Is Valve Taking On Microsoft? With Steve Burke

Summary

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Better Offline – “Is Valve Taking On Microsoft? With Steve Burke”

Date: December 3, 2025
Host: Ed Zitron
Guest: Steve Burke (Gamers Nexus)

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Episode Overview

This episode of Better Offline dives into Valve’s revived hardware ambitions with its upcoming Steam Machine console and Steam Frame VR headset. Host Ed Zitron and guest Steve Burke (Gamers Nexus) explore what makes these products unique, their potential to disrupt the stagnating console market—especially given Microsoft’s recent miscues—and the broader implications for PC gaming, indie developers, and consumer trust in tech. The episode stands out for its wit, skepticism toward industry hype, and infectious nostalgia for an era when hardware launches were genuinely exciting.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Valve’s Hardware Announcements: Real Innovation Amid Vaporware

• Valve’s New Efforts:

  • Valve recently announced the Steam Machine (a small form-factor PC console running SteamOS/Linux) and the Steam Frame (a next-gen VR headset).
  • Both products mark a return to “real,” consumer-facing technology, as opposed to hype-laden, AI/crypto buzz.

  “It was a really nice break from everything else because like you said, it’s real. They’re actually doing stuff, it’s consumer facing.”
  — Steve Burke (04:34)

• Technical Details:

  • Steam Machine: Essentially a modular Linux-based PC; comparable to a console, but more open/flexible (access to BIOS, upgradeable RAM and storage).
  • Steam Frame: VR headset with both standalone mode and wireless streaming from a gaming PC, leveraging a huge Steam library.

2. Steam Machine: The ‘Gabe Cube’ and Its Microsoft Disruption

• What Sets It Apart (05:50–08:42)

  • Not just a standard PC—marketed as a living room console alternative, but open/upgradeable.
  • Runs SteamOS (based on Arch Linux), optimized for gaming, with modern translation layers and upscaling tech.
  • Nicknamed internally (and on the show) as the “Gabe Cube” (after Valve CEO Gabe Newell).

  “People have been jokingly referring to the Steam machine as the Gabe Cube, as in Gabe Newell, the CEO of Valve.”
  — Steve Burke (06:58)

• Hands-On Impressions & Controller (08:44–11:00)

  • Ed and Steve discuss the new Steam controller: large, with haptic trackpads, grip sensors, and gyros—“clever execution of input.”
  • Notably, Valve never mentioned “AI” during press briefings—delightfully free of hype.

  “Not a single time… did at any point anybody from Valve say AI in that order of letters.”
  — Steve Burke (11:57) “Oh, magnifique. Thank God.”
  — Ed Zitron (12:00)

• Market Impact — Threat to Xbox (12:00–14:56)

  • Valve’s timing is ideal: Xbox is stagnating and losing market share, pricing increases aren’t helping.
  • Microsoft’s game plan (“going the route of Sega”) is in disarray.
  • Valve offers consumers open hardware at a critical inflection point for consoles.

  “Xbox is kind of at the lowest of its lows. You know, they just, they, they can’t seem to stop fucking everything up.”
  — Steve Burke (12:28)

3. Technical Deep Dive: Hardware & User Upgradability

• Core Specs (19:30–24:39)

  • CPU: Zen 4, 6 cores/12 threads, 4.8GHz, 30W TDP.
  • GPU: RDNA 3, 28 compute units (a bit below RX7600).
  • Some components are soldered (laptop-like), but RAM (SODIMM) and SSD (M.2) are upgradable; easy fan/power supply replacement.

  “The CPU and GPU are the only non modular [...] components…but you can do the RAM...and SSD.”
  — Steve Burke (19:42, 28:12)

• Positioning & Price Uncertainty

  • Intended as an affordable, entry-level gaming PC; price not announced but likely crucial to success.

  “They say it’s gonna be priced like an entry level gaming PC. [...] That could mean literally could cost 7 million.”
  — Ed Zitron (24:39)

  “The biggest concern is for sure price. But at a hardware level really I think the big story is the Linux side…”
  — Steve Burke (24:44)

4. Console Stagnation & Indie Gaming Renaissance

• Peak Console & Indie Games (22:10–26:32)

  • Both see the big graphics race hitting diminishing returns; fun/quality of play is driving more indie successes.
  • Steam remains the best path to discover “the lifeblood” of interesting, low-cost games.

  “More people are playing indie games that don’t push graphics to insane levels… Oh wait, I play video games to have fun and it doesn’t need to be—.”
  — Steve Burke (22:10)

  “Indie games are kind of like the lifeblood of it now. [...] There’s so much character in them.”
  — Steve Burke (25:42)

5. The Steam Frame: Next-Gen VR with Foveated Streaming

• What Is It? (33:14–37:05)

  • A wireless VR headset doing both standalone and streaming VR.
  • Major technical innovation: “foveated streaming” (tracks your eyes; the sharpest video stream follows where you’re looking, reducing bandwidth/latency).

