The Steam Machine hoves into view – we've been waiting months now for Valve to get into gear and announce both the release date and pricing for its highly-anticipated Steam mini-machine, and rumours are now swirling that everything will become clearer next week.
Depending on which leaker or report you pick, you might end up being told confidently that pre-orders will open on 22 June, next Monday, or that they might go live any time that week, but everyone seems to agree that we'll get some proper news in that window.
That's got us thinking once again about what we want from the Steam Machine, and what it has to do to really make a proper impact on the market – so here are three things we want to see from it.
1. Decent value, if not the steal of the century
If Valve had managed to get the Steam Machine ready a few years ago, it might have been too early to the market for the demand to have built up, but it probably would also have been able to build a proper little bargain of a machine for people. It's fairly clear at this stage that such a thing might be too difficult a demand in the year 2026, with the memory crisis continuing to wreak havoc.
Pricing is a huge variable for the Steam Machine, in case that wasn't obvious, and rumours about what it'll cost go from £999 here in the UK (which would be no disaster) to options closer to £1500 (which would indeed be fairly dire).
Where the machine lands is going to be massive for its long-term fortunes, and we can only hope that it ends up being around that £999 mark to give it a chance of looking like fair value. At this point we're no longer expecting a stunning deal, but something that looks solid enough might just be doable.
A decent amount of stock
Valve has been making popular hardware for a good few years now, but that doesn't mean that it hasn't had plenty of brushes with stock shortages. Even the new Steam Controller's launch has been noteworthy for how scarce it's been, albeit not to the levels of a launch PS5 back in the back old days.
So we're very much hoping that Valve has calculated the interest levels properly for the Steam Machine – it would be a real shame if it sold out instantly upong becoming available. Of course, it almost certainly will, but we're moreso hoping that Valve has plans in place for further waves of stock.
It should probably launch with an immediate reservation system much like the one now in place for the Steam Controller, but it's fairly hard to know whether that'll happen straight away. We hope it does, to cut down on pre-order chaos when things go live.
Some proper power
The last big question for the Steam Machine is how it'll run the latest games – meaning how much power it'll have at its disposal. Valve has already said that its machine should be able to run many modern releases at 4K resolution at 60fps, but there's still a lot of grey area there.
With FSR upscaling at play to sharpen things up, that means it sounds like there's quite good headroom in the Machine's capabilities, but it's still hard to know what that looks like until we get actual benchmarks out.
If we crank Cyberpunk 2077 up to its maximum settings, how will things fare? How will the Machine's ray-tracing capabilities stack up? And how will it do with even more recent releases like 007 First Light and Forza Horizon 6, both of which tie in really well with Nvidia GPUs, with less active partnership on the AMD side?
These are all unknowns until Valve goes deeper into the technical side of what it's offering, so all we can do right now is hope that the power on offer is enough to make this a proper living room option, something that can compete with the PS5 Pro but with more versatility and compatibility.
