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- [00:02]
David Pierce
Welcome to the vergecast, the flagship podcast of ray tracing. I'm your friend David Pearce, 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 gonna 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 too. It'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 22, 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.
- [00:54]
Valve Developer 1
1.
- [00:54]
David Pierce
There are new interest based 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 and 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. We'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. Claude code is fun. Don't get me wrong. Just be careful out there. You can read more about all of this@theverge.com, that's 90 seconds on the verge for Monday, June 22nd.
- [02:19]
ServiceNow Sponsor
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- [02:54]
Fetch Pet Insurance Sponsor
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- [03:30]
David Pierce
all right, let's talk steam machines. The Verge's Sean Hollister is here. Hi, Sean.
- [03:35]
Valve Developer 2
Hi.
- [03:36]
David Pierce
Tell me what games you've been playing the most over the last few days. You've been reviewing the Steam machine, learning what is like, what are the first and second games you go to to review the Steam Machine?
- [03:45]
Sean Hollister
I always try to test systems like this with Indiana Jones in the great circle because it's really demanding and it can play on there and from 12ft away on my couch. It's a pretty good experience. I'm whip cracking some Nazis.
- [03:58]
T-Mobile Advertiser
It's great.
- [03:59]
David Pierce
That's very exciting. That's a good first one to start with. Cause 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.
- [04:12]
Sean Hollister
And then of course, I had to do a little bit of Portal, because everybody loves Portal.
- [04:16]
David Pierce
This is a. This is a Valve product we're talking about. I 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 didn't. 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?
- [04:51]
Sean 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. It'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.
- [05:41]
David Pierce
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?
- [06:04]
Sean Hollister
For me, 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 a, you know, somebody who was loose 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. In this case, it has about the power of a PlayStation 5. But you are technically loading PC games. This, this catalog, this back catalog going back decades and decades of PC games. You can run them on your cat 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 touchpads, you can use a random Bluetooth controller that you buy from 8bitdo or whoever for 30 bucks 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.
- [07:16]
David Pierce
Okay. 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.
- [07:38]
Sean Hollister
There's so much baggage, despite the fact
- [07:40]
David Pierce
that it is literally what PC gamers need. Right. So it seems like, 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. It 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.
- [08:01]
Sean Hollister
They changed one super important thing about the strategy, one thing, and that is this. In 2012, 2013, 2015, by the time they actually ship the thing and 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.
- [08:29]
Valve Developer 1
They would take
- [08:31]
David Pierce
it. You're just being Nintendo at that. You make a console, you make games for our console.
- [08:35]
Sean Hollister
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. 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. We'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 chip because of a translation layer. This is not quite the same thing, but it's got similarities to that. We're gonna see the same thing happen with phones that are playing Steam games soon. You can already do this if you, 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. 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 did on this Steam 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. I am dual booting it too. I now have Bazzite 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 $1049 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.
- [11:11]
David Pierce
That's super interesting. Yeah. 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. Tell 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?
- [11:31]
Sean Hollister
Okay, so this is a 6 core AMD Zen 4 processor. It'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 8, 8 gigs of GDDR6 VRAM.
- [11:59]
David Pierce
People have been mad about this since the announcement, right? They really had VRAM was like the people had pitchforks that said 8 gigs of vram about the Steam machines.
- [12:08]
Sean Hollister
They did. And you can't unfortunately do a direct comparison with this GPU to basically anything else on the market, because the only time AMD has shipped a GPU quite like this is in external gpu. It's like an external box that you would plug into a laptop. But if you know what those are, it's around an RX7600, 7700, like M or XT somewhere in that real. 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 847pm is the number of vertical lines you'd get instead of getting your 1080 instead of getting your 4K. So 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 in 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.
- [13:35]
David Pierce
So on balance, roughly PS5ish graphics wise. I feel like that's a comparison a lot of people can probably hold in their head. That seems useful.
- [13:46]
Sean Hollister
But that PS5 digital edition, that PS5 digital edition was $400 and now it costs $600 and this costs 1049.
- [13:55]
ServiceNow Sponsor
Yeah.
- [13:55]
David Pierce
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.
- [14:06]
Sean Hollister
My first reaction was Actually that's not as bad as I thought.