  “You’re casting a video to the headset so you’re not rendering locally… what they’re doing is they are targeting specific areas where the eyes are tracked to be looking and then rendering those, assigning basically the maximum amount of bits to those areas.”
  — Steve Burke (35:02)

• Comparison/Contrast to Vision Pro

  • Similar productivity aspirations, but gaming-centric at heart.
  • Promises less setup/room-burden than earlier VR, but price and release still TBD (expected early 2026, probably $1000+).

6. Industry Cynicism: The Dread of AI Hype and Tech’s Moral Decay

• Why Valve’s Approach Resonates

  • Listeners and reviewers alike are “starved” for sincere, consumer-facing hardware, not just tick-boxes for investor hype (AI, data centers).
  • There’s relief that Valve is just launching real gaming hardware, without the shadow of morally dubious business partnerships.

  “I’m not used to companies not just immediately being evil.”
  — Ed Zitron (29:13)

  “Other than the fact that they’re partnering with Palantir, which has openly admitted to developing technology that is used on occasion to kill people. The GPU is pretty good. How do you cross that bridge?”
  — Steve Burke (39:31)

• Wider Industry Parallels

  • Hardware companies pivoting to AI/data centers, leaving gamers behind.
  • Microsoft, Google, Nvidia, etc. are increasingly linked to surveillance, government contracts, and profiteering.
  • Valve’s “just hardware that plays games” is refreshing (“sadly…pretty exciting right now,” Steve, 41:45).

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On the “Gabe Cube” and Controller:

  “God damn it, I wish I thought of that for a video.”
  — Steve Burke (07:00)

• On Microsoft’s Console Malaise:

  “They’re losing control of the market and it just looks like they’re kind of going the route of Sega right now…”
  — Steve Burke (12:40)

• On Indie Games Surpassing Triple-As:

  “My favorite game of this year was Dead Zone Rogue...Indie game, never heard of…the developers…Fantastic game. I haven’t enjoyed any AAA that much. Unless you consider Hades 2, which I’m not sure that counts.”
  — Ed Zitron (25:59)

• On Industry Cynicism:

  “I’m not used to companies not just immediately being evil.”
  — Ed Zitron (29:13)

  “People just feel so kind of beaten down where…RAM prices are skyrocketing, [and] just like the sort of, hey, it’s just hardware that plays video games…that sadly is pretty exciting right now.”
  — Steve Burke (41:45)

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Important Timestamps

| Timestamp | Segment Description | |-----------|--------------------------------------------------------------------------| | 02:51 | Show proper begins: Ed welcomes Steve and introduces Valve hardware news | | 04:34 | Steve explains the Steam Machine and why it excites him | | 06:58 | The “Gabe Cube” nickname for the Steam Machine | | 08:44 | Steam controller hands-on impressions | | 12:00 | Will Steam Machine threaten Xbox? | | 14:20 | Microsoft’s declining innovation/market share | | 19:30 | Steam Machine technical specs/depth | | 22:10 | Discussion of "peak console" and indie’s rise | | 25:42 | Indie games as PC’s lifeblood | | 26:03 | Ed describes his indie GOTY | | 28:12 | Upgradability and repairability of Steam Machine | | 33:14 | Steam Frame VR headset explained | | 35:02 | Foveated streaming: technical breakthrough | | 37:44 | The rarity of “just hardware” launches | | 41:45 | Why “just hardware” is such a relief | | 43:36 | Nostalgia: Creative vs. Apple, the Zune, and lost tech heritage | | 45:05 | Steve previews upcoming investigative story at Gamers Nexus |

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Closing Thoughts

Ed and Steve’s conversation is lively, skeptical, and hopeful all at once—a refreshing break from “AI economy” fatigue and corporate overreach in tech. As Valve re-emerges with hardware grounded in actual utility and user empowerment, the episode captures a rare moment of excitement in a jaded industry. The discussion is a must-listen for gamers, tech watchers, and anyone invested in the future of open, honest consumer tech.

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Recommended next steps:

• Check out Steve Burke’s investigative coverage at Gamers Nexus (esp. his upcoming scrapyard/dev kit story).
• For more Better Offline, visit betteroffline.com or check the show’s Discord/Reddit.

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Transcript

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[Ed Zitron]

Hello and welcome to Better Offline. I'm your host Ed Zitron. And I'd like to announce that much like Nvidia revealed in a recent leaked memo, we are also nothing like Enron. Today I'm joined by the wonderful Steve Burke from Gamers Nexus who's going to talk to you about. I know it's a thematic shift from the show about something that actually exists. And we're talking about an announcement from a few weeks ago from Valve about the Steam frame headset and the Steam Machine console. Steve, thank you for joining me.

[Steve Burke]

Thank you for having me. Quick question. What was the Enron thing? I think I didn't see it.

