If you play on a Steam Deck, or just rock with Big Picture Mode on your PC, the latest Steam client beta will be of big interest: It adds a new "Big Art Mode" that makes your home screen look a whole lot prettier (this is a subjective evaluation, yes, but I think it's prettier), a new screensaver feature, and a range of performance improvements and bug fixes.

The Big Art Mode is the big deal, so we'll start with that. Rather than the cluttered look of the standard interface, Big Art lowers the carousel of recently played games, and splashes, well, big art from the highlighted game across the backdrop.

So instead of this (not the video, the image below it):

You get this:

It's not quite perfect: Some games, like The Merlies, don't really adapt to the system super well.

Overall though, it's a cleaner and sexier look, ideal for those of you who prefer to keep things neat and tidy. And all the content offered through the old UI remains available, you just have to scroll down to see it now.

The new screensaver option in Big Picture Mode is also entirely cosmetic but very cool. You can choose from a slideshow of art from your recently played games, with or without your own screenshots included, or a "retro inspired bouncing logo" that has the Steam logo slowly bouncing off the edges of the screen, just like your dad's old DVD player. With a little effort, you can also set up custom screensavers.

Some of the less flashy stuff offered in this update is also very useful: Steam startup performance should be better following the update, the performance impact of game recording on some Direct3D 12 games on Windows has been reduced, and Linux support has been updated.

It's a beta, so there's always a possibility that things could go wrong, but Valve is generally very good with this stuff so I'd say it's not too much of a dice roll. If you want to check it out for yourself, you can opt into the Steam client beta by way of the Interface menu in your Steam settings. The full patch notes for the latest Steam client beta are below.

• Homescreen - Big Picture Mode
  • Added a new 'Big Art Mode' option for the home screen. This can be enabled in Settings > Home.
  • Added Personal Calendar to the Recommended tab on the home screen
• Screensaver - Big Picture Mode
  • Added a new screensaver feature, accessible in Settings > Customization. There are two screensavers available:
    • The default is a game art slideshow that can be configured to show artwork from recently played games and your recent in-game screenshots.
    • A retro inspired bouncing logo screensaver
  • Big Picture mode can also load custom screensavers. Similar to startup movies, they can be placed in the config\uioverrides\screensavers directory in your Steam install directory (e.g. C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam or ~/.steam/root). You can use the bouncing logo screensaver (in the steamui\screensavers directory) as an example to get started.
• General
  • Improved Steam Client startup performance
  • Fixed a case where after server maintenance some users might fail to auto-reconnect to Steam
  • Fixed bug where being prompted to refresh credentials more than once could trigger an immediate restart
  • On Windows, using the systray menu to exit while the Steam window is minimized will no longer flash the window visible briefly
  • Dialogs that appear for serious error conditions now stay above the main window
• Game Recording
  • Fixed some cases where playback would jump to an unexpected point in the timeline when reaching the end of a play session or clip
  • Decreased performance impact of game recording for some D3D12 games on Windows
• In-Game Overlay
  • Fixed frame rate hitches in D3D11 and D3D12 games when taking screenshots on Windows
  • Fixed rendering the overlay and using other overlay related features (screenshots, game recording, etc.) in Vulkan games that create multiple windows.
• Big Picture Mode
  • Added explicit warning text to power menu confirmation dialogs when proceeding will shut down an active game
  • Updated default artwork when an app does not have library or hero artwork
  • Reorganized the idle timer settings when on battery and AC power
• Steam Input
  • Improved CPU performance at runtime and in configuration loading
  • Added information about which configurations are compatible in the configurator browser when using a game that requires Steam Input API
  • Fixed the controller support widget showing "This game doesn't support controllers" for unreleased games that don't have controller support information yet
  • Fixed controllers not using the desktop configuration on the desktop UI login window
  • Added the missing settings for adjusting emulated joystick adaptive centering on trackpad
• Linux
  • Improved download speeds on high latency connections.
  • The "Select compatibility tool" dropdown is now always visible.
    • The recommended compatibility tool, or steam runtime for native games, now shows at the top of the list as the "Default" option.
    • Compatibility tool aliases, e.g. "Proton Stable", can now be selected from this dropdown.
  • The SteamOS compatibility dialogs will now show in desktopUI when installing games not verified for that HW
  • On Desktop Linux we will now show the SteamOS unsupported dialog when installing games that are known to not work with Proton
  • Improve distro information collection for hardware survey, preferring data from /etc/os-release.
• SteamRT3 Experimental Beta
  • Fixed "Add a Non-Steam Game" showing an invalid list of applications.
  • Fixed the "Run Steam when my computer starts" toggle.
• Remote Play
  • A PIN is no longer required to download an app to a remote device. A PIN is still required to Install and Stream from a remote device.
  • Adding Download Complete notification for a remote download if you initiated the download on your current device.

While I've largely enjoyed any time I've dipped a toe into virtual reality, I definitely do not own a VR headset. As cool as the tech is, that hardware remains an expensive niche within the increasingly pricey PC gaming landscape.

Global VR headset shipments apparently declined by 18% year-on-year in the second quarter of 2026, according to the latest data from Counterpoint Research. That doesn't surprise me—though it's also not great news for Valve or the potentially imminent release of its Steam Frame VR headset.

A dearth of major game releases is one reason why VR headsets aren't the most in-demand hardware. For instance, Valve's Half-Life: Alyx remains an unsurpassed high bar six-years after release. Counterpoint Research also highlights that VR isn't immune to the same pricing pressures as the rest of consumer hardware, citing Meta’s decision to raise the price Quest 3 and Quest 3S due to the memory supply crisis as adding "further pressure to an already cooling market."

Interestingly though, VR appears to enjoy consistent demand from businesses. "Enterprises and governments are generally less price-sensitive than consumers when adopting VR’s digital twin and spatial computing capabilities to address operational challenges and enhance productivity," Counterpoint Research says. "Meanwhile, driven by the continued development of the robotics industry, particularly in China, demand for VR headsets used for data collection and remote robot control is expected to grow this year."

Contrastingly AR devices, like Meta's smart glasses, have had an incredible year. "Global shipments of AR devices surged 138% [year-on-year] and 10% [quarter-on-quarter] in Q2 2026, driven by new product launches, international expansion by OEMs, and China’s 6.18 promotional campaigns."

Meta is easily the largest player in this space outside of China, with a 54% share of the AR/VR OEM market in the second quarter of 2026. There's definitely a lot I could say about the privacy concerns surrounding Meta's smart glasses—not to mention the money pit that is Reality Labs—but allow me to start bringing things back to Valve.

As far as we're concerned, the best VR headset overall is the Meta Quest 3, which will now set you back $600 at least. The best budget option, the Meta Quest 3S, now costs $350. Given the already mentioned RAMpocalypse, it will be impressive if Valve can offer its latest VR challenger at a price point that can compete. But given the pricing woes of the Steam Machine amid this here memory supply crisis, that could be a struggle.

Given that recent data mining suggests that, rather than making a debut with something new, the aforementioned six-year-old game might be the key launch offering instead, I'm a little unsure about Valve's footing. If you're already all-in on VR, then you've likely already got the hardware and you already loved Half-Life: Alyx when it first came out—but is the Steam Frame keeping a trick up its sleeve to justify Valve re-entering the 'cooling' VR market? Time will tell.

Valve rolled out 18+ age verification for Australian Steam users yesterday, which was inevitable: both PlayStation and Xbox have already done so and it is, after all, illegal not to, with fines up to AU$50 million at stake. But unlike PlayStation and Xbox, which offer a small handful of ways to verify one's adulthood, Valve has only one: you must own a credit card.

And no, your debit card won't work, or at least, mine doesn't. You'll need an actual credit card: a card that uses money you don't have, versus a card that uses money you do. It makes a bit of sense, because Australians need to be 18 to qualify for a credit card, whereas teenagers can own a debit card.

But there are other complications: You may be an adult and not qualify for a credit card because you don't earn enough money. You may not meet a particular bank's credit assessment criteria, as per CommBank. You may have a poor credit history. Or, you may simply not want to have a credit card because the prospect of spending money not in your possession is odd to you. If you fall under any of these categories—and I do the latter—then sorry: Valve won't sell you R18+ videogames.

It's not even possible to view the store page for an R18+ game. When I click on Doom 2016, I receive this message:

"Valve is required by the Age-Restricted Material App Distribution Services Code to verify that you are 18 or older before accessing mature content. If you wish to do so, please add a valid Australian credit card to your account and afterwards update the Mature Content Preferences."

As people online have pointed out, it's still possible to buy Steam keys for R18+ games from third-party sellers like Fanatical and Green Man Gaming, and then redeem them on Steam. So it's not a bullet proof answer, but then, few age verification methods are completely desirable. Third-party verification providers like Persona, for example, have raised serious privacy and information security concerns.

I've reached out to Valve to ask whether it intends to implement other age verification methods for Australian users and if so, when.