- [14:09]
David Pierce
Same actually I was fully prepared for them to be like, starts at 14.99 and goes up from there.
- [14:14]
Sean Hollister
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, 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 or my deck on my original Steam Deck review was Early Access Memories because it felt like it was a handheld in Early Access. 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 Bridgecast. They're gonna be super into this and they could charge a lot. But what they told me, what Pierre Le Griffet and Lawrence 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.
- [15:14]
Valve Developer 1
I mean you can get a broad stroke understanding of it by looking at what RAM and storage cost now versus what they costed back. 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.
- [15:34]
Valve Developer 2
If you're looking at something like the Steam Deck 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? Right? And like, at what cost? 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 ended up in a, I guess a pretty happy spot overall.
- [16:20]
Valve Developer 1
Oh, yeah. I mean, well, 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.
- [16:30]
David Pierce
So this is very much like a razors and blades model, right? That this company is confident that it will sell enough games to make not making money on the console worth it over time?
- [16:42]
Sean Hollister
I think so. They wouldn't tell you that, though. They always say it's about the learnings. They're like, I don't. I don't know what to believe.
- [16:49]
David Pierce
Like, of the learnings don't pay the bills. You know what I mean?
- [16:53]
Sean Hollister
Of the people I have talked to who say things like this, I would say I believe them 10% more than I would believe anybody else. 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's some small part of VAL that's like, I want this to exist in the world, we 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.
- [17:34]
David Pierce
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.
- [17:48]
Sean 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 gonna 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 room.
- [18:21]
David Pierce
Interesting. 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 specced this thing out, it was not supposed to cost anywhere near $1049. I know they wouldn't tell you what price they wanted it to be. Uh, 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 the sum of the parts of this box is 1049. Like that, 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 like stupendously powerful. If. If they accidentally sort of made the wrong price performance trade off in trying to make the right performance price trade off 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 1500 bucks, would it be that much less compelling to a lot of people who are already willing to pay over a thousand dollars for it? I don't know.
- [19:25]
Sean 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, it would do all kinds of crazy stuff. They seem to have fixed that. One day after I reported, they're like, hey, tell me if this is fixed, please. And I. And I. And it was, thankfully.
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Sean Hollister
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- [20:17]
Sean Hollister
Yeah, they all do one.
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- [20:32]
Sean Hollister
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- [20:35]
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Sean Hollister
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- [20:43]
David Pierce
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- [21:08]
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- [22:41]
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- [23:20]
David Pierce
Tell me about the out of box experience with this thing. Because I think again, if you're a Valve and the goal here is to make something that runs like a Windows gaming PC but doesn't feel like you're sitting on your couch operating a Windows PC, the very first like 10 minutes of the experience feels like it would tell me an awful lot about how Valve succeeded or failed on that front. So what is the sort of initial Steam Machine experience like?
- [23:47]
Sean Hollister
Unfortunately, the initial Steam experience we tried is not the final experience. I'm hoping that they ship the final experience by the time you're watching this video, listening to this podcast because I need to try it again. But how it is during the review period is you turn on your controller. It's not prepared like a PS5 controller, Xbox controller would be. You plug it in, you do this little dance where it's gonna update the controller and then you unplug it and then you're setting up your WI fi and then it's plug it back in again so you can pair it to the internal antenna and you start downloading a game. And when you launch the game, it's still downloading dependencies. Cause it has to download some Proton and some Steamworks. They advertise that you could stick in an SD cart full of games from your Steam deck and you could just play them and you can after you download the Proton dependencies and so on again. So it should really ship with all of this out of the box.
- [24:39]
David Pierce
Then again, I mean I have some tolerance for things have to download when you first boot. The thing like that's, that's everybody's experience with all of these now is yeah, everything has some giant system download when you first turn it on. And it sucks. But that feels like just kind of the state of things.
- [24:54]
Sean Hollister
They're fixing some of this and then the Windows state of things. Of course, if this was a Windows box, when you do a first time setup on a Windows box, you're sitting there for like 45 minutes.
- [25:05]
David Pierce
Oh yeah, it's awful. Yeah.
