gaming

Microsoft makes Zork I, II, and III open source under MIT License

Activision, gaming, GitHub, Infocom, Jason Scott, microsoft, MIT license, Open Source Programs Office, OSPO, Tech, xbox, zork, Zork I, Zork II, Zork III / Kelly Newman / November 21, 2025

Zork, the classic text-based adventure game of incalculable influence, has been made available under the MIT License, along with the sequels Zork II and Zork III.

The move to take these Zork games open source comes as the result of the shared work of the Xbox and Activision teams along with Microsoft’s Open Source Programs Office (OSPO). Parent company Microsoft owns the intellectual property for the franchise.

Only the code itself has been made open source. Ancillary items like commercial packaging and marketing assets and materials remain proprietary, as do related trademarks and brands.

“Rather than creating new repositories, we’re contributing directly to history. In collaboration with Jason Scott, the well-known digital archivist of Internet Archive fame, we have officially submitted upstream pull requests to the historical source repositories of Zork I, Zork II, and Zork III. Those pull requests add a clear MIT LICENSE and formally document the open-source grant,” says the announcement co-written by Stacy Haffner (director of the OSPO at Microsoft) and Scott Hanselman (VP of Developer Community at the company).

Microsoft gained control of the Zork IP when it acquired Activision in 2022; Activision had come to own it when it acquired original publisher Infocom in the late ’80s. There was an attempt to sell Zork publishing rights directly to Microsoft even earlier in the ’80s, as founder Bill Gates was a big Zork fan, but it fell through, so it’s funny that it eventually ended up in the same place.

To be clear, this is not the first time the original Zork source code has been available to the general public. Scott uploaded it to GitHub in 2019, but the license situation was unresolved, and Activision or Microsoft could have issued a takedown request had they wished to.

Now that’s obviously not at risk of happening anymore.

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Google’s latest swing at Chromebook gaming is a free year of GeForce Now

chromebooks, gaming, GeForce Now, Google, NVIDIA / Beth Washington / November 20, 2025

Earlier this year, Google announced the end of its efforts to get Steam running on Chromebooks, but it’s not done trying to make these low-power laptops into gaming machines. Google has teamed up with Nvidia to offer a version of GeForce Now cloud streaming that is perplexingly limited in some ways and generous in others. Starting today, anyone who buys a Chromebook will get a free year of a new service called GeForce Now Fast Pass. There are no ads and less waiting for server slots, but you don’t get to play very long.

Back before Google killed its Stadia game streaming service, it would often throw in a few months of the Pro subscription with Chromebook purchases. In the absence of its own gaming platform, Google has turned to Nvidia to level up Chromebook gaming. GeForce Now (GFN), which has been around in one form or another for more than a decade, allows you to render games on a remote server and stream the video output to the device of your choice. It works on computers, phones, TVs, and yes, Chromebooks.

The new Chromebook feature is not the same GeForce Now subscription you can get from Nvidia. Fast Pass, which is exclusive to Chromebooks, includes a mishmash of limits and bonuses that make it a pretty strange offering. Fast Pass is based on the free tier of GeForce Now, but users will get priority access to server slots. So no queuing for five or 10 minutes to start playing. It also lacks the ads that Nvidia’s standard free tier includes. Fast Pass also uses the more powerful RTX servers, which are otherwise limited to the $10-per-month ($100 yearly) Performance tier.

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Celebrated game developer Rebecca Heineman dies at age 62

3do, Atari 2600, baldur's gate, Brian Fargo, Doom, Fallout, game development, gaming, Gaming History, GLAAD, Google, Interplay Productions, Jennell Jaquays, lgbtq, Obituaries, obituary, Olde Sküül, Rebecca Heineman, retrogaming, retrotech, Scott Miller, space invaders, stadia, Tech, transgender, video games, Vintage computing, wasteland / 9u50fv / November 19, 2025

From champion to advocate

During her later career, Heineman served as a mentor and advisor to many, never shy about celebrating her past as a game developer during the golden age of the home computer.

Her mentoring skills became doubly important when she publicly came out as transgender in 2003. She became a vocal advocate for LGBTQ+ representation in gaming and served on the board of directors for GLAAD. Earlier this year, she received the Gayming Icon Award from Gayming Magazine.

Andrew Borman, who serves as director of digital preservation at The Strong National Museum of Play in Rochester, New York, told Ars Technica that her influence made a personal impact wider than electronic entertainment. “Her legacy goes beyond her groundbreaking work in video games,” he told Ars. “She was a fierce advocate for LGBTQ rights and an inspiration to people around the world, including myself.”

The front cover of *Dragon Wars* on the Commodore 64, released in 1989. Credit: MobyGames

In the Netflix documentary series High Score, Heineman explained her early connection to video games. “It allowed me to be myself,” she said. “It allowed me to play as female.”

“I think her legend grew as she got older, in part because of her openness and approachability,” journalist Ernie Smith told Ars. “As the culture of gaming grew into an online culture of people ready to dig into the past, she remained a part of it in a big way, where her war stories helped fill in the lore about gaming’s formative eras.”

Celebrated to the end

Heineman was diagnosed with adenocarcinoma in October 2025 after experiencing shortness of breath at the PAX game convention. After diagnostic testing, doctors found cancer in her lungs and liver. That same month, she launched a GoFundMe campaign to help with medical costs. The campaign quickly surpassed its $75,000 goal, raising more than $157,000 from fans, friends, and industry colleagues.

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The Analogue 3D is the modern N64 fans have been waiting for

analogue, Emulation, fpga, gaming, HDTV, n64, Nintendo, openFPGA, Upgrade / DJ Henderson / November 18, 2025

Excellent design and display filters, but the lack of OpenFPGA support rankles.