A release date for the Steam Frame has not yet been officially announced. However, data mining by VR leaker Brad Lynch has unearthed a reservation system in Valve's back-end, suggesting the hardware may not be far off.

Lynch shared a look at the definitely not yet live reservation system on X. "Expect nothing. It isn’t ready," he posted, accompanied by a screenshot of a lottery drawing notification email claiming the draw results would be revealed on the placeholder date of 31 December, 1969. Obviously, Valve aren't time travellers, and this date was likely chosen to avoid any part of this system going live before it's meant to.

Lynch wrote that the reservation system "is already up in Steam's backend for these two SKUs" in an earlier post, but shared no further hardware details. The data miner then added, "Before you ask: No. You can’t do anything with this information to beat the lottery system."

A reservation system isn't all that surprising, as Valve had these in place for both the Steam Machine and the new Steam Controller. The queue appears to have shortened for the Steam Machine since its June release, but Valve likely won't catch up on new Steam Controller reservations until 2027.

Uncovering a similar reservation system for Valve's VR headset is significant mainly because it implies a Steam Frame release could be close enough to touch. It also suggests stock may not be abundant to begin with—at least, not to the point that a reservation system wouldn't be necessary.

When Cookie Clicker and Candy Box both released in quick succession in 2013, I remember them being received mostly as a joke, or else as an amusing parody of "watch numbers go up" RPG gameplay. Then something weird happened: all my colleagues became fixated on Cookie Clicker. So did I. Lots of people on the internet, on Twitter and in various forums like Reddit, confessed to having become addicted to it.

Cookie Clicker did have an antecedent in Ian Bogost's Cow Clicker, which was a very deliberate satire. But Cookie Clicker wasn't presented as satire. And yet, it was so transparently meaningless that people doubted it could be anything else. You click a cookie repeatedly to generate more cookies. Once you earn enough cookies, you can invest those cookies into various ways of expediting the cookie making process. You click and watch numbers go up. It's stupid.

Fast forward more than a decade later and idlers, also known as incremental games, are massive on Steam. Last week, 54 games with the tag "idler" released. In total, there are 4,314 games with that tag on Steam.

Some of these look pretty good as far as idlers go. Next Reign: Kingdom has pretty handmade pixel art, atmospheric music and strategic elements. We Need More Humans! Has a novel premise—you have to become increasingly proficient at abducting humans—and, as far as this genre goes, a distinctive art style. Zad Archery's art style, on the other hand, is very generic but it has nearly 700 "mostly positive" reviews, so it must be doing something right.

None of those listed above are likely to rival genre heavyweights like Bongo Cat (currently being played by 135,803 people), Task Bar Hero (66,292 people) and Banana (3,628). But they have at least managed to rise above the onslaught of idler AI slop. The vast majority of the idlers that released on Steam last week have an AI disclosure.

And many of them look oddly, almost uncannily similar. Compare the UIs in the gallery below:

There's a special fondness for a roughly similar shade of blue, isn't there? They are not pleasant UIs. What is going on here? Why do these games all look roughly the same?

A quick look at their AI disclosures may be telling. Vespera has "AI generated images and other AI made components". Nexus: "Some assets were created using AI. I'm not as [sic] artist lol." Brainrot Clicker, fittingly, has "some pre-generated visual assets, written content, and development-related creative work", while Path of the Idle Cultivator used AI "for UI and some translations".

These are just four examples: browse the raw unfiltered list of Steam idler games and you'll find many, many more examples of games with loosely the same approach to UI, both in terms of layout and that gravitation towards a dark blue background colour.

The amount of games bearing the idler tag spiked dramatically last year, according to SteamDB. In 2020 there were 100, in 2024 there were 647, last year there were 1033 and this year—so far!—there are 1811. There are 1119 coming soon and 380 "TBA".

I don't mean to be too dismissive of the idler as a genre: there are decent examples. But the whole situation feels almost implausibly silly: Steam is being flooded with thousands of mindless "numbers go up" games developed primarily with the aid of generative AI. It's got to be the quintessence of brainrot.

If you'd told me in 2013 as I dumbly clicked on cookies that this was the future of the idler genre, I wouldn't have believed you at first. Then, maybe five minutes later, after giving it some thought, I'd probably have to admit to the inevitability of it.

Top Steam games by revenue (August 25 - September 1)

Star Wars Zero Company tops the list, which wasn't necessarily guaranteed: yes, it's a Star Wars game, but it's also a strategy RPG in the style of XCOM. Unfortunately, the offices at Bit Reactor probably aren't thrumming with post-launch elation: 80 percent of its workforce has reportedly been furloughed.

The Blood of Dawnwalker and Onimusha both released after the period tracked by this chart, but for what it's worth—and perhaps that's not much—The Blood of Dawnwalker's pre-orders had it at 17, while Onimusha came in at 28. Given The Blood of Dawnwalker has already sold a million units just three days after release (across all platforms) but we don't know how Onimusha has done.

Elden Ring Tarnished Pack came in at 29, which is quite low considering it's Elden Ring DLC. Most reviews suggest it's not worth the $5: "Not worth the money," one Steam user wrote. "Should have been free as it is a very small update made to promote the launch of the game on the Switch." A lot of reviews are in agreement.

Last week's Steam deep cuts

It's strange to think about in hindsight, but Left 4 Dead 2 was a controversial game in the run-up to its release in November 2009—just one year after the original Left 4 Dead laid the foundations for today's enormous cooperative gaming scene. Indeed, it was that rapid turnaround, combined with the fact that the first Left 4 Dead was a relatively short game, which led to accusations that Left 4 Dead 2 was nothing more than a cynical ploy by Valve to cash in on the success of the first.

Ultimately, Left 4 Dead 2 would prove a worthy follow-up to Valve's cooperative blaster. But it turns out there was some skulduggery afoot behind the scenes on Left 4 Dead 2, just not the kind that fans suspected. Shortly before the sequel's launch, a cinematic trailer—which would ultimately serve as Left 4 Dead 2's introductory cutscene—leaked onto the Internet. Now, it's been revealed that this 'leak' was orchestrated by Valve to evade the censorious watch of the Entertainment Software Ratings Board.

This is according to former Valve writer and Left 4 Dead designer Chet Faliszek, who revealed Valve's deliberate leak in a YouTube video about cut Left 4 Dead voice lines (via Ars Technica). In the video, Faliszek explains why Left 4 Dead 2 had a large number of voice lines cut from the final game. One reason was that, at the time, Valve had run-ins with numerous countries and ratings boards over the series' depictions of violence and use of profane language.

"You have to remember, especially during Left 4 Dead 1 and Left 4 Dead 2 time, Valve was in fights with the ESRB, with Australia, with Germany, with a bunch of countries about the profanity in the game, or the violence," he explains. "One of [Valve's] lawyers stepped in and said that us writers needed to be babysat on this. And so [the] first thing we did was, well, we made sure there was no profanity in there that crosses the line—basically F-bombs."

Faliszek personally believed that, when it comes to censorship of language and depictions of violence, "you push it and have the ESRB push back". But Valve's lawyer felt differently and Faliszek went along with it. However, the ESRB's regulatory oversight didn't just cover games, but extended to the marketing material for those games. And unlike today, the ESRB had different regulatory rules for trailers and games. Language or violence that might land a game a 'Mature' rating could result in a trailer that depicted the same things being banned outright.

It's this exact scenario Valve faced with Left 4 Dead 2. The cinematic trailer is no more violent or foul-mouthed than the game itself, but according to Faliszek, the ESRB drew a hard line on it. Hence, Valve decided the trailer should find its way online by 'accident'. "We leaked our trailer ahead of time, because they wouldn't let us release the trailer," Faliszek says. "I'll just admit that. I think we can't get in trouble for that now. It's like 20 years ago."

Valve's handheld launched in February 2022, opening the door to playing your Steam library on the go. Now, almost half a decade later, 30,000 games either enjoy the green stamp of being Steam Deck verified, or are at least considered 'playable.'

According to the latest numbers from SteamDB that breaks down to 8,964 Steam Deck Verified games and 21,083 games considered 'playable' on the handheld (via Gaming On Linux). That's a big jump from the 3,000 games either Verified or Playable back in May 2022.

'Verified' means your game of choice should work great on the Steam Deck from first boot, whereas 'Playable' games require either some finagling or adjustments for the best experience. Steam Deck verification is also joined by similar compatibility checks for the Steam Machine, the soon-to-be-released Steam Frame, and SteamOS more broadly. I make the whole thing sound straightforward, but it's worth noting that the Steam Deck's full verification criteria can present developers with confusing hoops to jump through.

One more thing to note: a game with neither badge doesn't necessarily mean it won't run on the Steam Deck at all. For just one example, Dragon Age: Origins is officially 'Unsupported,' but our Shaun says it runs incredibly on Valve's handheld. Granted, that's a 17-year-old game, but I think the point of 'Unsupported doesn't always mean a no-go on the Steam Deck' still stands. The thing you might want to be more wary of is how the kernel-level anti-cheat systems often used in competitive games don't play well with the handheld's Linux-based SteamOS.