- [25:06]
Sean Hollister
As it's downloading like it seems like the entire operating system again, it's not really. It's slipstreaming some things in, but it's a lot. And then you have to navigate the screen and then you have to set up your. You can set up Steam big picture mode on a Windows box so that you launch into it every time, but you have to set that up and on the Valve Machine. I mean, you're there in a controllable interface with your controller, with your gamepad. You just scroll it across the screen. My kid can figure it out. She wouldn't like the waiting part of waiting for this stuff to download, but she could do it herself.
- [25:37]
David Pierce
I mean, that's a big win. And I will say, as a piece of hardware sitting underneath your tv, I'm just looking at the one behind you. It's pretty innocuous. It certainly does not look like you put a giant gaming PC underneath your television. That's a win.
- [25:53]
Sean Hollister
It's roughly the size of the GameCube. Let me pull them both out and I'll give you a look.
- [25:56]
David Pierce
Sean just reached back and yanked two things out of the wall.
- [25:58]
Sean Hollister
I totally yanked while it was running. It was running portal on the crt. So this is the Steam Machine right here.
- [26:03]
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- [26:06]
Sean Hollister
And now we have a, a GameCube right next to it. So this is the, the GameCube and Steam Machine. They are roughly, roughly the same size. The Steam Machine's a little bit taller. And of course, the GameCube has that carry handle. So yeah, you can change these face plates on the Steam Machine. The Steam Machine starts with a black one, not this walnut color. So there's the black one up here instead. It does pick up fingerprints. This finish picks up a lot of fingerprints. But it's going to be under your tv. So I'm not thinking that's a huge deal.
- [26:37]
David Pierce
Okay.
- [26:37]
ServiceNow Sponsor
Yeah.
- [26:37]
David Pierce
I mean, the size of it is pretty nice. Like, I'm just so used to this new run of consoles, particularly the PS5, which is just preposterously huge.
- [26:48]
Sean Hollister
Oh, yeah.
- [26:48]
David Pierce
And so anything that actually will sit underneath my television, big victory.
- [26:54]
Sean Hollister
More importantly, this fan. They designed the whole unit around the fan. Giant fan, goes all the way through the system through these big grates on the other side. And this is so cool and quiet. And the frame rate is so stable. Yeah, it's not gonna run everything at 4k, but I'm running a game and I'm like, if the game is, you know, 60 FPS average, it might be 52 FPS low. And that's like, if you've got a variable refresh rate tv, that means it is smooth all the time. It also means that if I want to pump up the graphics a little bit, if I don't need that 60fps average, if I'm like, I could do 45fps, 48fps if that is the average. And the low is like 42 that experience at 1440p Indiana Jones, that is smooth. If you have a variable refresh rate tv, it feels really good.
- [27:44]
David Pierce
The overarching takeaway here is it is a console level console, right? Like pretty easy to use, pretty good gameplay, but you're not sort of blowing anything out of the water. And I guess the case here if you're Valve is it's all of that with access to your Steam library of all of the games that you've already bought, right? So I feel like if I'm already a Steam person and I'm already deep into this space, this becomes very compelling because like pay rebuying the six games I play most is already going to make up the cost difference. But I'm particularly curious for someone who is just coming relatively fresh to this space. I don't have a giant library of games. I don't want a like high end gaming PC. That is, that is not a thing I'm interested in. I just want a thing where I can sit down on my couch and play games. Can the Steam Machine hang in that competition right now?
- [28:47]
Sean Hollister
It can for now. Right now when I reviewed the PS5 Pro, I'm like PS5 versus PS5 Pro. The PS5 Pro has so much more horsepower. The games look so much better if you're 3ft away. If you are 12ft away on your couch, I do not notice an important difference between the PS5 and the PS5 Pro. I also do not notice an important difference at 12ft away between the steam machine and the PS5 Pro. It's hanging with them. Unless you're doing something like ray tracing, which this one kind of sucks at. But not a lot of PS5 games are using a lot of ray tracing anyway. So when you're in that experience, yeah, but the PS5 is also from 2020. It is six years old. This is just coming out now. How long is it going to be before we have a PS6 Xbox, you know, the next Xbox? How long is it going to be before that next wave of consoles come out in that way? The RAM crisis is actually helping Valve a little bit here because what the grapevine says is Sony and Microsoft are going to bide their time, rethink their strategy, possibly delay a year or two. So the Steam Machine has a little bit of time to hang the same way the Steam Deck had some time to hang. Steam Deck was not as powerful as other handhelds, not as powerful as consoles. It was $400 for an entry level Steam Deck. When you could buy a PS5 for $400. Is it worth spending for much less graphical horsepower if you get to take it with you? Is the Steam Deck value proposition? Is it worth spending so much more for the same graphical horsepower? But now it's under your TV. It's also a PC. It has access to all these games the PS5 doesn't have. That's the Steam Machine value proposition, right?
