The holiday season is almost upon us, but the new gear on gamers' wish lists won't arrive until next year.
Valve Corporation has pre-announced a range of three new gadgets to entice gamers, which will all arrive at some point in 2026. There's a standalone gaming PC, the Steam Machine, a new generation of the Steam Controller, and an Arm-powered VR headset, the Steam Frame.
It's enough to induce a temporary bout of chronological uncertainty. The Steam Machine was first announced way back in 2012, as The Register reported at the time. In 2013, El Reg returned to the subject with pictures, and also covered the forthcoming Steam Controller – although one version of that did ship in 2015.
The 2010s version of Valve's machine never appeared, despite multiple partner companies' claims and CES demonstration models. The only third-party Steam hardware The Reg got its hands on was the Gigabyte Brix Pro, and that ran Windows. One intrepid vulture did hack it into running the original Debian-based SteamOS, though. Moving on, a dozen years later...
The Steam Store's product page has tech specs, and the machine is a black cuboid, measuring 6 x 6.5 x 6.1 inches (152 x 162.4 x 156 mm). It will have a "semi-custom" AMD Zen 4 processor, with six cores/twelve threads, and an RDNA3 GPU with 28 compute units, coupled with 16 GB of DDR5 main memory and 8 GB of GDDR6 VRAM. It has five USB ports, Ethernet, DisplayPort 1.4, and HDMI 2 outputs, Wi-Fi 6 and Bluetooth 5.3. Buyers have the choice of a half-terabyte or 2 TB SSD.
The reason that this vulture is writing about it, of course, is that it's a Linux box. It will run SteamOS 3, the same as the Steam Deck that the company launched in 2022. This is a retail computer that comes pre-installed with Linux, and it's not locked down. The announcement page says:
…and it's a PC
Yes, Steam Machine is optimized for gaming, but it's still your PC. Install your own apps, or even another operating system. Who are we to tell you how to use your computer?
The viability of Linux as a daily driver consumer desktop OS is adequately demonstrated by annual sales of tens of millions of Chromebooks, but SteamOS is a different sort of beast. We described some of the technology in 2023, but the significant thing is that unlike ChromeOS – or any other distro – the primary purpose of SteamOS is to run unmodified Windows software. As we covered earlier this month, something approaching 90 percent of Steam games run on Linux now.
SteamOS is even more versatile than we previously realized. Valve's new VR headset, the Steam Frame, also runs it.
Steam Frame is a PC!
It runs SteamOS
Quick suspend/resume. Cloud saves. All the features of SteamOS that make for a great user experience are now available in VR. Just like any SteamOS device, install your own apps, open a browser, do what you want: It's your PC.
Unlike its larger sibling, though, this 0.97 pound (440 g) headset is an Arm computer. That means SteamOS is already cross-platform and has an Arm64 version, and it also implies that Valve is confident it can run x86 games through CPU emulation fast enough to be enjoyable to play.
The specs say it's a "4 nm Snapdragon 8 Gen 3," although PC Gamer is more specific and says it's a Qualcomm SM8650 SoC. This is a fairly high-end chip. In benchmark tests, it's comfortably ahead of the Gen 2 part in Meta's Quest 3 headset from 2023, but pretty far behind the M2 chip in Apple's Vision Pro – although to be fair that device costs several times what the Steam Frame is likely to go for.
The new version of the Steam Controller upgrades the version from a decade ago in several aspects. The new model has two thumb-controlled joysticks, as well as two trackpads and a D-pad plus A/B/X/Y buttons. It can connect wirelessly, obviously, but you will also be able to use it over a USB-C cable while it's charging (so it outdoes the Apple Magic Mouse 2, then).
You don't need special Valve kit to use it – it's compatible with anything that can run Steam and talk Bluetooth 4.2. For lower-latency connections, it also has a direct 2.4 GHz radio connection via the optional charging puck – although that link is built into the Steam Machine. The company has even upstreamed Linux support code already.
The new hardware is notable in several different ways. These are Linux machines aimed squarely at a mainstream, non-techie, consumer market. That's good to see. The AMD-powered machine is designed and built to run Windows apps under emulation, which is remarkable, but the Qualcomm-powered hardware is designed to do that including x86 emulation on Arm. That's been a reality for productivity apps for a while, but for gaming, it's bold.
Valve's move can be seen as trying to sell Windows games into the market for proprietary games consoles. Devices like the Xbox Series S and X and Sony PlayStation 5 are already x86-64 based – in fact, both use AMD Zen 2 family processors. Industry commentator Xe Iaso, author of the Anubis anti-LLM-bot crawling tool, thinks that Valve is about to win the console generation. Interesting times are coming in 2026. ®
Source: The register