Your Super Mario 64 cartridge has a new home. Credit: Kyle Orland

If you’ve ever tried to hook an old Nintendo 64 up to a modern HDTV, you know the results can be less than ideal. Assuming your original hardware still works and your flatscreen even has the requisite R/F and/or composite inputs to allow for the connection, the N64’s output will probably look like a blurry mess on a flatscreen that wasn’t designed with those old video signals as a priority.

The Analogue 3D solves this very specific problem very well, with a powerful FPGA core that accurately replicates a Nintendo 64 and well-made display filters that do a good job of approximating that cathode-ray tube glow you remember from decades ago. But the lack of easy expandability limits the appeal of this $250 device to all but the most die-hard fans of original N64 hardware.

A beauty to behold

As a piece of physical design, the Analogue 3D is a work of art. The gentle curves of its sleek black shell evoke the original N64 design without copying it, coming in at a slightly smaller footprint and height. Plus, there’s no ugly power brick.

3D COMPUTER GRAPHICS SYSTEM. Kyle Orland

This is a solidly built device, with a nice grippy underside and springy, elegant power and reset buttons. The shell has a lot of small, thoughtful touches, too, like a front power indicator that doubles as a Bluetooth sync button and lights on each controller port to indicate when a wireless controller is connected to that slot (the Hall Effect joysticks on 8bitdo’s wireless “64” controller are a joy compared to the crunchy mechanical sticks on your old N64 controller).

The one downside to this design is that the hardware can get slightly hot after running for a while, and it emits some noticeable fan noise when stressed. The welcome screen when you first boot the system recommends you give the vents adequate space to breathe, so be careful if you plan to place it directly on the carpet or something.

I saw the TV glow

The Analogue 3D’s custom 3DOS software automatically detects the game cartridge you’ve placed into its top-loading slot and displays basic info like player count, developer/publisher, and release date on-screen (you can also load your own custom cartridge images onto an included SD card). The system maintains this info in a scrollable list of every cartridge you’ve ever inserted, allowing for a quick way to browse through your library without the need to dig out your actual cartridges. You do have to plug in the cartridges to actually play the games, though, which limits the usefulness of the on-screen library more than a little bit.

Before you launch a game, you can also configure the Display Mode between five preset options (these can also be swapped during gameplay using controller hotkeys for an on-screen menu). Of these, you’ll generally want to stay away from the “Clean” option, which upscales the N64’s 320×240 image by simply blowing up each individual pixel to fit the display. The result is an incredibly blocky image with lots of jagged edges and blobs of color that refuse to blend well with nearby elements. It’s a look that’s especially unsuited to the low-resolution textures on most N64 games, which exploited the gentle blur of a CRT to create some vivid effects.

Switching over to the “Scanlines” display option helps a bit in rounding out those jagged N64 polygons, but things really start to look better if you activate one of the system’s three different CRT emulation modes. With these, 3DOS does its best to recreate the look of an electron beam actually scanning across the phosphors on an old tube TV. These filters do an admirable job of softening the hard edges of polygons and sprites while subtly and accurately blending the colors on those low-res textures.

A scene from Starfox 64, upscaled with the Analogue 3D’s “Clean” filter (direct capture). Nintendo / Analogue

The Analogue 3D has three tube TV emulation modes, each representing consumer CRTs and the kind of Pro/Broadcast Video Monitors you’d usually only find in TV station control rooms. You can go into the menus for each mode and tinker with settings like “beam convergence” and “edge hardness,” and you can toggle N64 hardware effects like anti-aliasing and de-blurring (you can also stretch the 4:3 image to fill a 16:9 display if you’re a specific kind of monster).

In general, though, I didn’t see much upside in this kind of settings tinkering. Using the system’s default “CRT” settings created a visual experience that was surprisingly authentic to the actual CRT sitting in my home office. The only thing really missing is an option to simulate the curve of a classic CRT; the hard square edges of the Analogue 3D output are a bit lacking on that score. But that’s a minor complaint for a filter that does such a good job mimicking an old TV on new display technology.

Paper Mario with the Analogue 3D’s “Clean” filter (direct capture). Nintendo / Analogue

Open and shut

Like previous Analogue hardware, the Analogue 3D uses FPGA to accurately recreate the inner workings of an N64 at the level of individual logic gates. This time, the Analogue 3D’s Altera Cyclone FPGA sports a whopping 220,000 logic elements. That’s a big step up from the two FPGAs on 2021’s Analogue Pocket, which have just 49,000 and 15,000, respectively.

That powerful FPGA allows for perfectly accurate and lag-free N64 emulation in all of our tests with original cartridges (Analogue’s Christopher Taber warns us that “flash carts and unofficial 3rd party products can be a bit of a wild card”). But players hoping to emulate other gaming systems with that powerful hardware may run into some problems. That’s because the Analogue 3D doesn’t support the OpenFPGA standard that Analogue itself rolled out in 2022 as “the future of video game preservation.”

That standard has allowed a vibrant community of OpenFPGA developers to create dozens of free “cores” that can recreate everything from classic arcade games to 16-bit consoles with amazing fidelity. Currently, though, those cores will only work on the Analogue Pocket and not subsequent hardware like the Analogue 3D or 2023’s Analogue Duo.

That’s a shame because the OpenFPGA community would certainly be happy to get their hands on the new, larger FPGA in the Analogue 3D to build out core support for even more classic gaming consoles. And we’re sure Analogue 3D owners would be happy to use their purchase to play existing OpenFPGA cores on the big screen, complete with 3DOS’ great display options.

The beginning of Goldeneye as seen through Analogue’s CRT filter (photo of the HDTV screen).

“If we wanted to offer Analogue 3D with OpenFPGA (which is not the purpose or focus of the product), it would require not only a second FPGA, but an even more powerful base FPGA, therefore increasing the price to a price that doesn’t suit our goals,” Analogue founder Christopher Taber told Ars when the system was first announced back in 2023.