- [30:30]
David Pierce
And I think you're right about the timing because I think about it wasn't that long ago that Microsoft was talking about how basically no one is going to be able to afford Project Helix, the next upcoming Xbox that they're already preparing people for. This thing is going to be prohibitively expensive to the point where we maybe have to rethink our entire strategy of how games work because consoles are going to be so expensive that most people are not going to want them. Which brings me to one of the things I've been thinking about a lot with this, right Part of the Steam Machine playbook, at least back in the day, was for it to be kind of an ecosystem, right, that Valve didn't want to be the only company making this kind of PC console. Is that still in the roadmap for Valve?
- [31:10]
Sean Hollister
They still say that. And as a matter of fact, as part of this announcement, they are saying, maybe not very forcefully, but they're saying lightly, that if you want to put SteamOS on your desktop PC, if you find only want to put desktop PC parts against it, you can do that. Now as long as you have an AMD gpu, I think you can do. If you have an Intel GPU too, not Nvidia yet.
- [31:32]
David Pierce
Okay, so you can hackintosh your way into a Steam machine basically is the idea you can.
- [31:36]
Sean Hollister
What you're doing, it's not something where they're going to help you do the dual boot or the installer necessarily, yet it's something where you're going to have to free up space on your own drive or wipe it or start with brand new hardware. But you can do this if you want to. You've been able to do this. It hasn't worked very well with Intel GPUs still does not work with Nvidia GPUs. Intel's kind of a new addition fairly recently that it seems like it's getting there, but they've done the work for years now to get all the controllers and peripherals and stuff you can imagine if you have any kind of gamepad, mouse, keyboard, I plugged an optical drive drive into this. I can play a Blu Ray on this. By plugging in Blu Ray drive into it. It does all the stuff it will work on here. And it's just a matter of GPU and so not Nvidia yet. They are not saying it super, super forcefully yet. It's kind of like if you want to go ahead and experiment kind of thing.
- [32:27]
David Pierce
Okay.
- [32:29]
Sean Hollister
They maintain tight control over who can ship a box with preloaded Steam and preloaded Steam os. Manufacturers cannot just go do this. They need to have a technical partnership. They say it's not a license agreement. They say it's not a business deal. They call it a technical partnership. They want quality control is what Valve wants over the end result. They don't want just anybody to be able to ship one. And it's terrible. And it stains their reputation. And that kind of is what happened in 2012 through 2015 when they tried to do it the first time. It's partly Valve's fault, but it's also partly the manufacturer's fault. They did not deliver stuff that really worked well with this. There was a company that said they were doing steamos and they didn't have any authorization whatsoever and it wasn't going to work on that machine, for instance.
- [33:18]
David Pierce
So if this all works, cast this out a little ways. Isn't this exactly the same playbook that Xbox is trying to run right now? You have a library of games, you have a bunch of different hardware you can play it on, some of which we'll make, some of which we won't make. You can already run it on your phone. Aren't we just doing Xbox everywhere? But it's Steam. Am I missing something?
- [33:37]
Sean Hollister
I am grinning ear to ear right now. You can see me grinning ear to ear because this is the right question. And it's like absolutely one of the thoughts in Microsoft's mind. Except Microsoft seems to have contradicted itself almost every day over the past three weeks about what it plans to do.
- [33:56]
David Pierce
They're like,
- [33:59]
Sean Hollister
we don't think we can sell $1,000 consoles. So we're gonna find new business models. And maybe those business models are gonna be partnering with other. Other companies can't ship hardware that's less than $1,000. We have seen repeatedly with these handhelds. They have no idea how to ship it without handhelds. Microsoft would love it if all of a sudden everybody was making the xboxes for them and they never had to build hardware again.
