Is the Steam Machine worth the wait?

0:02Welcome to the VergeCast, the flagship podcast of ray tracing. I'm your friend David Pierce, and today on the show, we're talking about the Steam Machine. After months of waiting, the Verge's Sean Hollister finally got his hands on Valve's new living room game console. He's been testing it. He's been playing games. He's going to come on and tell us all about how he feels and whether this is the next big thing in PC gaming. I'm very excited about it, if I'm being honest. The Steam Controller seems to be great. I sort of accidentally built a big library of Steam games over the years, and I do too much of my gaming right now on a Switch 2.

0:37It's probably time to upgrade. We're going to get into all of that in just a minute, but first, here's everything else happening at The Verge today. This is 90 Seconds on The Verge for Monday, June 22nd, 2026. Instagram just announced a bunch of new features specifically aimed at people who watch Instagram on their television, which I assume is currently no one. There are new intraspace channels you can watch. You can watch stories and reels. And Instagram even says it's testing longer form content, episodic series, and even things like live streaming on TVs. The context here is that YouTube has been growing like crazy on bigger screens over the last few years.

1:09And Instagram wants to do the same. The other context here is that Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube are all so desperately copying each other's features that they're just rapidly becoming the exact same scrolly video app. And I find it exhausting. The phone maker nothing canceled an upcoming device, which would have been a follow-up to the CMF Phone Pro 2. Nothing's co-founder said that, quote, with memory prices where they are right now, we can't build a phone that feels like a genuine step forward at a price that makes sense for CMF. Yikes. This is bad news for CMF fans, sure, but it's also a sign of things to come.

1:42We've talked a lot about the rising price of gadgets over the years, but as prices go up, a whole class of these lower-priced gadgets, in particular cheap phones that billions of people rely on, are just being priced out of existence. And finally, all your Vibe-coded projects might be a total security disaster. All of mine, too, don't worry, and everyone else's. Verge contributor Yael Grauer has the story of all the ways AI coding agents can screw up and all of the ways that can leave your data exposed. Cloud Code is fun, don't get me wrong, just be careful out there. You can read more about all of this at TheVerge.com.

2:15That's 90 Seconds on The Verge for Monday, June 22nd. Support for the show comes from ServiceNow. AI is moving fast across the enterprise. But without visibility, it's just chaos. Different tools, different models, different teams using AI in completely different ways. ServiceNow turns that chaos into control. With the AI control tower, you see all your AI across the business in one place. What it's doing, what it's done, and what it's about to do. So you stay in control. To put AI to work for people, visit servicenow.com.

2:53support for this show comes from fetch pet insurance do you have a pet every six seconds a pet owner in the u.s gets hit with a vet bill of over a thousand dollars and it's almost always an unwelcome surprise that's where fetch pet insurance comes in fetch is the most complete pet insurance get paid back up to 90 of vet bills you can use any vet in the u.s and canada All vets are in network. Go to FetchPet.com slash save right now for your free quote. That's FetchPet.com slash save. All right, let's talk Steam Machines. The Verge's Sean Hollister is here. Hi, Sean. Hi. Tell me what games you've been playing the most over the last few days.

3:38You've been reviewing the Steam Machine. What are the first and second games you go to to review the Steam Machine?

3:45Sean Hollister:I always try to test systems like this with Indiana Jones and the Great Circle because it's really demanding and it can play on there. And from 12 feet away on my couch, it's a pretty good experience. I'm whip cracking some Nazis. It's great. That's very exciting. That's a good first one to start with because I also feel like Indiana Jones has reached the Assassin's Creed level of like you can almost certainly play it on anything that plays games. It's just sort of everywhere now. It's great. And then, of course, I had to do a little bit of Portal. Because everybody loves Portal. This is a Valve product we're talking about.

4:18I want to start at the beginning a little bit with the Steam Machine, because the fact that this exists is sort of fascinating to me. We first talked about the Steam Machine in November, and I would be lying to you if I said I didn't half expect it to have been canceled by now because of Ramageddon and the rising cost of supply chain things, and everything is just getting harder for something like the steam machine. Are you a little surprised that this thing has actually shipped to you and is inside of your house right now?

