The Steam Machine is not the console Reddit ordered. Everyone pictured a cheap little box to stick it to Sony. What Valve actually shipped costs more than a grand – and once you get past the sticker shock, it might be the smartest thing they have made since the Deck.
Let me set the scene. For years the fantasy was simple: Valve builds a $500 SteamOS console, you plug it into the telly, and Windows can get in the sea. Then the real thing landed with a price tag that made everyone spit out their energy drink.
The dream, meet the receipt
Base model is around $1,049 / £879 for 512GB and no controller. Want the 2TB version with the new Steam Controller in the box? That is roughly $1,428 / £1,208. Valve has straight up admitted it costs more than they wanted it to. So no, this is not the budget console anyone was chanting for.
What it is, is a proper little gaming PC that never once asks you to think like a PC owner.
So what are you actually getting?
Under the hood it is custom AMD silicon – Zen 4 on the CPU side, RDNA 3 for graphics – and Valve reckons it is about six times the grunt of a Steam Deck. That is enough to chase 4K 60 with FSR turned on. It boots straight into Big Picture, plays your existing library through Proton, and you drive the whole thing from the sofa with a controller. No desktop, no driver updates at 11pm, no launcher soup.
It also turned up with mates: the Steam Frame VR headset and a redesigned Steam Controller. Valve is clearly done treating the living room as someone else’s turf.
The catch nobody puts on the box: anti-cheat
Here is the one thing that will actually decide whether this is for you. SteamOS is Linux, and a handful of big competitive shooters still block Linux at the kernel-anti-cheat level. If your 200-hours-a-season game is on that naughty list, it simply will not run – no workaround, no debate. Single-player and the vast majority of your backlog? Golden. But check your main game before you spend Deck-times-three.
Should you actually buy one?
Quick gut check:
- Buy it if you are Steam-first, want a couch 4K box, and cannot be bothered building or maintaining a PC.
- Think twice if your most-played game uses kernel anti-cheat, or if $1,000+ makes your eye twitch.
- Skip it if you mainly want portable play – a Steam Deck or an Arc G3 handheld is the move there.
The Steam Machine is not cheap and was never going to convert the PS5 crowd. But as the no-nonsense way to put your whole Steam library on a big screen, nothing else comes close.
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