Buying someone else a Steam game got a lot easier today. You no longer have to be Steam friends with the person to whom you're sending a gift, and don't even need a Steam account. You can also select gifts directly from a shared wishlist.

Here are today's Steam gifting changes, in short:

• It's now possible to gift a game without having a Steam account. (Previously, guest checkout could only be used for digital gift card and hardware purchases)
• You also don't need to know the recipient's Steam account, and can gift games and digital gift cards with just an email address (even if it isn't the address associated with their Steam account)
• You can now gift games across regions. You need to know the recipient's Steam account for this, as the price you pay will be the price of the game in their region
• You can now select and purchase gifts directly from a shared wishlist

Previously, sending a gift on Steam meant asking the recipient for their Steam account name and friending them, which dampens the surprise a bit.

My only wish now is for a simple way to stuff a Steam game into a physical card for birthdays and holidays. Steam retired physical gift cards recently, citing fraud. (With these new features, you could gift a game to an email address you control, and then print out the redemption link and make the recipient type it in manually, which is slightly mean in a way that I approve of as an uncle.)

Alongside the gifting update are some new wishlist features.

The big one is the ability to organize your wishlist into categories. When you share your wishlist with someone else, you can also now share just a specific category (eg, 'Xmas list'), and as mentioned above, it's now possible to purchase gifts directly from a shared wishlist.

I don't think I've encountered anyone, in the wild, who actually uses Steam's Remote Play game streaming feature since the days of the hardware Steam Link (and what tremendous days they were). In 2026, I think most people making use of in-home streaming tend to default to programs like Apollo and Moonlight.

But Valve keeps working on it, perhaps with renewed vigour owing to the recent release of the Steam Machine and upcoming release of the Steam Frame. In a new update for the Steam client, Valve introduced some new fixes and features for Remote Play, while also bringing in patches for Steam Input, the Steam overlay, the Workshop, and various other gubbins.

Steam Remote Play will now let you set a framerate limit of 59.94. This remarkably specific framerate is common in, well, televisions—the kind you might want to stream your videogames to from a desktop PC.

Previously, if you had configured Steam to output with a framerate limit of 60 fps, there'd be an ever-so-slight discrepancy between that output and what your 59.94 fps TV was capable of displaying, leading to dropped frames.

Speaking of which, Remote Play has also been tweaked in such a way that it has "Reduced frame drops when the framerate limit is set to automatic," says Valve. Apart from that, we've also got:

• Fixed black screen when hardware encoding is disabled.
• Fixed offline devices showing as streamable when they aren't.
• Fixed overloading the client video decoder when unlimited bandwidth is enabled.
• Fixed mouse coordinates for input-only streaming.

I've currently got my desktop hooked up to my TV directly with an HDMI cable, so it's all pretty academic to me. But I will probably—probably—not spend the rest of my life in my current flat, so I'm glad to know that, when the day comes that I do want to stream games from a desktop in another room to my television, Steam is getting better at doing that.

Anyway, here are the full patch notes:

General

• Improved notification settings layout in some languages.
• Fixed a case where the controller pairing screen could pop up during controller firmware updates.

Steam Workshop

• Re-worked system that managed what subscribed items needed to be updated.

In-Game Overlay

• Fixed a case where the in-game overlay could hold a reference and prevent a game which tries to fully tear down and recreate the renderer after a D3D12 device/driver failure from succeeding.

Remote Play

• Added 59.94 FPS as an available framerate limit.
• Reduced frame drops when the framerate limit is set to automatic.
• Fixed black screen when hardware encoding is disabled.
• Fixed offline devices showing as streamable when they aren't.
• Fixed overloading the client video decoder when unlimited bandwidth is enabled.
• Fixed mouse coordinates for input-only streaming.

Steam Input

• Steam Controller: The Gyro Calibration Threshold has been set to 50% of the previous value so that it is less likely to trigger while in hand.
• Steam Controller: Gyro Calibration threshold is now available in Steam->Settings->Controller->Details->Calibration & Advanced (Open)->Gyro Calibration.
• Steam Controller: You can choose to disable hardware calibration and rely on the standard Steam Input Gyro Calibration tools instead, by using the "Enable Software Calibration for Steam Controller" toggle.
• Steam Controller: Fixed gyro stutter due to IMU timestamp being ignored.
• Steam Controller: Fixed glyphs in Shadow of the Tomb Raider.
• Added support for both the wired and wireless versions of the PDP Afterglow Wave Controller for Nintendo Switch.
• Added support for Turtle Beach controllers for Nintendo Switch 2.
• Fixed the Apex 5 controller showing up as multiple controllers when "Allow third-party apps to take over mappings" is enabled in the FlyDigi Space Station app.

Steam Controller Firmware

• Fixed an issue where trackpad samples could be duplicated and cause issues w/ momentum in trackball mode
• Fixed an issue with unintentionally waking host devices while shutting down the controller.
• Fixed an issue with occasional repeated button presses on the B Button.

Linux

• Fixed a crash when manually starting a game recording.
• Fixed steamwebhelper crash when hardware acceleration is enabled on NVIDIA gpus.

macOS

• Fixed chat windows showing over fullscreen game windows when opened in the Steam overlay.

VR

• Fixed a case where Steam claimed that SteamVR crashed on last run when it didn't.

The Steam Deck was once a budget champion, but no longer. Ever since the price hikes earlier this year, Valve's handheld has become difficult to argue for as a value proposition—and according to recent sales estimates by Boiling Steam, it appears that consumers may agree.

The site has attempted to estimate the number of Steam Deck units sold by tracking its position on the Steam Top Sellers listing, and extrapolating data in relation to the entries above and below it (via XDA).

This back-of-the-napkin maths is hardly definitive, but it suggests that when the Steam Deck dropped from around fourth and fifth on the chart position to between tenth and fifteenth after the price adjustments in May of this year, the drop in weekly units sold would equate to roughly 80-82%.

Boiling Steam suggests that a slip to fourteenth on the Top Sellers list from its previous top five position represents a drop in gross revenue of approximately 72%, something the outlet characterises as a "complete collapse in total sales."

Presuming Boiling Steam's earlier estimate of between 11,000 and 18,000 units sold a week pre-price increase is correct, the figures would equate to between 1,400 and 3,000 units sold weekly in mid-2026. "The effect could not be clearer," says the outlet. "A 72% revenue contraction combined with a 54% price increase has completely shut down the demand for the Steam Deck."

Immediately after the price increases, replenished stock was reportedly sold out in North America, so it seems that some well-heeled buyers bit the bullet—at least initially. In fact, it's worth pointing out that regional shortages in Steam Deck supplies may have had their part to play in the Deck's position in the Top Seller rankings, which could skew this data significantly.

There's also a fair amount of guesswork here, as the outlet has made assumptions about the average Steam Deck price across the range for 2025 sales data, and extrapolated estimated weekly revenues for the positioning of the surrounding top-selling games. All of which is to say, a pinch of salt may well be required.

Still, it's been a grim 2026 in general for handheld gaming fans. While there's been plenty to get excited about on the hardware front, including Intel's Panther Lake-based Arc G3 and G3 Extreme offerings and the magnificent MSI Claw 8 EX AI+, the memory crisis-induced pricing has tarnished what was once an excellent entry point into PC gaming.

And the Steam Deck really was the entry point to beat all entry points. The cheaper LCD models have since been retired, the OLED models are hugely expensive given the performance you receive for your cash, and we're left wondering if the form factor will survive as anything other than a niche category for the very well-off.

I recently reported on a $5,299 handheld offering from Ayaneo, a 128 GB beast that I can't possibly see selling in large numbers for that sort of price. But, like Valve and countless other hardware providers, the company has felt the need to increase the pricing to cover memory and storage costs. Never mind global shipping uncertainty and a whole host of other contributing factors.

Those of you who picked up a Steam Deck back when it was cheap are probably feeling pretty pleased with yourselves right now, and rightly so. But, if these estimates are correct, I'd imagine Valve may be beginning to ask itself whether the hassle—combined with dropped sales figures—makes the whole endeavour worth it. And that, for PC gaming on the go, would be a sad state of affairs indeed.

The Steam Machine is a pricey piece of hardware. Which is why UK redditor mdumtshali must have been heartbroken (or very annoyed) when theirs was stolen from their doorstep after the Royal Mail dropped it off while they were at work.

The delivery driver sent a picture of the Steam Machine box to prove it had been delivered, and even tried to cover it with a plastic bag (via Notebookcheck). But alas, when mdumtshali returned home, porch pirates (my new favourite term) had already absconded with the ill-fated mini PC.

However, mdumtshali says they eventually contacted Steam Support, which duly agreed to send out a replacement Steam Machine free of charge. "Honestly, kudos to Steam Support," says the redditor. "[I] thought I was going to be out £1000, which I really can't afford."

Steam Support initially asked mdumtshali to check with neighbours to see if the parcel had been taken in, which they duly did to no avail. As the Steam Machine is a high-value item, it's surprising that a signature wasn't required by the Royal Mail for delivery confirmation, which would have likely prevented this whole fiasco in the first place.

Royal Mail Left My Steam Machine Outside from r/steammachine

As Notebookcheck points out, the UK Consumer Rights Act 2015 stipulates that sellers must ensure that items reach buyers, so this is less a case of good-guy Valve and more "Valve follows the rules"—which is still pretty pleasing to see in this "screw-you-got-mine" world of ours.

In other countries, however, the consumer protections aren't quite so clear-cut. Chalk one battered, bruised, and broken point up for this silly little country of mine, and kudos to Steam Support for quickly coming to this redditor's aid in their time of need.

When Valve launched Steam Direct in June 2017 it marked a huge shift in the storefront's identity. Before Direct, Valve manually decided what did and did not release on Steam, or else it used initiatives like Steam Greenlight to have users decide what games would or would not enjoy placement.

Before June 2017, the amount of games that shipped on Steam per month had only once exceeded 500 (518, in December 2016). Since February 2025, the amount of games shipping on Steam per month has never dropped beneath 1500.

Forgive me the onslaught of numbers, but just one more: The total amount of games shipped on Steam in 2025 was 21,382. In mid-July 2026, just a little over halfway through the year, there's already been 13,359 new titles launched.

I think Steam's history can be carved up into three distinct eras:

• February 2006 - August 2012 (rarely more than 30 new games a week)
• August 2012 - June 2017, the Greenlight years (growth from ~20 new games to ~350 games per month)
• June 2017 - onwards, the Steam Direct years (from ~650 new games a month to ~1500)

Within that third era, growth has spiked since roughly the beginning of 2025. You have three guesses why. (And if you need a second guess, which secluded island paradise do you live on and how do I get there?)

I was prompted to look up these numbers on SteamDB after reading a recent article by Sulka Haro, co-founder of the Finnish studio behind early access MMO Pax Dei (he's also worked on Habbo Hotel and a couple of The Walking Dead games). Haro has run a census on the roughly 53,600 Steam games released between mid-2023 and mid-2026 to determine how many come bearing an AI disclosure, keeping in mind that the disclosure box only rolled out in January 2024.

In 2024, 10.9% of games had an AI disclosure. In 2025, it was 19.9%. From the vantage point of July 2026, 30.8% of the games released on Steam this year so far have an AI disclosure (which corresponds with the much narrower "study" I conducted last month). According to Haro, the continuing growth of Steam's "release volume" is hugely influenced by AI.

"Steam’s release volume has grown a lot—but the growth isn’t evenly spread," Haro writes. "Non-AI launches have risen only modestly (~1,030 → ~1,320 per month), while AI-flagged launches went from a rounding error (~13/month pre-mandate) to ~530/month."

If the amount of AI-flagged games continues to rise at the current trajectory, around half of all games on Steam will be AI-flagged at some point between 2027-2028. Still, as Haro discovers, basically none of them will make any money, and few of them are reviewed well by users, if they're reviewed at all.

There are a huge amount of fascinating insights in Haro's article and I highly recommend you check it out. Also don't miss this follow-up which dives into, among other things, the genres that lean most heavily on generative AI (unsurprisingly: management sims are right at the top).

This growing tidal wave of AI-flagged content demonstrates that it's only going to get harder for smaller devs, especially those without the support of a publisher, to stand out on Steam. Why would anyone bother looking for deep cuts when there are thousands of entirely AI-built visual novels to wade through, each more soulless and uncanny than the previous?

With the sludge rapidly rising from our throats to our nose, a Steam filter cannot come quickly enough.

Top Steam games by revenue (July 7 - 14)

Steam releases its top sellers charts on Wednesdays, so the below chart doesn't factor in some late-week releases. That said, aside from Palworld's 1.0 launch, there wasn't much of note released last week.

An extremely sleepy week for new releases means there's basically no surprises here. Mecca Chameleon is still going gangbusters, to the extent that it's now spawning a pestilence of AI ripoffs. 2025's Granblue Fantasy: Relink just got a hefty expansion, hence its return to the chart. Palworld got its 1.0 release, and people continue to play the usual live service candidates.

The lull is likely to continue. While Halo: Campaign Evolved hits next week (July 28), it'll also be available on PC Game Pass, so Steam's numbers won't paint the full picture. After that, the next game most likely to make a splash is Star Wars Zero Company, which hits on August 27.

Last week's Steam deep cuts

Steam review of the week

"It's okay to kill people and throw them into an eldritch flesh-pit as long as they deserve it.

Is it a game about materialism? Is it about found family?

All I know is, it feels super cathartic to finally tackle and stab someone 58 times after being chased by a giant tree."

Failgirl69, ruminating rather disturbingly on Feed the Pit.

I'd completely forgotten Valve is working on an update for Team Fortress 2's cooperative Mann vs. Machine mode, though in my defence, it's been a long time since we last heard about it. The prospective patch was announced in June last year, via a blog post on TF2's official website that requested map and mission submissions from the community in time for this update—with a "fictional deadline" of August 27.

After that deadline passed, a brief progress report was provided in September. But for the past ten months there's been radio silence. Now though, Valve has provided another snippet of info on the patch's status on its blog. "We wanted to give everyone an update on the update we already gave on the update we're working on, and here it is: We're still working on the MvM update."

That isn't everything Valve had to say on the matter. But it is about half of it. Valve elaborated that "it's taking a lot longer to sort through the new content and changes that we'd originally planned, but we promise we're making progress. Thanks for being patient!"

This tracks with the progress report Valve gave back in September, where it explained that its request for community contributions resulted in "way more" submissions than it expected. At the time, Valve admitted it didn't "have a release date for the update yet" but it would be "going through the submissions and working on it".

Obviously, Valve could allocate more resources to getting this update out of the door if it wanted to, given that Steam alone has raked in an estimated $11.1 billion in revenue this year—not to mention the money Valve makes from Counter-Strike 2, Dota 2, and the tens of thousands of players still involved with TF2.

But that isn't how Valve operates. The company's flat structure means staff tend to drift between projects through a blend of desire and demand, and there's been a lot happening this year that is likely to be of higher priority than updating TF2. This includes the launch of the Steam Machine and the upcoming release of the Steam Frame, alongside the ongoing development of Deadlock.

Yet while major updates for TF2 are sporadic, with the last arriving in 2023 and pushing player counts to an all-time high, the game does get minor patches on a regular basis. Earlier this month, TF2 received an update that added a bunch of community maps, cosmetics, taunts and so forth, with a flurry of smaller patches following to fix bugs and tweak parameters related to that update.

As the AI boom gobbles up graphics cards, SSDs, memory sticks, and more, building a gaming PC has become eye-wateringly expensive (and it's never exactly been cheap). If, like me, you've been holding out in the hope those prices will drop to more sensible levels soon, I'm sorry to say that's looking unlikely.

Earlier this month, research showed that memory prices are predicted to rise sharply between now and 2027, with no reductions expected until 2028. Now, Valve has shared its own view of the hardware market, and it's equally glum. Speaking to Bloomberg's Jason Schreier about the company's long road to the Steam Machine, Valve engineer Yazan Aldehayyat said the company only sees prices going up in the short to medium term:

"Honestly, it's still getting worse," Aldehayyat explained. "Just in case people are not aware. What people are seeing on retail shelves right now, from our observations, is lagging what we're seeing from a bulk supply by at least three to six months."

Oof. Valve also provided some insight into how the memory crises affected the Steam Machine's launch. Unsurprisingly, initial supply of the Steam Machine was impacted by memory availability. "We're basically building everything we can," fellow engineer Pierre-Loup Griffais explained. "We're limited by memory capacity, for sure."

Valve didn't go into detail about how many Steam Machines have been produced or sold up to this point. But according to Bloomberg, Valve does not view the success of the device in terms of raw sales figures. Rather, it's about providing players with a viable option for open-source PC gaming in their living rooms.

"We suspect that the Steam Machine is a really good way to solve a very real problem that people have," Aldehayyat said. "If that's borne out to be true, from our opinion, it's a success."

In addition, Griffais said the memory crisis hasn't altered Valve's plans for the future of the device. "Users are getting their machines," he said. "For a lot of the experience, the work starts. We'll be doing that for years to come."

The memory crisis wasn't the only subject Valve addressed during the chat. The company also discussed why it opted against launching an exclusive game for the Steam Machine. I had vaguely hoped the launch of new Steam hardware might coincide with the reveal of a certain Half-Life sequel, but Valve said that it's much more interested in "having the whole PC catalog" as its "'launch exclusive'".

The living room PC is a certified thing now, and not just for those of us with extra long HDMI cables. The Steam Machine is "out" for the dozens of people who've picked up the $1,000 cube, but before that, folks were already making their own living room machines that run SteamOS.

Anyone can make a Steam Machine, which is exactly how Valve likes it. That's one reason it priced its GabeCube roughly at cost (which has skyrocketed thanks to the AI-driven memory crisis), and why it has no interest in making games exclusively for its Linux-based devices.

"We want it to still be viable for other hardware manufacturers to offer things like the Steam Machine either with higher performance or a different feature set," Valve engineer Yazan Aldehayyat recently told Bloomberg's Jason Schreier in an interview.

Valve is capable of selling its hardware at a loss to boost its adoption, but its goal is to grow the PC platform as a whole by maintaining an open spirit.

"We look at it from a long-term perspective,” Valve engineer Loup Griffais told Bloomberg. "Someone that is creating one of those PCs might actually create some meaningful innovation that is really important for things to come on PC that becomes so universal and brings the experience forward by that much that now the experience is better for everyone and then people might buy more games."

To that end, Valve also sees no need to fight the 'exclusives' war that Sony and Microsoft have recently recommitted to.

"We're much more interested in having the whole PC catalog as our 'launch exclusive,'" Giraffes said. "Restricting where people can play a game I don't think is a great model, at least for us."

I had to check to make sure, but even the Steam Deck's free pack-in game, Aperture Desk Job, doesn't require the device to play it (just a controller).

While Valve's hardware is good, it's the freely available SteamOS, with its console-like interface and relative ease of use, that has truly legitimized the category. Last year, we scored a Lenovo Legion Go handheld that runs SteamOS instead of Windows higher than the Steam Deck itself—an example of Valve embracing other companies making a better Steam machine.

But it's also the savvy business call for Valve, whose marketplace dominance and sizable 30% cut from all sales on the platform (with some exceptions) means it shares in the profits no matter what.

15 July, 2026: The original Steam Deck launched with an LCD screen back in 2022. Four years later, and Valve is apparently sunsetting replacement parts for this older model. A Redditor reached out to iFixIt to query the availability of a replacement battery for their LCD Steam Deck. Unfortunately, iFixIt responded that it was looking "less and less likely" that it would receive more OEM batteries for this model (via VideoCardz).

Another iFixIt representative chimed in on the comment thread under the Reddit post, writing, "To add clarity: it’s not that we’re choosing to not stock these anymore. Unfortunately, Valve is just starting to sunset these parts. We’re looking at alternatives!"

If the battery in your own LCD Steam Deck looks not long for this world, you're not completely out of luck as iFixIt said it was "actively evaluating aftermarket options." Currently, the company does not have a "confirmed timeline for when either OEM or aftermarket stock would be available" for the LCD model.

iFixIt already sells an aftermarket replacement battery for the Steam Deck OLED. Though this could physically fit inside the LCD Steam Deck shell, the OLED battery isn't really an option for a number of technical reasons.