[Ed Zitron]

Oh no, this is, this is important. So Nvidia had an internal memo that they put out and they said it's. And the headline from Barrons was, I'm just going to pull this up right now because it's one of my favorite I've ever read. Nvidia says it's not Enron in private memo refuting accounting questions. Ah, good stuff.

[Steve Burke]

That's good.

[Ed Zitron]

That's, that's what we want to hear. And they were like, we're nothing like Enron because we don't use SPVs to inflate revenue. It's also good. It's all real, Steve. It's all very real.

[Steve Burke]

I'm starting to have my doubts that this AI stuff is built on anything real. Although I did hear about the two data centers that are currently sitting empty because the grid can't support them until 2028.

[Ed Zitron]

Oh, which ones?

[Steve Burke]

I think was in Northern California.

[Ed Zitron]

Hell yeah. I love this. This is. We live in the future. But genuinely talk to me about the Steam Machine. What is this thing? It's like a games console. Like walk me through it.

[Steve Burke]

Yeah, no, I mean this stuff's actually. It was a really nice break from everything else because like you said, it's real. They're actually doing stuff, it's consumer facing. So that's nice. And there's some pretty, some of these things have cool innovations in them. So the Steam Machine is a small, basically small form factor PC, but it's kind of positioned almost like a console, at least in terms of sizing the intent to be used with a TV or in a living room, although it could be used desktop, but instead of being a more closed down console, it has the openness of a PC in terms of you have access to BIOS and things like that, some modularity of components and it's running on Linux, it's running on steamos. And so right now we've had some hands on time. We had interviews with the engineers, we have the specs, haven't tested it yet. You know, can't make any value judgments or anything at the time because they haven't even given us a price. But it does. There's some cool things. I think that regardless of how their launch goes with the Steam machine, it is in the very least very promising for Linux, which helps to maybe get people unstuck from Microsoft. So.

[Ed Zitron]

Yeah, so what makes this thing unique though, is it just like a. Because Steam, for those listening who don't know, Steam is a. It is not really a monopoly, but it's like the best way to download games and keep track of them, I would say. But it does also involve paying one company. Yeah, but is that really, is it just a big PC is because you've at least messed with it a little bit?

[Steve Burke]

Yeah, I mean it is still. I think it still qualifies as sort of just a computer. But really what they're doing is I guess in the same way that some handheld devices are technically computers. I mean, a lot of the modern handheld gaming, we'll call them consoles are actually just handheld PCs. Some of them, a lot of them have Windows on them even. And so it's that concept, except applied to a Cube, that goes. I mean, people have been jokingly, I don't know who coined this, and I wish I did, but people have been jokingly referring to the Steam machine as the Gabe Cube, as in Gabe Newell, the CEO of Valve.

[Ed Zitron]

That's really good.

[Steve Burke]

Yeah, I saw that and I was like, God damn it, I wish I thought of that for a video.

[Ed Zitron]

That's a banger. Well, so is it like a kind of consumer friendly ui? Like, have you, how much have you had to. How much of a chance have you had to play with it?

[Steve Burke]

We had, in total, I think it was about five or maybe six hours with Valve. And so in that time we were able to speak with engineers and mess around with it. So yeah, it's a steamos, which is on the Steam Deck. So the Steam Deck is a gaming handheld device that. These have existed for a long time, but the Deck was kind of the first one in recent years to really breathe life into the gaming handheld market outside of Nintendo. And that's not necessarily because everyone bought the Deck, but it's because all the other manufacturers saw like, oh, this is Real like Steam is a serious venue, you know, to move games and people will buy stuff and so Asus and Lenovo and all the other competitors jumped in. So the Steam machine is building on that because the Steam deck uses SteamOS which is an arch Linux based distribution and it has a lot of optimizations that solve long running problems with Linux and gaming in general. So that would include for example translation layers and things like this. So they build on that and then. Yeah, as far as the user experience goes, it is basically a sort of big picture mode or desktop mode, you know, operating system. But it's computer. It's just you kind of navigate it more like a console I guess.

[Ed Zitron]

Did you play it at all?

[Steve Burke]

Only a little bit, yeah. We tested the new Steam controller.

[Ed Zitron]

Yeah. Talk to, talk to me about how does that feel in your hand? Because I'm. I have peculiar hands myself and that thing looks straight. It's got like two little touch screens.

[Steve Burke]

At the bottom and yeah, it is large. It's so the two. It's basically a.

[Ed Zitron]

Screens but you know.

[Steve Burke]

Yeah, touch. Touch pads, track pads. So it's got two track pads and they function like. Like a laptop trackpad except there's haptics and things like that. There's a gyro and also like buses kind of like.

[Ed Zitron]

Kind of like you get on the switch as well.

[Steve Burke]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. You'll get like the haptic feedback like you would get, you know. Yeah. On a phone and. Yeah. So controllers. To me it's interesting and it's cool that they're trying it again. They last tried a controller somewhere around a decade ago and it went with the Steam.