It seems likely that hackers and tinkerers will be able to expand the Analogue 3D’s emulation capabilities in the future. As it stands, though, it’s hard to recommend the hardware when options like Android-based, emulation-focused handhelds, Raspberry Pi-based emulation consoles, and even (more expensive) MiSTer FPGA boxes offer able support for much more than just N64 games.

If you’re looking for a simple, plug-and-play way to use your original N64 cartridges and accessories on a modern display, the Analogue 3D offers pretty much everything you could hope for. If you want a single device that can handle more, though, you should look elsewhere.

Kyle Orland has been the Senior Gaming Editor at Ars Technica since 2012, writing primarily about the business, tech, and culture behind video games. He has journalism and computer science degrees from University of Maryland. He once wrote a whole book about Minesweeper.

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Fans’ reverse-engineered servers for Sony’s defunct Concord might be in trouble

concord, gaming, Reverse-engineering, server, Sony / 9u50fv / November 17, 2025

A group of dedicated coders has managed to partially revive online gameplay for the PC version of Concord, the team-based shooter that Sony famously shut down just two weeks after its launch last summer. Now, though, the team behind that fan server effort is closing off new access after Sony started issuing DMCA takedown requests of sample gameplay videos.

The Game Post was among the first to publicize the “Concord Delta” project, which reverse-engineered the game’s now-defunct server API to get a functional multiplayer match running over the weekend. “The project is still [a work in progress], it’s playable, but buggy,” developer Red posted in the game’s Discord channel, as reported by The Game Post. “Once our servers are fully set up, we’ll begin doing some private playtesting.”

Accessing the “Concord Delta” servers reportedly requires a legitimate PC copy of the game, which is relatively hard to come by these days. Concord only sold an estimated 25,000 copies across PC and PS5 before being shut down last year. And that number doesn’t account for the players who accepted a full refund for their $40 purchase after the official servers shut down.

Better safe than sorry

Red accompanied their Discord announcement of the first “playable” Concord match in months with two YouTube videos showing sample gameplay (“Don’t mind my horrible aim, I spend so much time reverse engineering that I no longer have the time to actually play the game,” he warned viewers). In short order, though, those videos were taken down “due to a copyright claim from MarkScan Enforcement,” a company that has a history of working with Sony on DMCA requests.

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Cities: Skylines upheaval: Developer and publisher announce “mutual” breakup

breakup, cities, colossal, developer, gaming, paradox, publisher, shakeup, skylines / Mike M. / November 17, 2025

For well over a decade now, the Cities franchise has done its best to pick up the urban simulation ball that EA’s SimCity famously dropped. Going forward, though, that ball will be handed off from longtime developer Colossal Order to Finnish studio Iceflake (a subsidiary of Cities publisher Paradox Interactive).

The surprise announcement Monday morning on Paradox’s official forums says that Cities‘ developer and publisher “mutually decided to pursue independent paths” without going into many details as to why. “The decision was made thoughtfully and in the interest of both teams—ensuring the strongest possible future for the Cities: Skylines franchise,” the announcement says.

“Both companies are excited for what the future holds while remaining deeply appreciative of our shared history and grateful to the Cities’ community,” the statement continues. Colossal Order “will work on new projects and explore new creative opportunities,” Paradox wrote in an accompanying FAQ.

A new mayor in town

New Cities developer Iceflake was acquired by Paradox in 2020, shortly after the release of its post-apocalyptic survival/strategy game Surviving the Aftermath. That game has maintained a small but seemingly dedicated following on Steam, thanks in part to updates and DLC that seem to be Iceflake’s main focus in the last few years.

Paradox writes that Iceflake is currently “hard at work getting into the nuts and bolts of Cities: Skylines II” and will be responsible for future free updates, expansions, and content packs for that game from the start of 2026 onward. Iceflake will also be working on the long-awaited console ports of Skylines II, which were originally planned to launch alongside the PC version in 2023.

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I’ve already been using a “Steam Machine” for months, and I think it’s great

Features, gaming, steam deck, steam machine, steamos, Tech / Kelly Newman / November 17, 2025

or, “the impatient person’s guide to buying a Steam Machine”

With a little know-how, you can get yourself a Steam Machine right this minute.

I started trying to install SteamOS on other PCs basically as soon as Valve made it possible. Credit: Andrew Cunningham

Valve’s second big foray into first-party PC hardware isn’t a sequel to the much-imitated Steam Deck portable, but rather a desktop computer called the Steam Machine. And while it could go on your desk, Valve clearly intends for it to fit in an entertainment center under a TV—next to, or perhaps even instead of, a game console like the Xbox or PlayStation 5.

I am pretty sure this idea could work, and it’s because I’ve already been experimenting with what is essentially a “Steam Machine” underneath my own TV for months, starting in May when Valve began making it possible to install SteamOS on certain kinds of generic PC hardware.

Depending on what it costs—and we can only guess what it will cost—the Steam Machine could be a good fit for people who just want to plug a more powerful version of the Steam Deck experience into their TVs. But for people who like tinkering or who, like me, have been messing with miniature TV-connecting gaming PCs for years and are simply tired of trying to make Windows workable, the future promised by the Steam Machine is already here.

My TV PC setup

I had always been sort of TV PC-curious, but I can trace my current setup to December 2018, when, according to a Micro Center receipt in my inbox, I built a $504.51 PC in a tiny InWin Chopin case centered on an AMD Ryzen 5 2400G processor.

At the time, the Ryzen brand was only a couple of years old, and the 2400G had impressed reviewers by combining a competent-enough quad-core CPU with a usably performant integrated GPU. And the good news was: It worked! It was nowhere near as good as the graphical experience that, say, a PlayStation 4 could provide, but it worked well for older and indie games, while also giving me access to a TV-connected computer for the occasions when I wanted to stream things from a browser, or participate in a living room-scale Zoom call (something that would become the box’s main job during the pandemic-induced isolation of 2020 and early 2021).