4:50Sean Hollister:A little bit. I would say that the overarching valve strategy is they build things that they want to exist for themselves, and they're totally fine if they're going to be trickling this out to early adopters for the next, like, two to three years, which I'm afraid they might have to because supplies are going to be low for this thing. We've been tracking their shipments overseas, and they don't have that many tons of Steam machines going over the ocean. And so I kind of love that in one way because it means that by the time this reaches lots of people, like the Steam Deck took months, maybe a year, to reach the people who wanted it, it'll hopefully be done.

5:31It'll hopefully feel like a game console experience where you just fire up your game and it works and it's beautiful. It is not quite that today. So tell me about that experience, actually, because my sort of most immediate big picture question for you is just fundamentally why this thing exists. And I think as much as I've come to understand, it's what you just said about the particulars of the experience of sitting down on your couch and playing video games seems to be the whole driving force behind why this exists. Can you just talk that out a little bit for me?

6:04Sean Hollister:The Steam Deck was you like the idea of games that just work. You shied away from PC because games don't necessarily just work. But what if you could have your games everywhere with you, like a Nintendo Switch, and those PC games kind of just work? And a lot of people were like, I am a PC gamer now, and I didn't realize it. Or I'm coming back to PCs after years. This is that for your TV. So you're a console gamer. Or you're somebody who used to think they were a PC gamer. You don't have time for that anymore. You don't want to mess with settings. You take this box, you stick it under your TV, and it should be like the experience of a PlayStation.

6:41Sean Hollister:In this case, it has about the power of a PlayStation 5, but you are technically loading PC games. This catalog, this back catalog, going back decades and decades of PC games, you can run them on your couch, and you do not need to plug a mouse or keyboard into this box if you do not want to. You can just use a controller. You can use the Steam controller if you want to have touch beds. You can use a random Bluetooth controller. that you buy from Matebitdo or whoever for$30 on Amazon. It all should work. And it all does work up until you reach some weird bugs that they haven't quite ironed out yet.

7:15Okay. Still, it all does mostly work, strikes me as a pretty big achievement for something like this. Like, you and I have spent a lot of time on this show talking about the way that Windows just continues to fail as a gaming platform. In a whole variety of ways, right? It's too resource intensive. It's too complicated. It just is not the thing that PC gamers need. There's so much baggage. Despite the fact that it is literally what PC gamers need, right? So it seems like Valve has, to a large extent, solved some of these problems. But the thing that is so fascinating to me is that this is the second time Valve has tried to do this.

7:53It first tried over a decade ago, and it super didn't work. And Valve changed nothing about its strategy, and now it kind of worked. They changed one super important thing about the strategy. One thing.

8:05Sean Hollister:And that is this. In 2012, 2013, 2015, by the time they actually shipped the thing, the controller, their idea was we will build the hardware and they will come. And they was developers building Linux games. They thought if they just built the hardware, all of a sudden people would turn around and build games for Linux. That's just a straightforward console idea, right? You're just being Nintendo at that point. You make a console, you make games for our console. Exactly. And they couldn't get the partners to do that. And the partners that they did have were not to be trusted to get the thing out there.

8:41Sean Hollister:And they screwed up the controller timing and it took the hardware was ready. The controller wasn't ready. The OS wasn't ready, et cetera, et cetera. Developers were not going to build games for that. The grand thing that they have changed, the amazing insight is they don't need Windows, but they do need Windows games. So you are literally playing Windows games 90 % of the time when you're running a Steam Deck, when you're running them on a Steam machine. They are the same games. Developers don't need to modify them. But they're going through this layer. They're going through Proton, which is built on wine.

9:15We've talked about this before. Nowadays, many operating systems are using layers like this. Your Mac can play and run apps that were designed for Intel Silicon on its arm because of a translation layer. This is not quite the same thing, but it's got similarities to that. We're going to see the same thing happen with phones that are playing Steam games soon. You can already do this if you know the right software, download. Game native, Game Hub. And now we're putting this on this TV box where they've got a chip in it that is roughly the power of the PS5, give or take.