[Ed Zitron]

The Steam. The thing that could mirror your Steam PC. Right.

[Steve Burke]

Yeah, they had the Steam link the controller.

[Ed Zitron]

Yes.

[Steve Burke]

Yeah. I think there was like one more thing in that sort of round of hardware. I don't really remember it, maybe the Steam boxes, but yeah. So the original Steam controller I guess went so well that they had to dump them on fire sale for $5 each and they've memory holed it by releasing a new Steam controller with the same name.

[Ed Zitron]

But how did it feel? Was it. How does it feel in comparison to like a first generation Xbox controller?

[Steve Burke]

Yeah, the first gen Xbox was. I think the Xbox controllers are probably regarded as one of the sort of most user friendly layouts. It's hard for me to say too much. The stuff that I tested with it and the limited time we had with it was related to some of the more unique inputs. So I will say it is a little larger, but larger than the original.

[Ed Zitron]

Xbox controller or like larger than, like an Xbox360.

[Steve Burke]

Larger than a more modern Xbox controller. I would have to put it next to the original.

[Ed Zitron]

But there's an idea for the future.

[Steve Burke]

Yeah, but some of the interesting inputs, I guess so there's a grip sense where if it's enabled when you let your fingers off of the grip, so you're still holding it, but you're not like tapping your fingertips to the actual grip of the controller, it'll detect that and it can use that to stop input. So you can rotate, you know, it's got a gyro, you can rotate to turn in the game if you want. And then you can basically lift your fingers off if you want to stop or kind of stutter step the rotation as you move. And so it's got some like clever execution of input. It feels like it takes some inspiration maybe from things like the Switch and stuff like that. That's cool. Yeah. And, and this is important. Not a single time, literally not even once did at any point anybody from Valve say AI in that order of letters.

[Ed Zitron]

Oh, magnifique. Thank God. Not once, not once. How delightful. Oh God, no. It's because they're building a real thing. How do you feel about this? So I was talking to my mate Casey Kagawa, friend of the show about this and he kind of put the thought, my head, this could be a quite dangerous, like this could be quite dangerous to Xbox especially because Microsoft is kind of just sitting there and letting that fester at times.

[Steve Burke]

Yeah, I think this is probably the absolute best time for anybody new to try and get into like console or console equivalent type devices. And in particular, I mean Valve is, is a deadly combination with it. But Xbox is kind of at the lowest of its lows. You know, they just, they, they can't seem to stop fucking everything up. And their best new thing they have is just a rebranded Asus Rog Ally handheld. And like that's doing well for Asus, but by Microsoft numbers historically, it's not impressive. And so yeah, I think Microsoft right now, they're in a compromised position. Their sales are awful. I don't have the numbers offhand, but they're easy to find and they're just not even close to what PlayStation's been doing. They're losing control of the market and it just looks like they're kind of going the route of Sega right now where Sega abandoned consoles for anyone who doesn't know and they went full on game publisher. And so, yeah, I mean, I agree, I Think Steam or Valve is in a position right now where this is before a new console launch cycle from the incumbents and it's when Microsoft's had its weakest with Xbox so it's really good timing for them.

[Ed Zitron]

Well, I don't know what you're saying. Microsoft can't innovate any further because they're reading this now. It's 24th of November and I read this Xbox prices could go even higher. They seem to be doing. Is really funny to just follow the Steam machine with that as well. Just being, just being like hey guess what, it was more expensive and it sucks more. Do you like it? Please God.

[Steve Burke]

But and the Xbox has been out for like a long ass time now. I don't remember when it might be like five years already or something. Yeah, the prices are supposed to come down and I know like some of these are whatever market factors they can't exactly control. Although even though Microsoft does kind of have a big part in the AI thing that's making the prices go up, but we'll forget about that. Yeah, there's stuff they can't control. But even still, like consumers aren't going to want to pay more for a thing that is now ancient.

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[Ed Zitron]

It just kind of it feels like they've been spinning their wheels for the longest time because it felt like they were sort of moving away from Xbox by leaning on Game Pass. Then it turned out to be giving everyone access to as many games as possible for $30 was not a good decision. So now they're, they're, they want to do something. It just, it does. I hadn't thought of the Sega comparison, but it really does feel like that, like Microsoft won't die, but Jesus.

[Steve Burke]

Yeah, I mean they're fortunate I guess to have their spying division with Windows. So yeah, they'll, they'll be fine, I guess.

[Ed Zitron]

But that ad revenue they get from installs of Windows on laptops that take 10 minutes to turn.

[Steve Burke]

Exactly. Yeah, yeah, no, they're, that'll keep them in business maybe better than what Sega had when it left hardware. But yeah, no, they're in a, they're in a bad spot for Xbox. I'm not really sure what the plan is over there and it doesn't seem like they're sure either. So.