(This PC evolved over time and currently uses a Ryzen 8700G processor, which includes AMD’s best CPU and integrated GPU for socketed desktop motherboards. I did this to get more stable 1080p performance in more games, but I would not recommend this build to most people right now—more on that in a bit.)

The main problem was Windows, which was not and still is not particularly well-optimized for controller-driven living room use. What I really wanted was a startup process that felt more or less like a game console: hit the power button, and automatically get launched into a gamepad-navigable interface that would let me launch and play things without touching a mouse or keyboard.

There are third-party apps like Launchbox that make a go of providing this functionality for people more interested in emulation or who own games from multiple PC storefronts. What I eventually settled on was a sort of hacky fix that allowed my user account to log in automatically, and then automatically launch Steam in Big Picture Mode.

This worked… fine—except when I needed to interact with a mouse and keyboard to install driver updates, or when some component of the Windows UI would steal focus from the Big Picture Mode window and make it impossible to use the controller to navigate.

So when reports indicated that Valve was working on a SteamOS version that would run on more hardware, I was immediately interested. SteamOS was designed to boot right into its gaming interface, and the desktop mode was its own separate thing that you needed to open up manually—ideal for my usage model, since I didn’t want to give up the desktop mode but also didn’t need to use it often. But I did run into some bumps during the installation process, which I’ll share here in case it helps you avoid them.

SteamOS or Bazzite

Bazzite’s desktop mode wallpaper. A community supported alternative to SteamOS, Bazzite offers much wider hardware compatibility but can have rough edges. Credit: Bazzite

I had trouble using Valve’s official restore image (SteamOS version 3.7.7, from this support page) to get newer hardware working, which may be one reason why that language was softened. It was no problem to install official first-party SteamOS on slightly older hardware, like the Ryzen 7040 version of the Framework Laptop 13 or an older Acer laptop with a Ryzen 6000-series processor installed. But trying to install the software on newer hardware failed no matter what I tried. Those systems included the Ryzen AI 300 version of the Framework Laptop; a socket AM5 testbed desktop with a dedicated Radeon RX 7800 XT GPU; and, to my great disappointment, my TV desktop’s Ryzen 7 8700G.

There’s very little information out there about installing or troubleshooting SteamOS on generic hardware, but if you poke around on Reddit about much of anything, you’ll quickly meet a specific Type of Guy who believes that anyone with hardware compatibility issues should just use Bazzite, a community-developed alternate operating system that attempts to provide a SteamOS-ish alternative with wider hardware support (including for Intel and Nvidia hardware, which isn’t likely to be supported by the official SteamOS any time soon).

And so Bazzite I tried! Indicating that I used an AMD GPU and wanted to boot into the SteamOS interface offered me the exact same image that Bazzite offers for the Steam Deck and other handhelds, and it installed on my Ryzen desktop with minimal fuss.

Bazzite also came painfully close to what I wanted it to be, in terms of user experience—a desktop mode to boot into on the occasions I needed one, but otherwise I could just fire up the Xbox controller I had paired to the PC and jump right into a game.

But Bazzite was sunk by the same kind of bugs and edge cases that often chase me away from Linux operating systems when I try them. The main issue was that periodically, the system would boot up into desktop mode without asking (usually this seemed to happen when the Steam client software needed an update, but I can’t say for sure). Restarting the system would usually boot it back into the SteamOS interface—but I’d need to log in all over again, and the OS would switch Bluetooth off by default. Not only am I having to dig out a keyboard and mouse to solve this problem, but I’m needing to use a wired keyboard until I could get Bluetooth turned back on.

By the time this had happened twice, I was sure it wasn’t a fluke; by the time it had happened four or five times, I was determined to blow the entire operating system away and try again. And I was particularly interested in trying actual, for-real SteamOS again, just in case a new Bazzite install would have the same problems as the one I was already using.

After some digging, I found this directory. If you look through those folders, you’ll see OS images for various versions of SteamOS, including newer versions of SteamOS 3.7 (the “stable” version you’ll find on the Deck) and builds of both SteamOS 3.8 and 3.9 (the Deck will pull these down if you switch from the “stable” OS channel to “main”). Not all of those folders include the repair image you need to wipe a device and install SteamOS, but a few do—this one, dated October 27, is the most recent as of this writing.

Those newer versions of the operating system include changes that expand SteamOS’s hardware support, most notably a step up from Linux kernel version 6.11 to version 6.16. And it was that steamdeck-repair-main-20251027.1000-3.8.0.img.zip file that I was finally able to flash to a USB drive and install on my TV desktop using Valve’s instructions.

It has only been a week or so since then, but at least so far I’m finally getting what I wanted: the same experience as on my Deck, just on my TV, with hardware that is somewhat better-suited for a larger and higher-resolution screen (and that’s the main reason to do this, rather than use a docked Steam Deck for everything).

The SteamOS experience

The “console-like experience” designed for the Steam Deck also works well with a TV and a gamepad. Credit: Valve

Once the OS is installed and is up and running, anyone who has used a Steam Deck will find it instantly familiar, and all you’ll need to do to get going is connect or pair a gamepad and/or a keyboard and mouse.

Most of the bugs and quirks I’ve run into stem from the fact that this software was developed for standalone handheld gaming consoles first and foremost. There are multiple settings toggles—including those for adaptive brightness and HDMI-CEC—that serve a purpose on the Steam Deck but just don’t function on a desktop, where these features usually aren’t present or aren’t supported.

SteamOS is also pretty hit or miss about selecting the correct resolution and refresh rate for a connected display. Navigate to the Settings, to Display, and then turn off the “Automatically Set Resolution” toggle, and you’ll see a full list of supported resolutions and refresh rates that you can pick from. You may also want to scroll down and change the “Maximum Game Resolution” from “Native” to the actual native resolution of your screen, since I occasionally encountered games that wouldn’t offer resolutions that were supported by the display I was using.