And it doesn't mean games will always be playable on the Steam Deck. Ubisoft recently announced that it is "removing For Honor from the Linux platform to ensure a safer environment for our players as we cannot meaningfully deploy protection on this platform." Which means no third-person melee fun for you on Steam Deck, so from September 10 there will be one less game playable on Steam Deck.

Anyway, for a bit more context, SteamDB also says well over 130,000 games total have been released on Steam to date. SteamDB's figures suggest there were half as many games on Steam back in 2022. With the platform having grown so significantly in just the last four years, the days of 10% of all Steam games enjoying official Steam Deck compatibility feel so long ago.

Folks who pick up Valve's soon to be released VR headset, the Steam Frame, may get a free Half-Life game with their purchase. Unfortunately, I'm not talking about a brand new release. Plus, it may well be a game virtual reality gamers already have—Half-Life: Alyx.

Dataminer Brad Lynch unearthed this tidbit, sharing a screenshot of code strings that refer to a 'Frame Alyx Promo'. He also observed on X that Valve did a similar thing in the past, offering the game for free with purchases of the Index VR headset after the game launched. That all occurred, of course, quite a few years ago now.

Lynch also noted in an earlier post that internal branches of Alyx had been regularly updated since early last year, though "the public app is only just now starting to get those many months of staged updates." The implication is that these are optimisation tweaks specifically for the Steam Frame, though that's not been confirmed.

Lynch is fairly reliable as a leaker regarding all things VR, having previously spotted that a number of SteamVR code components had been renamed 'Frames' shortly before the Steam Frame was fully revealed.

More recently, he spotted "the first 'official' Android app on Steam," which would make the most of all of Valve's work on its custom Android compatibility container for Linux, Lepton. Lynch also suggested back in June that the entire VR sphere may enjoy much better displays in the next few years, like Micro-OLEDs from Samsung.

So, no, it doesn't seem that Half-Life 3 is on the horizon, but I won't turn down a free copy of one of the best virtual reality games to come out in years. Mind you, the fact Alyx itself is already six years old probably says a lot about the state of VR these days.

While the Steam Frame is designed to play your entire non-VR library as well, given the lack of big releases in the niche, I personally won't be rushing out to buy a fresh virtual reality headset any time soon.

On Saturday, information began circulating online about a massive, 12-terabyte leak of Valve data that included prototypes of numerous classic Valve games. But it seems what is now being dubbed the "teraleak" contained far more than just old builds of Portal 2 and possible weapons from Half-Life 2: Episode 3, and may include prototypes of countless third-party games released on Steam over a ten-year period.

Specifically, the leak consists of Steam file groups known as 'depots' which were stored on Steam's servers between 2003 and 2013. A full list of these depots was shared on Reddit by user RefreshingCapybara, which includes depot names for hundreds of games as well as trailers, teasers, soundtracks, demos, game trials, and more. "Not to be hyperbolic, but this may be one of if not the biggest leaks to occur," RefreshingCapybara commented in sharing the list.

To be clear, the list doesn't show us what—if anything—is contained within those file groups. But as reported by Ars Technica, game preservation website Hidden Palace has identified numerous depots with obtainable builds in them. These include various prototypes of Spec Ops: The Line, Sid Meier's Civilization V, Mafia 2, and Grand Theft Auto 3.

According to Ars, it's also likely that the builds included in the leak are from a collection that has been amassed from various sources over time. Many game builds from before 2013—which is when Valve switched its content distribution pipeline from Steam2 to SteamPipe—were considered lost media up to now. Clearly, though, they were more accessible than Valve or anyone else realised.

As such, it's possible the leak is the product of multiple people pulling together builds from various sources (like old PCs) into one enormous archive. The most interesting clue to the leak's origins is a readme file contained within the leak, which includes the line "warm n good wishes to all hoarders who had stuff from this collection".

The fact that the build includes so many third-party prototypes may also make it legally perilous. "That archive contains a significant amount of third-party content, meaning we are dealing with a dramatically more dangerous situation than if it were just some Valve builds," wrote YouTuber and Valve specialist Tyler McVicker on social media.

Given the sheer amount of data that has been leaked, it will likely be some time before we know the true extent of what it contains. On the Valve side, dataminers have already unearthed a complete version of Portal 2's 2009 "beta", as well as prototypes for Left 4 Dead, Counter-Strike: Global Offensive, and even some files from Valve's cancelled puzzler F-STOP.

A ridiculous amount of games release on Steam every week and basically none of them make any money. It only takes a cursory browse of Steam's unfiltered new release list to understand why this is true.

But which genre is most likely to make money or be a hit? Ichiro Lambe, Matt Martindale and Dr. Tim Ermilov have collaborated on a Steam revenue report on weloveit.io and, as the name implies, the purpose of the site is to estimate the earnings of all Steam games, or at least, those with a price tag and at least one review.

The trio doesn't have access to Valve's internal sales data, so they rely on the Boxleiter method to estimate that data, which assumes that a games' review count is "roughly proportional of its sales, so multiplying reviews by a constant gives an estimated unit count." For a standard estimate (rather than a conservative or generous one) the multiplier is 35 times the amount of user reviews.

This may not provide exact figures, but as the site notes, it's a technique used by analysts and publishers and there aren't very many better ways to arrive at a sales estimate. And so, in the style of all great data enthusiasts, they've used the technique to map the success (or lack thereof) of over 100,000 Steam games in handy graph form.

Baldur's Gate 3 is estimated to have made $1,795,480,003 since its early access launch in late 2020. On the other hand Free Solo, a physics climbing game released in March, has made an estimated $34.

In the graph below every dot is an individual game (for a much better view of this graph you'll need to visit weloveit.io).

I was fascinated by the "genre economics" section, which uses user tags to get a sense of how genres rank on Steam. "A game counts towards a genre only when the tag is one of its six most popular tags," according to the study, so there needs to be pretty unanimous agreement among Steam users that the tag is accurate.

According to the data, sandbox games have the highest "hit rate" on Steam. Hit rate measures the amount of games with the tag that have made more than $100k. The sandbox tag has a 27.3% hit rate.

Of course,"sandbox" is unwieldy and impractical as a genre designation: the most popular games with the tag are unhelpfully different: Terraria, Red Dead Redemption 2 and Project Zomboid. But it does at least demonstrate that games promising some amount of freedom are preferred by Steam users, whether they be sloppy retail sims or $400 million cowboy adventures.

The next tag, FPS, is probably the "real" genre winner. It has a 21.6% hit rate, though keep in mind a lot of games that aren't strictly focused on shooting, like Schedule I or Portal 2, are tagged with FPS.

Here's the top 10 genres on Steam according to their hit rate:

There aren't a huge amount of surprises in that list. I guess I'm surprised to see visual novels rank so highly, though they are ubiquitous on Steam. Sports probably ranks highly because there are fewer games to which it applies compared to, say, "puzzle", a tag with a 9.5% hit rate.

The lowest ranking tags (according to report's list, at least) are probably more telling. Hidden Object games have a 5.4% hit rate, while 2D platformers have a 5.5% hit rate. Developing a game in either of those genres is thus, according to the study, risky business. Though they may also be cheaper to develop, and thus more common, and thus less likely to be discovered.

The full study is well worth browsing because it's full of great insights. For example: 2D platformers have severely dropped off in popularity since their heyday of 2016, but visual novels have remained almost consistently popular since 2014.

Top Steam games by revenue (August 18 - 25)

First of all, its worth noting that Star Wars Zero Company released on the 28th, and its review embargo lifted on the 26th, so next week's chart will better reflect its launch performance. It still came in at number 12, rising 12 positions for what must have been an eleventh hour rush on pre-orders (there were cosmetic pre-order incentives).

Based on the chart—which is, as always, a reflection of best performers by revenue and not necessarily by units sold—Mortal Shell 2 had a successful launch, but probably no where near as successful as How to Fish. The latter is a 1-4 player "physics-based fishing simulator, and while it looks like quintessential friendslop on the surface, it's a whole lot more violent than normal. It looks very fun.

The Wardogs beta obviously paid off as a taster for the full game, which releases next month. As for Stalker 2, it got a massive 2.0 update last week and a steep discount, hence its reappearance on the list.

Last week's Steam deep cuts

A massive cache of internal builds from Valve has reportedly leaked online, including beta builds of several classic Valve titles and possible weapons from Half-Life 2's cancelled third episode.

The leak, which began circulating on Saturday and comes from an unknown source, includes 12 terabytes of data currently being sifted through by data miners. The files are dated from a ten-year period between 2003 and 2013, and include builds and assets of many Valve projects across that timespan.

Thus far, data from Counter-Strike: Global Offensive, Left 4 Dead, and Portal 2 have all been claimed to feature in the leak. This reportedly includes the complete Portal 2 beta from 2009, a much sought-after artifact for Portal 2 fans.