You can no longer buy the more affordable LCD model of the Steam Deck directly from Valve, as these were quietly discontinued last year. That said, sunsetting replacement batteries four years post-release—you know, when a handheld gaming PC is likely to start to show its age with dwindling battery capacity—still doesn't feel fantastic. Such a truncated lifespan for OEM replacement batteries also seriously undermines the longevity of Valve's promises of repairability across its other hardware offerings.

iFixit Customer Support response for LCD Steam Deck batteries from r/SteamDeck

We have reached out to Valve for an official comment, and will update if we hear anything concrete.

So, what can you do? Besides re-visiting Valve's own Steam Deck teardown or reading iFixIt's handy-dandy battery replacement guide in anticipation of aftermarket stock, I would also advise treating your Steam Deck better than I've been treating mine recently.

If Steam is struggling to load on your PC or phone, it's not just you. The store is currently struggling, with multiple issues shown on SteamStat.us.

Currently the store and community pages are reflecting a "Very Slow" status, with several regional servers overloaded and Deadlock's multiplayer API reflecting an Internal Server Error.

The Steam API itself seemns to be flickering between normal and offline. The store and community are also throwing some "Bad Gateway" errors, which means they may not load at all.

We get it, Steam: it's Monday.

Games on Steam have already been enjoying the various shades of the Steam Deck Compatibility check mark for some time now. Well, now you can check a title's compatibility on both the Steam Machine and SteamOS right there on its store page.

A few beats after the Steam Machine's June release, you can now check whether Valve's funky game box is up to the task of playing the depths of your backlog at a glance. On Steam, just click 'learn more' next to the Steam Deck compatibility rating for a brief breakdown of what works and what doesn't across Valve's various hardware and software platforms.

However, not all games enjoy a full Steam Machine compatibility rating; as spotted by Ars Technica, Black Myth: Wukong's compatibility is still listed as unknown, accompanied by a message that says "Valve is still learning" about the 2024 game, and that it doesn't "currently have further information regarding Steam Machine compatibility." In the case of Wukong, this could be because the game is too GPU and/or CPU intensive, causing the title to fail to reach a minimum threshold of, say, FPS while in-play on Valve's game box.

Otherwise, the game is listed as running "successfully on SteamOS". That means you're not limited to the Steam Machine's hardware specs (or indeed its disappointing price point or availability). You could instead opt to enjoy Wukong plus all the benefits of SteamOS on hardier hardware from someone other than Valve, such as the Lenovo Legion Go S.

Swapping to SteamOS on your home machine, for example, can come with its own share of drawbacks, however. For just one thing, Valve's Linux-based OS is known to often not play well with the kernel-level anti-cheat systems you'll increasingly find in competitive games nowadays.

Anyway, Valve is apparently "still learning" about a number of games when it comes to Steam Machine compatibility, including but not limited to Dragon’s Dogma 2, Elden Ring Nightreign, Metal Gear Solid Delta: Snake Eater, and Resident Evil Requiem. That said, a number of games that are just about 'Playable' on Valve's handheld—such as 007: First Light—make the most of the Steam Machine's more powerful hardware and get bumped up to 'Verified'.

Personally, I've been jumping between much less graphically demanding titles. Level-based diorama builder Shanty Town enjoys 'Verified' status on both Steam Deck and Steam Machine, plus SteamOS compatibility. My other favourite this month has been Magical Princess (I feel like the title says it all), which instead enjoys the caveat-laden rating of 'Playable' on both the Steam Deck as well as the Steam Machine due to some text input and button glyph display shenanigans.

For now, you can't filter store results via Steam Machine or SteamOS compatibility, though that feature will likely soon follow. After all, the Great on Frame category was recently introduced, likely heralding the Steam Frame's imminent release. When that VR headset drops, we'll potentially see a similar compatibility category arrive too.

I Counter-Strike 2, small changes can have huge ramifications. There aren't many games where the addition of volumetric smoke grenades would be a headline feature. But in CS2's hyper tense battles, true 3D smoke cover has game changing consequences.

Now, with the advent of Season 5, Valve has made another tiny-yet-huge change. Put simply, it's changed how the bomb works, giving players more of a chance to survive after it detonates. Valve detailed the changes in a Steam post (via PCGamesN). "Now, when the bomb detonates, an explosive wave of destruction will flow from the bombsite through the map."

This won't make much difference if you're standing close to the bomb, with Valve emphasising that "you're toast". However, Valve explains that "the shockwave dissipates around corners and doesn't go through walls" meaning that a bit of canny positioning will keep you alive after detonation, preserving your precious gear into the next round.

But how will you know if your hiding spot will keep you alive? Well, Valve has thought about that too. As the bomb counts down, your health bar will flash to highlight how much damage you'll receive in your current position once it goes off. The shockwave effect has been pre-calculated for all defusal maps, which presumably means it'll be the same each time.

Valve hasn't posted any clips showing the new bomb tech in action, but Valve YouTuber Gabe Follower has uploaded a video detailing the changes in Season 5, alongside some footage of the shockwave. He also discusses another new feature which, currently, is only available in private testing: A new console command that enables players to detonate grenades remotely by shooting them. You can imagine the knock-on effect such a system would have in a Counter-Strike match, so it'll be interesting to see whether Valve implements it more widely.

Alongside the bomb changes, Season 5 also introduces two new weapon and sticker collections, one with an Arabian theme and another that's all about spy tech. There's also a new map, Cache, which replaced Overpass in the active-duty map pool, plus five community maps that have been added to various modes.

While Counter-Strike 2 remains the biggest game on Steam, it's not the only entry in the series that's doing well for itself at the moment. Its predecessor, Counter-Strike: Global Offensive, has racked up an impressive player count after it was de-absorbed from CS2, attracting tens of thousands of players despite not being listed on the steam store.

It's easy to feel like the videogame industry is an endless tornado of shattered dreams and hellfire, and that's because it is. But it also brings in a lot of money, and our beloved PC gaming space in particular is growing faster than both mobile and console markets. Thursday, a report from Alinea Analytics said Steam is just exiting its biggest six months ever.

"In the first half of 2026, we estimate that games on Steam generated $11.1B in gross revenue, the platform’s highest-ever half-year," wrote Rhys Elliott, Alinea's head of market analysis. "That’s up 14.5% on H1 2025, and up 8% even on the holiday-heavy H2 2025, which is the more remarkable comparison given the back half of the year usually wins on seasonal sales and holiday buys."

The full blog highlights some of the biggest reasons for all this growth: new games are more expensive, friendslop megahits like Meccha Chameleon rake in mountains of cash before you can blink, and third parties like Ubisoft are back on Steam after they tried and failed to escape Gabe's dread labyrinth to play ball with Steam's lessers.

The full list of causes and takeaways is in the blog, but this all follows a very long upward trend: as the report states, Steam's yearly revenue has gone from $5.5 billion in 2017 to roughly $20 billion in 2025. A growing percentage of all those sales is from old games, too: so far, "just 21%" of Steam's 2026 revenue has come from games that released this year, down from 29% in 2024.

That said, plenty of new games have been big moneymakers so far: the top five in terms of gross revenue for new games are Forza Horizon 6, Resident Evil Requiem, Crimson Desert, Slay the Spire 2, and Subnautica 2 (Meccha Chameleon snuck into sixth place). It might be especially galling to see a first-party Xbox game at the top of that list given, you know, everything. It's hard to imagine this growth will continue—or even amount to much—if the industry's biggest companies continue to destroy the teams they depend on.

The idea of taking serious hardware horsepower on the go was always the dream of my misspent, console-gaming youth. Don't get me wrong, I've always loved how older handheld systems made a calling card out of their limitations (and in the case of Nintendo, offered a hardware gimmick or gaming experience you couldn't find anywhere else). The fact that now you can play many of the same games on a portable device that you can also play in your gamer den would've blown my younger self's mind.

Unfortunately, the dream-come-true of handheld gaming PCs feels like it is coming to an end.

Our Andy updates our handheld gaming PC deals each week and recently shared a shocking revelation: 'Somehow, the $1,000 Asus ROG Ally Xbox X is the best value gaming handheld I can think of right now.' If you've got the cash then, sure, the Asus ROG Ally Xbox X with its AMD Ryzen Z2 Extreme chip, 24 GB of RAM, and 1 TB of onboard SSD storage makes sense for the asking price. But where does that leave you if you're on a much tighter budget?

The memory supply crisis has raised the pricing floor of all handhelds. Case in point, the device that we still rate as the best budget handheld gaming PC is the Steam Deck. The more affordable LCD models were quietly discontinued last year, leaving those looking to buy a Steam Deck new with only the very shiny OLED models to choose from. Years after release, the price for the base 512 GB OLED model has increased from $549 to $789. The 1 TB model has seen an almost 50% price increase, jumping from $649 to $949. The answer, then, to where that leaves the more budget-conscious? Without a paddle.

Despite this price hike (and the handheld's aged internals), both models of the Steam Deck sold out in North America shortly after the increase was announced back in May. The 1 TB model, which is going for £779 where I'm based in the UK, appears to be out of stock again at the time of writing. But I doubt this is a sustainable trend.

Let's zoom out a smidge. I update our best SSD deals every week, so I've not had the luxury of ignoring how storage prices have been climbing since the tail end of last year. Research suggests that memory prices are likely to rise as much as 50% in Q3 alone. Recent analysis by Bernstein suggests prices won't dip until 2028, when major manufacturers are expected to complete a number of capacity-increasing builds.

But here and now in 2026, it's not just gaming PC components that have seen price increases as a result of the memory supply crisis. For example, the Playstation 5 has seen three different price increases over the last six years and now costs a minimum of $650. I've written about it before but, despite buying a launch day PS5, it's becoming increasingly unlikely I'll pick up a PS6 day one. After all, if the PS5 Pro costs $900 today, how much more will the PS6 cost?

Hey, maybe Bernstein's predictions will bear out and hardware pricing will look a lot more sensible by the time Sony's next-gen console drops in 2028 or even 2029. But in the here and now, handheld gaming PCs remain in an arguably much more difficult position within the consumer market.

For those who don't already have a gaming PC, there's little doubt that a $650 base PS5 is going to look like the more economical option (particularly as Sony won't be bringing its handful of exclusives to PC in future, but maybe it's just me mourning the loss of, like, four games). If you already own a gaming PC, you'll likely want to save your pennies for increasingly expensive component upgrades. Where would a handheld feature in either budget?

The data suggests gamers generally are still willing to part with the cash for new hardware—though they aren't necessarily picking up a handheld gaming PC. A recent Circana report shared that the handheld of choice was overwhelmingly the Nintendo Switch 2, with the hybrid console largely credited for a year-over-year hardware spending increase that grew by 69%, climbing to $500 million this past March.

The Switch 2 saw its own price increase announced back in May, so it's worth pondering how much of this recent consumer clamour was motivated by a desire to scoop the console before it became more expensive. Even so, Nintendo's handheld is set to cost $500 from September 1 in the US.

There are plenty of PC gamers who have no interest in what the big N is doing these days, but a broad-view of today's gaming audience suggests a lot of gamers are more platform-agnostic. For instance, a 2023 Comscore report found 76% of gamers play across multiple platforms. Therefore, it's hard to ignore handheld gaming PC's most obvious competitor, even if the Switch 2 is underpowered compared to many of the available portable gaming options.

In short, the most performant handheld gaming PCs ask a price that's far too rich for my blood, and the best budget option is arguably not quite as compelling as Nintendo's offering (even after the price hike comes into effect later this year).

To paraphrase Andy's point, there's a chance gaming handhelds eventually revert to occupying a boutique niche for gamers with especially deep pockets. That's how they were in the before times prior to the Steam Deck's launch, with smaller Chinese outfits, such as OneXPlayer, releasing expensive, weak, poorly optimised devices. That's not really the future I want for handheld gaming PCs, but it's a strong possibility. However, given the state of, well, everything, I find myself taking a bleaker outlook.

In the longer term, it doesn't feel like handheld gaming PCs are the most economical proposition for brands or manufacturers either. For example, back in March Ayaneo suspended pre-orders for its uber-powerful Next 2 gaming handheld after costs approached 'twice the price we originally set'. To be clear, I strongly doubt Valve is going to pack it in with the Steam Deck any time soon. However, smaller companies with a much less diverse portfolio than, say, the company behind one of the largest storefronts for digital games, are likely to struggle.

What seems certain is that prices will continue to rise and meaningful chunks of the devices' audience will be priced out. My concern is that the maths may simply no longer math, and hardware companies will increasingly decide that handheld gaming PCs specifically just aren't worth it. For my wide-eyed younger self, I hope I'm wrong.

Indie creator Robert Yang—who makes good, funny, incandescently homosexual videogames—has an ongoing project. Radiator Forever is a free megabundle/remaster of Yang's experimental, short-form games that includes titles like Hurt Me Plenty (description: "consent, negotiation, spanking, and aftercare"), Succulent ("juicy cheek physics and demonic possession") and Stick Shift ("autoerotic night-driving, manually pleasure a gay car").

I'm sure we both agree that this news piece would have been worth writing just to get a chance to tap out "manually pleasure a gay car," but there's more: in a recent blog post on the experience of putting together Radiator Forever, Yang shone some light on the ongoing fallout from last year's purge of "adult" material from storefronts like Steam and Itch.io, for which right-wing anti-porn group Collective Shout claimed credit after putting pressure on payment processors, as well as on the impact of regional censorship laws like the UK Online Safety Act.

With indie storefront Itch.io forced to more-or-less shadowban adult games on its platform, projects like Yang's are impossible to find on there, driving him back to Steam. "Of course I will continue using and supporting Itch as a much-needed alternative to Steam, but the cold fact is that Itch reaches a lot fewer people these days," he writes.

But even on Steam, these sorts of games continue to run into problems. "Unfortunately Valve has tagged my game as "frequent nudity and sexual content" and now hides it from most Steam users," writes Yang. "Since no one changes their default settings, this amounts to a delisting / shadowban from 99% of the Steam user base.

"While I was careful to avoid explicit nudity, compliance-in-advance is never enough to appease a zealous censor, and the Steam content reviewers have decided the game's general "nature" was just too gay, regardless of my good faith efforts." Yang points to Steam's no-appeal ban of Horses to suggest that "Valve isn't interested in a nuanced conversation or in admitting any wrongs in moral judgment.

"If video games are a form of protected free speech, I do wish there was a bit more hand-wringing over blocking access to my games that were designed directly to be political speech," says Yang. "Valve loves it when Cyberpunk 2077 and Baldur's Gate 3 throw customizable genitals at you in the first five minutes, but of course I can't, because I actually have something to say about genitals!"

It's an eminently understandable frustration, and a reminder that—though the discourse around last year's censorship of online storefronts has died down—the reactionary crusade against adult content continues to impact creators.

You saw it in the Steam Machine reveal, and now it's finally happening: E-Ink faceplates. The twist in this tale though is that Valve isn't the one making it.

Instead, that honour goes to Shenzhen-based peripherals and accessories brand Jsaux. If you want to be near the front of the queue for Color E-Ink, Mono E-Ink, or Color Dot Matrix faceplate, you can drop your email here.

Jsaux also shared a better look at all three designs via X. Beyond that, neither pricing information nor a release date has yet been announced (via The Verge).

Besides the plain black panel that comes standard with every Steam Machine, the 2 TB model also enjoys 'red fabric and solid walnut' faceplates. But despite showing off a bunch of funky options in the run-up to the Steam Machine's launch, Valve has said it doesn't currently have 'any specific plans' to make more.

Instead, Valve plans to release the CAD files for the Steam machine's housing so you can make your own. It has also already released the necessary files for its own internally developed 'inkterface'—though this may still not be the most beginner-friendly project (via Digital Foundry).

Despite Valve's pretty chill approach to DIY hardware customisation, that hasn't stopped some brands from getting ahead of themselves. For example, Dbrand touted a Companion Cube-inspired case for the Steam Machine that it ultimately had to cancel as the company never actually got Valve's permission to make it.

If the memory supply crisis would only ease up, and Valve were able to make its funky game box cheaper, I could be persuaded to have a go at making my own faceplate monstrosity. Now, where did I leave that ancient Decoden kit…?

If you've spent any time on Steam from your Steam Deck, there's a good chance you recognise the 'Great on Deck' tag, signifying that games work, well, great on Deck. Well, Steam has just published its Great on Frame collection, and you get three guesses what that could be for.

As spotted by SadlyItsBradley on X, the new category is live now and comes with just four games. The games are Portal 2, Into Black, Aperture Hand Lab and The Lab. Into Black is the odd one out here, as it's the only title not published by Valve in the list, but that's a good sign too. It suggests there's some level of outreach from Valve to other companies.

The plan seems to be to add more games to this category over time, as the Upcoming section is currently entirely empty. Valve's Steam Frame is the only bit of new hardware from Valve that is not live yet. As Valve confirmed a Summer release window for it and the Steam Machine, all this points to an imminent launch.

As of last month, packages of the Steam Frame began arriving in the US. Those packages total 32,000 kg, so the likelihood is these aren't test builds or prototypes. All signs suggest that Valve is gearing up to actually put out the device in the near future.

The fact that the 'Great on Frame' collection is even live means Valve is either ready for the Steam Frame to launch very soon, or it was published by accident, and spotted by meddlesome analysts. The only problem with the Great on Frame collection is that the fact that games are appearing on it doesn't necessarily mean they actually work in VR. You can play flat games on the Steam Frame, so 'Great on Frame' could simply suggest it has been verified to work well in plain old 2D mode.

Still, even playing 2D games on the Steam Frame should serve to be plenty immersive. Valve has managed to entirely ditch the wires here, and it even has some neat built-in functions that help it stand out among its competition.

It has a special antenna for picking up a connection sent directly from a connector on your PC, which allows it to stream your games without any interference. And to top it all off, Valve has implemented foveated streaming, which means it focuses the bandwidth on exactly where your eyes are looking to get even better performance out of the headset.

The only question left, other than the exact release date, is the price point, and for that, I'm preparing for the worst. With all its little tricks and engineering feats, plus the Snapdragon chip and storage, I would have expected a hefty price even before the memory crisis. But now, its included 16 GB of LPDDR5X memory is sure to fetch a pretty penny, and Valve can't afford to eat the cost of production like console manufacturers can.

Either way, we're expecting to find out the answer to both questions in the coming weeks, assuming Valve sticks to its Summer promise.

It's not just you: Steam is down right now. If this were a Tuesday around this time that'd be no big deal (Valve does maintenance every week), but on a Thursday, you have good reason to be looking for an explanation for the error that currently displays when you try to load Steampowered.com:

"You've made too many requests recently. Please wait and try your request again later."

No, you're not being blocked from Steam for reloading the store too many times. Something's wrong: SteamStat.us reports "too many requests" errors for both the Steam store and Steam community. Maybe something to do with the Summer Sale ending today?

Many of Steam's services are still showing a green light, and we're able to see friends online. Steam's matchmaking services are likewise still in operation, according to the status page. It's specifically the Steam website that's out of commission. We'll update this post as the situation develops.

As a special treat to me personally, Valve has released a new version of its Proton compatibility layer—the special sauce that lets Windows games run on Linux platforms like the Steam Deck, Steam Machine, and your desktop if you're cool. Proton 11 is out now, freshly rebased on Wine 11, and accessible to Linux users via the compatibility tab in your Steam settings, or on a per-game basis via the compatibility tab in your games' individual Steam settings pages.

This is the Proton version that went into beta last April, bringing support for Deadly Premonition (a personal all-timer) to Linux among a raft of other fixes. Now it's out for real, with all manner of tweaks and patches and updates, the most important of which for me is "Fixed KDE window maximization support." I kept having issues with that on my desktop, which is hooked up to my TV.

Anyway, the complete list of now-playable games is a real hodgepodge, ranging from 1996's Resident Evil (which only hit Steam in April, explaining Valve's 2026 concern for it) to Metal Gear Survive, of all things. You can find a full list of supported games in the patch notes below.

