More from Steam Machines have returned: all the news about Valve’s new hardware universe
Jsaux was early to ride the Steam Deck wave, and it’s even earlier to committing to the Steam Machine. Months ahead of its launch, Jsaux shared renders of two screen-equipped face plates, one of which seems similar to Valve’s not-for-sale e-paper prototype. My big question: how will these be powered?
Valve’s big hardware push: you asked, we answered.
Valve hardware engineer Yazan Aldehayyat won’t promise anything, but he told us “that is something we are really interested in supporting” during our big Valve trip. It’s not as simple as it sounds, he says: What if users pull it off the dock mid-update?
It could fail and you’d be stuck in that state forever, right? Or you lose Wi-Fi connection and be in a weird state. There’s all kinds of situations where we want to be able to have acceptable behavior if that happens.
I’ve been looking for a better way to play Steam games on my TV, and the Steam Machine checks all my boxes.
Valve’s marketing video for Steam Frame is a bit misleading — its monochrome cameras mean you’d see the world around the screen in shades of grey, not color. But I’m hoping that means affordable. Valve’s Jeremy Selan told us:
While this is a premium headset, we did want to be cost considerate because we’re really trying to make this accessible to as many people as we can.
“This is both a peripheral controller for a PC as well as the Steam Machine or whatever else you want to plug it into,” said hardware engineer Steve Cardinali. “Most of the time, your audio will be coming from that, not directly your controller.” Because of that, “we just didn’t feel like it was necessary.”
I still wish it was there; I use the DualSense’s headphone jack for quiet audio at night all the time. Otherwise, I really like the controller.
I brought our Quest 3 to Valve’s offices just in case we’d be seeing the Steam Frame, formerly known as Deckard — and it paid off! I didn’t have time to directly compare optics, but I’d say comfort is superior. It’s noticeably smaller, with controllers that are bigger.
What’s inside Valve’s six-inch cube? We got a dozen photos of the console’s guts, including all six sides.
I told you security guards lined the halls during my Valve visit. CNET’s Scott Stein can back me up. But I’ve never seen guards during previous Valve trips — and maybe they were only there that day. Steve Burke (Gamers Nexus) told me he didn’t see any when he visited.
According to Valve, games are already Steam Deck Verified, they’ll “automatically be verified on Steam Machine.” There will be a Steam Frame Verified program, too.
[steamcommunity.com]
IGN’s Wesley Yin-Poole has an excellent interview with Valve’s Pierre-Loup Griffais and Yazan Aldehayyat, including one reason why they have no news about Steam Deck 2. It’s because yet again, the promised “generational leap” in performance is not yet possible. They haven’t found the right chip.
Griffais says:
“We’re not interested in getting to a point where it’s 20 or 30 or even 50% more performance at the same battery life. We want something a little bit more demarcated than that.”
The company confirmed it to Gamers Nexus in a statement:
APKs can also be side-loadable just like any non-Steam applications on Steam Deck. We expect that VR APKs that don’t leverage proprietary APls to just work.
Can Valve’s tiny box take on Microsoft and Sony?
This is what Valve’s new headset is all about.
Jon Bringus isn’t saying how he obtained this unicorn, but it looks completely legit!
It self-IDs as a “Valve Steambox,” fires up a Steam screen, makes Steam hardware sounds, and natively pairs with Steam Controllers! Intriguing components inside, like a presence-sensing front panel that fires up its iconic ring light. It appears to have a VirtualLink USB-C port, so it probably helped Valve designers test wired VR headsets before that standard failed.
Skip to 8:11 if you don’t want the preamble.