The 2009 beta has a somewhat different story from the final game. It still takes place in the ruins of Aperture Science, but sees you guided through the initial test-chambers by pre-recordings of GLaDOS rather than Wheatley, and features other personality cores much more prominently. Curiously, a team of beta researchers and enthusiasts recently released a Portal 2 mod that attempts to recreate the beta build as accurately as possible, a project that took four years to realise.

In addition, Valve-focussed YouTuber and enthusiast Gabe Follower reports that the files include the Weaponizer, an unfinished weapon that has been previously linked to Half-Life 2: Episode 3. Information about the Weaponizer appeared in a separate leak that occurred in 2011, inside a directory labelled "ep3", while a gun that resembles the Weaponizer was shown in footage of Episode 3 that appeared in Valve's 20^th anniversary documentary on Half-Life 2 (via Gamerant).

Also apparently included are files (but apparently not a working build) of Valve's cancelled puzzle game F-STOP, a precursor to Portal 2 that was in-development for around a year before Valve canned the project. Also known as 'Aperture Camera' F-STOP featured a mechanic similar to the one seen in 2023 puzzler Viewfinder, in which the player takes photographs of the environment which can then be applied as 3D objects in the game world.

While it's not clear where the leak originated from, it has been linked to Valve's Steam2 content-server infrastructure, which was replaced by SteamPipe in March 2013, which would explain why the latest files from the archive are from that year.

I have contacted Valve for comment on the leak and will update this story with any response.

I don't envy Deadlock players who are dying to see the hybrid MOBA-shooter continue to grow in its pseudo-early access state. Valve is notoriously elusive when it comes to communication and has never made any promises to update it on a regular schedule.

This is the kind of uncertainty that drives Deadlock players to salivate over any new rumor or post by the developer-run Discord and forum account known as Yoshi. It's also what drives them to keep watch over the pizzerias near Valve's Seattle offices for spikes in visitors in the hopes that developers are lining up for grub as they finish the next major update.

This week, Deadlock players were hoping Valve would release its follow-up to the Old Gods, New Blood update, which added six new heroes to the game along with other major changes. Valve previously said a "large content update" was in the works alongside two other smaller updates to its ranked mode and items. But now that the ranked rework is out of the way, players were hoping to see another update before the end of the month.

According to a new post from Yoshi, the update is taking longer than expected. Yoshi doesn't specify if they're talking about the item update or the large content update—it almost implies they've been combined into one patch—but said it's going to have to wait until "late September."

"The delay is mainly due to the regular process of playtesting and iteration sometimes taking longer than expected, rather than a change in the scope of the update itself," they wrote. "We hope you will like the update when it comes out, and we'll make sure to give you a heads up (or order a ton of pizza) when things are a few days away or so."

Even though Valve has kept Deadlock an invite-only game since its debut, the last year of updates have gotten it to a place that feels like it could go fully public as an open beta. You never know with Valve, a studio that has spent years on projects only to quietly abandon them before. But the Old Gods, New Blood update was the first time it made a big deal of a new patch, creating an entire webpage dedicated to it and letting the community vote on the release order of the new heroes.

It was an unprecedented level of effort that seemed to suggest Deadlock had a relatively large amount of weight behind it for a Valve project. Since then, the updates have kept a steady pace.

Whether or not Yoshi's acknowledgement of the pizza thing is tongue-in-cheek, it does make it seem like the team behind Deadlock is aware that players desperately want more from the game and that it plans to deliver on that as fast as it can. I hope it also means Deadlock is closer than ever to opening the gates for everyone to try its sharply-designed mix of MOBA and hero shooter mechanics.

One of the quiet tragedies of Valve's game library is a standalone Ravenholm game that never came to fruition—it was being worked on by Arkane Studios in the late 2000s, and it would've probably been pretty damn good if Valve had the moolah to make it. Over a decade later, an entire hour of footage would drop online, with reports stating that around 10 levels had been fleshed out prior.

Now, almost 20 years later, Arkane's founder Raphaël Colantonio has managed to find his zen with the heartbreak, speaking with Press Box PR in an interview earlier this month (thanks, GamesRadar+).

"It took us a decade to move on from the pain of the Ravenholm project because we were incredibly excited about doing that game and we put in a lot of creative energy into it and eventually when the decision was made to cut it, we did not understand it as it happened," said Colantonio. "We were young and we were just refusing to see the reality of the situation, and the reality was much simpler than the way it looked to us."

Colantonio, who left Arkane in 2017 but was instrumental on one of its all-time greats, Dishonored, says that "it all came down to the economics behind Half Life 2 and how the DLCs were selling. They had a business ratio between how much they could spend and how they could make it to be worth it to them, because it takes the attention of the entire structure on their side."

With time to reflect, Colantonio views Arkane's involvement as more of an experiment in retrospect—especially given that a Ravenholm game had already been in development between 2005 and 2007: "They thought, you know, why not try these guys? We seemed pretty effective and eventually, like the two other attempts that they had looked at, we went somewhere with it, and it was cool. What we had was really, really cool.

"But it still needed more time, and too much time to finish … There was a business call at some point where it was decided that it didn’t really make sense. It was very painful for us but it made sense, we grew up and got a little bit more mature about it."

It's not all bad, though. It got them in touch with Viktor Antonov, a concept artist whose work was instrumental in forming the aesthetic of both Half Life and Dishonored. Antonov sadly died in 2025: "Eventually he joined us to create Dishonoured and we did not betray the Valve mentality. We learned a lot from them, actually. It’s just that we probably snuck in some of our own Arkane stuff in there as well."

Honestly, while I'm glad Colantonio's found peace, I can't help but feel a touch melancholy. The same Arkane that couldn't ship a game, but got a second chance with Dishonored in the 2010s, is now cleaved in two, with Arkane Austin closed entirely by Microsoft, and a thin film of French law protecting Arkane Lyon. Not that the earlier videogame industry was a cakewalk, Ravenholm's ill fate proves that, but still. It was a different time.

Vapor World: Over The Mind is a Soulslike Metroidvania with an evocative, painterly art style reminiscent of Lies of P and the narrative platformers of Playdead. According to Korean studio Alive Inc, the game had 100,000 wishlists just before its early access launch on August 19, mostly on the strength of a demo available since January 2025.

But what should have been a triumphant early access launch went pear shaped very quickly. At launch, few talked about the quite distinctive worldbuilding or the parry-heavy combat. Instead, all focus was trained entirely on something absent from the popular demo: very obvious AI use.

"Saw the very first cutscene, before any gameplay, and how the generative AI they used couldn't even keep the main character's model consistent," reads the "most helpful" Steam review for Vapor World. "From the trailers the gameplay looked pretty fun [but] unfortunately I support people not robots. If the look you want to go for is beyond the scope you can achieve right now then I suggest you change it or wait until you can produce the art and style you want with people doing it."

That's pretty representative of the Steam reviews at the moment: Vapor World is currently sitting on 64 "mostly negative" reviews.

It's undoubtedly a disappointing result for Alive Inc, whose headcount is "about five" according to the studio. It's also possible the studio was blindsided by the backlash: this Pew Research Center survey places South Korea as the least AI sceptical nation among 25 countries surveyed, including the US, the UK, Australia and India. According to MIT Technology Review, the South Korean government has overwhelmingly embraced AI. It even tried to roll out AI-powered school textbooks (which failed).

Half (or in some cases, slightly less) of those surveyed in the US, Italy, Australia and Brazil are "more concerned than excited" by AI use in daily life. In South Korea, those "more concerned than excited" by AI make up only 16 percent.

There's a trace of surprise in the inevitable statement made by studio director Young Kim, who promised the AI-generated cutscenes would be replaced "by this weekend" (this has already happened).

"If someone asked me what I think about using AI, the honest answer is that I would have to think about it for a long time," the director wrote. "The reason I chose AI was that I believed it could reach a level of expression our existing resources could not, and that it would let us focus more on the game itself, outside of story and cinematics."

He continued: "That was a hasty judgment on my part. Unless AI takes one more leap and reaches a point where no one can tell the difference, what I believed was still closer to an ideal than a reality. I expected some of you would be disappointed by our use of AI. I did not expect it to become this big."

The statement then hits upon a question that will be raised again and again in the coming months and years concerning creative work: if AI can do it better, why not? In this instance, it unambiguously could not: the cutscenes, and I've seen them, are quintessential slop, and compare very unfavourably to the in-game art. Young Kim says the studio originally composed the cutscenes in-engine, but later replaced them with AI. Somehow, his team didn't detect this chasm.

"The truth is, we spent a long time trying to tell this game's story with cutscenes made entirely by our own hands," the statement goes on. "The results were devastating every time. We came to believe we could not properly deliver this game's complex, difficult narrative that way, and that is why we turned to AI. But if that choice hurt your experience, the fault is not in the tool. It is in our own shortcomings."

Alive Inc joins a long list of studios who have reneged on AI use after extreme public backlash, including Larian Studios and Sandfall Interactive. Vapor World isn't wholesale slop—the studio worked hard on the core game and it shows—but the outcry surrounding its launch does show that using generative AI to cut corners isn't, for now, something audiences are willing to tolerate.