I'm always a little surprised to hear of games 'getting support' in Proton, simply because my own experience with it has been everything I want to play, unless it is an only-came-out-today release, just works. But I imagine the work of ensuring true and universal compatibility across the entire stable of Windows games is never actually, truly finished.

Anyway, the headline item is that playing games on Linux is somehow even cooler today than it was yesterday (which was very cool, all the kids agree). Here are the full patch notes for Proton 11.

Proton 11.0-1 Patch notes

• Now playable (previously worked with Proton Experimental):
  • Universe Generator: The Golden Sword
  • DCS World Steam Edition
  • Resident Evil (1996)
  • Resident Evil 2 (1998)
  • Dino Crisis
  • Dino Crisis 2
  • From Dust
  • Blaite
  • Don't Die Dateless, Dummy!
  • METAL GEAR SURVIVE
  • Warhammer: Vermintide 2
  • Metal Fatigue
  • SHOGUN: Total War
• Newly playable:
  • Unknown Faces
  • Gothic 1 Classic
  • X-Plane 12
  • Breath of Fire IV
  • Deadly Premonition
• Fixed video playback in She Sees Red.
• Fixed rendering of certain symbols with Ukranian language option in Chambers.
• Fixed voice chat in Phasmophobia lobby for desktop players.
• Improved rendering of Rockstar Launcher popups.
• Fixed Sea of Solitude showing black screen on Proton.
• Fixed many EA games being unplayable after a recent EA Desktop update.
• Added support for SteamWorks SDK 1.64.
• Fixed Steam Overlay not working correctly with many EA games.
• Improved emoji support in Idle Trillionaire.
• Fixed intro video playback in Crimson Desert.
• Fixed Rei and the Floating City not being playable with gamescope.
• Fixed mouse movement behavior in Call of Duty 2.
• Fixed rendering issue in launcher of DEATH STRANDING 2: ON THE BEACH.
• Fixed a crash in HELLDIVERS 2 happening in high enemy-count missions.
• Fixed random hangs in Killer Inn.
• Fixed Killer Inn not launching on Steam Decks and other machines with /tmp sizes lower than 10GB.
• Fixed Killer Inn not being able to connect to Square Enix account.
• Fixed graphical gliches in Duck Game that happen with newer Wine Mono versions.
• Fixed REDLauncher (e.g. as seen with Cyberpunk 2077 and The Witcher 3) taking a long time to exit.
• Fixed Hollow Knight wrongly registering Steam Deck's Steam button as a left trigger after a game update.
• Fixed controller hotplug not working for 8BitDo Ultimate 2C and other controllers that expose multiple HID devices.
• Fixed Xalia intermittently failing to start when game is launched.
• Improved timezone detection.
• Fixed video playback in 我打不过漂亮的她们.
• Fixed lag spikes caused by Steam overlay being opened for prolonged time.
• Fixed VR controller tracking in Microsoft Flight Simulator.
• Improved VR support so that No Man's Sky VR mode is playable again.
• Fixed black blocks in dialog windows created by ARC Raiders and The Finals.
• Fixed glitchy video playback in Satisfactory.
• Fixed Rec Room not being playable after a recent game update.
• Fixed THE KING OF FIGHTERS XIII GLOBAL MATCH freezing when playing videos from the gallery.
• Fixed intro video not looping in Blazblue Centralfiction.
• Made more games using MonoGame playable.
• Improved support for Kodi media player.
• Added System Voice support for multiple languages in Phasmophobia.
• Fixed KDE window maximization support.
• Fixed Brighter Shores window resizing support.
• Improved Space Engineers dual monitor support
• Fixed scaling issue with Arma Reforger when changing window modes.
• Fixed Dungeon Siege tools showing up at character's feet.
• Improved focus loss behavior with RoBoRumble.
• Fixed rendering issue in Hellsinker. launcher.
• Fixed stutter from keyboard input in Titanfall 2.
• Fixed audio playback when playing intro videos in BIRDCAGE.
• Fixed hang after METAL GEAR SOLID 2: Sons of Liberty - Master Collection Version end credits.
• Fixed Disintegration getting stuck on the first loading screen.
• Fixed CHRONO TRIGGER flickering in windowed mode with certain resolutions when using Gamescope.
• RAGE no longer has focus issues when Alt-Tabbing on KDE Wayland.
• The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion Game of the Year Edition (2009) no longer has problems minimizing after Alt-Tabbing.
• Resident Evil 2 should no longer have issues when changing resolutions on GNOME.
• Call of Duty: WWII should no longer fail to render properly in fullscreen native resolution on setups with dual monitors.
• Age of Empires II: Definitive Edition no longer has issues with keyboard registration after refocusing the game.
• Fixed Far Cry 4 randomly hanging during launch.
• Updated Xalia to 0.4.9:
  • Fixed lockups happening when interacting with the EA App.
  • Added controller support for the MC Visual C++ 2010 redistributable installer.
  • Improved gamepad binding support for Graze Counter.
  • Added controller support for launchers of the following games: Red Faction®: Armageddon™, Final Fantasy X/X-2 HD Remaster, Sonic the Hedgehog 4 Episode II, Hellsinker., Disney Bolt, STAR WARS™ Starfighter™, Rocket Knight, Puddle, Zero Escape: The Nonary Games, Metal Slug XX, Mortal Kombat Komplete Edition, Disney Epic Mickey 2: The Power of Two, Batman: Arkham Asylum GOTY, LocoCycle, Ys SEVEN, Resident Evil (1996), Resident Evil 2 (1998), Resident Evil 3 Nemesis (1999), Dino Crisis, Dino Crisis 2.
  • Fixed Xalia wrongly selecting option from unfocused tabs in Rayman: Raving Rabbids.
  • Added controller support for DirectX Runtime Components installer when launching BioShock for the first time.
• Rebased on top of Wine 11.0.
• Added FEX-2605 for ARM64EC builds.
• Updated vkd3d to vkd3d-1.19-139-g30b93dcea8b0.
• Updated dxvk to v2.7.1-467-g83e503b4ae6d from Proton 11 support branch.
• Updated dxvk-nvapi to v0.9.1.
• Updated Wine Mono to 11.0.0.
• Updated vkd3d-proton to proton-20260410

There's something almost endlessly endearing about the wee Steam Machine box. It's beautifully designed, beautifully small, and it's a gaming PC that you wouldn't mind sticking in/on whatever furniture your TV sits on. But it's also hard to buy, was manufactured in small numbers, and commands an incredibly high price for a PC with a weak last-gen GPU and single-channel memory.

But, bless 'em, Valve is still trying to carry on as though it's all fine. And to that end, it has now listed the Windows drivers for its Steam Machine so users can easily switch from the installed SteamOS software to Microsoft's more-pervasive operating system. The drivers are all listed on the support pages for Steam Hardware, sitting just underneath the options for the different Steam Deck SKUs.

In the interests of choice and customisation, that's great. Having the option to switch from Linux to a more widely supported OS means that all the games which are blocked from SteamOS (such as most online shooters) are now available to you if you commit the sin of an operating system switch.

Okay, that's maybe a little harsh, but it does feel like one of the boons of the Steam Machine is innate support for SteamOS—something that's still not all that widespread for desktop PCs—making for a particularly ideal living room/TV-connected experience. Though I will say that the Steam Controller itself takes much of the pain out of using Windows from a sofa, which also kinda undermines the SteamOS positivity.

Anyways, if you're one of the (lucky?) few who managed to get hold of a Steam Machine, or at least have a golden ticket for the reservation queue, then you can download the latest Windows drivers ready for a clean install of the MS OS right now.

There are a few caveats, however. The first is that it's a binary choice, as currently there isn't a clean way to dual-boot both SteamOS and Windows on one Steam device. Valve says that it will release an installer with a dual-boot wizard "for SteamOS once it's complete" whenever that is. Though I would say you could easily just add in another Linux OS which will boot into the SteamOS gaming frontend, such as Bazzite or Nobara; that will allow you to dual boot.

You will also need to connect your Steam Machine via Ethernet to enter a Windows product key, as the Wi-Fi drivers don't get installed until later. I'm sure there would actually be a way to install the supplied Wi-Fi drivers during Windows installation, but you could also create your Windows install drive using Rufus and have it create a local account automatically to get around that.

Seven years ago, a user of the Steam Controller subreddit found a prototype of the original Steam Controller at a local Goodwill. Recently, in a strange bit of luck, a second prototype has been found at Goodwill. If one more pops up at the same chain, one must assume that Gabe Newell is simply dropping them off at Goodwills around America. It's the only rational assumption.

Taking to Reddit, user Waste-Set5032 shares that their dad happened upon the 'Chell' Steam Controller prototype at a Goodwill in Seattle. When one user ponders if the dad actually bought it, the dad steps in to confirm. He says, "I thought about letting this go, but I know my son is a fan of everything Valve, so I picked it up. On top of that, I now know my son’s Reddit handle."

Seven years ago, another member of this Subreddit found a Chell Prototype in a Goodwill. Well, would you look at this, it happened twice. My dad in Seattle found one. from r/SteamController

The son in question is 14 and claims "finding things from Valve is like finding ancient relics for me". He also says, "I love playing their older games like Portal 2 and Half Life because it feels like a bygone era of gaming and I love exploring it." You're not alone if reading that makes you feel like you're crumbling into dust.

The Chell Steam Controller prototype is believed to be from around 2013 or 2014, which means the prototype's new owner was around one or two years old when this prototype was created. It's got a fairly familiar design to those who know the original Steam Controller, with its inward curved shape and two big trackpads on either side.

It is, however, missing face buttons on the right-hand side, with these being scattered around the middle of the controller instead. The prototype also moves the Select and Start buttons to the bottom of the controller, and also misses out on any sort of thumbsticks. All of that is to say the prototype is even stranger than the 2015 model.

The 2026 Steam Controller launched just a few months ago and is altogether a much better device, though it still retains some of that Valve weirdness (complimentary), featuring two thumbsticks and two trackpads.

The original poster's dad has managed to give the controller prototype a try and claims it "works as a generic controller". However, he notes that the four buttons in the middle of the pad actually work as a D-Pad, with the top left button being up, the top right button being right, the bottom left button being left, and the bottom right being down.

Given it's a prototype without the button layout and thumbsticks you'd expect from a modern controller, the Chell prototype likely isn't something you'd use for competitive gaming, but it's a neat relic of the past to have. It's also a sign of how far Valve has come with regard to controller ergonomics in the last decade.

Unfortunately, we don't know much more about the controller in regard to feel or compatibility. We also don't know how much was paid for it. However, the prototype found seven years ago was reportedly bought for $8, which is $3 more than the OG Steam Controller was selling for when it was discontinued.

Watch Dogs 2 is currently $2.50 on Steam. It's hardly a classic, but it's not terrible either. At one cent per 10 minutes of content, how can you resist? It's only five pleasantly tactile mouse clicks away.

Maybe you can't resist. During Steam's seasonal sales it's possible to scoop up dozens of games for less than $5 a pop. Ted Litchfield found 31, many of which could individually keep you occupied for weeks. The temptation to splurge is probably irresistible, especially if you've been bitten by some of Steam's incentives to hoard: maybe you love to customise your profile using Steam points, for example. Or maybe you love trading cards. Or maybe you just find pleasure in watching your library grow.

Or maybe, one day, you really will find the time to play through Dead Island 2, even though you don't like zombie games, or first-person games, or games set in Los Angeles. For $5, it's an investment in case you change your mind about all of those things. I'm assuming that was the logic which led to the mysterious appearance of Gotham Knights in my library: I don't like Batman, I loath superheroes, and I can't stand grindy, icon strewn open world games.

As Mashable reports, Korea has a cost-free answer to the dopamine hit that comes with impulsive online purchases. FoodNeverComes is an app that simulates the shambling, shallow pleasure that comes with making an online transaction, except you spend no money. The user can browse a list of restaurants, select from dozens of menus, take pleasure in pressing "purchase", and then watch a fake GPS delivery tracker transport goods that never come. That's just one example of a growing number of these fake purchase sites, dubbed 'dopamine sites'.

As psychologist Dr. Gabrielle Schreyer-Hoffman tells Mashable, "We do see people use social media, shopping, and buying food to fill voids and avoid being present. Maybe you don't spend the money, but you're not really dealing with the core issue, which is: Why are we going to these websites to do this?"

Is it sometimes more pleasurable to buy games than to play them? I'm no psychologist, but reading about these Korean dopamine sites immediately puts me in mind of my Steam backlog. I wasn't surprised to find that someone has made a dopamine hit website themed around the current Steam summer sale.

At steamsalesimulator.com, developer Mike Wing has replicated Steam pretty much exactly. You can click "add to cart" on everything, add endless thousands of dollars to your wallet, and then hit that blessed "continue to purchase" button which triggers a succession of melodious, life affirming, congratulatory, slot machine-style chimes. Occasionally, Gabe Newell himself sends you a randomised gift. (Thank you, fake Gabe for gifting me fake Wall World). There's even a community market where you can buy fake cosmetics: for $0.09, I copped a Distinguished Antique Endtable for Don't Starve Together. Feels good, man.

After around ten minutes spent on that website I accrued 49 games, reached Steam level 51, and saved a total of $977.73. And I still feel barren inside.

The rise of these dopamine sites reminds me a little of the birth of modern idle games. When incremental games like Candies and Cookie Clicker appeared on the scene in the early 2010s, most people received them as a joke. I remember the widespread expression of bemusement on social media as people acknowledged the genre's satirisation of RPG levelling up mechanics. I remember droves of people—including myself—realising they were, by accident, fixated on these exquisitely meaningless toys, these lizard-brain feeders. Now there are hundreds of clicker games on Steam: it's a legitimate genre that people pay money to play.

So while I absent-mindedly click around Steam Sale Simulator, purchasing Russian Life Simulator, Lords Mobile and Sword and Fairy 7 because why the heck not, I wonder how many weeks will pass before everyone's wasting precious minutes of their life interfacing with fantasy ecommerce storefronts.

Top Steam games by revenue (June 23 - 30)

Steam releases its top sellers charts on Wednesdays, so the below chart doesn't factor in some late week releases. Not that anything of any particular interest released: it's extremely quiet out there.

Meccha Chameleon has now sold 15 million copies, so it's unsurprising that it topped last week's revenue chart. Cyberpunk 2077 held its spot at No 4 thanks to its current all-time low 75 percent discount.

Significantly, The Binding of Isaac: Rebirth hit a new concurrent player count record last week (130,954) thanks to its all-time low 90 percent discount, which also applies to the Afterbirth+ bundle. Modern Warfare 2 also saw a huge spike due to its 90 percent discount—it's extremely rare for COD games to go that cheap.

Dota 2 got a new event in late June, which explains its appearance last week.

Last week's Steam deep cuts

Steam review of the week

"It's okay to kill people and throw them into an eldritch flesh-pit as long as they deserve it.

Is it a game about materialism? Is it about found family?

All I know is, it feels super cathartic to finally tackle and stab someone 58 times after being chased by a giant tree."

Failgirl69, ruminating rather disturbingly on Feed the Pit.

The cult classic Half-Life 2 mod series Entropy: Zero has another entry in the works, and speaking as a fan of Thief, Deus Ex, and all things immersive sim, Entropy: Zero 2 - Progenitors may be the most exciting one yet.

Entropy: Zero has always presented the bad guys' side of things in Half-Life, but Progenitors trades the first two episodes' standard Combine trooper for a super sneaky assassin type⁠—she strikes me as a riff on the black ops ninjas from Half-Life 1.

Progenitors takes place an indeterminate amount of time after the Seven Hour War where the Combine took over the Earth, and our assassin protagonist is charged with taking out the rogue Progenitor from which the Combine's soldiers were first cloned or otherwise derived (or something). If Mr. P turns out to be Adrian Shephard from Opposing Force, I'll think about eating my shoe.

It's a neat take on the Half-Life lore bolstered by some great visual direction. All of the Entropies: Zero have done a great job of blending and homaging various eras of Half-Life⁠—Zero 2 took place in an Aperture Science facility and paired you with a snarky turret companion⁠—and Progenitors looks to be turning its gaze toward Opposing Force. I'm particularly fond of the evil Combine United Nations logo⁠—it's giving the dark Nazi future gags from MachineGames' Wolfensteins.

As for gameplay, developer Blixibon has been sharing clips of new weapons and mechanics on YouTube, and Progenitors looks incredibly ambitious⁠—practically an immersive sim, or at least a shooter-immsim hybrid like Dark Messiah or the aforementioned neo-Wolfensteins. Blixibon's latest clip shows a player pickpocketing an enemy soldier then throwing a beer bottle to distract him. We have Dishonored 3 at home, god bless it.

Progenitors does not have an estimated release date, and the latest blog post on its ModDB page alludes to development difficulties and creative burnout on the part of some team members.

But it sounds like the worst of it is behind them, and this is an incredibly exciting project. You can keep up with Entropy: Zero 2 - Progenitors via its ModDB page and Blixibon's YouTube channel.

Despite its high price and somewhat disappointing gaming chops, Valve's Steam Machine appears to be selling well, with lots of buyers showing off their new purchase on social media. And in what seems to be the first published instance, the consumer coverage also includes a console-like Red Ring Line of Death.

Well, the Steam Machine was pretty cool for the 20 minutes that it worked from r/steammachine

Reddit user me_hill posted a thread on how they were enjoying playing No Man's Sky on their new Steam Machine, but got an RLoD after applying a software update. Just as with the Xbox 360's notorious Red Ring of Death, Valve uses the LEDs on the front panel to indicate the operational status of its little PC box.

Anything white or blue is fine and dandy, but if it's red, then something's not right. In me_hill's case, half a line of slowing pulse red LEDs points to a GPU failure. Hopefully, since this occurred after a software update, it's not an actual hardware bail-out, but rather something not booting correctly and then reporting the error.

That's not to say that the Steam Machine is going to be immune to hardware failures, because the mass production of any product is going to result in something initially passing quality checks, but popping its clogs later down the line.

And the Steam Machine uses a lot of mass-produced stuff, despite claiming to have 'semi-custom' chips from AMD. The CPU and GPU might be unique to Valve's box of underwhelm in terms of production code, but the chips themselves are physically no different to the Ryzen 5 7540U and Radeon RX 7600M.

The Redditor has indicated that they've contacted Valve for support, so hopefully there's a solution for them. If not, then at least they've got something that can do a passing impression of KITT or a Cylon Centurion. Just a completely mute impression. And one that's cost them $1,000.

Previously serving as the president of SIE Worldwide Studios for Sony and then becoming the head of PlayStation Indies in 2019, Shuhei Yoshida retired last year. He has since taken to giving industry analysis over on X. With the Steam Machine and its mighty price tag serving as a big discussion point, Yoshida has had a couple of hours with the machine. So far, he doesn't seem mighty impressed.

Yoshida recently said on X, "3D performance is just…meh", going on to add, "The system recommends to default to 1080p—am I going back to PS4 days?"

This middling performance is something our Andy said of the device in his review. We saw performance sitting at significantly less than even comparably priced mini PCs, with the Atomman G1 Pro handily beating it. The Steam Machine's RDNA 3-era graphics hardware seems to particularly struggle with ray tracing, but it's not particularly pretty across the board when you consider the price.

Yoshida is critical of this, saying, "But the price was very unfriendly. Hard to recommend to people unless for research." He also finds that games take a "loooooooong" time to boot.

Yoshida also had thoughts to share on the new Steam Controller. Though he likes the notion of having touchpads in a controller, he does complain that they are very "touchy" and hard to use.

He also finds the sticks are looser than he'd like. Assuming the ex-PlayStation head of indies likes the PS5 controller, these two complaints make some sense to me. I lament the lack of stick drift protection in the DualSense, but they do have tactile, snappy sticks, and the touchpad is pretty out of the way (unless you play with a claw grip like I do).

Still, not all is bad, according to Yoshida. The ex-Sony president likes SteamOS as a UI, enjoys that you can turn on the system through nothing but the Steam Controller, and he praises the changeable face plate. He also enjoys the boot-up videos. Ultimately, he says, "It allows me to play Steam games on my living room TV, which is a reason enough to keep it."

