have a technical partnership. They say it's not a license. agreement, they say it's not a business deal. They call it a technical partnership. They want quality control is what Valve wants over the end result. They don't want just anybody to be able to ship one and it's terrible and it stains the reputation. And that kind of is what happened in 2012 through 2015 when they tried to do it the first time. It's partly Valve's fault,

but it's also partly the manufacturer's fault. They did not deliver stuff that really worked well with this. There was a company that said they were doing Steam OS and they didn't have any authorization whatsoever, and it wasn't going to work on that machine, for instance. So if this all works, cast this out a little ways. Isn't this exactly the same playbook that Xbox is trying to run right now? You have a library of games. You have a bunch of different hardware you can play it on, some of which we'll make, some of which we won't make.

You can already run it on your phone. Aren't we just doing Xbox everywhere, but it's Steam? Like, am I missing something? I'm grinning ear to ear right now. You can see me gritting ear to ear because this is the, The right question, and it's like absolutely one of the thoughts in Microsoft's mind, except Microsoft seems to have contradicted itself almost every day over the past three weeks about what it plans to do.

I mean, true. Yeah. They're like, we don't think we can have a, we don't think we can sell $1,000 consoles. So we're going to find new business models. And maybe those business models are going to be partnering with other companies. But those other companies can't ship hardware that's less than $1,000. We have seen repeatedly with these handhelds. They have no idea how to ship it without hand sales.

Microsoft would love it if all of a sudden everybody was making the Xboxes for them and they never had to build hardware again. To that end, Microsoft is like we want to make and provide games and we will make hardware to the extent that it enables that. But also if there's a rich, huge hardware ecosystem, we don't really need to be part of it. And Valve seems like it might as well be running down the exact same road in the exact same way. It just doesn't have, it may have, like you said, taken a tighter grip on who gets to do what

and how it partners in order to make sure all this stuff works, which I think is the right thing to do. But like, steam everywhere feels like it is just coming right for us. Every time I talk to Valve, they tell me that other manufacturers, that they seem themselves as paving the way for other companies to do this thing, that they are like,

this is the example of what you can, can do if you get off your bum and do it. We don't think anybody will do it unless we do it first, but once we've done it, others can. The reality is once Valve has done it, they require a partnership in order for anybody else to do it. And Valve is a 300-person company, 350-person company, that the other OEMs out there do not think they can rely on. If I talk to, you know, if I talk to through the grapevine, you know, I'm hearing through the grapevine. that these companies have established relationships with Microsoft, that bear fruit, that send dollars their way,

that, you know, get responses quickly, and they do not feel they have that relationship with Valve yet. Valve has started this relationship with Lenovo. Lenovo's put out one device with SteamOS. It theoretically had a second one before market conditions made it impossible to release that device for a price that anybody wants to pay. It was supposed to be out, I think, this month.

We'll see if it still is. The Legion go-to with SteamOS in case you're wondering. And I just don't know, like, is Valve going to make the time for more companies? When is Valve going to make the time for more companies? Will Valve change its mind and just say, SteamOS is here. Go ahead and use it. You don't have to pay us a cent. I don't know.

Yeah. So we're recording this a few days before your review comes out. You have a lot of testing left to do. But what is your early sense right now? Is this thing ultimately a success? Did it work? Did it do the job? Is this the steam machine we've been waiting for?

Oh, not, not quite. I really wanted it to be a console, not just a PC, and it might be in a month. It could be. Like the steam deck shipped broken, buggy, utter mess. A month later, it was something that I could recommend to my friends. Six months later, it was something I could remember recommend to tech heads. A year later was something I could recommend to anyone. I'm hoping the

steam machine is on the same path. Valve is the only company I trust to put it on that path because they are religious about software updates and even bringing new features to things years down the route. There's new functionality for the original Steam Deck LCD coming out this month where it'll be able to do proper hibernation, you know, instead of just sleep. That could be pretty cool. like they really believe in that and they really deliver on that and so I believe they can it is not that yet right now

it is in a better place than the original steam deck was but it is in a place where it is early access they have delivered for the kind of people who will jump in as an early access adopter who want to be there for that ride

the price is not excessive for that particularly if it's going to double as your PC but it's no PlayStation. That sounds about right. All right, go back to playing Indiana Jones. Thank you for coming on. Good to see you.

Oh, you bet. All right, that's it for the show. Thank you to Sean for being here, and thank you, as always, for watching and listening. If you have thoughts or feedback or strong feelings about the $1,049 price, if there are other things you wanted to see from the steam machine, we are all ears.

Call the hotline 866 Verge11. Send us an email, Vergecast at the birge.com. I really am curious if you're a person who is, like, actively making a gaming buying decision. You're looking at a Switch 2 or an Xbox or a Steam Deck or a Steam machine or a PS5, how you're thinking through that decision right now. Call us, email us, tell us all about it. As always, a reminder that the best thing you can do to support The Verge and all of this stuff

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podcast network. This show is produced by Josh Kajas, Eric Gomez, Brandon Kiefer, Travis Larchuk, and Aaron Lacassio. We'll see you tomorrow. Rock and roll.