Similarly, you may need to navigate to the Audio settings and switch output devices if you’re sending audio over HDMI. I also needed to turn the audio output volume up to around 80 percent before the sound coming out of my Steam Machine would match the volume of all the other boxes connected to my TV.

And if you’ve never used SteamOS before, it’s worth reading up on some of its limitations. While its compatibility with Windows games is quite good, Valve’s Proton compatibility layer is in continuous development, and not every game will play perfectly or play at all. Games that use anti-cheat software are still broadly incompatible with SteamOS, since many anti-cheat programs hook into the Windows kernel in ways that are impossible to translate or emulate. And while it’s possible to run games from other storefronts like Epic or GOG, it’s best done with third-party software like the Heroic Games Launcher, adding an extra layer of complexity.

And although SteamOS includes a useful desktop mode, it’s really not meant to be used as a day-to-day workhorse operating system—security features like “using a password to log in” are off by default in the interest of expediency, and you need to open your system to bootloader tampering just to install it. It’s fine for installing and running the odd desktop app every once in a while, but I’d hesitate to trust it with anything sensitive.

Finally, while our tests have shown that SteamOS generally performs at least as well, if not better, than Windows running on the same hardware, the first-party version of SteamOS is still made with handhelds and other low-power hardware in mind. In my limited testing of SteamOS on desktops with both integrated and with more powerful dedicated GPUs, I’ve generally found that those observations hold up. But I’ve only tested on a narrow range of hardware, and you could easily encounter a setup where SteamOS just doesn’t run games as well as Windows does.

Rolling your own Steam Machine

A Ryzen 7 8700G-based “Steam Machine,” in an InWin Chopin Max case. I enjoy PC building, but the economics of this box aren’t great for most people. Credit: Andrew Cunningham

Say you’re interested in having a Steam Machine, you don’t want to wait for Valve, and you don’t just happen to have a spare ideally configured AMD-based PC to sacrifice to the testing gods.

I am more or less happy with my custom-built mini ITX Steam Machine, but I find it difficult to recommend this hardware combination to basically anybody at this point. For me, it scratched a PC-building itch, and the potential for future upgradability is mildly interesting to me. But given the high cost of AMD’s Socket AM5 platform and spiking costs for RAM and SSDs, it’s going to be difficult to put together an 8700G-focused system in an InWin Chopin for less than $800. And that’s a whole lot to pay for a years-old Radeon 780M GPU.

For a more budget-friendly Steam Machine, consider the range of no-name mini PCs available on Amazon and some other places. We’ve dabbled with systems from manufacturers like Aoostar, Beelink, Bosgame, and GMKtec before and come away conditionally impressed by the ratio of utility-to-performance, and YouTubers like RetroGameCorps and ETA Prime periodically cover new ones and generally have positive things to say. You’re rolling the dice on long-term reliability and support, but it’s also tough to argue with the convenience of the form factor or the pricing compared to a custom-built system.

If you’re going this route, we have some general recommendations and performance numbers, based on testing of similar chips in other laptops and desktops. Note that the Ryzen 6800U/Radeon 680M system is an Acer Swift Edge 16 laptop with 16GB of soldered DDR5, while the Ryzen 7840U/Radeon 780M system is a Framework Laptop 13 with non-soldered DDR5. Performance may differ a few FPS in either direction depending on your hardware configuration. The Ryzen 7700X/Radeon RX 7600 system is a custom-built testbed desktop similar to the one we use for testing CPUs and GPUs; based on hardware alone, we’d expect the real Steam Machine to perform near or slightly below .

A handful of numbers from a single game, to show relative performance differences between some integrated and low-end dedicated AMD GPUs. Credit: Andrew Cunningham

In the $350 to $400 range, look for PCs with a Ryzen 6800-series chip in them, like the 6800H or 6850H (here’s one from GMKTec for $385, and one from Beelink for $379). These processors come with a Radeon 680M integrated GPU, with 12 compute units (CUs) based on the RDNA2 architecture. These boxes will offer performance slightly superior to the actual Steam Deck, which uses eight RDNA2 CUs and squeezes them into a system with a small power envelope.

If you can spend around $500, that generally seems to get you the best performance for the price right now. Look for processors in the Ryzen 7040 or 8040 series, or the Ryzen 250 series (here’s one for $$490 from GMKtec, one for $499 from Bosgame, and one for $449 from Aoostar). These chips all offer broadly similar combinations of eight Zen 4-based CPU cores, and a 12-core Radeon 780M GPU based on the RDNA3 architecture.

In a mini desktop, this GPU can come pretty close to doubling the performance of the Steam Deck, though it will still fall short of most dedicated graphics cards. It’s similar to the performance level of the non-Extreme version of the Ryzen Z2 chip for competing handhelds. The 780M is also the same GPU that comes with the Ryzen 8700G desktop chip I use, and I’ve found that it gets you decent 1080p performance in many games.

The GPU is the most important thing to focus on in these systems, since it’s going to have the most impact on the way games actually run. But keep an eye on RAM and storage, too; a 1TB SSD is obviously preferable to a 500GB SSD. And while most of these come with a healthy 32GB of RAM by default, pay attention to the type of RAM. If it just says “DDR5,” that’s most likely to be socketed RAM that’s a bit slower, but which you can upgrade yourself if you want. If it comes with LPDDR5X, that’s going to be soldered down, but also a bit faster, maximizing your graphics performance.

The Steam Deck is a useful benchmark here, because it’s a fixed hardware platform that’s popular enough that PC game developers sometimes go out of their way to target. Games often include Steam Deck-specific graphics presets, which are a useful starting point when you’re fiddling with settings.