[Ed Zitron]

So I had a specific Steam machine question. So what's it doing GPU wise? Like, is it doing, is it doing like one of the AMD ones with both a GPU and a CPU on the same die? Like what, what is the situation? There's.

[Steve Burke]

It is. So for the silicon, the short answer to that question is it's an rdna3 gpu with 28 cus. And I'll kind of loop back to that. But the silicon in general, the CPU and the GPU are the only non modular sort of normal components that you might swap in a computer. So meaning you can't change the CPU or the gpu, this is a big split from a normal computer. They're using BGA parts, ball grid array. So they're soldered to the board and that makes it more like a laptop. In fact they are basically laptop parts. They're semi custom laptop CPU and GPU that are discrete and the GPU. So rDNA 3.28cus. That makes it a little bit smaller than an RX7600. As an example, off the top of my head, I think that's 32 CUs. And the CPU is a Zen 4 part. It's 6 cores, 12 threads. Their maximum advertised boost is 4.8 GHz and they claim a 30 watt TDP. And so for reference, I mean some of the other lows, how does that.

[Ed Zitron]

Compare to like a gaming handheld? Exactly.

[Steve Burke]

A gaming handheld. It's. Yeah, it's higher power than a gaming handheld for sure. So it is better than that. You have the benefit of not worrying about a battery. Not worrying about skin temperature on the device because they're not holding it. And so for those reasons they can run more power. So I think they're in total somewhere around 110 watts for the GPU and then a 30 watt claim for the CPU. So you know, with, with other miscellaneous devices and with inefficiencies and whatever you maybe call it 200 watts. And I think the power supply is 300 watts. And so compared to a handheld, I mean at peak power consumption, which you're not normally at, this is significantly more power and will perform, I mean significantly better. It's a big difference, kind of.

[Ed Zitron]

It almost feels inevitable as well because the fall of Microsoft, sure it's that they don't give a shit and don't seem to be trying in any way imaginable, but it's also at some point we were going to meet, we're going to reach peak console. Surely at some point there's just how much more can we do with this?

[Steve Burke]

Yeah, I think. And you can, this is, this gets into like a broader interesting topic I've been thinking about lately too, but which is for gaming in general, you know, you do hit a point where it's like, okay, the graphics are sufficient and actually now the kind of meta is, you know, more people are playing indie games that don't push the graphics to insane levels and people are kind of rediscovering that, oh wait, I play video games to have fun and it doesn't need to be.

[Ed Zitron]

Whoa, whoa, whoa, what's that? I don't know. That's not why I play. I play games to get upset. Yes.

[Steve Burke]

Yeah, I have a game for you. I need an investor right now. Actually it's AI company simulator.

[Ed Zitron]

That sounds more fun.

[Steve Burke]

Yeah, yeah, yeah, it's great. Yeah. No, I mean it's. I think the thing with the. On the gaming side, I think the Steam machine on a technicality, it's more powerful than a lot of hardware people have. I guess if you look at the Steam survey in reality it's a low end modern computer and I think they're probably going to be partly leaning on things like FSR upscaling to try and bridge the gap, the performance gap. I mean one of the things they didn't say that I can remember when we were talking to them, but they did say on the spec sheet was that the steam machine supports 4K 60 FPS with FSR.

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That's pretty good.

[Ed Zitron]

And FSR is the one where they use AI.

[Steve Burke]

But actual AI, real stuff, actual machine learning. Yeah. Actually does something. Yeah. And so I wasn't too happy about that when I saw that on the spec sheet. Cause saying factually it's probably accurate because it says with FSR there but it has to always be there. They can't just say 4K60 because there's a big difference. And this hardware cannot do 4K60 without some kind of crutch, which FSR would be. But point being it's a low end computer. They say it's gonna be priced like an entry level gaming PC. I don't know what could mean anything.

[Ed Zitron]

Yeah, that could mean literally could cost 7 million. Like what the.

[Steve Burke]

Yeah, it's a big range. I mean it's, you know, in the old days like 20, I don't know, 12 to 16 maybe. You could build a super low end PC for 450 bucks more. Realistically probably 550, that's kind of gone now. So I think they'll have some pricing. The biggest concern is for sure price. But at a hardware level really I think the big story is the Linux side and then what you're saying, the Microsoft side where it's like is this just kind of twisting the dagger on Xbox?

[Ed Zitron]

I hope so because Microsoft sucks. And the thing is PC gaming is cool. Like it's the one. Like it's one of the great things about it in that there's such a great indie gaming gaming industry. And I feel like Steam is though imperfect is a great way to get into that in a way that I don't feel like the big consoles are.

[Steve Burke]

Yeah, indie games are kind of like the lifeblood of it now. I feel like there's so much character in them and they're very accessible in terms of often price but also not being overbearing on systems, you know, requirements.

[Ed Zitron]

Well, my favorite game of this year was Dead Zone Rogue. If you have played that.

