Valve is making a play for living rooms again with its new Steam Machine hardware, and the company believes that the compact gaming PC could be equal to or better than what “70%” of people have at home currently. In a new interview, Valve engineer Yazan Aldehayyat explained that the Steam Machine is designed to be both a powerful and entry-level gaming device, capable of running most of the games in your Steam library at high performance levels.
“As you know, we definitely learned a lot, from 10 years ago. We learned a lot from the Steam Deck. We really feel like we have all the hardware and the software bits to make that vision a reality,” Aldehayyat said to Tested. “It needs to have enough performance to play all your Steam games; we wanted it to be a pretty simple experience. We also wanted to target more of an entry-level device. Affordability is really important, and definitely the price-point played a huge factor in what performance level we’re trying to target. Another thing we looked at is the Steam Hardware Survey. It gives us a good benchmark of where people’s home devices are at in terms of performance, and the Steam Machine is equal or better than 70% of what people have at home.”
Aldehayyat’s comments might not be too far off the mark. Older gaming PCs are still capable of running a wide variety of games thanks to upscaling technologies, while in the console space, many games are still released for both current and last-gen machines, like the PS4 and the Switch. Valve has also said that the Steam Machine is over six times more powerful than the Steam Deck, and the official tech specs released for it do suggest that it’ll be capable of comfortably playing modern PC games.
The biggest question so far about the Steam Deck isn’t how it’ll perform, but what it’ll cost when it launches next year. Aldehayyat has mentioned that Valve wants to sell Steam Machine units at a “competitive” price, with analysts predicting that it could cost $400 in a best-case scenario or as much as $1,000 if Valve is aiming to break even on every sale or make a slim profit. This is the second time that Valve is launching a Steam Machine, but Valve says it’s determined to not repeat the mistakes of the past.
