Were we too nice to the Steam Machine?

0:02Hello and welcome to the VergeCast, the flagship podcast of VRAM. I'm your friend David Pierce and today on the show we are taking your questions about the Steam Machine. We published our Steam Machine review a couple of weeks ago. Sean Hollister got a lot of feedback from all of you. He came on the show, we talked about it. We also got a lot of feedback, questions about whether the Steam Machine is any good, whether it's worth the price, whether the fact that its valve is valuable. So we're going to dig into a bunch of your questions and try to make sense of the Steam Machine once and for all.

0:32But first, here's everything else happening on The Verge today. I'm Jake Castronakis, and this is 90 Seconds on The Verge for Wednesday, July 15th, 2026. Big changes are coming to the Google Play Store in the US. Google will start distributing rival app stores inside its own Android marketplace, and those app stores will get access to every app that's inside Google's own stores, too. It's a wild shakeup that could meaningfully alter the app store landscape. Google was ordered to make this change after losing a lawsuit to Epic in 2023. Google tried to avoid making the changes through a settlement, but as of last night, that settlement is dead.

1:04That means rival app stores can show up as soon as next Wednesday, July 22nd. While companies actually take advantage of this and launch their own app stores, it's hard to say. But this is the most open the app store ecosystem has been on Android in a long time, and you can bet Epic will take its shot. Next up, OpenAI seems to be trying to change the narrative after Apple sued it last week for allegedly stealing hardware secrets. First, a scoop in Bloomberg, sourced to some leaky people in OpenAI's world, revealed details of the AI company's first hardware product, a smart speaker with a built-in battery so you can move it around your house.

1:34The speaker could be announced later this year, but it isn't expected to ship until 2027. Meanwhile, OpenAI provided emails to NBC News trying to prove that it didn't ignore Apple's legal demands like Apple claimed. The AI company seems to be blaming Apple's lawyers for a confusing email thread that mixed up different people with the last names Wang and Cheng. Does any of this really change the story? eh, I'm waiting for the actual legal response. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, Home Depot's giant 12-foot skeleton can talk now. There's a new version where you can use an app to talk through its robotic mouth.

2:04It costs$379 and totally sounds like a deal. You can read more at theverge.com. That's 90 seconds on The Verge for Wednesday, July 15th, 2026. This episode is brought to you by Google Chrome. You think you know a browser, but Gemini and Chrome, that's new. It can help you with practically anything on the web, like restoring a vintage motorcycle from a 50-page restoration block or finally break down that long article you've had open for weeks. Gemini and Chrome is here for it. Ready to make anything online make sense? There's no place like Chrome. Check responses set up required compatibility and availability varies 18+.

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3:13All right, let's talk steam machine. The Verge of Sean Hollister is here. Hi, Sean. Hey. Okay, we got a lot of feedback on the episode we did about the C machine a couple of weeks ago. And I would sort the questions we're about to go through into two categories. One is functionally about price and sort of what are you actually getting? What is the true value of this machine? And then the other is the valve of it all. Like is the fact that it's valve a pro or a con or neither is a question we're going to reckon with a little bit here. But let's start with a very long email we got from Jude. Jude starts by saying, if this was released by Asus or whoever else besides Valve, you would have torn it to shreds for the bad product that it is instead of spending half the episode defending Valve and looking at the product with the most tinted glasses.

4:01Jude then goes on to say, here are all the possible markets. If someone doesn't have a gaming machine or games library, they're better off with the PlayStation as that offers double the value per dollar. If they have no machine, but do have an existing Steam library, they're better off building one themselves or getting a pre-built. And thus, the only remaining market here are people who already have a Steam library, a powerful enough gaming PC that can provide them with a great visual experience, a lot of disposable income, and just want an extra TV box to play chill games from or use for streaming.

4:28Basically, Jude's point is this thing is a terrible deal and you guys were far too nice of it because there's actually no one who should buy it. And I think this gets to the shouldn't you just buy or build your own PC? Doesn't that neatly solve this problem potentially for far less money? Walk me through how you think through the trade-off between those two things.

4:48Sean Hollister:As far as I'm concerned, the Steam machine is only a good deal if you do not already have a gaming desktop and you want something that seems more like a console than the gaming desktops that are out there right now or the gaming desktop that you could build. Because if you try to build one yourself, you will find it is quite expensive. You can certainly build a machine that is the price of the Steam machine that will play games. And you can certainly build a console-like experience out of it if you spend a lot of time configuring the settings and making it boot into Steam big picture mode and all of that.

