After months of speculation and delays, Steam Machines are going out into the world and people have been sharing their thoughts. One of those people is former President of Sony Interactive Entertainment Worldwide Studios Shuhei Yoshida. The industry veteran has worked around gaming hardware for decades. What does he think of Valve’s latest take on living room gaming? The ex-Sony exec’s initial impressions were a mix of surprise, delight, and disappointment.
“Thoughts after a few hours of playing with Steam Machine,” he posted on X overnight. “3D performance is just…meh. The system recommends to default to 1080p–am I going back to PS4 days?” Yes, it was a pretty brutal assessment, but not all of it was negative. In fact, his first reaction after turning the device on was being impressed with how much it functioned just like a console, despite Valve’s continued statements that it was definitely not aiming to be one.
While Yoshida was not impressed with how long some games take to boot, or the Steam Controller itself, calling the thumbstick too loose and the touch pad too “touchy,” other features won the PlayStation veteran’s seal of approval. He liked the changeable face plates, the system UI, and the fact that the device is very small and runs very quietly.
This is such a console experience 🙂 #SteamMachine @KOMODO_Games_JP pic.twitter.com/L914E5ywtG
— Shuhei Yoshida (@yosp) July 1, 2026
This assessment is in line with what a lot of tech reviewers have said, which is essentially that the Steam Machine is a very well-designed piece of hardware that doesn’t reach the crisp graphical output across all games, the way you might hope for a device that costs so much. “It allows me to play Steam games on my living room TV, which is a reason enough to keep it,” Yoshida concluded. “But the price was very unfriendly. Hard to recommend to people unless for research.”
The price is, of course, not Valve’s fault, but a consequence of how AI hyperscalers have upended the market for memory and storage and caused prices to spike to unprecedented levels. At closer to $750, the estimated price that Valve originally wanted to sell the Steam Machine at, it might have been a much more competitive value proposition. The trade-off at the heart of PC gaming is more freedom in exchange for more annoying fiddliness.
Valve was hoping to lower the barrier to making that compromise. The AI bubble had other plans. The company still has to launch its new Steam Frame VR headset. I hope we get to see Yoshida, who spearheaded Sony’s foray into PlayStation VR, review that device as well.