9:48Sean Hollister:And unfortunately, if you are running games that were literally designed for the PS5 and then brought to Windows on it, because Sony optimized those for the PS5, they look a little bit better on the PS5 sometimes. than they do on the Steam machine. The PS5 is six years old. The Steam machine is brand new. You're playing games at roughly the same performance, and you're paying about twice the price to get the Steam machine instead of your PS5. But you get that back catalog of decades of games that the PS5 does not have, and the thing is literally a PC, too. Several Verge editors right now are dual booting Linux or straight up running Linux as their desktop operating system that they do work on.

10:33I am dual booting it too.

10:34Sean Hollister:I now have Bazite and Windows on my desktop PC. Well, I'll tell you what. I took this little box. I plugged in literally everything that was plugged into my desktop PC. My monitors, my speakers, my headset, my mouse keyboard, all that stuff. And it just worked. Wow. On this box, and all of a sudden I was doing work on the Steam machine instead of doing it on my Windows PC. So you talk about$1 ,049 for this little box. If it doubles as a PC for you too, I think it's worth the money. If it doesn't, I don't know. That's super interesting. And even whether this thing is expensive as a gaming device depends on whether you perceive it to be a console for your living room or a gaming PC, right?

11:22Tell me about this thing actually as a piece of hardware. Like, spec it out for me like a gaming PC. How does it hold up?

11:30Sean Hollister:Okay, so this is a six-core AMD Zen 4 processor. that's a lot like an AMD Ryzen 5 8540U, which if you have no idea what those alphanumerics mean, it's like a mid-range laptop processor, which is more powerful, newer technology than the CPU that's in the PS5. It has an RDNA 3 GPU, which should have more power technically than what's in the PS5, but it's only got eight gigs of GDDR6 VRAM. People have been mad about this since the announcement, right? Eight gigs of VRAM was like the people had pitchforks that said 8 gigs of VRAM about the Steam machines. They did. And you can't, unfortunately, do a direct comparison to this GPU to basically anything else on the market because the only time AMD has shipped a GPU quite like this is in external GPUs, like an external box that you would plug into a laptop.

12:19But if you know what those are, it's around on RX 7600, 7700, like M or XT, somewhere in that realm. And so what you get out of that, because of that 8 gigabyte VRAM, You can get this thing playing games on your 4K screen, but you're talking about upscaling, super resolution upscaling from basically 1080p. If you think of this as a 1080p console that can output a 4K image, that's the way to think about this. And there'll be some games like on the original PS5 where you're running it at lower resolution than that internally. So Alan Wake, you know, that might be 847p is the number of vertical lines you'd get instead of getting your 1080, instead of getting your 4K.

13:03So it's very similar to the PS5 there. But if you take that PS5 image and that Steam Machine image and you look at them side by side in like Sony optimized games, Sony has techniques like checkerboard rendering where it can make things look a little bit crisper than they would be otherwise. If I look at Cyberpunk 2077, it looks better on the PS5 than it does on the Steam machine. If I look at Horizon Zero Dawn, it's a bit of a toss-up. If I look at Returnal, Returnal looks better on the Steam machine to me. I can get more resolution out of the Steam machine there. So on balance, roughly PS5-ish graphics-wise.

13:40I feel like that's a comparison a lot of people can probably hold in their head. That seems useful.

13:45Sean Hollister:But that PS5 Digital Edition, that PS5 Digital Edition was$400, and now it costs$600, and this costs$1049. Yeah. The price has been the big unknown about this thing for a very long time. Tell me your first reaction when they told you what the price was going to be just a few days ago. My first reaction was actually that's not as bad as I thought. Same. Actually, I was fully prepared for them to be like, starts at$1499 and goes up from there. I feel like they could charge what they want to for this out of the gate because it's early adopters that are going to be getting this. It's going to be people who are really, they really want the Steam machine.

14:26Sean Hollister:They want the new hardware. They want to have the thing that nobody else is going to have. They want to experience it in beta. My headline on my, or my deck on my original Steam Deck review was early access memories because it felt like it was a handheld in early access. this. It was fun to be there in early access. People are going to feel that way about this thing too. They're going to be printing, you know, new face plates for it. It comes with like these ones out of the box and that wooden one back there. I wanted to 3D print something. I didn't get quite done in time for the Fridgecast. They're going to be super into this and they could charge a lot.