Yoshida does clarify he has only gotten a few hours with it so far, but I suspect his observations will be fairly common for Steam Machine owners, considering our own testing. It's a pricey and underpowered device. Yoshida does offer one bit of praise to finish out his thoughts, though: "The small form factor and quietness is super good."

Categorically, I cannot afford to buy my own Steam Machine. Much to my chagrin, the most basic 512 GB model still costs $1,049. Even Valve's own engineers wish their game box was cheaper. Thankfully, a French retailer is stepping in to try and do what even Valve could not: offer a compact PC for very slightly less than a grand.

LDLC has unveiled its own compact gaming PC, even going as far as to initially dub it the 'Stim Machine.' The retailer has since dropped this name in favour of the less ire-tempting 'LDLC PC box' (via VideoCardz). Though no longer available to buy, the 500 GB model used standard PC components and went for €1,000 as a kit you would need to assemble yourself.

A pre-built model was also briefly available. This went for €1,040, a price point directly comparable to how much the Steam Machine is selling for in Europe. The compact desktop even came with a tutorial on how to install SteamOS, though obviously that's not a hoop you would have to jump through to get the Steam Machine up and running.

So, what was the 'Stim Machine' offering beyond a potentially sub-1,000 euro price tag with some assembly required? For a start, the specs sheet includes a more recent RDNA 4 GPU in the cheap and (mostly) cheerful AMD Radeon RX 9060 XT. This GPU has a few extra compute units (and a much newer architecture) compared to the Steam Machine's semi-custom RDNA 3 card.

The LDLC PC Box has a Ryzen 5 8400F processor, whereas Valve's offering enjoys a similar, semi-custom AMD Zen 4 6C / 12T chip. So far, so comparable. Thanks to its standard Mini-ITX motherboard, the LDLC PC Box also has 16 GB of upgradeable DDR5 memory, as well as 500 GB of NVMe storage with two additional SATA slots on top. The Steam Machine also features a single 512 GB internal SSD, plus a MicroSD slot.

While achieving such comparable specs for less than a grand is impressive, that's still a whole lot of Euros for a relatively low amount of gaming horsepower (thanks, memory supply crisis). In other words, even if LDLC's PC Box was still available to buy and I was based in France, it's still a little rich for my blood. Ah well, I'll just hit repeat on Daft Punk's 2005 banger—that's almost just as good, right?

Arm chips are making increasing inroads into the realm of PC gaming. Valve is already all over the chip architecture, and is planning to launch an Arm-specific version of SteamOS alongside its Snapdragon-based VR headset, the Steam Frame, later this year. But what about the Steam Machine?

We asked Valve engineers Yazan Aldehayyat and Pierre-Loup Griffais whether Arm was in consideration for the Steam Machine 2. "Definitely, yeah," Pierre-Loup answered, "[In addition to our work on] things like FEX, we're just trying to be able to support everything, right?"

For those unfamiliar, FEX is a translation layer that allows games built for x86 architecture to run on Arm chips, similar to how Proton gets games made for Windows to run on Linux. Pierre-Loup adds, "If we have more options to pick from, and if users have more options to pick from [...] to play all the latest games in their back catalog library, they'll have a better outcome in terms of finding something that is cheaper for the horsepower that they need."

Arm chips are an enticing alternative to x86 CPUs for gaming PCs specifically. So, we may see something of a chip architecture slap fight before long (especially after Nvidia went all-in on a custom Arm architecture for their RTX Spark lineup). Many game developers are also already working on Arm game ports, and wholly Arm-native versions; our Dave was especially impressed to see an Arm-native version of Alan Wake 2 running on a pre-release model of Microsoft's Surface Laptop Ultra earlier this year.

On the subject of the Steam Machine and potential follow-ups in an Arm-based future, Pierre-Loup says, "When we're designing a system like that, we're just like users: Picking parts, trying to figure out what makes sense. So for us, yeah, things like FEX and the work that we've done on SteamOS and Proton are more like catalysts to get to a better outcome in terms of price performance, and all that—for sure, we would consider any platform."

Mind you, don't expect an Arm-based follow up any time soon. Though Valve has said that the Steam Machine won't have "as long of a timeframe" as the Steam Deck, new models are constrained by "a matter of when it makes sense to [upgrade], at what price point, at what time, on what games are available."

The memory supply crisis has had a significant impact on more things than the game box's price, with Valve even unsure whether it was gonna have any Steam Machines to sell at the start of 2026. Bearing in mind the RAMpocalypse likely won't ease until maybe 2028, we're unlikely to see a sequel any time before then.

Cards on the table, the first thing that piqued my interest about the Steam Machine's initial reveal were the interchangeable faceplates. After all, I am but a simple hardware creature with a penchant for the aesthetic. Unfortunately, Valve has no plans to release a whole slew of custom plates for their tiny game box.

We caught up with Valve engineers Yazan Aldehayyat and Pierre-Loup Griffais to talk all things Steam Machine, including customisation options. "Right now the two plates that come with the two terabyte SKU are what we're doing," Pierre-Loup explains, "And we don't really have any specific plans around what else [we might do]."

The 2TB Steam Machine comes with the 'red fabric and solid walnut' faceplates but, just because Valve has no plans to make more, that doesn't mean fresh faceplates are no-go from other sources, though. "We want to make sure that third parties can do everything they need to there, and that people tinkering at home can also do that," Pierre-Loup adds, "So, like usual, we'll be releasing all the CAD [3D files] and the dimensions for the outside, the attachment points for the magnets and the sizing of all that so that folks can make their own stuff."

Valve has already released the new Steam Controller's CAD files for easier customisation, though at time of writing we're still waiting on these files for the Steam Machine. That hasn't stopped some from taking matters into their own hands though.

Perhaps most notably, peripheral and accessory maker Dbrand teased custom Companion Cube housing for the Steam Machine last year. Unfortunately, they've had to start issuing refunds since the game box's release as it turns out the company had never actually got Valve's permission to make it.

To be clear, this was a third-party customisation being sold commercially, hence why Valve asked for it to be taken down. Fresh faceplates made for fun and not profit are unlikely to attract the same ire. So, yes, if you wanted to make your own Companion Cube inspired housing, you could—you just couldn't sell it like Dbrand attempted to.

I'm no 3D modelling wiz, so a single swappable faceplate appeals more to me anyway. Now, if you'll excuse me, I'm going to gather a bunch of cute Decoden bits, clear my schedule, and make my Steam Machine look like a tasty little snack (complete with fake whipped cream, my temps be damned).

Hardware development, much like games, is all about iteration. So, it's fair to say we wouldn't have the Steam Machine without the Steam Deck. We recently spoke to Valve engineers Yazan Aldehayyat and Pierre-Loup Griffais, and asked them whether they felt Valve's ongoing work on the Steam Deck meant there'd be less to fix with the Steam Machine.

"Oh, for sure, yeah." said Pierre-Loup. He goes on to acknowledge that the Steam Machine required a lot of focus on specific aspects Valve didn't have to worry about for the Steam Deck—things like the "discrete GPU, VRAM management, ray tracing performance, all this stuff."

But those unique features aside, the foundation of the two platforms is very similar. He says, "The other 99% of the work [on the Steam Machine was] already done in a sense."

Yazan also highlights that the way many people were already using their Steam Decks presented a compelling use case for the Steam Machine. "People were using their Steam Deck docked to their TV, and they're having a great experience without us doing any specific work," He says, "So, it was almost proven before we even started working on it in some ways."

Though our Wes rated the Steam Deck when it debuted back in 2022, the handheld gaming PC didn't enjoy the smoothest launch due to stock issues. The platform itself also had its share of teething troubles, including but not limited to a whiny fan, stick drift caused by a software problem, and a buggy dock. Valve continues to support the device and these kinks, plus a number of other quirks, have all been significantly ironed out. In other words, much of the foundation was already laid for whatever Valve would do next.

"We tend to want to work like that—incremental steps that always add up. When we worked on Steam Input, and just input stuff in general, the [original] Steam Controller, we were solving and kinda thinking around a lot of the same issues that we were trying to solve with Seam Deck," Pierre-Loup adds, "And we just kinda kept working on the same thing, just adding a little bit to it every time, right? It was very incremental and I think we're still working towards more increments, towards completing the experience overall."

None of that is to say it's been clear skies for the Steam Machine. For one thing, Valve feared stock issues would strike again at the start of this year. The impacts of the memory supply crisis on the Steam Machine cannot be understated, with 'Making it cheaper' sitting top of the list of things the engineers wish they could change about the hardware.

Getting back to Valve's further iterations, what can we expect from a Steam Machine sequel? According to Pierre-Loup and Yazan, the Steam Machine won't have as long of a timeframe as the Steam Deck, but new models are 'just a matter of when it makes sense.' In other words, with no end in sight for the RAMpocalypse until maybe 2028, don't expect to see a Steam Machine 2 (or a Steam Deck followup for that matter) any time soon.

Apologies for yet another downbeat post about PC component shortages. But you don't often get insight from as significant a player—and one with quite the same track record for a certain brand of transparency—as Valve. It turns out the problem for the company regarding memory and storage for the new Steam Machine hasn't just been cost, but just getting hold of supply at all is a major challenge.

If you haven't already watched Andy and Jacob's recent interview with Valve's Steam Machine reps Pierre-Loup Griffais and Yazan Aldehayyat, may I suggest you get that done pronto, it's well worth a watch. But among other takeaways from the chat is insight into just how acute the memory and storage supply crisis has become.

You might have thought that it's just a pricing issue. In other words, paying more fixes the problem. But apparently not.

"Things that were a year ago, two years ago, commodity things," Griffais explains, "you'd just pay the normal price for it and it's all good, now you have to negotiate really hard just to secure a few thousand. And there's so many more people in line in front of you."

Griffais says Valve saw evidence of this problem before it fully impacted retail memory and SSD prices. "Most people have started to see this in the past six months. But we've been dealing with it for eight months to a year.

"Compared to the retail channel, we see —we're talking directly to suppliers of things that will get built and then will get put on shelves, and so we've had to deal with it a little bit ahead of everyone else in the public."

"It's a really weird climate right now for memory and storage," Griffais concludes. Indeed. Somehow, Valve still managed to build up sufficient stock to get the Steam Machine launched. But as we've already covered, it was touch and go for a bit. At the beginning of the year, it wasn't clear that they would have any Steam Machines to sell.

As it is, the Steam Machine has launched, but at that painful $1,049 price. You have to assume Valve would have loved to have pushed the Machine under $1,000, just for the optics of a three-digit sticker. So the fact that they went with the uglier $1,049 figure probably speaks volumes about just how tight the whole thing was.

Undoubtedly, it's all a bit of a pity. But until, and indeed if, the memory and storage market returns to something resembling normality, there's little to be done. We just have to suck it up. And maybe pay even more attention to saving money on the best deals for other components. May I suggest monitors? There are at least some stellar deals on those of late.

Back in November 2025, Dbrand teased a Portal Companion Cube case for the Steam Machine, and while the initial render wasn't great, the underlying idea was so good that PC Gamer hardware editor Andy Edser declared, "You have to make it now, no takesie-backsies." Sorry, other Andy, but I'm afraid the takesie-backsies are on, as Dbrand has pulled the plug and scrubbed all trace of its existence from the internet.

The reason for the sudden turnabout is quite simple: Dbrand, uhh, made the cube without Valve's permission.

"On November 12th 2025, the day the Steam Machine was announced, we put up a concept render and sign-up page to see if anyone would be interested in a Companion Cube enclosure," Dbrand wrote on Reddit. "It went moderately viral, with over 15,000 people signing up to be notified in the first day. In the months that followed, we built the idea into something real without ever asking Valve if we could.

"We’re going to regret that decision for a very long time."

Dbrand said it put "more than a thousand hours" into engineering the project, with multiple redesigns and sets of injection tools involved created to support it, and even rented out a university campus to film the cube's launch video. "By the end, we were losing money on every $99 Poverty Cube sold, but it didn’t matter. This had turned into a passion project for the entire organization."

When sales for the Companion Cube case launched, it became the second-fastest selling in Dbrand's history. It also came to the attention of Valve, which is where things went very wrong: Valve's legal team contacted Dbrand to remind it that the Companion Cube is Valve's property, to which Dbrand did not have a license, and thus requested it all be taken down immediately.

Valve was "direct, fair, and respectful throughout," Dbrand said, but it also rejected the company's request for a second chance, with proper licenses in place and entirely on Valve's terms. To its credit, Dbrand said the rejection "was a fair answer," given the "backwards approach of building first and asking permission later" it had initially taken.

In fact, Dbrand took pains to be clear that Valve was entirely in the right on this one: "It goes without saying, but we’ll say it regardless: Valve didn’t do anything wrong here. They built a game franchise a lot of people love and they alone get to decide how it’s used."

This one really sucks. The Steam Machine is literally a cube, and the Portal Companion Cube is one of the most famous cubes in the world—certainly the most famous cube in videogames. (At least for now). It's such an obvious match, it's weird to me that Valve isn't selling Steam Machines wrapped up in Companion Cube cases by default. Which leads to the obvious question that has us all briefly indulging our inner William Hurt: How do you screw that up?

Valve might have refused to license the cube to Dbrand anyway, especially if it's planning some sort of cube case of its own—not a bad bet, and for the moment the only hope that excited Dbrand cube supporters have left. And yes, I have reached out to Valve to ask about its own potential plans for a home-grown Steam Machine Companion Cube—after all, that'd be a very good reason for refusing to give Dbrand a second chance at making it happen.

Regardless of Valve's intent, pitching the idea up front would've at the very least eliminated the hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars that Dbrand poured into this project, all of which are now just lost. It's such a huge unforced error, it'd almost be funny if it didn't mean that an extremely cool accessory for one of the biggest PC hardware releases in ages is toast—not to mention the potential long-term damage it's done to Dbrand's financial situation.

Dbrand is handling the cleanup with as much grace as anyone could reasonably ask for, apologizing to fans and Valve alike. But seeing all that excitement and hype built up over months—knowing you've got a real banger on your hands and sinking the resources into pulling it off—go up in smoke because you forgot to do the obvious super-important step one of the process, man, that's gotta hurt.

Even if building a gaming PC is prohibitively expensive for most people in 2026, software continues to be cheap and abundant. Valve launched its Steam Summer sale last week and all the normal things happened: Red Dead Redemption 2 got a 75% discount for the 14th time since January 2025. The Witcher 3 got its fifth 95% discount since July 2024 (though it's been discounted 15 other times since then, at slightly lower percentages). After eight 65% discounts since June 2025, Cyberpunk 2077 finally got a new record (75% off).

Big publisher games—especially from the likes of Ubisoft, Sega, Sony, 2K and Bethesda—obviously dominate the front page, with major indie mainstays like Terraria, Satisfactory and Dead Cells sharing some of the limelight. Nowadays it's rare to be surprised by an especially steep discount during a seasonal sale: publishers normally increase the discount percentage incrementally as a game gets longer in the tooth. If you've got a wishlist, you probably gravitate towards browsing that.

Rather than splashing out on games that might be conventionally fun to play, this sale has prompted me to spend most of Sunday afternoon browsing Steam's ever-surprising abundance of '90s PC gaming obscurities. It's an especially deep, fascinating and occasionally troubling rabbit hole. I'm talking about real forgotten obscurities like—to pull an example randomly out of the air—this Accolade-published 1994 FMV motorbike racer.

For every carefully updated Nightdive Studios reissue like I Have No Mouth And I Must Scream, or D: The Game there's something like the straight-to-DOSBox Wolfenstein engine obscurity Operation Body Count, which had the great misfortune of releasing a year after Doom. I wouldn't recommend playing it necessarily, but for $2.44 it's fascinating as an insight into how devs were pushing that engine at the tail end of its relevance.

Or what about Interphase, a still-unique 1989 cyberpunk adventure puzzler whose better version was on Amiga? Or Corpse Killer, a 1995 FMV rail shooter with straight-to-VHS presentation, by the guy who directed Child's Play 2? Keeping to the FMV theme, what about The Dame Was Loaded, a 1996 Australia-made detective noir point 'n' clicker with laughable accents? How could you possibly resist?

You don't even need to buy these games: sometimes watching the trailer, looking at the screenshots, and then Googling other material—videos, contemporary reviews, forum threads—is enough. I wouldn't necessarily advise you to go and finish the whole Realms of Arkania trilogy (though please feel welcome), but loading Blade of Destiny and simply beholding its gorgeously ornate pixel art immediately evokes the fragrance of the '90s (the chemical smell of magazine paper, in particular).

Like Red Dead Redemption 2 and Cyberpunk 2077, these are all discounted as part of the Steam Summer Sale. For a good entry point to Steam's collection of forgotten oldies, this Retro Games curator page is worth a browse.

If you want a couple of suggestions that I've enjoyed recently: Sanitarium is an absolute banger of a horror point 'n' clicker, while Bad Mojo Redux is still the best cockroach sim on PC.

Top Steam games by revenue (June 16 - 23)

Steam releases its top sellers charts on Wednesdays, so the below chart doesn't factor in some late week releases, particularly the Steam Machine. We'll also start to see the effect of the Summer sale more clearly this coming Wednesday (expect Red Dead Redemption 2 and Cyberpunk 2077 to factor heavily).

Mecha Chameleon continues its domination: Lincoln Carpenter reviewed it late last week, writing that its "a multiplayer experience that exceeds its friendslop trappings". It hit 10 million sales last Friday, which is a jaw-dropping amount for a sub-$10 indie.

The PUBG PNC 2026 tournament happened between June 23 and 28, hence its sudden flight to the top of the chart. As for Cyberpunk 2077, it's among the most steeply discounted major games in the Steam Summer sale.

Last week's Steam deep cuts

Steam review of the week

"Can bring kitty with you. Can pet kitty. Kitty don't take resources. 10/10 game"

Vivilyen, enjoying the cats in Don't Sleep With The Fishes.

It's been established that Doom can run on produce, but porting wizardry doesn't start and end with blasting cacodemons on increasingly ludicrous hardware setups. It's sometimes the simple things that stick out most, like this web browser port of Half-Life 2. Not as silly as potatoes, but impressive all the same.

It's got some kinks—my frames are a mite inconsistent and certain animations seem to be broken—but it is, in fact, Half-Life 2 in the browser. You can play the game as normal, use console commands, and send your working hours down the drain with a spot of entertainment slightly more sophisticated than the average Flash game.

The project has garnered lots of attention thanks to a post on X from Gabe Follower, which states it was "created by Slqnt and 98006 in just three months." A follow-up post shared that the project was based on a similar browser port of the original Portal, just in case you don't have enough browser-based Valve gaming in your life yet. Maybe try and get through these while waiting to respawn in Deadlock.

Fans seem happy that the game is playable in a new, novel setting. A reply on X from ripplesworld reads, "Shit gonna go triple platinum in middle schools nationwide." The less-convinced HivoltageCS replied, "I don’t think the children are playing half-life anymore, bro."

Either way, it's neat to see a big Source engine FPS running in a tab on my browser. Maybe Half-Life 2 can be the next thing programmers get running on potatoes, earbuds, pregnancy tests, and whatever else is lying around in a given programmer's house. I assume that's how they pick this stuff.

If you signed up for a spot in the Steam Machine reservation queue, you might want to take a quick look at your email, because the notices for those who made it into the first wave—and those who did not—have been sent.

I did not personally order a Steam Machine for several reasons, which in truth can be boiled down to one reason:

Instead, I heard about the email sendout from Game Awards host Geoff Keighley, who apparently took the shotgun approach to the lottery and came out of it with a reservation for a 512GB model.

Videogame deals poster Wario64, who also claimed a golden ticket, took note of an added bonus: Buying one will net you a veritable butt-ton of Steam Summer Sale trading cards.

Buying a Steam Machine can earn you at least 105 Summer Sale 2026 Trading Cards during the Summer Sale.