I would generally try to avoid systems with Ryzen AI 300-series chips in them—their Radeon 890M GPUs are faster, but they can also be twice as expensive as the Radeon 780M boxes. I’d also stay away from anything with Ryzen 5000 or 3000-series chips, or Ryzen 7030-series chips. The price tags on these $200 to $300 systems are tempting, and they will probably run SteamOS, but their older Vega-based GPUs will fall far short of the Steam Deck’s GPU, let alone the Radeon 680M or 780M.

The Framework Desktop is a compelling alternative to the actual Steam Machine, if you don’t mind paying for it. Credit: Andrew Cunningham

OK, but what if you have more money to spend, and you’re more interested in 1440p or 4K gaming performance (roughly what Valve is targeting with the actual Steam Machine)? I think that the Framework Desktop is a surprisingly good fit here; $1,200 will get you a console-sized PC with an eight-core Zen 5 CPU, a Radeon 8050S GPU with 32 CUs based on the RDNA 3.5 architecture (the Steam Machine has 28 RDNA3 CUs), 32GB of RAM, and a 1TB SSD. I can confirm firsthand that SteamOS 3.8/3.9 installs and runs just fine.

This desktop is probably a bit more expensive than the Steam Machine will end up being, but it’s impossible to say how much more expensive before Valve actually puts out a price.

The TV PC is ready for its close-up

TV-connected PCs have historically been a niche thing. They’re expensive, they’re finicky, and purpose-built game consoles have always provided a more pleasant and seamless experience for people who just want to do everything with a controller from the couch.

But the TV PC could finally be ready for its moment. In SteamOS, Valve has created a pretty good, pretty widely compatible Windows substitute that buries a lot of the PC’s complexity (without totally removing it, for the people who want it sometimes). Like the Nintendo Switch, Valve has crafted a user interface that feels good to use on a handheld screen and on a TV from 10 feet away.

And this is happening at the same time as a weird detente in the console wars, where Sony seems to be embracing PC ports and easing up on exclusive releases at the same time as Microsoft seems, for all intents and purposes, to be winding down the Xbox hardware operation in favor of Windows. Valve is way out in front of Microsoft on its console-style PC interface at the same time as the PC is becoming a sort of universally compatible über-console.

I’m kind of the ideal audience for the Steam Machine; nearly all my PC games are on Steam, I play practically nothing that requires anti-cheat software, and I play mostly graphically undemanding indie games rather than GPU-bruising AAA titles. So, you know, take my enthusiasm for the concept with a grain of salt.

But as someone who has already functionally been living with a Steam Machine for months, I think that Valve’s new hardware could do for living room PCs what the Steam Deck has done for handhelds: defining and expanding a product category that others have tried and failed to crack. This year, my Steam Machine has ably kept up with me as I’ve played Silksong, UFO 50, Dave the Diver, both HD-2D Dragon Quest remakes, part of a bad-guy run through Baldur’s Gate III, some multiplayer Vampire Survivors experimentation, several Jackbox Party Pack sessions, and more besides. I’ve never been less tempted to buy a PlayStation 5.

Andrew is a Senior Technology Reporter at Ars Technica, with a focus on consumer tech including computer hardware and in-depth reviews of operating systems like Windows and macOS. Andrew lives in Philadelphia and co-hosts a weekly book podcast called Overdue.

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Are you ready for a $1,000 Steam Machine? Some analysts think you should be.

Analysts, components, gaming, Hardware, steam machine, steam machines, tariff, valve / Mike M. / November 15, 2025

If you ask random gamers what price they think Valve will charge for its newly announced Steam Machine hardware, you’ll get a wide range of guesses. But if you ask the analysts who follow the game industry for a living the same question… well, you’ll actually get the same wide range of (somewhat better-informed) guesses.

At the high end of those guesses are analysts like F-Squared‘s Michael Futter, who expects a starting price of $799 to $899 for the entry-level 512GB Steam Machine and a whopping $1,000 to $1,100 for the 2TB version. With internal specs that Futter says “will rival a PS5 and maybe even hit PS5 Pro performance,” we can expect a “hefty price tag” from Valve’s new console-like effort. At the same time, since Valve is “positioning this as a dedicated, powerful gaming PC… I suspect that the price will be below a similarly capable traditional desktop,” Futter said.

DFC Intelligence analyst David Cole similarly expects the Steam Machine to start at a price “around $800” and go up to “around $1,000” for the 2TB model. Cole said he expects Valve will seek “very low margins” or even break-even pricing on the hardware itself, which he said would probably lead to pricing “below a gaming PC but slightly above a high-end console.”

A loss leader?

At the other end of the spectrum, Superdata Research founder and SuperJoost newsletter author Joost Van Dreunen predicted the entry-level Steam Machine could come in as low as $549, rising to $749 for the 2TB version (plus an additional $50 for bundles including a Steam Controller).

To Van Dreunen, Valve’s unique position as a private company with a loyal fan base means it can “price its hardware to hit its own strategic sweet spot rather than mirror the competition.” And in this case, he said, that could mean taking a “modest” loss on the hardware as a way to get more gamers invested in SteamOS.

Getting people to buy more games on SteamOS could be worth a lot more to Valve than any Steam Machine hardware profits. Credit: Valve

“Just like Sony and Microsoft, the real money isn’t in the box, it’s in the ecosystem you enter once you buy it,” Van Dreunen said. “To me the question isn’t whether Valve can afford to eat margin. It’s whether they want the SteamOS footprint to grow fast enough to justify it. … Strategically, this is about expanding the platform, not squeezing the hardware.”

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Years later, Arkane’s Dishonored is still a modern stealth classic

arkane studios, C:ArsGames, dishonored, gaming / Kelly Newman / November 14, 2025

Chief among these is the “blink” system, which lets you warp instantly from point to point in a way that reminds me now of the similar nausea-preventing movement systems seen in many virtual reality games. Here, being able to go from one hidden corner to another without the risk of being seen revolutionizes the stealth gameplay.