[Steve Burke]

I have not, but I will.

[Ed Zitron]

It is a. It's a roguelike. It feels like the. And I realize there are numerous other sufferers who listen to this may not understand what I mean. It feels like when Destiny was fun in the single player. It has that kind of very clicky, very. It's just very satisfying game. Indie game, never heard of. The developers don't know if they've ever made anything before. Fantastic game. I haven't enjoyed any AAA that much. Unless you consider Hades 2, which I'm not sure that counts.

[Steve Burke]

I feel like that doesn't really count, you know, like it's. Yeah, I feel like that. That to me still feels like sort of the smaller.

[Ed Zitron]

Yeah.

[Steve Burke]

Side of things. Yeah. And yeah, there's a big market there and I think, I do think that big picture for some of these companies. I was about to say gaming companies, referring to Nvidia, intel, amd, but that's not really what they are anymore. But looking at these companies, I'm happy to see some of the success of indie games and I'm happy to see things like a Steam machine in terms of hardware being capable of playing most of the games people play. Because specifically on the cynical side, it's like if you sell GPUs for playing games and the graphics have kind of peaked for a while and it might take a few more years to really reach another major peak where it's invalidating older hardware to a point where people feel forced to buy something new to keep the flow of money going for the companies. In that situation, cynically it would feel like you would need to invent a problem to solve so that people will buy your next GPU to play games. Unless you can generate sort of escape velocity from the gaming side and get into some other business, which right now appears to be AI data center. They don't need to invent problems to solve for gaming because they're doing that for someone else.

[Ed Zitron]

Invented one for the economy.

[Steve Burke]

Right.

[Ed Zitron]

But actually this is. I feel like you slot. This is just a question I had forgot to ask. You can't replace anything inside the Steam machine, it looks like.

[Steve Burke]

So you can do the ram. Oh, that's not bad. Yeah, the RAM is so dim. So it's laptop memory sticks. And then you can also do the SSD. It supports up to M 22280, which is the sort of standard larger form factor. Those would be the main ones. I guess. That's not too bad.

[Ed Zitron]

Can you. Hard drive's probably going to be solid state though.

[Steve Burke]

Yep. Yeah, solid state. And then it is very accessible. I mean it's easy to remove the COVID and the heatsink. If you wanted to, you could pull. You could swap it. The fan is easy to swap and replace. The power supply has a blade connector. So it's sort of similar to server form factor styles where they don't use cables but they use just a connector. And so all of these things from a repairability standpoint would in the very least be easy to repair and swap. Valve has a pretty good track record of making those parts available for the Steam deck, so hopefully they'll do that too. Yeah.

[Ed Zitron]

Jesus. I'm not used to companies not just immediately being evil.

[Steve Burke]

Yeah. I mean there's still time. Oh yeah, there's still time.

[Ed Zitron]

It could end up being $1,200. Like that's. That's where I could see them fucking this one up for me.

[Steve Burke]

Right?

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[Ed Zitron]

Talking of successful industries that everyone loves. The Steam Frame yeah, what is going. What is this meant to, is it, is it meant to be a Vision Pro situation? Is it meant to be like the, like, like what was the Valve Index like? What is it?

[Steve Burke]

Steam Frame is pretty interesting. So the Steam Frame is a new VR headset from Valve. They launched the HTC Vive with obviously HTC a long time ago now and then later the Index and then there was the Oculus Rift that later turned into the Meta Quest. So that's kind of the VR industry. It's really just these are the big milestones. There've been a lot of other devices in between, but Valve is jumping back into it with what they're calling the Steam Frame. The Steam Frame is pretty interesting in that it both has standalone functionality with basically an integrated, we'll call it a compute unit that mounts to your face with the goggles. And then it's also got streaming capability where it streams content from an actual gaming computer. And so Valve is here leveraging the fact that it has an unbelievably large library of games, probably the largest ever to have existed, and the fact that most of its players probably have a decent gaming computer and so they can render the game content on their computer and then stream it to the headset. Basically you're casting a video to the headset so you're not rendering locally, and then that allows you to be tetherless and wireless from the computer, which solves a lot of the problems this kind of VRs had historically. But the new.

[Ed Zitron]

Its own thing.

[Steve Burke]

Yes. Yeah. So but the new problem if you're doing this is anytime there's streaming, there's latency, right? Yeah. And so the concern just becomes if I'm streaming this from my computer instead of playing it with a wire plugged into the back of my headset, am I going to notice that in actions in game. And the cool part, I think that maybe this technology could apply elsewhere in some capacity, but is what they're calling foveated streaming. And so, yeah, so there's already a thing called foveated rendering. But basically the concept is to preserve bandwidth and maximize sort of how much data you can get across without causing major latency issues. You know, to keep the frame rate high. And everything else what they're doing is they are targeting specific areas where the eyes are tracked to be looking and then rendering those, assigning basically the maximum amount of bits to those areas. Yeah. And everything else gets a reduced bitrate in the streaming, uses less bandwidth and so it technically renders at a lower quality. But in the quick testing we did, I only had a little bit of a hands on with it, but I couldn't tell. I mean, when I was looking, wherever I was looking in the headset, it looked full quality. And then if I tried to quickly dart my eyes over somewhere else, I'm not fast enough. I don't know that any human is fast enough really to move your eyes quick enough to beat when it detects your change of focus and then reassigns those bits to the new area to maximize that area's resolution. So I think the response time is something like 8 to 12 milliseconds.