— @wario64.bsky.social (@wario64.bsky.social.bsky.social) 2026-06-26T20:56:05.574Z

randomized lotteryAs explained by PC Gamer hardware hero Jacob Ridley, Valve opted against a first-come, first-served approach to selling the Steam Machine, and instead went with a randomized lottery: Everybody who wants one puts their name in the metaphorical hat, and from there a random selection of potential buyers are selected and notified.

I say "potential" because those whose names are drawn have three days to complete the purchase after the unit they were selected for is available—if they don't, their reservation will be cancelled and the next person in the queue will get the shot instead.

• We're keeping track of all the Amazon Prime Day PC gaming deals here

That provides a very small sliver of hope for those who missed the bus: As others on social media have shared, those folks received an email saying, "As we work our way through the reservation queue, some customers may cancel their reservations. If that happens, you may be moved into the reservation queue, and you'll be notified by email that you have a reservation after all."

Valve said when it announced the randomized reservations to "limit resellers," because as we've seen in the past, when high-demand hardware shows up, scalpers are never far behind. And yes, it's happening here too: Valve may have limited resellers but it hasn't eliminated them completely, and listings for preorder access are already appearing on sites like eBay, with obscenely inflated prices attached.

You do you, but me? I think I'd rather just wait.

June 25 is a big day: After years of waiting, Grand Theft Auto 6 preorders are finally live! Well, y'know, for some people, anyway.

But it's a joyous day for us too (and, importantly, in a way that excludes them*) because today also marks the start of the 2026 Steam Summer Sale, the annual discount extravaganza that you're just not going to find on consoles.

(*Am I really cheesed about GTA 6 not coming to PC side-by-day with console? No. I find it a little baffling, given that PC gamers clearly are a "core" GTA audience despite what Strauss Zelnick may say, but cynical though it may be I think PC Gamer editor Ted Litchfield is correct in his assessment: Holding it back for a year or two is a very effective way of double-dipping. It's a strategy that's been successful for Rockstar and Take-Two in the past, so it's not terribly surprising that they're carrying on with it now. Anyway, back to the point: Steam sale!)

As always, although I'm pretty sure this is the first time Valve has ever used this specific term for it, the Steam Summer Sale includes "deep-ass discounts"—and hey, don't blame me, I'm just quoting the trailer here—on thousands of games across pretty much every genre you can think of.

To get the ball rolling, here are a few I like:

• Mass Effect Legendary Edition - $4.79/£4/€4.79 (92% off, and that, my friends, is a deep-ass discount indeed)
• Red Dead Redemption 2 - $15/£15/€15 (75% off, while you wait for GTA 6)
• Warhammer 40,000: Darktide - $10/£8.24/£10 (75% off, did you hear about Chuck Tingle's new book?)
• Morels: The Hunt 2 - $5/£4.18/€4.27 (75% off, the original is even cheaper and there's also a new sci-fi sequel)
• Mewgenics - $22.49/£18.74/€21.74 (25% off, not the biggest discount but it's still fairly new and it's great)
• Creature Kitchen - $6.39/£5.25/€6.23 (20% off, another not-huge discount but it's pretty cheap to start with and it's also great)
• Herdling - $12.49/£10/€11.89 - (50% off, I liked Herdling a lot and my list, my rules—also there's a demo if you're curious but uncommitted)
• Ghostwire: Tokyo - $6/£5/€6 (90% off, I was late to the party on this one but it's a genuine low-key banger)

Instead of our usual "deals of all sizes" roundup, PC Gamer smart shopper extraordinaire Ted Litchfield has put together a list of 31 must-play games you can pick up for $5 or less. You can get all of them for around a hundo, but since the odds are pretty good you already own at least a few, you can expect to spend less than that. Great list, great deals.

And of course there are also stickers to earn and fresh loot in the Steam Points Shop that you can use to spice up your profile page or chat messages, so don't miss out on that. The 2026 Steam Summer Sale is set to run until July 9.

• We're keeping track of all the Amazon Prime Day PC gaming deals here

I'll be honest, my Steam Deck is still trucking along just fine, even with four years of light between today and its 2022 release date. Nevertheless, there are more than a few people who'd quite like a Steam Deck 2 (though, uh, even they are probably prepared to wait for prices to become sane). It's been a while, after all.

Well, perhaps some good news, then: in our chat with Valve engineers Pierre-Loup Griffais and Yazan Aldehayyat, the pair said that the Steam Machine is a bit of a different beast. "I don't think we're thinking about [the Steam Machine] with quite as long of a timeframe as something like the Steam Deck," said Griffais.

• We're keeping track of all the Amazon Prime Day PC gaming deals here

"The Steam Deck, by its nature, needs a little bit more of a fixed performance target for both developers and users to make sense of, 'What can I play on this?' and not have that picture change once every year, every two years," said Griffais. "Whereas the Steam Machine is very much in line with gaming PCs. There's a big gradient of it: low-end CPUs, high-end CPUs and GPUs—Steam Machine is somewhere on that gradient, right? So I think it's a little bit less important to have a fixed performance target for, like, five years for a product like that."

So, there you have it, right? Steam Machine 2 imminent, perhaps releasing concurrently with Steam Machine 3? Well, not quite. While Valve doesn't think the Steam Machine needs to hew to Steam Deck timeframes, that doesn't mean it's diving right into a second iteration.

"At the same time," continued Griffais, "we don't really have immediate plans to be like, 'In N years we'll have a different performance target,' or something. We're actually really curious to see how things pan out… there's a lot of questions about the new systems generation, how that's gonna roll out, how games are gonna adapt." In other words, Valve is paying attention to how console manufacturers and other tech firms are handling the transition to a new generation in our current, RAM-crisis-afflicted world.

Aldehayyat was quick to point out that the next iteration of Steam Machine hardware isn't right around the corner, either, and that's partially just a reflection of PC gamers' modern habits. "I think we're seeing a natural slowdown of the upgrade cycle for gaming PCs," said Aldehayyat, "so in some ways that probably means that the Steam Machine is a viable product for longer than you would have expected if it was launching 10 years ago." That means the Machine as-is "probably has more longevity… it's gonna basically be in line with typical PC upgrade cycles and what people typically do.

"It's just a matter of when it makes sense to [upgrade], at what price point, at what time, on what games are available. Like if a bunch of new games come out on Steam that require more performance, that would probably make us wanna upgrade the Steam Machine faster." Alright, guess we're waiting for Cyberpunk 2 then.

It is a singularly bad time to purchase computer parts or release a computer product. The RAM crisis has made memory and storage costs astronomical, and the most recent indignity it's inflicted around our neck of the woods is the price of the Steam Machine—a box whose min-spec edition will still set you back $1,049. Valve itself wishes it was cheaper.

But I guess even an expensive box is better than no box at all, which—to hear Valve tell it—may have been a possibility. When we sat down and chatted with Valve engineers Yazan Aldehayyat and Pierre-Loup Griffais, we got to chatting about how the company's overall stock of Steam Machines is looking as it gears up to ship them. The answer? Less than there would be in a pre-RAM-crisis world, but way better than the beginning of the year, when Valve wasn't certain it would have any Steam Machines at all.

• We're keeping track of all the Amazon Prime Day PC gaming deals here

Griffais said the stock of Steam Machines is "a little bit less" than it would have been pre-crisis, but that Valve's built up "a sizable amount compared to what it initially looked like. Things looked really dire at the beginning of the year. We weren't sure if there was gonna be anything at all."

Compared to that, I suppose any number of boxes seems good, and heck, securing supply even in non-apocalyptic circumstances is hard: "I wanna emphasise that, even under the best of circumstances, getting enough quantity for day one is always hard-slash-impossible, I think," said Aldehayyat. "From our perspective, we still got to a pretty good place," said Griffais.

"Typically what happens with a product like this, is the day one demand is going to be a big, big percentage of the year one demand," Griffais continued. "You just cannot have your factory building for six months… there's always gonna be some gap between supply and demand the first couple of days, couple of weeks." Thus, the Steam Machine reservation system that has been running since last Monday, which lets people enter themselves into a queue which is set to be all shaken up today, ideally achieving a modicum of fairness in distribution.

"I'm really proud of where we're at in terms of, like, our sourcing guys did a great job. I think the quantities we have are really good given the circumstances, and our hope is to kinda catch up to demand as quickly as possible," said Griffais. It's certainly better than nothing.

Valve has a new cube coming out, and boy is it pricey. The Steam Machine finally broke cover last Monday, revealing that its absolute cheapest model would still set you back $1,049—for which you can thank the RAM crisis. It caused some consternation, with a lot of people who might have thought themselves day-one buyers balking at the sum. Well, Valve balked too.

PCG sat down and chatted with Valve engineers Yazan Aldehayyat and Pierre-Loup Griffais ahead of last Monday's reveals and, yep, they're not happy about the price either. We asked the pair, if they could snap their fingers and magically change one thing about the Steam Machine, what would it be? Their answer was quick: the price.

• We're keeping track of all the Amazon Prime Day PC gaming deals here

"Make it cheaper," laughed Aldehayyat, in response to the question. "Yeah, I mean, that's an easy one," agreed Griffais. But it sounds like Valve went through the wringer when it came to negotiating memory and storage for the Steam Machine. "Things that, two years or a year ago—commodity things—you would just say, 'Yeah, I need that much,' and you just pay the normal price for it and it's all good. Now you have to negotiate really hard just to secure a few thousand."

As for the hardware? Valve's pretty chuffed with it, sounds like. "It's kind of perfect for what I need because we've shaped it like that, right?" said Griffais, though Aldehayyat added "We're open for feedback. I think we're pretty biassed, obviously."

Oh, there was one thing: "We always want more ports," said Griffais. "People want more ports. The thing would be full of ports on all the sides if we listened to everyone." Mark it down, folks: Steam Machine 2 to feature a trypophobic mess of ports on all available surfaces.

Anyway, the result of Valve's hardware travails is that a min-spec Steam Machine costs $1,049. And Valve says it's not gonna subsidise the cost owing to its "religious" refusal to "build a more closed system." On the plus side, you could always turn your own PC into a Steam Machine, provided you're using an AMD GPU. As of SteamOS 3.8, Valve has given its official blessing to SteamOS installs on non-Valve hardware.

Plenty has been said about the hundreds of games that launch on Steam each week and the many features Valve has concocted over the years to funnel that waterfall of content through a straw an average player can actually sip on. Latest among them is the new "personal calendar" feature and you know what? I think this is finally the perfect way to recommend games to me.

A small Personal Calendar module now appears on the Steam homepage when you're logged in, showing a couple upcoming releases for each of the next five days that Steam judges you may like based on what's already on your wishlist and the tags of games you typically play. The calendar actually rolled out earlier this month in a Steam blog post but, look, June's been too busy for me to casually surf Steam and also the announcement really undersells the feature.

When you click through to the full Personal Calendar page, you'll see a list of games released in the past month, some from the past week, and then a forward looking calendar of the next two months showing a per-day preview of a few games (up to six for a single day, on mine) that you might like. You can also make the calendar page more specific by filtering for a specific tag like "farming sim" or "city builder" and some other options like games per page and showing or hiding games that are already on your wishlist.

I've given Steam deserved grief for leaning too hard on algorithms to tackle the Sisyphean task of curation, but this solution is the most visually attractive and immediately comprehensible to me, a human, that I've seen from the store in years.

I never really got on with Steam's Discovery Queue, for instance. I get the logic in attempting to pluck games for me out of the mad bucket of Legos that is Steam's glut of releases. Just shoving a new game in front of me every time I click "next in queue" doesn't really help me make sense of my options (and always reminded me of the StumbleUpon browser extension from the late '00s).

A calendar just works though. It's more digestible than Steam's storewide list of upcoming games or the queue that serves just one game at a time. My calendar reminded me that a new Game Freak game, Beast of Reincarnation, comes out on August 3, the day before House House's next game Big Walk, which is the day before the 1.0 launch of Fields of Mistria on August 5. That's going to be a big week for me!

The fact that it mixes in games it thinks I might like with things on my wishlist and the 1.0 launches for Early Access games already in my library is a genuinely good view of how I think about what I want to play next month. Thankfully, it also doesn't recommend a game for every single day which would have taken the concept from refreshing back to overwhelming.

It seems to do quite a decent job of surfacing smaller indie games I've not heard of too, though your mileage may vary if you don't routinely interact with small, weird games for work. It's shown me lots of options including a cute pixelated management game called Cat Isle. The calendars for my fellow PCG folks have included Bingle Bingle for Morgan Park who described it as "roulette Balatro" at a glance. Dinoblade for Lincoln Carpenter, and Cat Chess for Tyler Wilde who made us all watch a trailer of cats battling during a meeting. I think the feature is working.

There was a bit of concern from indie devs earlier this month fearing that changes to the "new releases" module on the storefront would push visibility away from small games. We'll have to wait for folks to report back on how the calendar feature has affected their discoverability. Speaking as a player though, I'm way more likely to peruse and buy from this screen than an overwhelming list of loosely upcoming stuff.

The Steam Machine is finally here, with pre-orders now live, so long as you can get lucky in the reservation system lottery that is. And, honestly, we're kinda underwhelmed with the thing, beautiful wee companion cube though it is. Though that's more the fault of the AI apocalypse hoovering up all the memory and making the price of the Steam Machine utterly prohibitive for the entry level PC gamers it was originally aimed at. But Valve is still committed to improving the system, and has announced ahead of launch it is working directly with AMD to bring FSR 4 support in for the Steam Machine and its RDNA 3-powered GPU.

"We’ve been working with AMD on FSR 4 support for Steam Machine," we're told by Valve, "and can confirm that it will be coming soon."

Unfortunately that's all it's saying in regards to an actual release date, but then AMD itself has been rather cagey about when it's going to be getting FSR 4 support opened up beyond the original RDNA 4 target GPUs. Back in May AMD said it would be bringing FSR 4's machine learning-based upscaling to RX 7000-series graphics cards in July, but notably said during Computex that no decision had been made about whether it would be opened up to the RDNA 3.5 GPUs housed in its Ryzen AI Max APUs or the chips powering the latest AMD-powered gaming handhelds.

Which seems to suggest that July launch date is very much just for the RX 7000-series graphics cards alone and not a blanket level of support for the RDNA 3 architecture and above. That would also explain why Valve would have to be working directly with AMD to ensure its semi-custom 28 CU RDNA 3 GPU is going to get support for the improved upscaler in FSR 4.

"We can’t say more about timing," Valve notes, "but are excited for you to test it on your Steam Machine press units once it’s available. It should offer a significant improvement in upscaling graphical quality."

While the improvement in upscaling quality will definitely be a benefit for the Steam Machine, it's a double-edged sword of a feature. The Steam Machine's relatively weak GPU component needs upscaling and frame generation to be able to cope with modern games at decent graphics presets and at the sort of resolutions you'll want to see on a modern TV in your living room. So, chances are almost every game you play on the Steam Machine will want to be using upscaling.

That means it's a win that you'll get the best image quality AMD can muster for that upscaling experience. However, the machine-learning model of the improved FSR 4 upscaler is more performance intensive, especially for hardware that it was not initially designed for, namely RDNA 4 GPUs. And when performance is at a premium with the Steam Machine, that little bit extra hardware overhead for FSR 4 could mean that it's not an automatic on for some users, and could just be another balancing act owners are going to have to juggle with their new PC console.

The other thing to note is that FSR 4 support is not natively enabled in a whole lot of games right now. The list of supporting titles for FSR Redstone (inc FSR 4, AKA FSR Upscaling) looks extensive on first glance, but only around 20-odd have it natively built in; all the other games on the list need to have it enabled via the Adrenalin Driver software. How those games can get FSR 4 enabled in SteamOS is going to be interesting to see, if it happens at all.

I've just finished reviewing the Steam Machine, Valve's TV-friendly gaming PC for the masses. I think that was the initial idea, at least. Unfortunately, Valve's magic box has, thanks to the memory crisis, ended up with a price tag that simply doesn't add up.

For those who haven't heard, the base-level, 512 GB, non-Steam Controller-including Steam Machine retails for $1,049. Add a controller into the mix, and it comes in at $1,128. Back when we first took a whirl at predicting Steam Machine pricing, our average guess was around $525 for the base model.

Oh, how wrong we were. To be fair to myself, Valve, and my hardware team colleagues, this was back in November of last year. The pre-RAMpocalypse times, as we now call them. Before the AI server market swallowed memory module manufacturing capacity, and consumer electronics began to climb rapidly in price.

We adjusted our guesses more recently, and actually came kind of close, for the most part.

Still, the final pricing has me all hot and bothered, even if it's not far off what we eventually predicted. Because the Steam Machine, thanks to some lower-spec internal components now sold for high prices, represents poor value—and I feel like it deserves more than that.

And I haven't even got to the 2 TB model I reviewed yet, which is $1,349 without a controller, and a wallet-trembling $1,428 with one. That's a huge sum of money for a machine that struggles against budget gaming PCs, some of which come from the previous generation.

Gaming benchmarks

Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora (1440p Ultra)Cyberpunk 2077 (1440p RT Medium)Cyberpunk 2077 (Quality upscaling, 1440p RT Medium)Baldur's Gate 3 (1440p Ultra)Black Myth: Wukong (1440p Very High)Black Myth: Wukong (Quality upscaling, 1440p Very High)Metro Exodus: Enhanced Edition (1440p Ultra)

Avg FPS

1% Low FPS

Steam Machine

21

17

AtomMan G1 Pro | RTX 5060 | AMD Ryzen 9 8945HX

44

38

Lenovo Legion Tower 5i | RTX 4060 | Intel Core i5 14400F

33

25

Custom PC #11 (issue 413) | Arc B570 | Intel Core Ultra 7 265K

28

24

015304560

Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora (1440p Ultra) Data

Product	Value
Steam Machine	21 Avg FPS, 17 1% Low FPS
AtomMan G1 Pro | RTX 5060 | AMD Ryzen 9 8945HX	44 Avg FPS, 38 1% Low FPS
Lenovo Legion Tower 5i | RTX 4060 | Intel Core i5 14400F	33 Avg FPS, 25 1% Low FPS
Custom PC #11 (issue 413) | Arc B570 | Intel Core Ultra 7 265K	28 Avg FPS, 24 1% Low FPS

Avg FPS

1% Low FPS

Steam Machine

16

12

AtomMan G1 Pro | RTX 5060 | AMD Ryzen 9 8945HX

32

26

Lenovo Legion Tower 5i | RTX 4060 | Intel Core i5 14400F

24

19

Custom PC #11 (issue 413) | Arc B570 | Intel Core Ultra 7 265K

26

23

010203040

Cyberpunk 2077 (1440p RT Medium) Data

Product	Value
Steam Machine	16 Avg FPS, 12 1% Low FPS
AtomMan G1 Pro | RTX 5060 | AMD Ryzen 9 8945HX	32 Avg FPS, 26 1% Low FPS
Lenovo Legion Tower 5i | RTX 4060 | Intel Core i5 14400F	24 Avg FPS, 19 1% Low FPS
Custom PC #11 (issue 413) | Arc B570 | Intel Core Ultra 7 265K	26 Avg FPS, 23 1% Low FPS

Avg FPS

1% Low FPS

Steam Machine

28

20

AtomMan G1 Pro | RTX 5060 | AMD Ryzen 9 8945HX

86

69

Lenovo Legion Tower 5i | RTX 4060 | Intel Core i5 14400F

60

49

Custom PC #11 (issue 413) | Arc B570 | Intel Core Ultra 7 265K

81

74

0255075100

Cyberpunk 2077 (Quality upscaling, 1440p RT Medium) Data

Product	Value
Steam Machine	28 Avg FPS, 20 1% Low FPS
AtomMan G1 Pro | RTX 5060 | AMD Ryzen 9 8945HX	86 Avg FPS, 69 1% Low FPS
Lenovo Legion Tower 5i | RTX 4060 | Intel Core i5 14400F	60 Avg FPS, 49 1% Low FPS
Custom PC #11 (issue 413) | Arc B570 | Intel Core Ultra 7 265K	81 Avg FPS, 74 1% Low FPS

