Valve Revealed More About Steam Machine & Frame

Right now we are craving basically anything we can possibly know about Valve's upcoming Steam Machine and Steam Frame. Frankly, I am a lot less interested in the Steam Frame than I am the Steam Machine. Maybe things will change. Maybe this is the time that I actually really like VR and VR is going to change everything for me. I don't think that's going to be the case. The Steam Machine I'm interested in because I really want to know how they price this thing and exactly how it's going to perform in real world tests. And recently we got a little bit more info about what's going to happen at GDC. Now I'll leave the full slides linked down below because most of the stuff in here we've already seen before. It's kind of like a overview of the hardware, but there's a few interesting inclusions. For the game developers out there, you can see how many people are actually playing your game on the Steam Deck. So if you want to go and optimize things specifically for the Steam Deck, maybe make sure it's being verified on the Steam Deck, have a native Linux version if that's what you want to do, all that information is going to be there so you can make that sort of assessment. And obviously when the Steam Frame and Steam Machine are also out, that's going to be expanded to include that information as well. But most of you aren't game developers and instead are the ones playing the games and want to know sort of how things are going to work. So they actually talked about how the Steam Machine Verified program is going to work. This is like the Steam Deck Verified program where Valve goes and says, Okay, this is the games that we know are working, we know are playable, we don't have an idea about, we know are unsupported, things like that. So you have a general idea of what's probably going to work. And on the Steam Machine, a lot of that existing Steam Deck information is going to be reused because a lot of it basically also applies here. All Deck Verified games are machine verified because the Steam Deck is pretty much just a handheld version of the Steam Machine and if it performs fine on the Steam Machine, works fine on Linux, there's no reason why it also wouldn't work on the Steam Machine. Same input expectations as the Steam Deck. So the new Steam Controller, this is basically the Steam Deck without the screen. It has the same buttons, a slightly different layout, you know, things are angled in a slightly different way, but for the most part, it's a Steam Deck. So if it works with the Steam Deck input, it's going to work with the Steam Controller. This right here is the documentation on what specifically you need to look for input. So obviously having the controller support, the game actually, you know, recognizes the controller, having the correct controller glyphs. This part here, this one will have to be slightly modified, the text input. So this allows for input with the on-screen keyboard. Obviously on the Steam Machine, you're not going to have a touchscreen to use the keyboard. I would assume you're still going to be able to use the on-screen keyboard with like the little touchpads, but it's going to be a little awkward. I would hope that any game that says supports controller supports text input with a controller in some sort of way. 30 FPS at 1080p for verified performance is 6x the Steam Deck. Now without proper independent benchmarking, I don't buy this number. You shouldn't buy this number. I don't know what game this is tested in and what their methodology is, but that is what they are claiming. Now IGN actually makes a really good point for once, and this is very rare for IGN. What happened to 4K60? When Valve first showed off the Steam Machine, it made a big deal out of it being able to play games at 4K with 60 FPS as long as FSR is enabled. Frankly, I don't think they ever should have made a big deal about FSR and being able to do 4K60 because you're not playing 4K60 on that device. Unless you're playing like Stardew Valley, it's not going to happen. While it seems like that target is incompatible with the verified program, only requiring 1080p at 30 FPS, it actually makes a lot of sense. After all, if you turn FSR to performance mode on a 4K display, the game is going to be rendering at 1080p anyways. Yes, so like you can, it's going to pretend to be 4K and it's kind of like 4K sort of. It's an approximation of 4K, but not really. It might have been nice to see Valve stick to its marketing and say the Steam Machine is a 4K60 machine. It's not a 4K60 machine though. But with the GPU being the equivalent of a Radeon RX 7600M, 1080p at 30 FPS is a much easier bar to clear. Even then, I'm curious to see what sort of coverage they're going to get with this device. The Steam Machine will probably lose some of that performance upscaling to 4K with FSR, but as long as the game has some breathing room over that 1080p, 30 FPS minimum, it should have no problem being playable at that higher resolution

even if it isn't native 4K gameplay that we'd all like to see from a new gaming device in 2026. Can I just say, I legitimately don't care about 4K gameplay. I've never cared not cared about it since literally the beginning of talking about 4K displays. Can we focus more on higher refresh rates? No one actually cares about, oh, it's a higher resolution, especially with a lot of people playing on garbage displays, sitting halfway across the room. Higher refresh rate though, that you immediately feel. Obviously, they won't be testing a display resolution or legibility because it doesn't have a built-in display. And again, you're playing regular, this is a PC, right? Display legibility is going to be the same on playing, like, you know, on a console or a regular PC or anything else out there. It's not like you're playing on this tiny little display where you actually do need to make sure the text is readable. And they're going to have an updated API to easily detect hardware. Also, they have this nice little flowchart showing what is and is not going to be supported. So if through the Steam Deck testing, it is Steam Deck verified, then it's just machine verified. If it's playable because of legibility or default resolution, it's verified. If it's playable for things like input and various other things, it's still probably going to be marked as playable. If it's