Top Steam games by revenue (August 11 - 18)

Overall a pretty unremarkable week for the top ten. Kingdom Hearts is there because Square Enix hosted a sale. Phantom Blade Zero pre-orders opened.

The top 11-20 part of the list is arguably more interesting: Mortal Shell 2 debuted at number 12, Wardogs pre-orders catapulted it to number 13 (though its current beta is apparently blowing up, with an all-time concurrent players peak of 105,774), and the Lord of the Rings: War in the North reissue has sold decently enough to help it reach number 17.

As for Wardogs: expect it to factor heavily into the charts in the coming weeks ahead of its September 11 release date.

Curiously, Star Wars Zero Company pre-orders debuted at number 24, way below Phantom Blade Zero and Wardogs pre-orders. Star Wars fatigue perhaps?

Last week's Steam deep cuts

Steam review of the week

"If you Spam Punch the Dude in the start of the game you Can level your unarm to level 100.

10/10 Broken just like Morrowind"

Skybob, on The Lantern of the Laughless Saint, who I'm sure is also relentlessly bunnyhopping to increase Acrobatics.

As we've reported on many times over the years, Valve's hardware efforts attract the attention of the DIY project community like no other. The Steam Controller is no exception, as creator Owen Feldman has managed to get classic text adventure Zork running on its internal hardware.

Feldman has documented the project on their blog, but it wasn't always a smooth ride to convince the controller to play ball (via Hackaday). An internal tool discovered within a Steam hardware updater folder was used to flash the firmware—but Feldman managed to temporarily brick their controller in the process.

After recovering the controller, a custom Rust-based program was used to emulate an Intel 8080 CPU and run the CP/M-80 operating system on the Steam Controller's internal processor. As the device has no keyboard or screen, the built-in USB connection was used for I/O streaming purposes.

So, what do you do first when you've successfully convinced a controller to emulate a CPU and run an OS all on its own? Well, you play games on it, of course.

A floppy disk (hey, remember those?) copy of Zork was used to load the game via an external drive, resulting in a Steam Controller rig that's been connected to a remarkable number of add-on devices. I doubt it knows exactly what hit it.

Still, the end result looks like a very playable experience. Feldman describes the process of creating the custom program as "1514 lines of pain," but what they've ended up with is the PC hardware equivalent of a magic trick. Who knew the Steam Controller could play games in its own right?

However, I think I'll be leaving this Steam Controller-flashing method well alone, and not just because my Rust coding abilities are non-existent. Feldman warns that bricking your device through the flashing process is a real possibility, and given that it's a $99 piece of kit, perhaps it's better to leave this one to the braver hardware hackers among us.

Our Jacob got his hands on a Steam Frame back in November of last year, and came away raving about the wireless VR headset's capabilities. Since then, we've reported on numerous signals that the Frame is on its way—but some new leaked videos give the rest of us a closer look at the hardware itself.

The videos were apparently leaked as part of an Arm Steam Client update, and have since pulled by Valve (via SteamDeckHQ). However, X account Steam Hardware Updates has reposted them, and what they reveal looks to be a very cushy, premium-looking design.

In one, a model demonstrates the process of putting on the Frame and adjusting the headband, including swapping out the internal faceplate to accommodate a pair of glasses. The large, cushioned rear-plate looks very comfortable, and the overall design is remarkably less... nerdy, for want of a better word, than I expected.

This particular video ends with a sequence of models wearing the VR headset in several, completely wrong ways, including as a shoulder bag. Even I smiled. There's also another video showing how to link the Steam Frame with the Steam mobile app for sign-in authentication purposes.

The focus adjustment wheel is demonstrated in another clip, while a full unboxing video shows exactly what you get in the packaging. There's the headset itself, of course, two wireless controllers, a large USB dongle, a cable, and an instruction manual/warranty card that's immediately thrown out of shot.

The video also shows the pairing process for the controllers, while even more clips posted in a separate comment go through what appears to be a short Steam Machine linking tutorial.

Ordinarily I'd advise a pinch of salt regarding leaks like this, but these are so well-done, I'd say we're probably looking at the final product. Valve is unlikely to be pleased—but I have to say, as someone not particularly interested in VR, the videos have made me want to try one for myself.

As for when the Steam Frame might be released? There's no official date as of yet, but the timing of these leaks suggests it won't be too long. We were told the second half of 2026, and here we are towards the end of August with plenty to go on. I wasn't that fussed before, but now the hype is beginning to build? Yep, even this VR cynic is kind of curious.

Lord of Undead is a "grim" third-person RPG about building an army of vicious zombies in order to maliciously raze the villages of mortals. The goal is to defeat peace and innocence, all the better for evil to prevail. You also get to build houses. It sounds pretty fun and, as far as I can tell, it's the second most popular game releasing on November 19 behind GTA 6.

Lord of Undead does have some advantages. The most obvious is that GTA 6 isn't coming to PC. It also has the most "Follows" of all Steam games releasing that day. Follows are different to wishlists: to follow a game is to see news and announcements about it in your news and updates feed, but you won't receive a notification when it releases. Wishlist data isn't public, but follows, for some reason, is.

Lord of Undead has a fairly impressive 2,649 follows right now, slightly more than Parry Survivor, which enjoys 2,062. Parry Survivor stars a school-uniformed anime character who must fend off waves of masked boys. It's from the creator of Kunkun League, Black Gunner Wukong and Evolve or Die, all of which have between 150 and 450 "very positive" reviews.

We have other games to look forward to as well: at least 30 more. Cute Country has 736 follows and is described on its Steam page as "super cute cure simulation operation single machine masterpiece" (I think it's basically a city builder with mobile game RPG elements). Then, with 123 follows is Phantom Vice Auto, which Chris Livingston has already written about.

Looking further afield, Man Simulator has a modest 9 follows. It's a "comedy simulator" where you get to be a slobbish middle-aged man: there's lawnmowing, fishing, hammering, wood chopping, barbequing, beer drinking, and it promises "meme-style presentation and humor".

And it wouldn't be a day on Steam, let alone GTA 6 launch day, without yet another first-person horror game. Flick is "a first-person body-cam horror game scientifically engineered to spike feelings of dread", which may help to alleviate our feelings of FOMO.

What else? Let's just list 'em shall we:

• Lord of Undead
• Parry Survivor
• Cute Country
• Phantom Vice Auto
• Flick
• Moba Team Manager
• Astro Industry Wars
• The Creator: Live Together
• Dig! Dig! Dino!
• Iona's Island
• Blyte
• Boom Rush: Desert OPS
• Core Logistics
• Sokobomb
• 树人：中国班主任
• Veil Breach: Raven County
• Neo Light
• Man Simulator
• Desert Island Time
• Utopium
• Cats and Pillos
• Anomaly Corp.
• Dungeon Cooking
• Divine Move
• Maximum Security Boyfriend
• G.E.M. Grab & Exit
• Sweet KOL (extremely NSFW!)
• Black Market Space Station Shop Simulator
• Crowns & Tiles
• Space Tenacity
• Ship Shape Slam!!!
• Pavel Repin's #tacticalunderground (DLC)

Curiously, there are actually more games releasing on November 19 than the day before and after (six on the 18th and 12 on the 20th). The same is true the Thursday before (27) and the Thursday after (5).

Will major publishers release anything close to GTA 6? And I'm talking, through the entirety of November? So far, according to our list of upcoming 2026 PC games, not really, though Devolver keeps promising it will.

Top Steam games by revenue (August 4 - 11)

Soulslike extraction RPG Mistfall Hunter disappeared from the top 10 after debuting in at number 3 last week (it ranked 12th, so almost).

Another interesting fact gleaned from just outside the top 10 is that Gears of War: E-Day came in at number 11, which is—as far as I can tell—the highest its reached since Steam pre-orders started on June 7. By contrast, Forza Horizon 6 hit number 4 on the revenue charts during the week pre-orders commenced.

I don't mean to seem like I'm ragging on Microsoft—I'm happy to do so for more important reasons—but Halo: Campaign Evolved has dropped pretty severely, coming in at 69 after enjoying 5th place last week. Assassin's Creed: Black Flag, by contrast, is dropping much more slowly.

It's neat to see Big Walk rank so highly, and it was overall a big week for niche Steam indies: Iron Nest is a heavy turret simulator and ReStory is about fixing old electronics.

Last week's Steam deep cuts

Steam review of the week

"EA didn't finish the game so I'm not finishing this revi"

Phantom, on the new Madden game, which is copping an absolute flogging by Steam users.

The Rideshare Stimulator AI fiasco almost, but not quite came to a close today when writer Stella Sacco shared that she had received a private message from Saber Interactive CEO Matthew Karch, who apologized for his hurtful comments to the press regarding her employment and capabilities.

In a separate post on LinkedIn, Karch reflected on the controversy and seemingly alluded to his personal contact with Sacco. But he also couldn't resist taking a swipe at Portal writer Chet Faliszek, who has publicly criticized Karch for his actions—most notably in the form of a 26-minute vlog on YouTube.