Avg FPS

1% Low FPS

Steam Machine

46

26

AtomMan G1 Pro | RTX 5060 | AMD Ryzen 9 8945HX

59

42

Lenovo Legion Tower 5i | RTX 4060 | Intel Core i5 14400F

60

40

Custom PC #11 (issue 413) | Arc B570 | Intel Core Ultra 7 265K

57

24

015304560

Baldur's Gate 3 (1440p Ultra) Data

Product	Value
Steam Machine	46 Avg FPS, 26 1% Low FPS
AtomMan G1 Pro | RTX 5060 | AMD Ryzen 9 8945HX	59 Avg FPS, 42 1% Low FPS
Lenovo Legion Tower 5i | RTX 4060 | Intel Core i5 14400F	60 Avg FPS, 40 1% Low FPS
Custom PC #11 (issue 413) | Arc B570 | Intel Core Ultra 7 265K	57 Avg FPS, 24 1% Low FPS

Avg FPS

1% Low FPS

Steam Machine

20

16

AtomMan G1 Pro | RTX 5060 | AMD Ryzen 9 8945HX

26

20

Lenovo Legion Tower 5i | RTX 4060 | Intel Core i5 14400F

23

17

Custom PC #11 (issue 413) | Arc B570 | Intel Core Ultra 7 265K

17

13

07.51522.530

Black Myth: Wukong (1440p Very High) Data

Product	Value
Steam Machine	20 Avg FPS, 16 1% Low FPS
AtomMan G1 Pro | RTX 5060 | AMD Ryzen 9 8945HX	26 Avg FPS, 20 1% Low FPS
Lenovo Legion Tower 5i | RTX 4060 | Intel Core i5 14400F	23 Avg FPS, 17 1% Low FPS
Custom PC #11 (issue 413) | Arc B570 | Intel Core Ultra 7 265K	17 Avg FPS, 13 1% Low FPS

Avg FPS

1% Low FPS

Steam Machine

31

26

AtomMan G1 Pro | RTX 5060 | AMD Ryzen 9 8945HX

37

33

Lenovo Legion Tower 5i | RTX 4060 | Intel Core i5 14400F

48

42

Custom PC #11 (issue 413) | Arc B570 | Intel Core Ultra 7 265K

27

17

015304560

Black Myth: Wukong (Quality upscaling, 1440p Very High) Data

Product	Value
Steam Machine	31 Avg FPS, 26 1% Low FPS
AtomMan G1 Pro | RTX 5060 | AMD Ryzen 9 8945HX	37 Avg FPS, 33 1% Low FPS
Lenovo Legion Tower 5i | RTX 4060 | Intel Core i5 14400F	48 Avg FPS, 42 1% Low FPS
Custom PC #11 (issue 413) | Arc B570 | Intel Core Ultra 7 265K	27 Avg FPS, 17 1% Low FPS

Avg FPS

1% Low FPS

Steam Machine

45

30

AtomMan G1 Pro | RTX 5060 | AMD Ryzen 9 8945HX

52

36

Lenovo Legion Tower 5i | RTX 4060 | Intel Core i5 14400F

53

36

Custom PC #11 (issue 413) | Arc B570 | Intel Core Ultra 7 265K

50

31

015304560

Metro Exodus: Enhanced Edition (1440p Ultra) Data

Product	Value
Steam Machine	45 Avg FPS, 30 1% Low FPS
AtomMan G1 Pro | RTX 5060 | AMD Ryzen 9 8945HX	52 Avg FPS, 36 1% Low FPS
Lenovo Legion Tower 5i | RTX 4060 | Intel Core i5 14400F	53 Avg FPS, 36 1% Low FPS
Custom PC #11 (issue 413) | Arc B570 | Intel Core Ultra 7 265K	50 Avg FPS, 31 1% Low FPS

It's not like the Steam Machine makes up for its shortcomings with a completely smooth user experience, either. It feels, at the time of writing, a little half-baked. I still found myself hunting through the settings menus to configure it properly on my home TV. I still had to enable compatibility game settings to get past some Linux… quirks.

It's got crunch, in places where, for the money, I'd hoped it would be more refined. It's virtually a premium product now, after all. But it doesn't quite feel like it in terms of the overall user experience. And it doesn't run demanding games like it, either.

In many ways, this isn't Valve's fault. The Steam Machine's diminutive, RDNA 3-graphics powered specs sheet clearly indicates that it should have been affordable, and was designed with a lesser price in mind. It should have been a lightweight, somewhat-entry-level machine that lives underneath your TV, capable of running indie games with little issue, and demanding ones if you were prepared to make significant compromises. For reasonable money.

I'd be pretty keen on it then, even with its flaws. Something deep within my heart wanted another Steam Deck-like PC gaming hardware moment. A budget machine with just enough go (and just enough convenience) to make it attractive. Another entry point into this expensive hobby of ours. A people's champion.

But no, it's got RAM modules. And an SSD. And therefore, it needs to be much pricier now than it was supposed to be when it was first specced out, if Valve is to make any money on it at all.

As a hardware reviewer, my job is to provide consumer advice. There's no point in recommending that you, the reader, buy something simply because it's interesting—without taking into account the value you get for your money. And at this price, the value proposition simply doesn't add up.

In some sense, I don't think my take on all this really matters. The Steam Machine will sell, I'd put good money on that. There are enough well-heeled enthusiasts out there to swallow up whatever launch stock Valve has on offer, even if it ends up being more of an executive-level desk toy than the great equaliser the rest of us might have hoped for.

It won't be a catastrophic failure for Valve, of that I'm fairly certain. But, given all of the above, the Steam Machine has, to my mind, become a damning representation of where we are in regards to PC gaming hardware in 2026.

We now live in a world where we're paying serious sums for meagre specs. And given that the memory crisis is expected to rumble on (and perhaps even worsen) into 2027 and beyond, this may be just the beginning of our woes.

I hate that. I hate that the AI-demand behemoth is pricing out average gamers from reasonably priced hardware, and reasonable hardware upgrades. I hate that I'm forced to give an interesting, if flawed, machine a lower score because it simply doesn't make any value-based sense—whereas for the right price, it just might.

Valve has worked really hard on the Steam Machine, and that's obvious to see. Even if it does feel underpowered, and a little rough around the software edges. But when all's said and done, I simply wouldn't spend this much money on one. And that, as much I wish it wasn't the case, is the truth.

Valve has announced the price of a Steam Machine, its new SteamOS-powered gaming PC. There are a few options available—two storage capacities and with/without a Steam Controller—and if you're still interested after seeing the price, you can sign up for a chance to buy one from today.

• 512 GB: $1,049 USD / 1,509 CAD / 1,039 EUR / 879 GBP / 1,609 AUD / 4,389 PLN
• 2 TB: $1,349 USD / 1,919 CAD / 1,359 EUR / 1,149 GBP / 2,109 AUD / 5,739 PLN

• 512 GB w/ Controller: $1,128 USD / 1,628 CAD / 1,108 EUR / 938 GBP / 1,728 AUD / 4,698 PLN
• 2 TB w/ Controller: $1,428 USD / 2,038 CAD / 1,428 EUR / 1,208 GBP / 2,228 AUD / 6,048 PLN

Both 2 TB models come with two additional faceplates, red fabric and solid walnut, which are attached with magnets. Though you could as easily make your own, as Valve tells us it will be releasing the CAD files.

The bundle with a Steam Controller is better value than buying one separately: it costs $99 on its own, but adds only $79 here. Not to mention availability of the Steam Controller is shaky, and you may end up having to wait until 2027 to purchase one individually.

Availability for the Steam Machine is also likely to be quite poor. Due to the ongoing memory crisis, Valve admits that some components it had originally intended to use in the PC have increased in price. Furthermore, some were altogether unavailable to purchase "at any price".

"More than anything else, this impacted our launch quantity," Valve says.

To deal with this limited launch quantity and to avoid a system which "tends to reward bots", Valve is rolling out a randomised reservation system for the Steam Machine. Similar to those for the Steam Deck and Steam Controller, wherein a user registers their interest in the product to purchase at a later date, where the Steam Machine reservations differ is in how the queue is formed.

Here's Valve's explanation:

• Starting right now, you can sign up for the Steam Machine model/bundle you're interested in
• If you're busy now, no problem: You can sign up anytime before Thursday June 25th at 10 a.m. Pacific.
• At that time, we will close signups and do a one-time randomization to determine the reservation order

After that one-time randomisation, Valve will let you know whether you successfully reserved a unit or were put into the waitlist for further units down the line. Valve hopes to have got through the reservation queue by the end of the year, which means those on the waitlist may be waiting a very long time indeed, likely into 2027 and beyond.

Valve explains that it felt it had a "good understanding" of how costs might change over time when it first started sourcing parts in 2023. This all changed with the memory crisis.

"Over the past year or so, that has changed quickly and significantly, most visibly for RAM and storage components," Valve says. "There are a variety of reasons, all of which are affecting hardware products everywhere. The overall effect is that our original goal for the price of Steam Machine is no longer viable. So the prices we're sharing today reflect the state of the world for manufacturing; or, more accurately, it reflects the price the components as we've secured them over the past 6 months."

It's that final line that gives me pause. Most PC gamers will likely have experienced price hikes for components and systems over the past eight months or so, especially with RAM but increasingly SSDs, too. Manufacturers have since warned of further sticker shock to come, as stockpiles of components dwindle and they are forced to buy new parts at further inflated prices. If Valve is delivering a price that's based on stock over the past six months, should the next six months be any worse, I think this leaves the door open to a price rise later on.

Valve recently increased the price of the Steam Deck due to increased component costs and 'global logistical challenges'.

We've heard mixed reports on RAM and SSD availability. There's been some suggestion that RAM prices may have levelled off since earlier in the year, but SSDs are still going up, but also reports from those in the know that prices are likely still to rise yet.

Valve also explains why it isn't "subsidizing" the price of the Steam Machine, ie putting some of that sweet, sweet Steam cash into making an affordable PC—profits be damned. The company's answer, it's not what PC gaming is about.

"When companies sell their hardware under cost for competitive advantage, or buy exclusive content for it, they're doing that to build a more closed system, one where you don't get to choose what software you want to use.

"We don't want that for PC hardware, and we don't think you should want it either. You shouldn't feel like you have to buy Valve hardware; you should be able to view it as just one option alongside all the devices for playing games, and select the one that makes sense for you."

For now, your best shot at a Steam Machine in 2026 is to sign up for that reservation system before June 25. Then cross your fingers and toes for an email landing you in the right queue and not on the waitlist.

It's finally here. The much-anticipated Steam Machine, a mini gaming PC designed for your living room, is in my possession—and it's a lovely device to behold. It's sleek, futuristic, and very, very Valve. I've been testing it thoroughly over the past week, and I'm sure you're anxious to know the results. Have all my mini gaming PC Christmases come at once?

Well, not quite. Because while Valve's attempt to bring PC gaming to your TV—and thereby the masses—has plenty of admirable qualities, it's got one giant caveat hanging over it: The price.

The 2 TB, Steam Controller-included Steam Machine bundle in my possession costs $1,428 (£1,208 / AU$2,228). The controller-less 2 TB variant is $1,349 (£1,149 / AU$2,109), while the 512 GB version, again without controller, is $1,049 (£879 / AU$1,609). Add a controller to the 512 GB variant, and you're looking at $1,128 (£938 / AU$1,728).

Much has been made over the Steam Machine's delayed launch and increased price tag, brought on by the ongoing memory crisis crippling the consumer electronics market right now. But holy moly, that's a lot of money for a mini gaming PC. Especially one with internals that, in 2026, feel underpowered before it's even officially released.

The RDNA 3-based GPU inside the Steam Machine has left me feeling, if I'm honest, rather deflated. It's certainly possible to drop the settings, bump up the upscaling, and squeak some smooth gaming performance out of the little black box. But the drawbacks feel like a step too far when you're paying this sort of cash.

The idea might be to bring the PC gaming experience to your living room, but if that experience includes smooth frame rates in demanding games, you're going to have to make some major compromises. And, because of its Linux origins, it hasn't been a flawless experience getting some of those games to run properly to begin with, either.

I want to get excited about the Steam Machine, I really do. It's a fascinating piece of design, and an admirable attempt to bring PC gaming from your desktop to your couch in one bite of the cherry. But like so much hardware these days, it's been hampered with a price tag that, given what you actually receive, feels like far too much to pay.

Steam Machine features

The Steam Machine is, by default, a black cube. Measuring 15.2 x 15.6 x 16.2 cm, its top is a touch smaller than a handspan. Or mine, at the very least. Underneath the removable magnetic front face plate (two extras are included in the box with the 2 TB bundle) is a small panel consisting of a power button on the right hand side, two USB 3.0 Type-A ports, and a microSD card slot.

Above them lies an RGB strip, which by default lights up in blue while you're gaming or downloading, and turns off at idle. Around the back are two USB 2.0 Type-A ports, a single USB 3.2 Gen 2 Type-C port rated to 10 Gbps, and a 1 Gbps ethernet connection. For display options, you've got a choice of a DisplayPort 1.4 connection, or an HDMI 2.0 port.

And of course, it can be bundled with a Steam Controller, which is a sizable symmetrical-style unit with twin TMR thumbsticks, eight face buttons, four rear grip buttons, two trackpads, haptic rumble, gyro controls, and a 35+ hour battery life. It's perhaps not the prettiest of objects, but as our Jacob found in his review, it sure is comfortable. Useful, too.

On the outside, the Steam Machine is a very unassuming little device, which is certainly by design. It's the internals, however, where things get really interesting.

Under the hood lies a semi-custom AMD Zen 4 CPU with six cores and 12 threads, alongside 16 GB of system RAM. The GPU is also a semi-custom AMD RDNA 3 job, with 8 GB of dedicated GDDR6 VRAM, 28 compute units, a sustained max clock speed of 2.45 GHz, and a 110 W TGP.

Being a semi-custom GPU, it's difficult to make a direct comparison with existing RDNA 3 graphics cards—although the budget RX 7600 XT from the same generation features 32 compute units and a similar game clock speed.

The Steam Machine comes in two different storage flavours: 512 GB and 2 TB. I've got the 2 TB model, which provides plenty of storage for many, many games. Should you opt for the 512 GB variant, you'll want to keep an eye on install sizes.

Speaking of games, the Steam Machine makes use of SteamOS 3, an Arch-based Linux implementation with the KDE Plasma interface, allowing you to directly interface with your Steam library and the storefront. Steam Deck users will be very familiar with this design, although there are of course more options to tweak in the settings menus for the Steam Machine itself. More on that later.

For connecting to the outside world, beyond the already-mentioned ethernet port you also get a 2x2 Wi-Fi 6E connection and Bluetooth 5.3 support. The Steam Controller connects via an integrated 2.4 GHz wireless adapter, although requires the included puck or cable to be used for pairing on initial setup.

It's pretty impressive to think of the sheer amount of hardware and connectivity options Valve has crammed inside such a relatively small chassis design. Especially when you consider that, in terms of cooling, air is moved by a single 120 mm fan around the back.

As our Jacob found when he held a caseless prototype model, inside is a substantial heatsink which obscures the motherboard almost entirely, distributing heat away from all of the internal components.

Overall, the Steam Machine feels… solid. More solid than I was expecting, actually, despite its reasonable 2.6 kg weight. Given the form factor, you could easily shove it in a decently sized backpack to take around a friend's house. Although the design here is definitely specced to fit within an under-TV living room unit—where it'll live, faceless and mysterious, next to your other consoles and set-top boxes.

Steam Machine performance

And so we reach the first major sticking point. The Steam Machine 2 TB bundle is, in essence, a $1,428 mini gaming PC. As a result, it's only fair the little black cube goes up against our gaming PC benchmark suite in competition with similarly-priced machines.

Put aside the tidy form factor, the SteamOS experience, and the delightful "Valve-ness" of the thing for a second. If you're buying one of these, you're going to want your games to run well, and for it to deliver comparable performance to a gaming PC you could have spent your cash on instead.

And I'm not going to sugar-coat it—the benchmarking results are a little ugly.

Gaming benchmarks

Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora (1440p Ultra)Cyberpunk 2077 (1440p RT Medium)Cyberpunk 2077 (Quality upscaling, 1440p RT Medium)Baldur's Gate 3 (1440p Ultra)Black Myth: Wukong (1440p Very High)Black Myth: Wukong (Quality upscaling, 1440p Very High)Metro Exodus: Enhanced Edition (1440p Ultra)

Avg FPS

1% Low FPS

Steam Machine

21

17

AtomMan G1 Pro | RTX 5060 | AMD Ryzen 9 8945HX

44

38

Lenovo Legion Tower 5i | RTX 4060 | Intel Core i5 14400F

33

25

Custom PC #11 (issue 413) | Arc B570 | Intel Core Ultra 7 265K

28

24

015304560

Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora (1440p Ultra) Data

Product	Value
Steam Machine	21 Avg FPS, 17 1% Low FPS
AtomMan G1 Pro | RTX 5060 | AMD Ryzen 9 8945HX	44 Avg FPS, 38 1% Low FPS
Lenovo Legion Tower 5i | RTX 4060 | Intel Core i5 14400F	33 Avg FPS, 25 1% Low FPS
Custom PC #11 (issue 413) | Arc B570 | Intel Core Ultra 7 265K	28 Avg FPS, 24 1% Low FPS

Avg FPS

1% Low FPS

Steam Machine

16

12

AtomMan G1 Pro | RTX 5060 | AMD Ryzen 9 8945HX

32

26

Lenovo Legion Tower 5i | RTX 4060 | Intel Core i5 14400F

24

19

Custom PC #11 (issue 413) | Arc B570 | Intel Core Ultra 7 265K

26

23

010203040

Cyberpunk 2077 (1440p RT Medium) Data

Product	Value
Steam Machine	16 Avg FPS, 12 1% Low FPS
AtomMan G1 Pro | RTX 5060 | AMD Ryzen 9 8945HX	32 Avg FPS, 26 1% Low FPS
Lenovo Legion Tower 5i | RTX 4060 | Intel Core i5 14400F	24 Avg FPS, 19 1% Low FPS
Custom PC #11 (issue 413) | Arc B570 | Intel Core Ultra 7 265K	26 Avg FPS, 23 1% Low FPS

Avg FPS

1% Low FPS

Steam Machine

28

20

AtomMan G1 Pro | RTX 5060 | AMD Ryzen 9 8945HX

86

69

Lenovo Legion Tower 5i | RTX 4060 | Intel Core i5 14400F

60

49

Custom PC #11 (issue 413) | Arc B570 | Intel Core Ultra 7 265K

81

74

0255075100

Cyberpunk 2077 (Quality upscaling, 1440p RT Medium) Data

Product	Value
Steam Machine	28 Avg FPS, 20 1% Low FPS
AtomMan G1 Pro | RTX 5060 | AMD Ryzen 9 8945HX	86 Avg FPS, 69 1% Low FPS
Lenovo Legion Tower 5i | RTX 4060 | Intel Core i5 14400F	60 Avg FPS, 49 1% Low FPS
Custom PC #11 (issue 413) | Arc B570 | Intel Core Ultra 7 265K	81 Avg FPS, 74 1% Low FPS

Avg FPS

1% Low FPS

Steam Machine

46

26

AtomMan G1 Pro | RTX 5060 | AMD Ryzen 9 8945HX

59

42

Lenovo Legion Tower 5i | RTX 4060 | Intel Core i5 14400F

60

40

Custom PC #11 (issue 413) | Arc B570 | Intel Core Ultra 7 265K

57

24

015304560

Baldur's Gate 3 (1440p Ultra) Data

Product	Value
Steam Machine	46 Avg FPS, 26 1% Low FPS
AtomMan G1 Pro | RTX 5060 | AMD Ryzen 9 8945HX	59 Avg FPS, 42 1% Low FPS
Lenovo Legion Tower 5i | RTX 4060 | Intel Core i5 14400F	60 Avg FPS, 40 1% Low FPS
Custom PC #11 (issue 413) | Arc B570 | Intel Core Ultra 7 265K	57 Avg FPS, 24 1% Low FPS

Avg FPS

1% Low FPS

Steam Machine

20

16

AtomMan G1 Pro | RTX 5060 | AMD Ryzen 9 8945HX

26

20

Lenovo Legion Tower 5i | RTX 4060 | Intel Core i5 14400F

23

17

Custom PC #11 (issue 413) | Arc B570 | Intel Core Ultra 7 265K

17

13

07.51522.530

Black Myth: Wukong (1440p Very High) Data

Product	Value
Steam Machine	20 Avg FPS, 16 1% Low FPS
AtomMan G1 Pro | RTX 5060 | AMD Ryzen 9 8945HX	26 Avg FPS, 20 1% Low FPS
Lenovo Legion Tower 5i | RTX 4060 | Intel Core i5 14400F	23 Avg FPS, 17 1% Low FPS
Custom PC #11 (issue 413) | Arc B570 | Intel Core Ultra 7 265K	17 Avg FPS, 13 1% Low FPS

Avg FPS

1% Low FPS

Steam Machine

31

26

AtomMan G1 Pro | RTX 5060 | AMD Ryzen 9 8945HX

37

33

Lenovo Legion Tower 5i | RTX 4060 | Intel Core i5 14400F

48

42

Custom PC #11 (issue 413) | Arc B570 | Intel Core Ultra 7 265K

27

17

015304560

Black Myth: Wukong (Quality upscaling, 1440p Very High) Data

Product	Value
Steam Machine	31 Avg FPS, 26 1% Low FPS
AtomMan G1 Pro | RTX 5060 | AMD Ryzen 9 8945HX	37 Avg FPS, 33 1% Low FPS
Lenovo Legion Tower 5i | RTX 4060 | Intel Core i5 14400F	48 Avg FPS, 42 1% Low FPS
Custom PC #11 (issue 413) | Arc B570 | Intel Core Ultra 7 265K	27 Avg FPS, 17 1% Low FPS

Avg FPS

1% Low FPS

Steam Machine

45

30

AtomMan G1 Pro | RTX 5060 | AMD Ryzen 9 8945HX

52

36

Lenovo Legion Tower 5i | RTX 4060 | Intel Core i5 14400F

53

36

Custom PC #11 (issue 413) | Arc B570 | Intel Core Ultra 7 265K

50

31

015304560

Metro Exodus: Enhanced Edition (1440p Ultra) Data

Product	Value
Steam Machine	45 Avg FPS, 30 1% Low FPS
AtomMan G1 Pro | RTX 5060 | AMD Ryzen 9 8945HX	52 Avg FPS, 36 1% Low FPS
Lenovo Legion Tower 5i | RTX 4060 | Intel Core i5 14400F	53 Avg FPS, 36 1% Low FPS
Custom PC #11 (issue 413) | Arc B570 | Intel Core Ultra 7 265K	50 Avg FPS, 31 1% Low FPS

Yes, that's a 28 fps average result in Cyberpunk 2077 at 1440p Medium RT, with Quality FSR enabled, no frame gen. RDNA 3-era graphics hardware usually struggles with ray tracing, and the Steam Machine's 28 CU semi-custom GPU is no exception.