unsupported, it's unsupported. If it's unsupported because of performance, then you can do an additional test and say, okay, is it unsupported on the deck because it's slower? Or is this just a game that is not going to run on this hardware whatsoever? I've said it before and I'll say it here again. And I'm not a big fan of the Steam Deck verified system. Not because having a system that is of Steam Deck verification is a bad thing, but it's always been kind of messy with what games get accepted and what games don't. I've seen games that are marked as verified that crash on launch. unsupported when the only issue they have is the resolution is a little bit funky out of the box or maybe it doesn't have a default profile that runs well on the Steam Deck, but turning it down, it just works totally fine. And there's oftentimes a lack of instruction on what you might need to do to resolve the issues. This is why I highly recommend people, anytime you play games on Linux and you're not sure if the game is going to work well, go over to ProtonDB. On this site, we can search for a game, I don't know, let's say Path of Exile, which we've been playing a lot of recently, and we can say, give it a moment, oh, it's marked as gold, and there's also this section here on the Steam Deck. I don't know why you'd play PoE on the Steam Deck, because the game doesn't run well on anything, but you have separate sections here to know the different devices you want to play on and also settings to change to make it work better. Now, as for the Steam Frame, we have a separate section on this as well. So, when we are doing streaming of a game from your PC over to the headset, there's no verified program for doing the streaming, because the Steam Frame itself isn't actually doing anything besides accepting a video stream and sending over input. So, anything that you can stream is going to work fine. If it runs well on your host PC, it will run well on the Steam Frame, streaming is optimized, no extra work on the developer. This is what you should expect for doing any sort of streaming, anyone who thought anything else. I don't know, you're kind of insane. The important part, though, is actually running games on the device. So, the Steam Frame Verified program is just running games directly on the hardware. This is for VR and non-VR games. So, you want to play Beat Saber, for example, a VR game, and then let's say you want to go and play, again, don't play it on the Steam Frame. Let's say you want to play Path of Exile on a big 2D screen. That can also be done on the Steam Frame as well, and that is also going to be involved in the testing. I can tell you now, it's going to run badly, because it runs badly on my 9800X3D, but that's PoE for you. I believe this is going to include both games running through Fex, and also running through Leptin, which is the way to run Android games, the Wadroid fork they have. I believe both of those will be included in their verification program. As for input, it needs to be fully playable with the Steam Frame controllers. Most things probably will be if they're playable on the Steam Deck. It has pretty much the same input, but performance for VR is very important. Standalone VR titles, 90 FPS. So they're going for 90 FPS for VR stuff. A lot of people want them to target higher. I can understand that. I presume if it's a stable 90, it's probably going to be fine. But again, I'm not a big VR guy.

As for standalone 2D titles, 30 FPS at 720p. So again, this is slower hardware, and it's doing ARM translation. So you kind of get what you get. And obviously, like the Steam Deck, the UI needs to actually be usable in VR. And again, we also have another flowchart if you like flowcharts for some reason. Unlike with the Steam Machine, if a game is Steam Deck verified, it is not automatically verified on the Steam frame, because you're now playing in VR, you now have different controllers, concerns to make sure a game is going to run well. Also, the hardware is slower than what is in the Steam Machine. At that same talk, Valve also had something else to say. If you have a line on a bunch of RAM, we're in the market, and we would like to buy it. Now, obviously, this is kind of a joke, right? Everyone's making a big deal about this quote. Oh my God, they're saying that the device is never going to come out because they need RAM. And hey, do you have RAM? They probably do need some RAM, right? Don't get me wrong. and they're not actually asking the general consumer to just send them RAM to make the Steam Machines. At the same time, if you're selling a computer, you're in a really bad situation right now. I talked a bit about this at the time, but about a month and a half ago, they also posted this. Steam Hardware, Launch Timing, and Other FAQs. Currently, we're still sitting at 2026, and basically, they don't know what it's going to cost. They, like, I'm sure they're, like, bouncing around numbers internally on maybe we charge this much, maybe we charge that much, but honestly, I am kind of worried for what happens to the Steam Machine. Because whilst they have been saying this is faster than what most people on Steam have, and I do completely believe them in what they're saying because most people do not have a fast computer, the longer you delay things, the more things begin to catch up. And, you know, the rumor is that the GPUs they have, it's kind of just GPUs AMD had, and they aren't really the fastest thing anyway. As we've seen, like, most people are speculating somewhere around, like, 7600M, which, you know, that already puts you quite behind what the pinnacle is, and then the floor is slowly creeping up as well, and whatever you price it at is gonna be a mess because there's no way this is gonna be priced in a way that anyone is gonna be happy about because they could say, oh, we're just gonna release it at, I don't know, $1,200, and they could, and that would be presumably a reasonable price to put it at. But no one's gonna look at this hardware and say, I'm gonna pay that much money for it. But if they then release it at something that people actually would pay for, they're probably gonna be taking a massive hit on these devices and trying to make things back on game sales through Steam. They've already pretty much said that they wanna do PC pricing as opposed to console pricing, which, at least in my mind, pretty