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

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.

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.

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.