The briefest of recaps if you haven't been paying attention (bless you):

• Saber Interactive releases a trailer for Rideshare Stimulator, a mundane job sim where you play a cabbie.
• Writer Stella Sacco claims to have worked on the game before getting fired, her workload then taken over by an LLM.
• Saber's official statement on the matter admitted to AI use in Rideshare Stimulator, but denied that any writers were replaced wholesale by AI tools.
• Saber CEO Matt Karch supplied his own statement to This Week in Video Games, belittling Sacco's competency, asserting that she was not replaced by an LLM, but also that "I would frankly in retrospect have been happy to replace her with AI."

Today, Sacco shared a post to Bluesky saying she had been messaged by Karch, and that "he apologized unreservedly for the way he spoke about me in the press." While Sacco noted that she and Karch remained opposed in their personal stances on the use of AI, she concluded that, "Apologies are simply in too short supply these days to spurn one when it's offered."

Great. Awesome. That'd have been a wonderful place to end things. But Karch also shared his own further statement on the matter to LinkedIn. Karch did not mention Sacco by name, but mostly reflected on his experience, particularly the negative consequences of responding to a feeling of personal insult with a public statement. Karch also noted that he is sticking to his guns when it comes to deploying generative AI in games.

"Resolve issues human-to-human," Karch wrote, seemingly alluding to the apology Sacco received from him. "Escalating disputes through media channels or public statements rarely solves anything. Real resolution happens through direct, personal connection. If you cross a line, own it directly with the person involved."

But Karch's fourth paragraph in the post threw us for a loop. "The digital ecosystem thrives on outrage and surface-level takes," Karch wrote. "Case in point: a 26-minute video essay from an unsuccessful writer dedicated entirely to analyzing a single sarcastic quote of mine and pretending he knew exactly who I am—which somehow concluded with personal remarks about my physical anatomy and encouragement to accost me.

"When 'industry analysis' devolves into personal insults and threats, it says far more about the creator than it does about the subject. Relying on outrage algorithms for industry insights is a trap."

PC Gamer's top news hound, Andy Chalk, clocked that this could only be referring to an August 14 video shared by Chet Faliszek, a veteran writer whose credits include Portal, Left 4 Dead, and the Half-Life Episodes. The video in question, "Who is the CEO of Saber Interactive?" is 26 minutes and 13 seconds long, and Faliszek repeatedly states that Karch's behavior is compensating for something. Faliszek also says to viewers that, if they encountered Karch at an industry event, they should "make fun of him."

To be fair to Karch: Faliszek does repeatedly mock and insult him over the course of the video, going so far as to extrapolate that he has a domineering character, and that his actions are, at least in part, meant to discipline and control employees at Saber. I can see a certain tit-for-tat fairness to getting back at the person who said that.

But also: Faliszek's primary argument in the video is that, separate from Karch's personal character or the ethics of Sacco's original treatment, Karch's statement to This Week in Video Games was a completely avoidable PR and marketing catastrophe that worsened the controversy.

Karch's own conclusion in the same LinkedIn post where he took a jab at Faliszek was that he should have not said anything and left it to the communication team. At the time of writing, Faliszek's video is coming up on 4,000 views⁠—small potatoes.

Karch ignored Faliszek's and his own advice and escalated again⁠—right as things were calming down⁠—by providing so much identifying information about Faliszek's video. He effectively expanded the story to "Saber CEO vs. Portal writer" in a way I am now professionally obligated to make note of.

While I have my issues with the Steam Machine (mostly surrounding its price tag), I really do love the way it looks. It's a classy device, particularly as you can swap out the magnetic faceplates to your taste. I've seen some fairly tasteful designs so far, but none more OTT than this marble version from redditor GinoWT.

The marble used is supposedly from the Carrara quarry basin, which is the one Michelangelo worked from. I know absolutely nothing about marble, but some searching suggests that the old master did indeed use marble from this region.

As for this stuff specifically? Yeah, I'll take a hard pinch of salt with that one. It all looks the same to me—but I am, of course, a classless heathen of the lowest regard. Anyway, GinoWT says they usually cut marble for superyacht materials, so they've got the workshop setup to make square plates of the stuff .

It seems to be more involved than you might think, though, as each needs to be individually finished by hand. "Nobody is scaling this," says GinoWT. I'll take your word for it.

The stone itself is five to six millimetres thick, and bonded onto a 3D-printed structure with magnets to hold it to the front of the Steam Machine. This is apparently the same principle used on superyachts, to keep the weight "sensible" and to prevent the stone from cracking. We really are learning things today, aren't we?

It's not just marble that GinoWT specialises in, either. They've also made a "Sahara Noir" version in black with a gold vein going across it, and another out of Roman travertine. Yes, I had to look that one up as well.

If you're of a classier (and presumably wealthier) disposition than I, GinoWT has a website where you can sign up for one of the first small batches. No mention is made of actual prices beyond the "wait and see" form, so I'm willing to bet they'll be fairly expensive. Still, at what price Michelangelo's supposed leftovers, ey?

I love my Steam Deck. Although the internals are starting to look a bit long in the tooth these days, it still feels like the archetype of what a handheld gaming PC should be. It's a bit large and in charge though, which is why my ears pricked up when I heard of the Steam Boy.

This custom Steam Deck re-imagining is the work of Reddit user PhyFawkes, and the thinking behind it amounts to this: "The Steam Deck motherboard seems pretty small. I wonder if you could make a Steam Deck the size of a Game Boy?"

Turns out, for the most part, you can (via Tom's Hardware). The chassis amounts to a 3D-printed PETG shell, which manages to squeeze in not just the Steam Deck's relatively miniature mobo (complete with APU heatsink and fans), but also its rather sizable battery.

PhyFawkes has also tucked the Deck's internal speakers within the frame, alongside the separate audio board and some creative placement of ribbon cables. All this hardware hasn't left a whole lot of room for controls, though, which have been reduced to a D-pad, four traditional face buttons (alongside two system buttons), one thumbstick, and one touchpad.

That's some pretty tidy work, though—especially when you see the Steam Boy next to an original Steam Deck. In terms of footprint, it's well under half the size. The hardware is stacked, Tetris-style, within the frame, so it's a fair bit chonkier.

Still, you could reasonably fit one in a large jacket pocket, which is more than you can say for the original Deck.

There is one slight drawback, though. PhyFawkes hasn't yet been able to hook up the screen, which is a suitably sized 1200 x 1080 90 Hz OLED panel in traditional Game Boy config. It's going to require an adapter board between the motherboard output and the display, plus a BIOS mod as well by the looks of things, so that's the next task to be ticked off.

PhyFawkes also says that triggers are on the checklist. At least one of them, anyway, which is apparently in a good spot on the board in terms of being mounted somewhere usable on the outside.

So watch this space, as the Steam Boy is definitely a project to keep an eye on. Alongside all the Steam Machine mods we've been covering recently, like this water cooling project, or this RX 9070 XT eGPU setup. There's something about Valve's hardware that makes y'all want to tear it apart, huh?

The RX 9070 XT is one of our favourite graphics cards of this generation, as it delivers a hefty whack of gaming performance that can sometimes edge it ahead of the RTX 5070 Ti. As for the Steam Machine... well, I reviewed it and I'd like it a lot more if it was cheaper, put it that way. Or if it was more powerful.

One redditor may have solved the Steam Machine's performance drawbacks by putting the two bits of AMD-powered hardware together. Large_Customer_3840 has hooked the big AMD graphics card in to a Steam Machine as an eGPU, via some clever use of adapters.

"I did this by using the NVMe slot with an NVMe to Oculink adapter" say the redditor, "and then had the NVMe drive on a USB-C NVMe adapter to boot SteamOS."

Apparently, this setup works surprisingly well. "When I turned it on, the 9070 XT became the primary monitor and worked straight away," says our intrepid tinkerer. It's always a good feeling, isn't it?

The only issue to date has been a black screen problem, which revealed the Steam Machine needed to be connected to a TV for the eGPU to work. Other than that? It looks to be plain sailing.

Large_Customer_3840 says they've only tested the performance with Crimson Desert so far, but reports that the Steam Machine/AMD GPU hybrid gets over 100 fps on High. The setup looks to require the removal of the Steam Machine backplate, although the redditor says it could become a permanent upgrade with some modification of the case.

Perhaps some water cooling might be in order, just to put the cherry on the cake? It feels like we're gradually putting together the Franken-Steam Machine over here, and I can't wait to see what the modding community does next.

Another week, another hint that the Steam Frame might be close to launch, though this time the hint comes not from leaks and rumours but directly from Valve. According to recent official update notes, SteamOS Beta and Preview channels are to receive "preliminary support for the Steam Frame Wireless Adapter."

The Steam Frame is Valve's upcoming standalone VR headset, and based on what we've seen of it—my colleague Jacob Ridley having tried it last year at Valve HQ—it's definitely worth looking out for if you've a penchant for VR. Though the global memory shortage is of course a looming threat for the LPDDR5-laden device.