much rules out that approach altogether. But if you don't do that, I don't know who's gonna buy it with the way that RAM is currently priced. At the same time as all of this, you'll see a statement made by Valve about one of the lawsuits they're involved in, one of the many, many lawsuits about the New York Attorney General lawsuit against Valve. This is the New York lawsuit regarding mystery boxes, crates, the, uh, the gamba that is present in a number of Valve games. You may have seen the New York Attorney General recently filed a lawsuit against Valve claiming mystery boxes like crates, cases, and chests in some of our games violate New York gambling laws. We don't believe they do, and we are disappointed to see New York Attorney General make that claim after working to educate them about our virtual items and mystery boxes since they first reached out to us in early 2023. We rarely talk about litigation, but we felt we should explain the situation to you. We shared with the New York Attorney General that these types of boxes in our games are widely used not just in video games, but in the tangible world as well, where generations are grown up opening baseball card packs and blind boxes and bags, and then trading and selling the items they receive. On the physical side, popular products used in this way include baseball cards, Pokemon, Magic the Gathering, probably Pokemon way too much, and Labubu. In the gaming space, digital packs similar to our box date back to 2004 and are in widespread use. Players don't have to open mystery boxes to play Valve games. In fact, most of you don't open any boxes at all

and just play the games because the items in the boxes are purely cosmetic. There is no disadvantage to a player not spending money. In the process of cooperating with New York Attorney General's investigation, we shared with them our efforts over many years to shut down accounts found to be using Valve's game items on gambling sites in violation of the Steam subscriber agreement. We also shared with them our efforts to combat fraud and theft of users' items and our extraordinary measures to stop gambling sites from taking advantage of Steam accounts and Valve game items. Valve does not cooperate with gambling sites. To date, we've locked over a million Steam accounts that were being misused by third parties in connection with gambling, fraud, and theft. We've also shipped features like trade reversal and trade cooldown to discourage gambling sites' ability to operate and protect Steam users from fraud. And we forbid any gambling-related business to participate in or sponsor tournaments for our games. We have serious concerns with many of the alterations the New York Attorney General claims are necessary to make to our games. First, the New York Attorney General seems to believe boxes and their contents should not be transferable. They appear to assume digital mystery boxes and items in our games are different from tangible items like baseball card packs which contain random cards and take issue with the fact that users have the ability to transfer the items they receive through Steam trading or user-to-user sales on the community market. We think the transferability of a digital game item is good for consumers. It gives a user the ability to sell or trade an old or unwanted item for something else in the same way an owner can sell or trade a tangible item like a Pokemon or baseball card. New York Attorney General proposed to take away usability to transfer their digital items from Valve Games. transferability is a right we believe should not be taken away and we refuse to do that. You know what I think is actually the case here? They want a cut of the tax revenue. That I think is legitimately what is happening here and it's probably not going to happen. The New York Attorney General also proposed to gather additional information beyond what we normally collect in the course of processing payments about each game user on the off chance someone in New York was anonymizing their location to appear outside of New York such as by using a VPN. This would have involved implementing invasive technologies for every user worldwide. Similarly the New York Attorney General demanded that Valve collect more personal data about our users to do additional age verification even though most payment methods used by New York Steam users already have age verification built in. Valve knows our users care about the security of their personal information and we believe it's an owl and their interest to only collect the information necessary to operate the business and comply with law. In addition although this case is about mystery boxes we feel the need to address comments made by the New York Attorney General about games real world violence and children. These extraneous comments are a distraction and a mischaracterization we've all heard before. Numerous studies throughout the years have concluded there is no link between media movies, TV, books comics, music and games and real world violence. Indeed many studies highlight the beneficial impact of games to users. Ultimately a court will decide whose position ours or the New York Attorney Generals is correct. In the meantime we want to make sure you are aware of the potential impact to users in New York and elsewhere. While this isn't related to the Steam Machine and the Steam Frame I had no other time that I was going to be talking about this I didn't really feel like doing a dedicated video on it so I thought I just added in on the end here and if you stuck around if you didn't well I don't know you're not here so you're not going to hear me say anything. So let me know with everything going on with the price the Steam Machine is probably going to be at let alone the Steam Frame as well are you actually interested in these devices or is it at the point where you would like to be interested but you know how much it's going to cost? I'd love to know and um I guess let me know your thoughts on the verification as well yeah if you have any thoughts on these devices I would love to see them so if you like the video go subscribe as well and if you really like the video and you want to become one of these amazing people over here check out the Patreon, SubscribeStar, Liberapay, linked in the description down below that's going to be it for me and like Steam I'm going to fade away