5:27Sean Hollister:But what you will not have at the end of the day is a relatively inexpensive machine, and you will not have one that is very cool and quiet and nice to hang around, that feels like it belongs in your living room. and and and asterisk sign i was going to say when you pull it out of the box the problem with the steam machine and this is why we gave it a six jude not a not a seven not an eight not a nine if you read our six it is good there are issues but also redeeming qualities that's where it stands in our rubric it's right above just okay and mediocre so we're just a step beyond those things uh this box it is not quite ready right out of the box this is why we're giving it a six and not a seven or an eight it has a number of issues but i don't think price is the main issue with it unless you're hoping that it would be playstation price for playstation performance and i skewered in the review for not quite delivering that thing i skewer it for one not delivering better performance than a machine from 5.5 years ago, the 2020 PlayStation 5, and two, for not being ready out of the box.

6:42Sean Hollister:It has issues. This is also what we did with the Steam Deck. The Steam Deck review, I called it a mess, but I said it was a lot of fun. That was the original Steam Deck review. The machine is in a very similar place. The difference here, as I lay out in the review, is that where that thing started at$400, this is$1049. And so a lot of people who know how to build PCs, who've known how to build PCs for years, are like, of course I can build a better thing for that amount of money. But if you go out and you look at the prices, you can build something for that amount of money. But can you build something better?

7:18Sean Hollister:I argue you can't. I built many PCs in my life. I don't think I can build anything this cool, this quiet, this compact. this, even this performant for this level of money, the performant. Yes, that part I could do. Sure. So on that front, actually, the thing I've been trying to think about is, and I think this goes to both parts of the feedback that we've gotten, which is also about, again, the valve of it all. Is there something greater than the sum of its parts about the steam machine that is hard to see on the spec sheet? Right. And I think part of it is you talk about the fact that it runs very cool and the fact that it looks nice in your living room in the way that your average RGB computer tower doesn't.

8:00But is there something that is genuinely hard to replace or imitate about this thing that is done the way that it is because Valve is Valve and is doing it the way that it does?

8:15Sean Hollister:Again, with an asterisk sign, SteamOS, if you run Windows on a compact computer like this or on any computer, really, you are dealing with an operating system that is designed to do so many, many, many, many more things, which some of which you may want. If you're used to that Windows environment, if you want to be editing videos on it, a lot of people say that Linux does not have a good video editing tool like your Adobe Premieres or like the Final Cuts of the World on the Apple side. If you need lots of legacy things, if you need lots of Windows things, obviously you're going to want a Windows box instead of this.

9:01Sean Hollister:But if all you want to do is sit down and play games and have it boot up into a gaming environment that feels like it was designed for the task, SteamOS is finally that thing. And Windows, despite Microsoft's recent efforts with the Xbox Ally X and other handhelds, game mode is not that thing right now steam os is on the steam deck and it should be on the steam machine but it is not quite yet because of sometimes i'd have suspended resume issues sometimes i've had other growing pains other bugs i'm hoping that like the steam deck a few months from now a year from now this thing is great by the time you can buy it hopefully it's right right which is a funny thing for you like one of the you know truisms of life as a verge reviewer is you can only review the thing in the box but also valve has done this exact thing before and did deliver like the steam deck did eventually become the thing that we hoped it would become and so i think there is reason to be optimistic and yet you still have to sort of look it in its face and be like this thing does not work yet yeah like i think it probably will but i want i I want readers and viewers to understand this is why it's a six and not like a seven or an eight.

10:15Sean Hollister:I'll tell you right now. Sean, I'm sensing you got some feedback on your review when you published it. Do we need to talk about this? Feedback much like our commentator, who I think also may have been in the comments of the review itself. If it could sleep and resume as reliably as the Steam Deck, it would be a seven, not a six. That alone bumps it up a point. We've done that. for other handhelds that have come back from the point of, oh, you couldn't really resume the games anymore. Now you can. Now you can press the button. It turns off. You press it on. There's your game waiting for you exactly where it left off.

10:52Sean Hollister:That happens some of the time on the Steam machine, so it's a six. If it happened all the time, it'd be a seven. It's that simple. One more hardware question that comes from Jim, who basically, again, if I'm summarizing Jim's email, says, I think the debate on the hardware longevity needs to be at the forefront. This is a$1 ,000 box that isn't modular outside of the storage and faceplate, but with hardware in real world testing that is roughly on par with the RTX 3060 equipped with a meager 8GB of RAM. The point is essentially, this thing, you buy a PC or you build a PC expecting it to last a long time.