- [34:21]
David Pierce
To that end, Microsoft is like, we want to make and provide games and we will make hardware to the extent that it enables that. But Also, if there's a rich, huge hardware ecosystem, we don't really need to be part of it. And Valve seems like it might as well be running down the exact same road at the. In the exact same way. It just doesn't have. It may, it may have, like you said, taken a tighter grip on who gets to do what and how it partners in order to make sure all this stuff works, which I think is the right thing to do. But like Steam everywhere feels like it is, it is just coming right for us.
- [34:57]
Sean Hollister
Every time I talk to Valve they tell me that that other manufacturer, that they see themselves as paving the way for other companies to do this thing that they are like, this is the example of what you can do if you get off your bum and do it. And we don't think anybody will do it unless we do it first. But once we've done it, others can. The reality is once Valve has done it, they require a partnership in order for anybody else to do it. And valve is a 300 part person company, 350 person company that the other OEMs out there do not think they can rely on. And if I talk to through the grapevine, I'm hearing through the grapevine that these companies have established relationships with Microsoft that bear fruit, that send dollars their way, that get responses quickly and they do not feel they have that relationship with Valve yet. Valve has started this relationship with Lenovo. Lenovo's put out one device with SteamOS. It theoretically had a second one before market conditions made it impossible to release that device for a price that anybody wants to pay. It was supposed to be out. I think this month. We'll see if it still is the Legion Go two with steamos. In case you're wondering, and I just don't know, is Valve going to make the time for more companies? When is Valve going to make the time for more companies? Will Valve change its mind and just say steamos is here, go ahead and use it, you don't have to pay us a cent. I don't know.
- [36:33]
David Pierce
Yeah, so we're recording this a few days before your review comes out. You have a lot of testing left to do. But what is your early sense right now? Is this thing ultimately a success? Did it work? Did it do the job? Is this the Steam machine we've been waiting for?
- [36:50]
Sean Hollister
Oh, not, not quite. I really wanted it to be a console, not just a PC. And it might be in a month. It could be like the Steam Deck shipped, broken, buggy, utter mess A month later. It was something that I could recommend to my friends. Six months later it was something I could recommend to tech heads. A year later, it was something I could recommend to anyone. I'm hoping the Steam Machine is on the same path. Valve is the only company I trust to put it on that path because they are religious about software updates and even bringing new features to things years down the road. There's new functionality for the original Steam Deck LCD coming out this month where it'll be able to do proper hibernation, you know, instead of just sleep. That could be pretty cool. Like they really believe in that and they really deliver on that and so I believe they can. It is not that yet. Right now it is in a better place than the original Steam Deck was, but it is in a place where it is early access. They have delivered for the kind of people who will jump in as an early access adopter who want to be there for that ride. The price is not excessive for that, particularly if it's going to Double as your PC, but it's no PlayStation.
- [38:10]
David Pierce
That sounds about right. All right, go back to playing Indiana Jones. Thank you for coming on. Good to see you, bud.
- [38:14]
Sean Hollister
Oh, you bet.
- [38:15]
David Pierce
All right, that's it for the show. Thank you to Sean for being here and thank you as always for watching and listening. If you have thoughts or feedback or strong feelings about the $1,049 price, if there are other things you wanted to see from the Steam Machine, we are all ears. Call the hotline 866 verge 11 send us an email vergecasthe verge.com I really am curious if you're a person who is like actively making a gaming buying decision, you're looking at a Switch 2 or an Xbox or a Steam Deck or a Steam machine or a PS5, how you're thinking through that decision right now. Call us, email us, tell us all about it. As always, a reminder that the best thing you can do to support the Verge and all of this stuff that we're up to is by subscribing theverge.com subscribe it gets you all of our podcasts ad free, including this one. It gets you all of our exclusive newsletters. It gets you all of our coverage of the Steam machine. Sean's been writing about the Steam machine for like 13 years. You can read all of it at theverge.com subscribe thank you in advance. The Vergecast is a Verge production and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. The show is produced by Josh Kahas, Eric Gomez, Brandon Kieffer, Travis Larchuk and Aaron Locasio. We'll see you tomorrow. Rock and roll.
- [39:23]
GEICO Advertiser 1
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- [39:30]
GEICO Advertiser 2
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- [39:44]
GEICO Advertiser 1
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- [39:48]
Sean Hollister
It feels good to save some hard earned cash. It feels good to Geico.
- [39:53]
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