extinguish

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. The fronts will be customizable 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. The ecosystem 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. It seems that Valve is going with everything, which is what it did not do 10 years ago 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. Point directly to the living room 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 … Read more