Hopping up to a nearby rooftop or down on top of an unaware enemy with a quick blink is incredibly satisfying, making you feel less like a crawling assassin and more like a bona fide superhero. The same goes for the “dark vision” that lets you see enemies and allies through walls, an ability that’s all the more necessary in a game without any sort of mini-map to help you get the lie of the land.

This screenshot makes the combat look more exciting than it is in practice. Credit: Arkane Studios

In contrast to the elegant, super-powered sneaking, combat in Dishonored can feel a bit slow and clunky. This is exacerbated by the game’s “chaos system,” which sends seemingly endless waves of enemies that turn each violent engagement into a war of attrition against a nearly overwhelming force.

It’s usually a better idea to simply blink away to safety until they quickly call off the pursuit. Or, better yet, just avoid combat altogether by sticking to the shadows, coming out only when you can take out your next assassination target cleanly and silently.

In a lesser game, the assassination-focused gameplay could threaten to feel too repetitive. But Dishonored‘s structure encourages different paths to that same final goal in each mission, from magically assisted sneaking to social manipulation and eavesdropping to actually taking a moral stand in a long-running feud.

Add in side quests that offer plenty of opportunity for creative problem solving, and you have a game that encourages multiple playthroughs to explore all the different ways you can succeed. That should provide enough of an excuse to revisit Dishonored, or to dive in for the first time if you missed it during its debut.

Ars Technica may earn compensation for sales from links on this post through affiliate programs.

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Valve says it’s still waiting for better chips to power Steam Deck 2

gaming / 9u50fv / November 13, 2025

Yesterday’s announcement of new living room and VR hardware from Valve obviously has many gamers clamoring for any news of a more powerful version of the nearly 4-year-old Steam Deck. In a new interview with IGN, though, Valve Software Engineer Pierre-Loup Griffais says that portable gaming silicon still hasn’t advanced enough to justify brand-new benchmark hardware.

“The thing we’re making sure of is that it’s a worthwhile enough performance upgrade [for a Steam Deck 2] to make sense as a standalone product,” Griffais told IGN. “We’re not interested in getting to a point where it’s 20 or 30 or even 50 percent more performance at the same battery life. We want something a little bit more demarcated than that.”

“So we’ve been working back from silicon advancements and architectural improvements, and I think we have a pretty good idea of what the next version of Steam Deck is going to be, but right now there’s no offerings in that landscape, in the SoC [System on a Chip] landscape, that we think would truly be a next-gen performance Steam Deck,” Griffais continued.

More power, but at what cost?

At first glance, Griffais’ comments might seem to run counter to the advancements we’ve seen in portable PC gaming handhelds in recent years. The eight-core Zen 5-based AMD chip in the recently launched ROG Xbox Ally X, for instance, is significantly more powerful than the four-core Zen 2 chip in the Steam Deck. The newer handheld can push out decent-quality 1080p graphics at reasonable frame rates for many recent games that the old Steam Deck struggles to run at all.

Keep in mind, though, that Griffais said Valve is focused on getting those kinds of performance improvements “at the same battery life.” The ROG Xbox Ally X has a 50 percent larger battery than the original Steam Deck, and it still fully drains that battery in around two hours when running the most taxing games in “Turbo” mode.

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Valve rejoins the VR hardware wars with standalone Steam Frame

gaming, headset, steam, valve, virtual reality, vr / Beth Washington / November 12, 2025

Valve also tells Ars that streaming to the Steam Frame will be “as efficient as possible,” maximizing battery life from the included 21.6 Wh battery. “Standalone battery life will be much more variable, depending on the game and its settings,” Valve Engineer Jeremy Selan and Designer Lawrence Yang told Ars via email.

While a wired PC connection would go a long way toward addressing those battery-life and extra latency concerns, Valve said the Steam Frame won’t even support it as an option. “We’re focused on a robust wireless streaming experience, which is why we included a dedicated wireless adapter, have a dedicated radio on the headset just for streaming, and invented a new streaming technology to optimize the streaming experience (Foveated Streaming),” Selan and Yang told Ars.

A low-weight modular “core”

All told, the Steam Frame comes in at just 440 grams, a welcome and sizeable reduction from the 515 grams of the Quest 3. Interestingly, Valve’s spec sheet also specifically calls out the 185 gram “core” of the headset hardware, which comprises all the main components besides the battery, headstrap, and speakers (e.g., lenses, displays, motherboard, cooling, processor, RAM, tracking system, etc).

That core weight is important, Selan and Yang told Ars, because “it’s designed to be modular so one could imagine other headsets connecting to this core module that bring different features.” So tinkerers or third-party headset makers could theoretically build modified versions of the Steam Frame with lighter batteries or streamlined headstrap/speaker combos, for instance. The Steam Frame’s monochrome passthrough cameras can also be accessed via a front expansion port with a standardized Gen 4 PCIe interface, Valve said.

It’s an interesting potential direction for new hardware that will launch into a more niche, less irrationally exuberant VR market than Valve’s previous virtual reality headsets. But with companies like Apple and Meta pivoting toward augmented reality and/or mixed-reality hardware of late, it’s nice to see Valve continuing to cater to the small but dedicated market of gamers who are still interested in playing in fully immersive VR environments.

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Steam Deck minus the screen: Valve announces new Steam Machine, Controller hardware

controller, gaming, steam, steam controller, steam machine, steamos, valve / DJ Henderson / November 12, 2025

SteamOS-powered cube for your TV targets early 2026 launch, no pricing details.

Meet the ValveCube (not its real name) Credit: Valve

Nearly four years after the Steam Deck changed the world of portable gaming, Valve is getting ready to release SteamOS-powered hardware designed for the living room TV, or even as a desktop PC gaming replacement. The simply named Steam Machine and Steam Controller, both planned to ship in early 2026, are “optimized for gaming on Steam and designed for players to get even more out of their Steam Library,” Valve said in a press release.

