All of Valve’s new {hardware} is now out within the wild, and whereas I’ve loved all the pieces from the Steam Controller to the Frame, it is exhausting to suggest any of it to anybody proper now. That downside is not unique to Valve both. Throughout your entire trade, getting any {hardware} that may run video video games is considerably dearer than it was a yr in the past, and that is spoiled some in any other case superior devices.
However whereas prohibitively excessive costs may need lessened the speedy affect of Valve’s {hardware}, its objective of increasing SteamOS help and providing a baseline configuration for builders to focus on nonetheless offers me hope for the way forward for PC gaming.
Every thing’s Costly
Again when Valve revealed its 2026 trifecta of {hardware}, I was excited to see Valve essentially create its own gaming ecosystem, free from the subscriptions and information harvesting that we have all grown used to on different platforms. That alone remains to be a fairly good motive to purchase into one thing just like the Steam Machine. However its comparatively weak efficiency with a comparitively excessive worth is a large barrier, and I am unable to actually blame anybody for balking on the concept of spending $1,049 on it – and that is with no controller.
Outdoors of Valve, Intel launched its new handheld chips, led by the Arc G3 Excessive, and it is a power to be reckoned with. Once I examined it within the MSI Claw 8 EX AI+, it completely trounced handhelds just like the Xbox Ally X and the Lenovo Legion Go 2, but it surely prices $1,899, and for that worth you may get a fairly respectable gaming laptop, at the least till these go up in worth too.
That is earlier than mentioning graphics playing cards. The high-end Nvidia GeForce RTX 5090, which first retailed at $1,999, goes for about $8,000 nowadays on account of its big quantity of VRAM and the way good it’s at powering AI fashions. Even the RTX 5070 has gone as much as $850 when it is speculated to price $549. There are shaky rumors that Nvidia will launch its new graphics cards early subsequent yr, however even when it does, who would be capable to afford one?
The Hope for PC Gaming
If costs throughout the trade had been what they had been a yr in the past, Valve’s {hardware} and Intel’s handheld chips would have been vastly impactful. I do know I am not the one individual on the earth who’s able to drop Home windows 11 — with all its little bugbears, like needing to be on-line to get previous setup and the pervasiveness of Copilot — altogether. I would like to undertake SteamOS or one other Linux distro full time.
Making it simpler to play PC video games on SteamOS was Valve’s major objective with this wave of {hardware}. I nonetheless consider that the Steam Machine offers sport builders a superb baseline configuration to focus on their optimization towards. That is why the Machine has specs that largely line up with what nearly all of Steam customers have already got.
The Steam Body can be all about increasing SteamOS software program help to ARM {hardware}. Whereas the standalone efficiency of Valve’s new VR headset is lackluster, due to an growing older telephone SoC, the corporate was nonetheless in a position to make use of Proton and Fex to get Home windows video games working natively. And, now that Valve has been working on Nvidia driver support, its future imaginative and prescient of SteamOS working on all the pieces is definitely in attain.
And I believe that is the worst a part of the excessive costs on Valve’s {hardware}. If the Steam Machine was able to come out at $750, it may need been dearer than the PS5, however it could have at the least been extra inexpensive than it’s now, Valve would have been capable of get its arms on extra RAM to get extra Machines on the market, and it could have made extra of an affect to Linux gaming help writ giant.
I do not suppose that progress has been fully kneecapped, although. Even when shopping for a Steam Machine is off the desk for lots of people – possibly even most individuals – the work being carried out on SteamOS and Bazzite carries over to different {hardware}. You possibly can nonetheless construct a comparatively decent alternative to the Steam Machine and set up the working system your self, even on older, used {hardware}.
Paradoxically, that older, used {hardware} is the way forward for PC gaming, at the least within the brief time period. Over the previous few years, there’s been an enormous deal with probably the most highly effective current-generation {hardware} and its capacity to run video games on the best attainable settings with ludicrous body charges. I’ve contributed to that myself. However, maxing out games is mostly just a way to help justify spending thousands of dollars on a high-end rig. In case you’re prepared to tweak some settings, most PC video games will run simply nice on 5–10-year-old {hardware}, and also you’d battle to even discover the distinction except you are zooming in on the pictures side-by-side.
It helps that, for probably the most half, PC video games are getting simpler to run, so long as you ignore any sport working on Unreal 5. Capcom, as an illustration, has been on a large successful streak with its latest video games like Pragmata and Onimusha: Approach of the Sword, due to RE Engine’s capacity to scale to lower-power {hardware}. Even Crimson Desert, with its large open world and ridiculous draw distances, does not take a vastly highly effective PC to run.
As bizarre because it feels to say, particularly with a brand new console technology on the horizon, I hope that extra builders understand how costly {hardware} is correct now and spend extra time optimizing their video games. As a result of at a sure level, extra practical graphics are simply going to restrict how many individuals will really be capable to play a sport as supposed.
Jacqueline Thomas
Senior Tech Editor
Jackie Thomas is the Senior Tech Editor at IGN and the PC parts queen. She’s been protecting gaming {hardware} for greater than a decade for IGN, TechRadar, Gizmodo, PC Gamer and extra. You possibly can comply with her @Jackiecobra