14:59But what they told me, what Pierre-Luc Graffet and Lauren C. Yang told me, the developers, perhaps let's call them the lead developers of this system. It's a team effort, but they're kind of public faces over at Valve. What they told me is they are selling this at cost. I mean, you can get a broad stroke understanding of it by looking at what RAM and storage costs now versus what they costed back then. The cost of the product is basically the cost of the components and what it takes to make it. For instance, Steam Deck, we recently had to change our price because not because Steam Deck changed, but because the price that it costs to actually make Steam Deck with those same components changed.

15:33If you're looking at something like the Steam Deck and and the steam machine where we were envisioning it and where we are now, I would say that the new price is actually much more aggressive on that. So we're trying to make it as fair as possible there. This whole industry has kind of transitioned to a model where you don't know what the cost is going to be ahead of time. COVID kind of paved the way for that a little bit. The price that, you know, we might get more parts to make it, but the price might be double what it is today, right? And so at that point, we have to make the calculus of like, oh, should we still build machines with this?

16:06right and like at what cost and and so we're thinking through all that right now at some point we were not even convinced we could build you know any significant quantity so i think we we ended up in a i guess a pretty happy spot overall oh yeah i mean well it it is still pretty aggressive for us to hit this price so even though it's more than we wanted it to be like we're happy that it can be this at the very least so this is very much like a razors and blades model right that even this company is confident that it will sell enough games to make not making money on the console worth it over time i think so they wouldn't tell you that though

16:43Sean Hollister:they always say it's about the learnings they're like i i don't i don't know what to believe like of the learnings don't pay the bills i mean of the people i have talked to uh who say things like this, I would say I believe them 10 % more than I would believe anybody else. That's fair. Because Valve just makes so much money per capita that they can afford to throw ridiculous amounts of money at projects that they think will give them learnings down the road. Do I believe it 100 %? I do not. But they do learn a lot from this. And I do believe that there is some small part of Valve that's like, I want this to exist in the world.

17:24We want this to exist. We want to play this. We want this in our homes. And we're happy to sell a few more to our devout fans along the way. Yeah, I mean, I think that approach is one that has worked extremely well for Valve over the years, right? Like, the Steam Deck was very much that, especially at the beginning. And that has turned into something pretty powerful and very popular for a lot of people.

17:47Sean Hollister:But you'd say Razer and Blade's model, and that makes me think that they should subsidize this, right? Like Sony used to do with the PlayStation, like Microsoft used to do with the Xbox. Microsoft says it's not going to do that anymore. And they are not doing this. They are most definitely not doing this. They don't seem to be bundling a new Half-Life with it either as an exclusive. They say they're religiously against these things. They do not want to do that. And I think that's maybe a little bit of a shame because if this were priced less, it could be the console too, not just the PC for your living.

18:21Interesting. Yeah, part of me has been wondering if knowing what we know now about what this stuff costs, I'm so sure that when they initially spec'd this thing out, it was not supposed to cost anywhere near$1 ,049. I know they wouldn't tell you what price they wanted it to be. Boy, am I sure it was not$1049. But I also, at this point, given what we know about the market, I'm not at all surprised by the idea that some of the parts of this box is$1049. That actually sort of tracks. But part of me wonders, okay, we know it's going to be over$1 ,000. Let's bump it up another couple hundred bucks and make this thing stupendously powerful.

19:00if they accidentally sort of made the wrong price performance tradeoff in trying to make the right performance price tradeoff two years ago or whatever it was. Obviously, it's hindsight. It's complicated to know. But, like, if this thing were vastly more powerful and$1 ,500, would it be that much less compelling to a lot of people who are already willing to pay over$1 ,000 for it? I don't know.

19:25Sean Hollister:If they could bump up the price$100 and have 12 gig of VRAM instead of 8, then it would not struggle so much to do 1440p 4K stuff the way it does. It'll play lots of 4K on older games. It'll look great. It's just when you get to the games that are really RAM intensive and they're starting to be that way. You know, Indiana Jones, Alan Wake 2, you start to run into things. There's actually a bug that I guess I was one of the reviewers helped discover during the review period, where when it was running out of VRAM, when you were hitting that ceiling, it would spontaneously reboot. It would crash.

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