We'd previously seen a bunch of things that indicate an approaching launch date. Valve itself had previously indicated a launch of summer 2026, and over the past couple of months we've seen signs of Steam Frame imports, a 'Great on Frame' Steam classification, and the public availability of Frame-relevant software on Steam.

All this has had prospective Frame owners chomping at the proverbial bit for a bite of the upcoming VR headset. So much so that the Steam Frame subreddit recently seemed to lose its collective mind in anticipation, even sharing hopeful potatoes of luck (yes, you read that right).

Despite this hopeful anticipation, initial responses to the new SteamOS update note were somewhat pessimistic, given support for the Frame's wireless adapter is only just now being added—"preliminary" support, at that—and not even in the main SteamOS branch but the beta one.

However, one Redditor points out that the change in question simply adds "support for the dongle to wake Steam Machines from sleep", not support for the adapter in general. The implication being that such general support was already there.

Debates, of course, ensue. Primarily over whether Valve is waiting perhaps for an updated Half-Life Alyx (with foveated rendering) to be finished before the Frame launches.

Wherever you stand on the topic—whether you think the lucky potatoes have worked their magic or not—the Frame is no doubt that little bit closer to being ready for launch (or at least a more bug-free and feature-full launch) than it was before. Your guess is as good as mine for when that will actually be, though.

Earlier this morning, Valve began contacting customers who have purchased Steam hardware in Europe to notify them that one of its regional shipping partners, CEVA Logistics, was the subject of a recent cyberattack that "likely" exposed their personal information.

In its email—shared by notified users on Reddit and elsewhere—Valve said the attack took place sometime between July 29 and August 1, 2026. The company explained that the attackers targeted "specific delivery-related information" that Valve provides to CEVA Logistics in order to fulfill hardware orders for European customers, which the France-headquartered shipping company retains "for up to 90 days after that order."

In a statement emailed to PC Gamer, Valve confirmed that it first learned of the attack on August 7.

"Over the weekend more details came through that allowed us to assemble a list of customers that we see at risk of having been affected," Valve told PC Gamer. "Though CEVA is still investigating the attack, we wanted to at least send out messaging to all customers we can assume were affected based on what we currently know."

Valve says the name, street addresses, phone numbers, email addresses, and order details of European customers whose orders were fulfilled by CEVA Logistics "may have been compromised."

The company warns that affected users should be vigilant about fraudulent messages masquerading as Valve or a delivery company, and that those attempts might use compromised information to seem genuine. However, Valve says users shouldn't need to change their passwords, and because its shipping partners aren't provided with any customer payment information or other non-delivery details, any unrelated Steam account information should still be secure.

According to FreightWaves reporting, eight CEVA warehouse hubs were affected by the cyberattack, causing shipping delays across Europe for its retail partners.

It's unclear how many users in total have been affected by the breach: Valve itself is still working to get all the details of the cyberattack, as it says it's "pressing CEVA for the full scope of what was taken and how" while it works with data protection authorities in respective European countries. In a statement given to TechCrunch, CEVA says its "thorough investigation" of the incident is still ongoing.

Although I criticised the Steam Machine for its hefty price tag upon release, part of me hoped the creator community might do something interesting with it. Lo and behold, we now have the first example of a water-cooled version—and I can't help but be impressed.

The Not-so-steamy Machine (as I shall call it) is the work of Stefan Warecka, who claim's it's the "world's first" example. They've posted a short video on Reddit summarising some of the build process, which begins with... attacking the Steam Machine's carboard box with an angle grinder. Good lord.

Despite the "hack first and ask questions later" approach, the end product is a rather beautiful Steam Machine with a fan-cooled radiator strapped to the back, a custom CNC-ed water block, and lots of external tubing—which is then duly filled with a neon-pink liquid solution. It looks like a mini PC that's spent a long night on the Pepto-Bismol. We've all been there, folks.

Warecka says that APU temps have dropped by 20-30 degrees, and a full video is coming soon to their YouTube channel. In the meantime, we can only guess at the potential performance benefits. Cyberpunk 2077 is shown running in the background, so hopefully some benchmarks are on their way.

I'm also struggling to wrap my head around the concept. The standard Steam Machine runs cool and quiet with a clever air cooling design, while the neat form factor means you can tuck it easily under your TV. This one? Not so much.

Still, I suppose it doesn't matter. This project seems to be focused on the fun of hacking one up for giggles, and that's a principle I can stand behind. Techmagnet says the next step is to open it up again and work on the VRM cooling, "which is quite challenging as the MOSFETs are super tiny… and also they run quite on the limits of thermal design which sucks."

Godspeed, you goggle-clad maestro of mayhem. Just put the angle grinder away, would you? I know a few mechanics with missing fingers that might advise you against that sort of thing. Just a thought.

Valve is still beavering away at the internals of SteamOS, and the latest update notes for the 3.8.25 Beta release mention the addition of "initial gamepad support" for several non-Valve gaming handhelds. The mighty MSI Claw 8 EX AI+ is on the list, as are two offerings from Ayaneo.

These are the Ayaneo Pocket S2, an Android-first, Snapdragon-powered device that launched in June of last year, and the Konkr Fit, a recently-launched Windows handheld released under one of Ayaeno's sub-brands.

The Fit comes in two AMD APU flavours, the Ryzen AI 9 HX 470 and the Ryzen AI 9 HX 370. It's also got TMR joysticks and Hall effect triggers, which should hopefully benefit from the latest update.

Tucked away at the bottom of the "Non-Valve Devices" section is a note on updated gamepad support for the OneXPlayer Apex. You know, the one with an optional plug-in liquid cooling tower released back in the pre-memory crisis times, when ultra-high-end handhelds made a small modicum of sense.

Anyway, it seems Valve is working hard on SteamOS compatibility with the latest handheld releases—even if they're increasingly looking like some of the biggest victims of the RAMpocalypse so far.

Alongside gaming laptops, gaming PCs, consoles... all the things we like, basically.

Speaking of recently-released devices hit hard by the pricing stick, the update also includes new firmware for the Steam Machine, which is supposed to fix a couple of problems including "a rare issue where CPU performance could be degraded until reboot after waking up from sleep."

No software update is going to solve the consumer pricing problem in hardware right now, but it's pleasing to see Valve trucking on anyway. If you're planning on dropping some serious cash on a new handheld gaming PC sometime soon, it seems SteamOS is rapidly becoming ready for you. Even if your bank balance might not be, naturally.

Games about cleaning are all the rage. The recent success of House Flipper, Power Wash Simulator and Unpacking demonstrates there's a mainstream-sized appetite among PC gamers for making messy places neat and tidy.

But the micro-genre goes back way further than that. The 1982 arcade game Bubbles was about using a bubble to clean a filthy sink. Cosy foundational text Harvest Moon—like its descendant Stardew Valley—has you gradually transforming a forgotten ruin into a quaint and personalised space. Then there's stuff like Chibi-Robo and Katamari Damacy.

Not all cleaning games are cosy or sim-oriented. Viscera Cleanup Detail is about cleaning blood 'n' guts and The Gunk is a 3D platformer about eliminating space gunk in order to, I'm not sure, probably save the world. And the recent wave of retail simulators have lots of cleaning and sorting.

But the cleaning or tidying game has evolved once again. Its newest manifestation may clock as either a living nightmare or the height of blissful stimulation, depending on your temperament.

To demonstrate, here's the trailer for Toy Shop Tidy Up, which launched on August 7:

With all due respect to both the creators Shiftmoon and those enthusiastic about this new virtual-tidying frontier, this trailer gives me a panic attack. But it's far from the only recent PC game focused entirely on sorting through a massive pile of objects all the better to place them on shelves.

Toy Shop Tidy Up has only been a very modest success so far, but the Steam user reviews so far offer some insight into the appeal of this microgenre.

"Although it’s a relaxing game, it’s missing that satisfying feeling of placing every item exactly where it belongs," writes Sosich. Another user, Joker, agrees. "Great base game, but the one thing I wish it had, would be that the toys had their own spot to put them in, rather than just being able to place them anywhere in the area."

For a more demanding experience, these users have a number of games to choose from, all released in 2026. Cellar Keeper, also released on August 7, plonks the player in a wine cellar and tasks them with returning exactly 2,448 wine bottles to their "proper" shelf. In other words, critics of Toy Shop Tidy Up will be pleased, because every bottle must be sorted by their variety and stacked exactly where it belongs.

"Watching disorder disappear is its own reward," promises the store description.

Many user reviews of Cellar Keeper refer back to what is clearly considered the high watermark of this burgeoning orthodoxy: Released in April, Librarian: Tidy Up the Arcane Library! has players inhabit a cosy oaken library strewn with 3,072 books. These must all go back on shelves, and in the right order. Among the key features of Librarian are listed "visual satisfaction" and "strategic efficiency".

Librarian is by far the most successful sorting game thus far: its peak all-time concurrent players figure is 29,469. Over 3,200 people are playing it as I write. It has over 17,000 "very positive" reviews.