[Ed Zitron]

But it is both like a Vision Pro and a VR headset.

[Steve Burke]

Yeah. In the sense, yeah. You can technically do like call it productivity tasks and things like that.

[Ed Zitron]

Yeah, I just, I, I am, I'm a Vision Pro truther. I actually think that, I think it's a fun idea. I wish there were more fun ideas like it, but I also recognize I'm peculiar for that one. And also I don't think Apple gave enough of a shit. It's just, it is nice to see Valve doing something, I think, I realize also talking to you about this how depressing is to just be like, yay, someone did something else.

[Steve Burke]

I mean that's how it felt. It was like, it's. Yeah. I mean the VR side doesn't get a lot of love compared to when it started.

[Ed Zitron]

But it does VR games as well, though.

[Steve Burke]

Yeah, it's primarily a VR gaming headset. And then they are saying, look, if you want to replace your monitor with this, you can do that.

[Ed Zitron]

That sounds expensive, though. And of course, they have yet to say how much this will cost.

[Steve Burke]

Yeah, they said less than an index, but they didn't say how much. And. Okay, so. And an index. Yeah, There's a few SKUs, I think, the common dollars. Yeah, yeah, it's, it's. They range like 600. I want to say the highest is 1200 or something, but it's not going to be 600, it'll be. It'll be a thousand plus.

[Ed Zitron]

But we. And we don't really have an idea of when these things are coming out, do we? Just next year.

[Steve Burke]

Next year. The frame, specifically the Steam frame. The VR solution. They said early 2026, which in my experience, early to a lot of these companies just means first half, so.

[Ed Zitron]

Yes.

[Steve Burke]

Yeah.

[Ed Zitron]

You excited?

[Steve Burke]

I am.

[Ed Zitron]

I'm oddly excited about both of them. It feels like we're finally getting something in PC gaming again.

[Steve Burke]

Yeah. I mean, I'm excited because for that same reason it's nice where it's like, okay, it's just the hardware and there doesn't appear to be a lot of bullshit. So, you know, if we test it and it's not the best solution for the value, then fine, that's a really easy review. You know, maybe you say it's good, but it costs too much. But that is a lot better than saying, like, what I'm kind of having to lately think about, which is, okay, when Nvidia launches their next gpu, how do I handle the conclusion? Where do you get to the end? And you're like, other than the fact that they're partnering with Palantir, which has openly admitted to developing technology that is used on occasion to kill people. The GPU is pretty good. How do you cross that bridge? Right. It gets into really serious stuff.

[Ed Zitron]

It's a problem across the whole tech industry. I think Google's working with Border Patrol.

[Steve Burke]

Yeah.

[Ed Zitron]

Like, it. It's just. And I always had the theory that people were like, wow, I can't believe the tech companies are suddenly doing this. I'm like, they have been fucking waiting.

[Steve Burke]

Oh, yeah.

[Ed Zitron]

They've been looking like, this is be. They're like, oh, goody. Finally, the chance to make all that revenue from the evils.

[Steve Burke]

Or they've already been doing it and now it's just more in the open or whatever. Yeah.

[Ed Zitron]

And it's and I'm guessing that this is becoming increasingly a challenge with like, even with like AMD who is increasingly. Though I realize the evils are slightly different there.

[Steve Burke]

Yeah, I mean AMD is, is not quite as boisterous I guess as Nvidia in that way, but they, they still a lot of the same concerns. And see with Valve it's been, I think that's why, why the reception has been so good on this because there's no, there's no hardware launch yet. It's just announcements. But the sentiment's pretty high and I do think that's because people just feel so kind of beaten down where it's just every RAM prices are skyrocketing over 100% in several cases. I think we saw one stick, one kit that was like 185% higher than it was three weeks ago. Yeah, that's going to affect GPUs. That'll right when the prices were coming down on those and, and these will affect the Steam machine. But I think just like the sort of, hey, it's just hardware that plays video games and I guess if you want to use it for other stuff you can too. Like that sadly is pretty exciting right now. So yeah, I'm excited about it. I think the Steam frame. I'm actually really interested in the original VR testing we did. We did some really cool VR benchmarks a long time ago and it just kind of did it a couple times. Never did it again. I thought it was a cool idea, but the setup for VR was just way too burdensome. At that time I was still running the company out of my childhood bedroom and so room scale VR was like, you need to spend like three hours cleaning your house first.

