Perhaps it’s obvious, but I’m still psychically searching for Valve’s intended market with the Steam Machine. Yes, even after 12 long years of contemplation. To be clear, I have fond memories of using a PC as a TV and gaming hub in my shared living room during college, and I’ve been completely sold on the basic concept of a console-like PC that plugs into a TV. It’s the timing that’s making my head spin today. Fanboys and Richie Rich aside, it’s difficult to make a case for most people to invest in this box, at this price point, with the harsh economic and social realities of 2026.
It’s clear why Valve wants the Steam Machine on the market: It’s a new entry point for Steam fanatics and console players to build out their Valve-dependent libraries, expanding Valve’s monopolistic influence beyond solely the PC space. The timing is simply atrocious. In the middle of a storage and memory crisis driven by unchecked corporate investments in AI infrastructure, at a time when hardware prices are skyrocketing and financial security is more tenuous than ever for a majority of people, Valve said, release the Steam Machine. It’s impossible to make a great computer for $1,049 right now, so of course Valve is unable to produce a great Steam Machine for $1,049. I’ve been testing the 2TB model, priced at an even more outrageous $1,349. Neither of those prices include a Steam Controller, which adds $79 when bundled and $99 when purchased separately.
The Steam Machine simply isn’t worth the price that Valve is asking. This is especially true with a fresh generation of consoles on the horizon, and the promise of falling RAM prices (at some point) in the future. The market right now won’t be the market forever, and it’s worth asking yourself whether you’ll regret spending more than $1,000 on a living room PC once prices finally drop. The Steam Machine is underpowered compared with modern consoles like the PS5 Pro or even the Xbox Series X; it has just 8GB of VRAM, plus a GPU/CPU combo similar to an RTX 3060 and Ryzen 3600, which you could find in many sub-$1,000 PCs in 2021. It can’t really handle any ray tracing, which is, whether you like it or not, becoming a required feature in some PC games.
At launch, the Steam Machine can handle anything you throw at it, so long as you’re willing to tweak some settings and upscale from low resolutions. It is years behind the competition, though, and since it’s a locked system that can’t be upgraded like a PC, it doesn’t feel like it will be able to run demanding games in only a couple of years.
That said, it’s nice to be able to access my Steam library from my couch, at the push of a button, and the Steam Controller is still an excellent gamepad with a satisfying click to its connector puck. The Steam Machine has also improved in my short time with it. When I first booted it up and connected the box to Wi-Fi, I couldn’t reach download speeds past 180Mbps. A post-launch update improved these speeds massively, and I can now hit a steady 1Gbps over Wi-Fi, which is fantastic for a console-like piece of hardware. An update to Proton that will bring AMD’s superior FSR 4 upscaling tech is also imminent (it’s currently in the “experimental” phase). Valve is only going to push out more updates to improve the Steam Machine on the software side of things, and the OS itself is easy-to-use, familiar to anyone who’s messed around with Steam Link or Big Picture mode. An update can’t magically give it a stronger GPU, CPU or VRAM pool to play with, though.