11:25Is this thing going to have the longevity and usefulness life that you could expect from a device like that? And what Jim says is, well, I do think this is ultimately just trying to advance Linux as a gaming platform. It's a right place, wrong time product that is too expensive for non-gaming PC owners and too weak or superfluous as an upgrade option for those who do have one. Tough. But I am curious how you feel about the idea of what this thing might be like one, two, five, eight years from now.

11:54Sean Hollister:Yeah, I agree with a lot of what Jim is saying. And honestly, our previous commentary too, except for the complaint with the score. But Jim, yes, absolutely. This thing should have been either priced much lower or kitted much better. I am surprised we're in this place where it's only got the 8GB of VRAM. We're kind of like fighting to make it play things at 4K, where if it had 12, maybe we wouldn't be having this issue. um i i i think that if in you know in my perfect world it would have other replaceable components but not not everything uh the storage is replaceable the memory is replaceable if you dig in there under the cooler uh what the rest of it is very cleverly and compactly designed around the fan and the cooler such that it can be so cool and quiet that's really important to me I don't know if I would trade that in the living room for upgradability of an internal variety.

12:55Sean Hollister:I would like this to have a very powerful like Thunderbolt 5 or USB 4 port so I could expand it with an eGPU or something down the road. I do not like that, like you say, this is not designed for the longevity, not designed with the upgradability that a normal PC would have, again, which would be much larger to make it as cool and quiet as this or this size, but louder. It's kind of the tradeoff you get right now, I think. Is it fair to have higher expectations for something like this than for something like the Steam Deck, which I think you could make a lot of the same arguments about, but it doesn't feel as much of a negative in something like the Steam Deck just because of the way the form factor works?

13:40I don't think anyone picks up a Steam Deck saying, I expect to use this as my daily driver for a decade. It's just not how we treat devices like that. But I think for something like this, which is, for all intents and purposes, a PC, I feel like our expectations are different. Do you think that's fair?

13:54Sean Hollister:That's absolutely fair. That's absolutely true. The expectations for this are and should be different because it is supposed to be a desktop, a living room PC. When you put it in one of these places and you think about how long it's going to be there, you have to think about how the PlayStation 5 has already been in those places for five and a half years with this level of performance. and the games that are coming down the road in one, two, three years may not play on this as well as you would want them to. Even if it plays a lot of stuff that's coming out today, great. I would like more upgradable modularity for sure.

14:33Sean Hollister:And I don't feel quite the same way about the Steam Deck because again, the constraints of making it so portable, so handheld, nobody's expecting to put another motherboard in there. That doesn't come with the territory, right? Now, what proponents, and I kind of consider myself one of them here, would argue is that the Steam machine, because it's for this living room use case where it's supposed to be so cool and quiet, that gives them a little bit of leeway in the upgradability department because that's also a constraint where you have to make things less upgradable to get the results that they wanted to.

15:13Sean Hollister:Now, the other place where Valve maybe gives itself some leeway is in the operating system if it is wholeheartedly putting SteamOS out there for other people to make their own Steam machines. One of The Verge's friends, Chris Person, dunked on folks on Blue Sky brilliantly, I thought, when he pointed out that everybody who's building a Steam machine out of their own components to show Valve is doing exactly what Valve wants, because Valve would love for everybody to build Steam machines out of PC components and load Steam OS on them. The caveat there is that Valve is not letting companies go out and build Steam machines.

15:54Sean Hollister:It's only letting individual people go out and build them. And making this work on every component under the sun is not Valve's primary goal right now. It's a fairly small 350-person company with a bunch of Linux and Proton experts that they also fund. And so if you're diving into it with your own components, do not be surprised if there be dragons in that direction. So this is an interesting bit of this tension that I hadn't really thought about until you were just describing it, where there is part of the reason the PlayStation 5 continues to work five and a half years later is because there is only the PlayStation 5.

16:34They have not released a slightly upgraded PlayStation 5 every 12 months. Since then, the PC market, though, is getting relentlessly faster. There's always new stuff. There's always more stuff to support. And that's a good thing for the overall industry. It's a bad thing for the ongoing relevance of your particular device that you put in your living room. So maybe to some extent, just by buying a PC, you are signing yourself up for a faster run of obsolescence, especially in gaming, when more and more people are going to do more and more bleeding edge stuff. And so in a case like this, where it's already slightly underpowered, you just run the risk of getting very underpowered much more quickly as the industry kind of leaves you behind.