It's particularly shocking when you compare it with the AtomMan G1 Pro, an RTX 5060-equipped (albeit with 1 TB of storage) mini PC currently available for around $10 more, which manages 58 extra frames on average at the same settings.

Similarly, the Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora benchmark gives the Steam Machine some serious trouble, resulting in a 21 fps average at Ultra settings. Compare that with the G1 Pro, which churns out over double the frame rate. In fact, even the RTX 4060-equipped Lenovo Legion Tower 5i manages a respectable 33 fps result at the same settings, which goes to show roughly where we're at.

That's not to say the Steam Machine gets completely trounced in every benchmark. It beats one of our custom, Intel Arc B570-equipped PC builds in Black Myth Wukong, both with and without upscaling. If we were to build that PC today, it would be slightly more expensive than the Steam Machine 2 TB bundle—mostly due to the beefy Core Ultra 265K CPU and pricey RAM.

Still, you could save some money with a weaker CPU and (slightly) cheaper RAM, and get very similar gaming performance. Again, the RTX 4060, Intel Core i5 14400F-toting Legion Tower 5i powers ahead of the Steam Machine in Black Myth (with upscaling enabled) quite convincingly. That's a budget gaming PC with last-generation components, no two ways about it. And it's got the little Steam Machine thoroughly licked across almost all of my benchmarks.

Steam Machine real-world testing

It's important to remember that the Steam Machine is designed for your living room TV, which these days is likely to be a 4K-native model. So, putting our comparative benchmarks aside for a second, I decided to jump into three relatively demanding (and very popular) PC games at 4K resolution, and see how far I had to drop the settings to get a mostly-solid 60 fps.

In the case of Cyberpunk 2077, I managed to get a 58-61 fps average by dropping the settings to Medium (no ray tracing), bumping FSR into its Performance mode, and enabling 2x frame generation. That means the base frame rate is still trundling away at somewhere around the 30 fps mark, even with the upscaler working at its hardest.

Which means added latency, and some messy visuals. It's not a straight-up bad experience at these settings, but you can definitely see the FSR/frame gen combo struggling with details and fast movement on a regular basis. Could I play Cyberpunk 2077 like this? Sure, I guess. Would I feel good about it, having dropped $1,000+ on a new piece of hardware? Hmm. Pass, I think.

In the case of the newly-released (and fairly well-optimised) Forza Horizon 6, you can forget ray tracing if you want 60 fps at 4K. At this point, that's probably no surprise. However, you can just about keep things smooth with a combo of FSR Performance and High settings.

There's the occasional dip into the low 50s in downtown Tokyo, but it's plenty playable. Cutscene characters look a bit fuzzy, though, and given that frame gen in this game is an Nvidia-only option, you'll need to drop things further if you want higher/more consistent frames.

And then there's Lego Batman: Legacy of the Dark Night. At Medium settings, with FSR set to Performance and with frame generation enabled, you can indeed live your best Batman life at 4K 60 fps. Just about. Again, there's the odd dip, and the base frame rate is pretty low, so the extra latency is definitely palpable.

And again, FSR in all its older iterations looks rough around the edges at Performance settings. Valve says it's working on FSR 4 support for the Steam Machine, but for now, older FSR is what you get as an AMD-specific option.

You might be finding this all a bit obvious. The Steam Machine isn't particularly powerful, so why would I expect high resolution and 60+ frames from my tiny under-TV box? Well, Valve said as much when it first unveiled the Steam Machine last year, stating that 4K60 in your Steam games was its benchmark. And 4K TVs are pretty much the standard at this point. While you can drop the res below native, you're really not going to want to if image quality is a concern.

And as for smooth frame rates? It's sort of PC gaming's thing, man. Especially when you're spending proper PC gaming money.

Can the Valve box deliver in the demanding stuff? Sometimes. As long as you're prepared to make some pretty major compromises in the upscaling, frame generation, and settings departments.

Steam Machine software

First time setup involves attaching the included power cable (and the rather meagre 1.8 metre HDMI cable), booting up the box, and connecting the Steam Controller via the wireless puck. After entering your Wi-Fi details and your Steam account login (and adjusting your screen scaling, which I'll go into below) you're then presented with the SteamOS interface, after any incidental updates.

Anyone who's used a Steam Deck (or indeed, the Steam interface in general) will feel like they're in familiar territory here. A press of the central Steam Controller button opens up a side menu to access your Library or the storefront itself, while also providing a litany of options menus. More still can be accessed with the three-dot button at the bottom of the input device.

One slight hang-up I experienced involved connecting the Steam Controller to the Steam Machine itself, so I could ditch the wireless puck. The menu system is a little obtuse, as the settings appear to want you to shutdown the controller while connected to the puck, boot it up, disconnect it, and then hold down a combination of buttons and bumpers to pair it with the internal connection while booting it up again. A three finger job.

I think. It took a few goes, and I'm not quite sure which combination I used to eventually cause it to pair. In fact, if I had one overall critique of the Steam Machine software experience, it's that the option menus often feel overly complicated.

Some are simple toggles, others are drop down menus, some are sliders, some are in strange orders, some are accessed with one button, some another… it's all a bit much when you're trying to lie back on the couch and game.

The onboarding process has other quirks, too. This could be user error, but on first setup I adjusted the scaling to fit my particular (ancient) 1080p TV, which the Steam Machine merrily ignored once I was booted into the OS itself. This led to much head-scratching as I figured out how to adjust it again from within the slightly unclear (and now poorly scaled) menu options.

Switching over to my 4K monitor, SteamOS seemed to recognise the native resolution immediately, and displayed the appropriately-scaled menus. I then jumped into several games, only to find the resolution maxed out at 1080p. According to Valve, this 1080p default is deliberate Steam Machine behaviour, designed "to ensure a good gameplay experience out of the box."

Though I thought this was supposed to be a 4K-ready device?

After some hunting around in the SteamOS menus, I discovered a secondary resolution option under the Advanced Display settings that was set to "default" in a dropdown menu. Adjusting this manually to the native resolution of my 4K screen allowed me to select higher resolutions in games. It had me stumped for a good 10 minutes or so, though, as the main resolution scaling settings didn't do the trick.

I've had the odd game-specific issue, too. Baldur's Gate 3, for example, repeatedly crashed on boot—until some searching revealed a similar issue with the Steam Deck. The fix is to enable a Proton experimental setting in the Compatibility menu, which handily works for the Steam Machine, too.

So, does Valve's new box provide a seamless PC gaming experience? Well it hasn't for me, I have to say. And while this sort of tweakery is common for those of us who do battle with the PC gaming gods—especially those of us who run Linux operating systems on the regular—I had hoped for a smoother ride from a living room-first machine. Valve says it's working on various aspects of the interface for a better experience, but for now, it definitely feels like a work in progress.

Steam Machine aesthetics

Opinions will vary here, but I'm a big fan of the Steam Machine's design. There's something high-tech, slightly ominous, and very Valve about the aesthetic. It looks and feels like an ancient artifact you'd find in a sci-fi shooter, some sort of key that unlocks a machine designed to bring about the end of the universe. I'm riffing here, but if you pick up one for yourself, you'll see what I mean.

Should the all-black, all-knowing cube design not be to your tastes, there's always the option to swap out the faceplates. These are attached with small magnets at all four corners to the front of the chassis, and pull themselves into place with a meaty thock.

Something I accidentally discovered is that, such is the force of the magnets, you can stack two together at once, although a single plate locks smoothly in line with the front I/O panel below. My top-end 2 TB Steam Machine bundle includes two extra plates, one covered in red fabric, and the other with a wood finish.

Tapping my finger against the latter, it appears to be an actual piece of tree—rather than a cheap walnut-style veneer. Very nice indeed, if you're into that sort of thing.

My main point, however, is just how unassuming the Steam Machine looks when tucked among my other set-top boxes and routers, even with a jazzy face plate attached. It looks like it'll blend in just about anywhere, and the front LED strip can be configured in a multitude of ways. You can set it to pulse through the RGB spectrum to deliver a gaming PC-like aesthetic, or you can turn it off entirely, among other options.

At which point, you may end up forgetting you've got a Steam Machine under your TV at all. It's well-sized enough that I don't think anyone will have a problem integrating it into their setup with ease.

As for the controller? Well, it's a sizable beast, that's for sure. Still, with an all-black, relatively muted design, I don't think your average non-gamer would notice much of a difference between this and a standard Xbox controller unless they picked one up.

Temperatures and noise

The Steam Machine is quiet. I mean, really, really quiet. The single, geometry-optimised 120 mm fan at the back does an admirable job of moving large amounts of air at whisper-like levels, so much so that I don't think you'd notice it at full pelt over any other ambient noise.

Temperatures

Gaming TemperaturesIdle temperatures

Avg CPU Temp (°C)

Max CPU Temp (°C)

Avg GPU Temp (°C)

Max GPU Temp (°C)

Steam Machine

68

74

65

69

AtomMan G1 Pro | RTX 5060 | AMD Ryzen 9 8945HX

89

91

77

67

Lenovo Legion Tower 5i | RTX 4060 | Intel Core i5 14400F

64

76

67

71

Custom PC #11 (issue 413) | Arc B570 | Intel Core Ultra 7 265K

57

81

66

71

0255075100

Gaming Temperatures Data

Product	Value
Steam Machine	68 Avg CPU Temp (°C), 74 Max CPU Temp (°C), 65 Avg GPU Temp (°C), 69 Max GPU Temp (°C)
AtomMan G1 Pro | RTX 5060 | AMD Ryzen 9 8945HX	89 Avg CPU Temp (°C), 91 Max CPU Temp (°C), 77 Avg GPU Temp (°C), 67 Max GPU Temp (°C)
Lenovo Legion Tower 5i | RTX 4060 | Intel Core i5 14400F	64 Avg CPU Temp (°C), 76 Max CPU Temp (°C), 67 Avg GPU Temp (°C), 71 Max GPU Temp (°C)
Custom PC #11 (issue 413) | Arc B570 | Intel Core Ultra 7 265K	57 Avg CPU Temp (°C), 81 Max CPU Temp (°C), 66 Avg GPU Temp (°C), 71 Max GPU Temp (°C)

CPU (°C)

GPU (°C)

Steam Machine

38

41

AtomMan G1 Pro | RTX 5060 | AMD Ryzen 9 8945HX

51

38

Lenovo Legion Tower 5i | RTX 4060 | Intel Core i5 14400F

29

30

Custom PC #11 (issue 413) | Arc B570 | Intel Core Ultra 7 265K

37

46

015304560

Idle temperatures Data

Product	Value
Steam Machine	38 CPU (°C), 41 GPU (°C)
AtomMan G1 Pro | RTX 5060 | AMD Ryzen 9 8945HX	51 CPU (°C), 38 GPU (°C)
Lenovo Legion Tower 5i | RTX 4060 | Intel Core i5 14400F	29 CPU (°C), 30 GPU (°C)
Custom PC #11 (issue 413) | Arc B570 | Intel Core Ultra 7 265K	37 CPU (°C), 46 GPU (°C)

It runs relatively cool, too. Certainly much cooler than the AtomMan G1 Pro when you crank it up to its top whack, which is significantly noisier, too. Valve has clearly prioritised refinement when it comes to both the Steam Machine's size and sound, which is a good instinct to follow when it comes to a living room-friendly box.

Steam Machine value

When the Steam Machine was first announced, we on the PC Gamer hardware team took a look at the specs and all came to the same rough conclusion. It's relatively low-powered, it's designed for your living room, and it's gunning for a position next to your other consoles. Therefore, it'll have to be reasonably priced.

That was in the before times, of course. Back when cheap memory modules were abundant, and the idea of a $550-$600 base-level Steam Machine seemed quite possible. Then the AI server market hoovered up all the manufacturing capacity, the consumer market got stuffed, and we've been living in a world of ridiculous pricing ever since.

Given all this, on the surface, the $1,049 Steam Machine 512 GB seems almost reasonable. Let's put it this way, it's not as highly-priced as we feared, given everything that's going on at the moment and the recent price hike of the Steam Deck. But the unfortunate truth is that budget gaming PCs—while being much larger, noisier, and more unwieldy than Valve's magic box—can still be found for the same sort of figure.

A perusal of our cheap gaming PC deals page reveals several 1 TB-equipped, RTX 5060-toting models for under $1,000. And, as I've shown with the AtomMan G1 Pro, anything with Nvidia's current-gen budget card is likely to give the Steam Machine a good thrashing in the performance stakes.

Speaking of which, the AtomMan machine can be found (at the time of writing) for $1,439 at Amazon. That's pretty pricey for a mini PC, but it does come with a beastly laptop CPU, said RTX 5060, and 32 GB of RAM. You only get a 1 TB SSD, it's true. And like the PCs above, it doesn't have an included controller, nor a couch-native SteamOS interface.

But it's only $11 more than the top-spec Steam Machine 2 TB. And Steam Big Picture mode in Windows works great for gaming on your TV. As for the controller? A suitable model doesn't cost a whole lot extra (particularly if you go for something budget-yet-brilliant, like the GameSir Nova Lite).

I just can't square the Steam Machine's performance with any idea of consumer value. I really can't. The first question you need to ask yourself as a hardware reviewer is this: Would I buy one?

And despite the little black box's lovely design, excellent controller, and sheer curiosity value, the answer is no. Not when I can still pick up a regular gaming PC for the equivalent cash, with much better overall gaming performance.

Because, when it comes to the PC gaming experience, I think you should ask yourself what it means to you. To me, it means better graphics than consoles. It means higher frame rates. It means flexibility, and it means spending more money in return for a better experience when I actually play the games.

Having a neat little PC gaming box tucked away underneath your TV is all well and good, on paper. But when it feels underpowered (and internally outdated) right out of the gate, while still costing north of a grand for the base-level model? I'm simply not sure it makes much sense.

You can now sign up for a chance to buy a Steam Machine. Yes, a mere chance, not a preorder, as Valve is doing something different with the launch of its Linux-powered cube. Rather than forming an orderly queue, it's taking names, throwing them in a hat, and drawing them out at random to decide who gets a reservation and who gets lumped on the waitlist.

The Steam Machine starts at $1,049 for the 512 GB model, and if you're still interested in purchasing one after hearing the price, you're going to want to take heed of the new reservation process. It's different to what Valve has done in the past, and for good reason.

"In an effort to improve the purchase experience and limit resellers, we're implementing a reservation system," Valve says.

• Starting right now, you can sign up for the Steam Machine model/bundle you're interested in.
• If you're busy now, no problem: You can sign up anytime before Thursday June 25th at 10 a.m. Pacific.
• At that time, we will close signups and do a one-time randomization to determine the reservation order.

"Based on the reservation order, you will receive an email on June 25th indicating one of two things:"

• You've been added to the reservation queue and a Steam Machine has been reserved in your name.
• You've been added to the waitlist and we'll let you know when more units become available.

In theory, this deters bots from hammering the reservations faster than any real human and securing units for resellers to sell at inflated prices. It also means that it's become a lottery for all involved.

By signing up on June 25, you give yourself the best chance of purchasing one before the end of the year. Those lucky enough to make it into the reservation queue will begin receiving emails asking them to make their purchase from June 29.

If you miss this date, you'll be added to the back of the waitlist and presumably in for a long wait.

Valve has said it intends to get through the reservation queue by the end of 2026. That means those on the waitlist are unlikely to be able to purchase a Steam Machine before 2027—unless people drop out of the queue without purchasing one, in which case the offer extends to whomever is next in line. Those offered a unit will have 72 hours from receiving their notification email to checkout before Valve passes it onto the next person in the queue.

What you need

To make your initial sign up, you have to have a few things in order:

• a Steam account in good standing
• made a purchase on Steam prior to April 27, 2026.

There's also a limit of one per household. Valve says it will check payment information, shipping address, and other information to remove duplicate entries. So if you're in shared accommodation with a bunch of fellow PC gamers, looks like you'll have to share your Steam Machine, too.

Each region has its own sign-up list. These are North America, United Kingdom, European Union, and Australia, which Valve is organising directly. Valve's official distributor, Komodo, will be dealing with orders in Japan, Taiwan, and Hong Kong.

So, why the new system? Why not just do what it did with the Steam Deck and have a first-come, first-serve system?

Valve says it's both because of resellers and lower availability than it would have liked for components used in the Steam Machine.

"Over the past year or so, that has changed quickly and significantly, most visibly for RAM and storage components… the overall effect is that our original goal for the price of Steam Machine is no longer viable," Valve says in an FAQ.

"Price wasn't the only thing impacted by all of this: availability was as well. We found we couldn't source some of our components at all, at any price. More than anything else, this impacted our launch quantity."

We've heard this before: memory chips are a precious commodity right now and they're being sucked out of the market before ever reaching us consumers by big businesses with even bigger bank accounts. Even the biggest companies are feeling the heat. Valve is no small fry, but it's nowhere close to the size of OEMs like Dell, HP, or similar. Everyone's scrambling for whatever the major memory manufacturers can give them, which isn't enough.

When a manufacturer is this honest about availability concerns from the get-go, that usually means things really are tough out there. This launch is going to be a very long, drawn out affair from the sounds of things. Make sure you're there before June 25 for the best chance at a Linux console this year, or be prepared to be patient. Heck, as Valve points out in its FAQ, you could always build your own Steam Machine with SteamOS 3.8 as a shortcut.