[Ed Zitron]

Yeah, the term room was a little bit fungible.

[Steve Burke]

Yeah, yeah. I mean it was like. But now it seems like all of that has matured a lot. And as someone who has not felt any desire whatsoever to play any VR games for the last like 10 years, I actually do really want to try the Steam frame and I think it'll be pretty fun.

[Ed Zitron]

Yeah, it's so weird. It's like even I wouldn't say Microsoft was ever known as like a deeply quality company, but there was at least at some point a level of prestige to it. There was like, oh, Microsoft would never just make a big pile of shit they'd never wheel out of. I mean they might do that in their software, but it felt like they were. At least there was the brief period where we could humor ourselves being like, oh, that pretty. I Like my Xbox. Not anymore. Fuck you, customer.

[Steve Burke]

I think you're right. I mean, I think the hardware, for a while it was like, it seemed pretty serious.

[Ed Zitron]

You know, their laptops were pretty well respected. I like the wind. They had the weird. I think it was Panos. Panay, who's over at Amazon now. But they had like a weird thing where they were respectable for laptops.

[Steve Burke]

Yeah.

[Ed Zitron]

And now, I don't know, it's all just, it's all eating itself. It feels like.

[Steve Burke]

Well, it felt like, it felt like after, after the Zune they realized they needed to change something in hardware and went okay after that. And just to put it out there, I still have my original Zune.

[Ed Zitron]

Hell yeah. I was a creative nomad guy myself.

[Steve Burke]

Oh yeah? Yeah, yeah. Creative got really screwed during that whole period. I mean it was. Yeah, just in the sense that it was like Creative was kind of. They were sort of their first or very early and they, they did a lot of innovation and they just got squashed by Apple. Like Apple did kind of the Apple thing where it just, it's this juggernaut.

[Ed Zitron]

And they just dropped their weight on them.

[Steve Burke]

Yeah, I think there was even a lawsuit. I want to say Creative one. It was maybe like a couple hundred million dollars or something, I don't know.

[Commercial Voice]

And I gotta load this up.

[Steve Burke]

Yeah, yeah, that's. It's. It was one of those win or lose, you still lose. Yeah, yeah.

[Ed Zitron]

No one's winning by the end of this other than Apple. Oh boy. Well, on that happy note, Steve, where can people find you and what are some recent things they should go and look at?

[Steve Burke]

$100 million 2006, by the way, Apple will pay Creative $100 million for a paid up license to use Creative's awarded patent MP3 players. Anyway, what was your question?

[Ed Zitron]

Yeah, it's just where can people find you and what are some interesting things you've been covering recently?

[Steve Burke]

Most interesting. Yeah, recently is. So we have a story coming up where I previously mentioned to you I would be going to the UK for something and you immediately said, I'm sorry.

[Ed Zitron]

Yeah, that's the appropriate.

[Steve Burke]

And so we went over to London. We've got a really interesting thing we're finalizing now where I'm still trying to sort through who's right, who's wrong, all that stuff. But long story short, there is a guy who bought Sega, Nintendo, Microsoft and other game development kits and development cartridges from a scrapyard. We visited the scrapyard, we visited the guy and he was arrested by the police and Sega was connected to it. They had a private investigator look into the guy. And basically all the companies involved in the chain, as far as we tell, freaked out when they found out their game development kits and cartridges made it into the hands of a person, even though they had thrown them out. And we're basically trying to sort through where did stuff fall through the cracks. And is this an overextension of a corporation into someone's home to work with the police on a raid over game development cartridges, you know, or is there any old games?

[Ed Zitron]

Right.

[Steve Burke]

Primarily, yeah. I think there's maybe like some Switch stuff in there, which is I think probably what set the alarm bells off.

[Ed Zitron]

Fucking Nintendo.

[Steve Burke]

Yeah.

[Ed Zitron]

Anyway, well that. So that will go up I'm guessing in the next few weeks. So of course we'll link to gamers Nexus. But yeah. Thank you for joining us, Steve. It's always a pleasure having you.

[Steve Burke]

Yeah, thank you. Appreciate it.

[Ed Zitron]

And you've been listening to Better Offline. You can find me@better offline.com who knows when this one goes out being the next couple of weeks, he says, knowing that you'll have no concept of the time scale I'm talking about. But thank you so much for listening, everyone. Thank you for listening to Better Offline. The editor and composer of the Better Offline theme song is Mattasowski. You can check out more of his music and audio [e-mail] m a t t o s o w s k I.com you can email [e-mail] or visit betteroffline.com to find more podcast links and of course, my newsletter. I also really recommend you go to chat wheresyoured at to visit the Discord and go to R betteroffline to check out our Reddit. Thank you so much for listening.

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[Ed Zitron]

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[Ed Zitron]

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[Ed Zitron]

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[Steve Burke]

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