17:14In the way that if you're PlayStation, you're like, well, look, this is just the PlayStation. Like, it's still this. You have to make your game for this.

17:19Sean Hollister:But that is exactly the thing about the console play. But if you pull it off right, if you get enough gamers, enough developers to latch onto your piece of hardware, as opposed to all the possible Steam machines, if you get them to latch onto the Steam machine the way they latched onto the Steam Deck, where Sony was making sure all of its games worked well on the Steam Deck, all the major game developers you can think of, Square Enix, you know, which never took the longest to support Steam. they are supporting the steam deck making sure final fantasy you know seven rebirth and remake run well on a steam deck if valve could put out enough of these steam machines if they had the supply if the price was low enough that a lot of people would buy into it then it would set a nice low bar the lowest common denominator whatever you want to call it it would set a standard that game developers could aim at, could target, and then games would actually not progress as quickly, as recklessly as they otherwise might into the stratospheric level of, you know, K-shaped economy graphics that people are going to be able to buy if they can afford ridiculous NVIDIA and AMD cards, bringing it more down to earth where you just, you expect games to run on this because game developers need to make them run on this the way they need to make them run on a PlayStation 5.

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21:06Okay, I have a question for you that is, it's from Adam, and it is the kind of exact other side of the coin of what we've been talking about here. Adam says, I'm considering paying the extra money for the support that Valve provides. This is based on their historical releases, like the first-gen Steam controller that is still usable, even though it's out of production. I'm hesitant to believe Sony and Microsoft won't try to change their gaming business models, so they want to sell you services between when you sit down to play and when you actually play. this is a great middle ground for me willing to take some tinkering but also expecting that valve will smooth this out sooner than anyone else listen do i think adam is maybe a valve employee in disguise i don't know but that is that's the case for the thing right like it that is kind of the summation of what you just said that actually maybe valve is not the most chaotic possibility here that actually signing up for an xbox or a playstation is just as much a risk on what the future of those companies or those platforms might look like.

22:02And that actually Valve's history of doing right by its products and its customers is pretty strong.

22:08Sean Hollister:Valve is the only company I can point to where I would say I trust this company to put out the updates that make this device better and more usable down the road. I mean, yeah, the Steam Controller, the original Steam Link, both of those devices were like fire sale devices for Valve. They did not sell very well. They were given away at a pittance. I think I paid$5 for the Steam Link. It kept getting updates. It kept working for years and years and years. I'm pretty sure it would still work if I plugged it in today, although it is on an older Wi-Fi standard. The Steam controller used AA batteries, so it's going to keep working forever.

22:49Sean Hollister:No internal lithium back I need to worry about there on the original Steam controller. The Steam Deck is still getting new functionality. The original one, the one that they don't sell anymore, the LCD Steam Deck. They are currently using that crowd of early adopters of the original Steam Deck LCD to test out a new hibernation mode, which should make your Steam Deck last longer when you're just leaving it out unplayed. They have an incredible, unprecedented track record of support for this stuff. much closer to a console manufacturer, except here the updates are making the product better instead of trying to figure out how to keep people from hacking it.

23:34Sean Hollister:And I do worry about what Microsoft and Sony are going to do next with their consoles. I have a lot of thoughts about the end of disks. But I will say this for Microsoft and Sony. they since they embraced x86 chips since they since the playstation and the xbox basically became pcs that happened to run a very locked down operating system uh we don't have really have to worry very much about backwards compatibility anymore yes they're shutting down the playstation 3 digital store and playstation vita digital store but ps4 games just work on PS5 because they are both PCs. And I'm pretty sure the PS4 and PS5 games will just work on PS6.

24:17Sean Hollister:They have started, finally started down the path that PCs have been on for ages where your library will just come with you. And so unless they rip it away from you like they rip away as digital movies when they lose licensing rights, I'm not as worried about them as I would if they were using like proprietary or special chips for each generation. Yeah. Yeah, it makes sense. I think Valve's reputation is sort of crucial to its ability to pull this thing off that it's trying to pull off. It's going to be really interesting to see. Okay, one tiny question and then one more big question that we're going to add here.

24:54We got a couple of people asking us basically, how is this thing going to work as a set-top box? Like, can I replace my Roku or whatever with it? And I think functionally that question is just, does this have streaming apps on it that you can use?