A Steam Machine spec sheet shared by Valve lists a “semi-custom” six-core AMD Zen 4 CPU clocked at up to 4.8 Ghz alongside an AMD RDNA3 GPU with 28 compute units. The motherboard will include 16GB of DDR5 RAM and an additional 8GB of dedicated DDR6 VRAM for the GPU. The new hardware will come in two configurations with 512GB or 2TB of unspecified “SSD storage,” though Valve isn’t sharing pricing for either just yet.

If you squint, you can make out a few ports on this unmarked black square. Valve

Those chips and numbers suggest the Steam Machine will have roughly the same horsepower as a mid-range desktop gaming PC from a few years back. But Valve says its “Machine”—which it ranks as “over 6x more powerful than the Steam Deck”—is powerful enough to support ray-tracing and/or 4K, 60 fps gaming using FSR upscaling.

Externally, the Steam Machine is housed in a stark black cube measuring 160 mm (~6.30-inch) on each side, making it slightly larger than the old Nintendo GameCube (sans handle). The front of the Machine sports two USB-A ports, an SD card storage expansion slot, a power button, and a “customizable LED bar” that can change to reflect when the system is booting up, downloading updates, etc. A huge fan vent takes up most of the rear of the unit, alongside three additional USB ports (including one USB-C port) and HDMI 2.0 and DisplayPort 1.4 outputs.

Taking control

While the Steam Machine will be able to connect to standard USB and Bluetooth PC controllers and peripherals, it has been designed with a brand-new Steam Controller in mind. And while both pieces of hardware will be sold separately, they will also be available in a bundle for gamers who want an all-in-one living room gaming solution.

If it weren’t for those touchpads, it would be hard to distinguish this gamepad from a lot of other modern controllers. Valve

The new Steam Controller (not to be confused with the identically named old Steam Controller) will make use of a proprietary 2.4 Ghz wireless connection that allows for around 8 ms of end-to-end latency between a button press and the resulting signal received by the system. A radio for that connection will be built into the Steam Machine but will also be available via an included “plug and play” Steam Controller Puck that can support up to four wireless controller connections.

Without the puck, the new Steam Controller can still connect to PCs (including portable gaming PCs) and smartphones via Bluetooth or a wired USB connection. And while console connections are technically possible, Valve Software Engineer Pierre-Loup Griffais and Designer Lawrence Yang told Ars via email that it would “require collaboration with the vendor” that the company would be “happy to discuss… if it came up.”

The most striking feature of the Steam Controller is the dual touchpads underneath the thumbsticks, mirroring the similar, somewhat underutilized control options on the Steam Deck. Each touchpad will come with its own haptic motor for “HD tactile feedback” that should feel akin to rolling a clicky trackball under your thumb (two more haptic motors in the grips handle force feedback output from the games themselves).

Aside from that, the Steam Controller seems a lot more standardized than Valve’s last attempt at a controller. It features thumbsticks, a d-pad, face buttons, and shoulder buttons pretty much where you’d expect them, plus four programmable “grip buttons” on the back side of the controller. The familiar Steam, View, Menu, and QAM (aka “three dots”) buttons also come over from the Steam Deck for quick access to useful SteamOS functions.

Internally, the Steam Controller will use magnetic TMR thumbstick sensors, which should hopefully limit the kind of stick drift we see with the mechanical sticks on the Nintendo Switch, for instance. A six-axis IMU will allow for gyro-based tilt controls as well, and a “grip sensor” can help make sure those controls turn off when you’re putting the controller down or picking it up.

Let’s try that again

Software-wise, the Steam Machine will of course run SteamOS, the custom Linux-based operating system popularized by the Steam Deck and recently officially expanded to other handhelds. Valve says that means fast suspend/resume features, easy access to your Steam cloud saves, “and all the other Steam features you’d expect.” It also means the ability to boot to a Linux desktop mode or install Windows with the help of drivers available on Valve’s website, Griffais and Yang told Ars.

Crucially, the new SteamOS offers compatibility with the vast majority of games made for Windows via Proton, a key feature that was missing the last time Valve pushed Linux-based “Steam Machines” hardware roughly a decade ago. Recent versions of SteamOS can actually boast better in-game performance than Windows on some games and hardware in Ars’ testing.

“One of our biggest learnings [from the first Steam Machines effort] is that it’s a tall order to ask developers to port their games to run on Linux—so we have done a bunch of work on Proton to the point where almost all games just work out of the box,” Griffais and Yang told Ars. “Since that time, we’ve gained valuable experience in manufacturing, made big improvements to Steam, Steam Input, and SteamOS, and we are excited to bring our own first party Steam Machine and the new Steam Controller to market.”

Valve’s ill-fated Steam Machines hardware rollout 10 years ago also relied on third-party manufacturers to handle the actual construction of a wide range of branded Linux boxes. This time around, Valve is handling the manufacture and distribution of a singular Steam Machine on its own, following the success of a similar rollout for the Steam Deck. And while we’ve seen leaked “Powered by SteamOS” branding suggesting third-party SteamOS living room boxes might be in the works, Valve hasn’t announced anything official yet.

“We’re always happy to chat with companies who are interested in making their own SteamOS powered devices,” Griffais and Yang told Ars. “We are working on broadening support, and with the recent updates to Steam and SteamOS, compatibility with other devices has improved, starting with other AMD powered PC handhelds.”

But while the Steam Deck filled an obvious market need for portable access to PC games, it’s harder to know where the new Steam Machine will fit in the already crowded market for living room gaming (not to mention the highly modular desktop gaming market). That’s especially true since the Steam Deck and its imitators can already serve as passable living room gaming devices when plugged into any number of third-party USB-C docks.

A lot will depend on pricing details and just how simple and convenient the new hardware makes the experience of playing PC games on the living room TV. We’ll keep you posted as more information comes in and when we’ve had a chance to get some hands-on time with Valve’s newest swing at the hardware market.

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