Good luck.

Every Monday morning I scroll through the previous week's new games on Steam. I've always enjoyed doing this. It can surface niche gems I might otherwise not have found, and it's also useful for detecting new trends in their infancy.

But if I'm perfectly honest, the reason I've always loved to browse through Steam's raw and unfiltered new release list is because it's fun: Steam is hilarious and bizarre. For every earnestly developed roguelite deckbuilder or metroidvania there's something like, I dunno, Fuck's Quest 2, or Milk inside a bag of milk inside a bag of milk. Lost in the murkier corners of Steam, untouched by recommendation algorithms, are some of the strangest, most distinctive pieces of software you're likely to ever see, most of which won't ever make the front page.

Most people don't see these games. What we see on Steam's front page is overwhelmingly determined by what Steam already knows about our gaming habits, or what's trending in our region, or what's discounted. Which is increasingly for the best, because in 2026—and I hate to complain about this—Steam bulges with more useless, tasteless, low-effort churn than ever before. It increasingly feels like a waste of time scratching beneath the guardrailed, algorithmic surface.

As I pointed out last week, AI-generated games are rife on Steam. You can usually tell straight away because the capsule art is obviously AI-generated, with that tell-tale uncanny AI sheen. Despite how ostensibly low effort these artefacts are, there's a uniformity among them that you may charitably call an aesthetic.

Take Store Simulator Pettikkada and Chiggas - Survival of the Mitiest as examples. That the capsule art is AI generated for both is basically unquestionable the moment you see it. Pettikkada has that familiar near-photographic illustrated realism that smacks vaguely of Grand Theft Auto loading screen art, while Chiggas adopts the wide-eyed Pixar tack, a style so ubiquitous in popular culture that it's basically become a generative AI default setting. Click through to the store pages themselves and the screenshots reveal an audacious disjuncture between capsule art and the game you actually get.

I do acknowledge that this contrast has been a feature of box art since the beginning of the medium. Atari 2600 box art never looked like the Atari 2600 game on the cartridge, for example. Doom didn't look like this. But key art created with generative AI has that certain grotesquely generic patina which immediately tells you that clicking through will be pointless and perhaps harmful to your senses.

These games are all by different developers:

In the distant olden days before generative AI, a game's Steam capsule art and the general professionalism or care afforded to it, could signal straight away whether a game was likely a 99 cent asset flip or a possible unsung indie gem. Now there's greater ambiguity. Chiggas could very well have the same production values as The Smurfs - Dreams, until we click through to the page itself and discover its cheap, rudimentary in-game screenshots.

I think most people would agree that a game's Steam capsule art is a hugely important determinant for whether they click through to a store page or not. Capsule art tells us what kind of game we're probably going to see when we click, but it also captures the spirit of the thing: the atmosphere of the game, its art style, its genre, whether it'll make us laugh, rage, shudder in terror, zone out, and so forth.

The capsule art for the games above do none of those things. Like most generative AI, these images are not designed to persuade or entice: they exist to fill space. They're steely, clinical, affectless, chillingly inhuman, and most offensively: they're freaking ugly. They immediately signpost waste.

And there's more and more of this churn with every passing week, gradually undermining the pleasures of curious Steam users who like to dig deeper for unsung gems. In 2026, your new favorite game may remain eternally ignored, wedged between a vape store simulator and Total Simp Death.

Will Valve ever allow us to reliably filter out AI-generated churn? It's hard to imagine no one in Bellevue has noticed how ugly the store has become. Surely it's only a matter of time?

Top Steam games by revenue (June 9 - 16)

Steam releases its top sellers charts on Wednesdays, so the below chart doesn't factor in some late week releases that might have been big, though it wasn't a big week for splashy blockbusters.

The obvious outlier here is Meccha Chameleon. It's a multiplayer hide-and-seek game starring white, featureless bodies who must blend in with their environment using paint brushes. Since releasing on June 10, the $6 game has sold 7 million copies. Elie Gould wrote about it last week.

Interestingly, its Japanese creator Lemorion has been very prolific: it has released six games since late 2024. None of them have achieved anywhere near the success of Meccha Chameleon, not even this free-to-play Penguin-themed take on Exit 8. Meccha Chameleon's immediate predecessor, Link Penguins, released only two months ago and is also an online multiplayer game.

Destiny 2 continues to see a resurgence since the announcement of its sunsetting. EA FC 26 is currently 80%, hence its return to the chart.

Last week's Steam deep cuts

Steam review of the week

"Slop 👍"

BigFloppa332, with poetic succinctness, on Slop Fighter.

Valve is struggling to meet demand for its Steam Controller. The trackpad-equipped gamepad quickly sold out when it released in early May, and ever since there's been a reservation system similar to the one once used for Steam Deck.

And people have been using it, to such an extent that Valve has needed to upgrade the system to manage expectations regarding when you'll actually get one. "When we launched Steam Controller last month, we quickly saw that initial demand exceeded our expectations," Valve writes in an update.

"We have no plans to stop making Steam Controller. But as we look at the current demand compared to how many we know we can make by the end of the year, we want to manage expectations as much as we can with regards to when folks can expect to receive their order."

To get to the point: if you're not in the queue already you probably won't get a Steam Controller until 2027. One of my colleagues based in the United States joined the queue today and their "estimated order availability" is 2027. It's the same for me in Australia.

According to Valve the reservation page now shows one of three estimated shipping windows, including "by September 2026", "by December 2026", and "in 2027", with more specific timing for the latter to come later. If you joined the queue already you can revisit the page and it'll show you which of those three categories you fit in.

Still, I do wonder how many of those in the queue have decided they're definitely going to buy a Steam Controller. It's possible to reserve your place without placing a deposit, so there's really no harm in registering your interest even if you're not committed to making the purchase. When something is in such hot demand, it's probably smarter to make the reservation than to not, because what if you change your mind between now and next year? What if the Steam Machine proves so mindblowing that the Steam Controller becomes an essential piece of kit?

Whatever the case, once your ticket is called you have 72 hours to make the purchase before you lose your place in the queue. With Steam Machine and Steam Frame seemingly imminent, I'd be very surprised if we don't see the same situation with those.

After a standard spell in beta, the latest iteration of SteamOS—Valve's Arch-based Linux distro for use on Steam Deck, Steam Machine, and Steam Frame—has hit the big three-eight. Or, well, three-point-eight. SteamOS 3.8 is out, is what I'm saying, and if you turn your face to the wind and inhale, you can detect the first notes of upcoming hardware.

Specifically, the Steam Machine, for which SteamOS 3.8 brings "initial support," as well as support for waking a SteamOS device from sleep via a connected Steam Controller. Alas, no word on the Steam Frame in these patch notes, but consider me as eager as ever to get my hands on Valve's living room box, presuming the RAM crisis has not made it cost $5,000 dollars.

But this is a pretty big release even excluding the GabeCube stuff. I'll stick the full patch notes down below, but there are a number of tweaks and new features that leap out to me as a longtime Deck user. Chief among them is that yer Deck now defaults to Wayland rather than X11 in desktop mode.

Those are two different display servers for Linux desktops—the gubbins that make your GUI function when you're not working straight in the virtual console like god intended. To cut to the chase: X11 is the old one (and as such, tends to have greater compatibility and work better for some particular tasks, at least for now) and Wayland is the new one (though it's been out in some form for nearly 20 years)—it's more secure and generally a bit more dextrous for most tasks.

So swapping to Wayland-by-default means that SteamOS has reduced "several cases of reduced performance in Desktop Mode compared to Game Mode" on your Steam Deck, desktop mode also has better scaling on TVs, support for external HDR displays, and support for VRR displays. The kind of stuff you might care about if you were making an OS for a device that's expected to live underneath people's TVs.

There are also new BIOSes for the LCD and OLED Decks, which will be installed as part of the general 3.8 update when you run it. The LCD one, sorry to say, isn't too exciting, save that it adds preliminary support for device hibernation. OLED, though? Valve's updated the Deck so that the charging LED now respects your device charging settings. If you set your Deck to top out at 80% charge for battery health reasons, then the LED will turn green—meaning fully charged—when it reaches that point, rather than remaining standard 'charging' white for eternity.

All good stuff, then. Here are the full patch notes for your perusal.

General

• Updated Arch system base
• Initial support for upcoming Steam Machine hardware
• Added support for waking from sleep via connected Steam Controller
• Substantially improved speed of future OS updates on high-speed connections
• Improved support for screen casting in Game Mode (e.g. OBS/Discord)
• Fixed dropdown menus not appearing in some games
• Fixed excessive trackpad sensitivity on certain early Steam Deck LCD models
• Improved support for games that attempt to open PDF files in external viewers
• Fixed an issue where video output could become frozen while using Remote Play
• Fixed a possible session crash when using Game Recording with certain "Maximum video height" settings
• Fixed an issue affecting certain titles (such as "SpongeBob SquarePants: Titans of the Tide") where the game window could have an incorrect position
• Fixed closing certain titles (such as "STAR WARS Jedi: Survivor™" and Starfield) resulting in a session crash
• Improved support for certain USB racing wheels and USB devices that boot in a non-standard mode
  • Frequently these are devices that appear as USB storage devices with a driver installer, and must be switched to their normal mode by the OS
• Steam Deck controller firmware updates now display update progress on the splash screen
• Fixes issue on specific Steam Deck revisions where firmware updates could render the left controller inoperative for that session
• Numerous stability and security updates

Display / Performance

• Updated graphics driver with performance and stability fixes
• Added preliminary support for HDMI VRR for devices with native HDMI output
• Fixed an issue where "Allow Tearing" wouldn't have the intended effect in certain configurations
• Improved VRR frame pacing
• Fixed FSR badge remaining off in the performance overlay, even if it was actually active
• Fixed a case where per-app performance settings would intermittently fail to apply when launching a game
• Added missing graphics features needed for titles such as "Crimson Desert"
• Fixed an issue on certain TCL TVs where the display may remain blank using the Steam Deck Dock when VRR is enabled (requires a Dock firmware update)

Bluetooth / WiFi

• Fixed a case where WiFi performance could become degraded until the device was put to sleep or manually reconnected
• Re-re-enable Bluetooth Wake for Steam Deck LCD
  • Fix for more spurious wake issues that were present in earlier attempts

Audio

• Detect HDMI channel count and expose surround configuration if available
• Add a setting to allow using Bluetooth headset mics (Bluetooth playback quality will be worse while capture is active)
• Restore internal audio device on reboot if set to "Off" in desktop mode
• Increase suspend timeout for HDMI devices so initial audio isn't cut off after a few seconds of inactivity
• Fixed a bug with switching input devices when a wired headset is plugged in
• Fixed an issue where audio underruns could be experienced after sleep/resume
• Fixed a bug on Steam Deck OLED where rebooting would occasionally cause a loss of speaker output until rebooted again
• Fixed a case where FPS limits would fail to apply when downscaling games from a higher resolution

Accessibility

• Added an option to force mono audio output

Desktop Mode

• KDE Plasma updated to version 6.4.3 from 6.2.5, and now uses wayland by default

  • Fixes several cases of reduced performance in Desktop Mode compared to Game Mode

  • Improved support for rotated displays

  • Better scale factor out of the box on TVs

  • Adds support for external HDR displays

  • Adds support for VRR displays

  • Adds support per-display scale factor

  • For more information, see Plasma release announcements

  • https://kde.org/announcements/plasma/6/6.3.0/

  • https://kde.org/announcements/plasma/6/6.4.0/

• Keyboard layout and language are now obeying Game Mode settings

• Improved windowing behavior for games running in Proton

• Fixed a bug in Desktop Mode causing previously open applications to not be remembered when using the 'Return to Gaming Mode' shortcut to logout

• Fixes for experimental nested desktop mode

• Fixed Desktop Mode night color settings inappropriately remaining active when switching back to Game Mode

System Firmware

• Includes Steam Deck LCD BIOS v133

  • Security updates

  • Added "Memory Power Down" setup option

  • Preliminary support for hibernation

• Includes Steam Deck OLED BIOS v114

  • Security updates

  • Charging LED now changes color when charge limit is reached, rather than only at 100%

Non-Deck

• Improved compatibility with recent Intel and AMD platforms

• Greatly improved video memory management on discrete GPU platforms

• Fixed a compatibility issue with the SteamOS chainloader that could cause a boot failure on some desktop systems with recent UEFI firmware

• Power button short and long presses now supported across a wide variety of devices

• Improved controller support for OneXPlayer F1 series, GPD Win 5, GPD Win Mini, Anbernic Win600, OrangePi NEO, and Lenovo Legion Go

• Added controller support for OneXPlayer X1 series and Lenovo Legion Go 2

• Added system and controller firmware update support for the Lenovo Legion Go 2

• Added preliminary charge limiting support for Legion Go, Legion Go S, and Legion Go 2 - currently only accessible in Desktop Mode

• Added controller RGB LED color settings for the Lenovo Legion Go 2

• Added controller, TDP control, and speaker audio support for the ASUS ROG Xbox Ally series

• Reduced handheld controller input latency from 5-8ms to 100-500us

• Night mode, color vibrance, and color temperature sliders in Steam now work on Z2E and later AMD APUs

• Seamless boot fixes for Z2E and later AMD APUs

• Automatically handle internally rotated display for some third-party handhelds

• Improved motion control support for handhelds with BMI260 IMUs

• SD card reliability improvements for some third-party handhelds, including ASUS ROG Xbox Ally, Legion Go 1, Legion Go S, Legion Go 2, and MSI Claw

• Fixed washed out colors for Zotac and OneXPlayer handhelds with OLED

• Fixed some GPU hangs on Phoenix APU devices (Tales of Arise, Octopath Traveler II)

• Fixed ASUS ROG Ally power consumption from fingerprint reader while shut down

• Fixed trackpad losing functionality after sleep/resume on the Legion Go

• Fixed spurious wake-ups when using a Logitech Bolt receiver

• Add controller support for MSI Claw devices (A1M, 7 AI+ A2VM, 8 AI+ A2VM, A8 BZ2EM)

• Add controller support for OneXPlayer APEX and X1 series.

• Improved gyro response for devices that use AccelGyro3D (Legion Go 1, Claw A1M)

• Fixed a system crash on international Asus ROG Xbox Ally models

• Fix Bluetooth not working on some Intel handhelds

• Add initial firmware for upcoming Intel handhelds

Developer

• Desktop Mode now uses Wayland by default

  • X11 support may still be selected via Steam developer settings, or via `steamosctl`

• Updated Linux kernel to 6.16

• Steam now uses steamos-manager to query available desktop sessions and trigger desktop session switching

• Added support for setting the desktop password in developer settings

• Initial support for running as a Virtual Machine guest (virtio guest drivers)

• Added support for third-party devices to trigger the SteamOS boot menu via EFI variable

• Added `custom-update` verb to `atomupd-manager` for easier testing of specific builds

• System reports now include more audio debug information

• Initial support for LAVD CPU scheduler via `steamosctl set-cpu-scheduler lavd`

Gabe Newell, yacht enthusiast and the founder of one of the biggest videogame storefronts and developers on the planet, has just bought a big stonking house with his seemingly bottomless well of "I own Steam" money.

The news comes courtesy of the Wall Street Journal, which reveals that Newell has bought a property in Manalapan, Florida, for $70.8 million from Cindy and Ron McMackin. The home's previous owners certainly didn't get a bad deal, mind, having purchased it for $39 million in 2020. Ah, to be on the property ladder and to make almost $32 million just by living somewhere.

Anyway, the estate—which has about 20,000 square footage—is located on the Intracoastal Waterway and has a tunnel directly connecting the house to a slice of the ocean, as you can see in the video embedded above. It also, naturally, has a dock and boat lift. Likely for Newell's superyachts (or indeed, a smaller boat to ferry him back and forth) one of which he purchased for $500 million back in May.

It also enjoys a substantial outdoor pool, which is appropriately snazzy for a mansion that costs more than you or I'll likely see in our lifetimes. On the whole, it's an appropriate domicile for Newell, who has taken up a lot of scuba diving in recent years. Back in July of last year, Newell confirmed in a YouTube interview that his daily routine was the following:

"I get up, I work, I go scuba-diving, work some more, [then] either go on a second scuba dive or I go to the gym and work out. I live on a boat so I just hang out with everybody on the boat. Then I work."

So, yeah—snagging a mansion where you can live on both your big boat(s) and an actual demesne seems like a logical next step. I'm happy for him—and not at all jealous of his routine scuba breaks, which I tried to suggest as an expense for the team here at PC Gamer and was told "Harvey, we cannot afford a superyacht". Life is deeply and mercilessly unfair, sometimes.

The FCC has just made public some exhibits for the left Steam Frame controller (via SadlyItsBradley). We've known the FCC ID 2AES4-1013 refers to the left controller for the upcoming Valve VR headset for a while, but we now have iFixit-style teardown pictures of it, courtesy of Valve itself.

Things could presumably still change, but the main takeaway is that it looks like the controller could actually be pretty repairable.

The pictures show internals made of multiple little PCBs, rather unlike the Index's giant, finnicky PCB chunk that requires a soldering iron for some repairs. It looks like the new controller will have plenty of threaded screws, too, and everything looks pretty easy to access.

This isn't too surprising, given we were very impressed with the new Steam Controller's repairability. Our Jacob Ridley did a teardown of the Steam Controller and concluded: "Valve has shown it cares about repairability in the past and that holds true for the Steam Controller... Many parts of the Steam Controller should be an easy replacement with minimal fuss, especially once spare parts are available to purchase."

Regarding the Steam Frame more generally, Valve has been sticking to its summertime launch goal, and a recent shipping manifest suggests that Frame imports are already arriving in Valve's US warehouse. The new FCC filings are just further evidence of a hopefully imminent launch.

We still don't know how the headset will be priced, however. One thing to note on this front is that it's a standalone device, meaning it has to have memory so it can, well, run games—16 GB of LPDDR5, no less. In other words, it won't be immune to the RAMpocalypse.

Still, every little helps, and not having to fork out for a whole new controller if anything goes wrong would be a nice way to potentially keep costs a little lower, even if indirectly.

SteamOS, once the purview of the Steam Deck alone, eventually opened itself to other handhelds. Officially that extends only to the the Legion Go S, but beta versions of the operating system have since supported the Asus ROG Xbox Ally and "Other AMD powered handhelds."

The key term there being 'AMD', because until very recently, SteamOS had only supported handhelds running an AMD processor. Now, though, a new SteamOS beta seems to have added support for Intel and one YouTuber has got it up and running on an MSI Claw (via VideoCardz).

The 3.8.7 beta lists "Improved compatibility with recent Intel and AMD platforms" and, more conspicuously, controller support for MSI Claw devices and "SD card readability improvements" for the same. Excluding a recent deviation, the MSI Claw is of course an Intel-based handheld.

This, on its own, doesn't imply that Intel-based handhelds will actually run SteamOS well and have games playable on the platform. But thankfully ETA Prime on YouTube has actually tested it out using a Claw 8 AI+ with a Lunar Lake CPU, the Intel Core Ultra 7 258V.

They struggle to bring up the menu with the left-side button, meaning they have to go into desktop/mouse mode to do so, and they also note an inability to adjust TDP, meaning a third-party plugin is required to do so.

Apart from this, everything seems to work just fine, although games will need some optimisation, as ETA PRIME says Cyberpunk, for instance, does run better on Windows on the handheld.

We should remember this is only a beta, but it's a promising look at what's to come. I doubt Valve would be working on it if it didn't plan on getting the release out there officially for Intel handhelds.

It's certainly a good time for Valve to be working on adding Intel support to SteamOS, not least because of MSI's upcoming Panther Lake-powered Claw 8 EX AI+. That handheld certainly impressed our Dave when he tried it, and in the beta notes Valve does mention new "initial firmware for upcoming Intel handhelds", so it's exciting news on that front, too.

Well, assuming anyone will be able to afford the new Claw in the first place, that is—pricing isn't looking pretty.