The PC had been gaining ground on consoles for years. Steam Machine is directly a meteorite to extinguish them

What has been rumored around Valve for a long time has happened. No no ‘Half Life 3‘, but the return of Steam Machines. It was something that had been circulating for a while, but yesterday seemed like the day and Valve did not disappoint. They presented a new Steam Controller (with looks better than the first), the Steam Frame glasses and the cherry on top for many: its new Steam Machine.

Its appearance is that of a Xbox Series Xbut flatter, and it is not only that it has all the external appearance of being a console, but that it aims to be the device that, finally, presents the PC as a serious threat to the console segment. Your argument? Which has the ease of use of a console, but also the versatility of a PC.

We are not going to go into detail about its characteristics because we have already told everything there is to know about the inside of the Steam Machine and it is already estimated that its performance would be similar to that of a PS5. What I am going to do is theorize about why Valve’s new console can be the meteorite for consoles.

And for Windows PCs.

Now the Steam Machine can work. We have seen it on Steam Deck

This thing about Steam Machines is nothing new. Not only the Steam Deck is a “Steam machine”, but because Steam Machines already existed a decade ago. At the end of 2013, Valve presented Steam OSa hybrid system between Linux and Steam focused on video games. It was green, but they wanted it to be the heart of the, also recently presentedSteam Machines.

In their day, these first machines They were nothing more than pre-assembled computers thanks to the Valve partnership with brands such as Dell, Asus, Gigabyte or AlienWare. They had Steam OSthey were powerful, the hardware could be upgraded and… they didn’t make sense. Its high price, that at the time ‘gaming’ in Linux was not so developed and that to buy a PC like this, you would assemble one piece by piece, meant that Steam Machines did not take off.

In fact, all Steam hardware stumbled, from computers to the curious Steam Controller, to a steam link that was liquidated on Steam next to the command. It didn’t catch on, but Valve continued developing the idea and things were different with the Steam Deck. Following the Switch model, the Steam Deck was portable, but it could also output images to a television.

It runs the games very well, it has generated a great community and it does not have Windows, but Linux and Steam OS have been its great strength. What didn’t work a decade ago works now thanks to Steam putting a lot of effort into making everything playable on the Deck: from native Linux games to Windows games that they run perfectly with something called Proton. Broadly speaking, it is a “translator” of Windows instructions so that Linux understands them and, thus, can run its games.

Plus, everything is easy, intuitive, and if you just want to play, you don’t have to do weird things with the Deck. Bringing that concept from a laptop to a desktop PC was the natural step, and the new Steam Machine has something that the previous ones didn’t have. absolute support from Valve.

That is, the company wanted the previous ones to work, but Steam OS was not mature nor did they have control over what the hardware companies did. The new Steam Machine IS from Steam, and that means that they have optimized software and hardware to make it work perfectly. It is something similar to what Apple does or what Sony and Microsoft do with AMD– PC-like components, but tweaked and tuned to meet your console needs.

Valve itself has confirmed that they are currently fine-tuning some components, such as the GPU, with AMD. The TDP of the discrete GPU is 100W, but they have confessed who are working in a range between 100 and 130 together with the hardware company. That total control was something they didn’t have in the past, and something that didn’t happen years ago was that the components lasted as long.

Like it more or less, the arrival of artificial intelligence tools in video games is showing that obsolete hardware (like the Steam Deck) can stay fresh thanks to image reconstruction tools and frame generation. When the Steam Machine arrives in early 2026your hardware will not be cutting edge (in fact, the GPU is based on RDNA3not in RDNA 4), but those AI tools are what gives valve confidence that everything will run smoothly. 4K60 thanks to FSR.

It is exactly the same philosophy as a console:

• Closed hardware.
• Components adjusted by the system designer.
• Operating system optimized for those components.
• Direct support from the company that releases the hardware.

And, as I said, Valve now has a reputation for supporting gaming hardware, something it has been demonstrating for years with the Steam Deck.

The Steam Machine is a threat to consoles, Xbox and… the PC

That’s why a Steam Machine that didn’t work in 2015 can work in 2026but there is something else: the market itself. Although consoles continue to have a high share (Sony has confirmed that a PS5 that is having a fairly weak generation in launches It has already sold more than 80 million units), things are very different now.

No more big exclusives: everything comes out on PC. Excluding a Nintendo that, with nintendo switch 2 and its intellectual properties, it goes at its own pace, of course. Xbox launches its games directly on computers and consoles (in fact, it is already more third than first, becoming a heavyweight within PlayStation’s own video games) and Sony has been releasing its great sagas on PC for years, specifically on Steam.

They don’t arrive on the same day as the PS5, but they end up arriving and, in fact, a ‘Horizon’ MMOSony’s most important saga in terms of sales in recent years, and It will not come to your console, but directly to PC. We are in a scenario in which the PC has become the platform on which more games are available, where there is more freedom to buy and, although the Steam Machine integrates its own store, it is still a PC on which to play your Epic Games or Good old Games games.

Furthermore, rumors suggest that The next Xbox will be very similar to a PC, even with free online, so Valve is only the first to reach a gap that others want to explore. Getting there first is key, something we have seen with Steam (with Amazon trying to understand whywith all the money in the world, they can’t compete against Steam) and with a Steam Deck with which We compare all consolidated PCs with Windows.

And there is another key: Windows. Although it is still the most versatile system, it increasingly seems the least suitable for playing. It consumes a lot of background resources that are not dedicated to the execution of video games and, in fact, in the analysis of the ASUS ROG Xbox Allya console that brings Xbox closer to the Steam Deck segment, we already mentioned that there were those I had installed Steam OS instead of Windows and games ran 30% faster.

It is always difficult to know what will happen in the future, but I am clear that the Steam Machine that took a tremendous hit ten years ago is now It can be a dagger both for the console segment and for the PC itself. The components are very expensive due to the rise of AI, it is still a PC with the versatility that this implies (Valve has confirmed that you can install other operating systems, such as Windows) and its format makes it powerful and small, ideal for the TV cabinet in the living room.

There are still details to know such as the price, which is always fundamental and which is already We are talking about a range of between 500 and 800 eurossee direct performance tests and see how non-state-of-the-art components stretch. But considering how the Steam Deck works, it’s no surprise that the community is very interested in this move from Valve.

With consoles that They are more expensive today than when they were launched five years ago, some games that They have settled at 80 euros (and we will see what happens with GTA VI) and more expensive servicesthat idea of ​​having a PC-console with Steam and what this implies in terms of freedom of stores and offers is something that many of us already have an eye on.

And most importantly: now, it seems that Valve is going all-in, which is what it didn’t do 10 years ago.

Images | Steam

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