Taking a more arch approach is Supermarket Chaos, which crash landed onto Steam on June 30. Thanks to an errant robot shelf-stacker with a sudden distaste for order, groceries have been left in a big messy pile on the floor. It is your job, of course, to put everything back where it belongs. This outing offers three maps, with the most challenging containing 9999 objects. Thankfully, online cooperative play is supported.

The most terrifying entry in this genre isn't out yet, but it does make me thirst for whisky: Never Sort By Color, which dares release in November, takes the same tack as all the previously listed games except you're sorting Lego in a room littered with 100,000 bricks. Thankfully you've got a grappling hook, a sieve tray and other tools to help.

And that's not all! Arriving next week is TV Archive: Tidy Up Together, which is the inevitable retro videostore take on the genre. Last week's Cleaning Up The Puzzle Gallery is about finding puzzle pieces in a whitewalled gallery space, all the better to re-apply them to art works. And also coming next week is Tidy Up Together. I think by now you get the idea.

And like the now-ubiquitous retail sims, sorting simulators are being turned out at a rapid pace to capitalise on the actual commercial success of Librarian. In August alone, and not including those listed above, all of these are listed as forthcoming: Sort Them Ducks, Shelve the Potions!, Shelves & Sorcery, Mall Tidy Up Together, Konbini Cleanup, Storehand, Old Market Restored, Tidy Mart, Game Shop Panic, Big Bad Pharma, Package Chaos and Megastore Tidy Up Together.

There are heaps more "scheduled" for September 2026 and "Q3" as well. Will all of these come out? I severely doubt it. But you're going to start seeing a lot more of these on Steam in the coming months.

Top Steam games by revenue (July 28 - August 4)

Steam releases its top sellers charts on Wednesdays, so the chart below doesn't account for the 1.0 launch of Fields of Mistria, the QuakeCon-themed Bethesda sale, or the recent surprise update and deep discount on Ghost Recon Wildlands.

Mistfall Hunter is inevitably quite high on the list, though we are in a major release slump. The Soulslike extraction RPG only has around 4,700 "mixed" reviews right now, though its player count is consistently much higher than that would normally imply. Its current 24-hour peak concurrents in 37,123 (the record is 44,472).

Studio Bellring Games wrote on August 7 that over a million players had signed in to Mistfall Hunter. That includes both PS5 and Xbox users. It's doing well but—and this still feels surprising to me—not as well as recent hits like Meccha Chameleon.

Three games on the list are there because of major sales: Cyberpunk 2077, Baldur's Gate 3 and Spider-Man 2.

Last week's Steam deep cuts

Steam review of the week

"Worst game I have ever played. I got this game in a random Steam key bundle for about €5 along with five other games because it was on sale, and I still regret buying it. I think I would enjoy being electrocuted more."

Qube37, on the joys of electrocution compared to the drudgery that is Cyberpunk SFX.

What counts as cyberpunk anyway? Easy, it's whatever games are currently tagged as "cyberpunk" on Steam and therefore part of the Steam Cyberpunk Fest, a sale running until 10 am on August 10 with the baffling tagline: "They say never look back. Cyberpunk says ALWAYS be in the future. Think about it."

Whatever that means, what's important is the discounts that will help us fill our backlog with even more games about cyborgs and hackers and sticking it to the man. Here are some of the highlights.

• Slow-mo brawling with a bossy hacker lady who grades you, Ruiner: 90% off, $1.99
• Immersive sim about ex-spy on the run off the grid, Neon Struct: 90% off, $1.79
• Action RPG where you cross lovingly detailed arcology, The Ascent: 75% off, $7.49
• Baffling vomitcore corpo assassin simulator Cruelty Squad: 90% off, $1.99
• Best cyberpunk story this side of Snow Crash chapter 1, The Red Strings Club: 80% off, $2.99
• Recruit a ghoul samurai and convince people he's a movie star, Shadowrun Hong Kong: 75% off, $4.99
• Turn-based stealth is a good idea actually in Invisible, Inc: 75% off, $4.99
• Historic low price for Final Fantasy 7 Remake Intergrade: 65% off, $13.99
• If ya basic, Cyberpunk 2077: 70% off, $17.99

There are plenty of other bargains in the list if you want to dig down the Steam page, and if you still don't own the original Deus Ex that's half-price while Deus Ex: Human Revolution – Director's Cut is 85% off.

Steam's got a couple more sales planned for this month, with a Pins & Pegs Fest running from August 17–20 that will be all about "Games involving pins (pinball, bowling) and pegs (pachinko, bagatelle)" followed by the somewhat less niche-sounding PvE Survival Crafting Fest from August 31–September 7.

Despite Valve warning them that matches will be "very rocky" to start, Deadlock players are struggling to adjust to the MOBA's new ranked mode.

Late last week, Deadlock finally got a proper ranked mode, replacing the rudimentary version that existed for the last couple of years. Valve reworked the matchmaking system behind it, added a bunch of rules for how you climb the ranks, and created a new standard mode for casual play.

Valve warned players that "the next week or so" would be turbulent as everyone settles into their correct ranks, but it seems like people weren't ready for how severe it would actually be. The Deadlock subreddit, as well as my YouTube feed, has been full of people discussing whether or not the new update was a miss.

Some of the criticisms don't surprise me: Players are discovering what it's like to be forced to play a casual mode while they tally up enough wins to play ranked. Valve decided that you need 15 wins on a hero to play them in ranked, which is, by many accounts, a Sisyphean effort in the chaos of the standard mode. It's even worse for all the people who spent their Deadlock careers maining a single hero and are only now trying to branch out.

Players cannot fathom why nobody is shotcalling over voice chat or playing like experts in a mode made to be a casual alternative to ranked. While my experiences in Overwatch make me sympathize with them a little, it also sounds like what you'd expect from playing an invite-only game that isn't finished yet. Not everyone cares about optimizing their strategies like their life is on the line and the small pool of players means the match quality will waver more than it does in bigger games.

Maybe the requirement for ranked is too high, but you have to draw the line somewhere so it feels like a place for people who take the game somewhat seriously. It also doesn't help that ranked players who were previously in the highest tier are finishing their placement matches three or four levels lower. This has made even ranked matches inconsistent, according to the people who have been in the mines for the last few days.

Like other games, Deadlock tracks your progress to the next rank through a points system and the numbers can fluctuate based on the skill level distribution of the players in a match. You can completely stomp a team and come out of it with almost no progress, for example. This has confused a lot of players as they struggle to reach the same rank they had before.

Given how much Valve has changed in the update, I suspect we might be seeing the result of a ranked system in the middle of recalibrating what each rank represents in the first place. It's very possible that a high-ranked Eternus player who only played Mina before is now only an Oracle player when forced to flex to other heroes or when put on teams with a wider spread of skill levels (potentially due to the fractured player based across modes now)."People need to remove their expectations and just enjoy the game," wrote one Reddit user. "If they can't enjoy it because of their rank then that's their problem not a problem with the game."

All I know is that matchmaking systems are extremely complex and extremely delicate. Small changes can feel huge to certain sections of players. Deadlock is a game with a lot of barriers to entry that is probably exacerbating the frustrations that normally come with any kind of rank reset. So far, Valve hasn't made any drastic changes, but I'll be curious to see how things shake out in the next month or so.

Last week, Valve finally fixed a longstanding issue with users not being able to access local network game transfers, and all was right with the world. Well, not really, as it has now fixed even more problems causing that issue. But this time, it might be done… hopefully.

In a discussion board announcing a Steam Client Update on August 3, Valve said it has "fixed additional cases preventing local network game transfers from starting."

It doesn't say what exactly those problems are, but one can assume they were reported after the local game transfer fix last week. If you're wondering why people care about this issue, local transfers are a way of bypassing using the internet to transfer games.

For a long time, users would attempt to transfer game files, but only be greeted with the option to download it via Steam itself. If your bandwidth isn't very good or you are operating on limited data, this could be a problem. That's especially true for 100 GB+ games that could take hours over the internet.

So now, as long as your Steam Client is updated to the latest stable channel, you should be able to transfer games locally without a problem. Provided you have another system with them already installed and waiting to be transferred, of course. Luckily, to actually get onto the latest version of Steam, you don't have to do anything. It should install and update all by itself.

As well as fixing the local network game transfer problem, the latest Steam Client update has also fixed a problem where Steam asked players to choose a user on startup even if it wasn't requested. It's a fairly light update but, if it actually fixes the local network woes, a pretty good one all the same.

I haven't yet seen any reports of local network game transfers not working after the release of the update, which is a good sign, and one commenter even claims it fixes their issues on GNU/Linux. If you happen to have multiple rigs, or even both a home rig and a Steam Machine plugged into your TV, I could see this being a great way to get around bandwidth problems and get your games a little quicker, too.

Valve's wireless VR headset, the Steam Frame, doesn't yet have a nailed down release date beyond the vague window of 'later this year'. I've got a hunch it'll drop soon though—and not because I put any stock in the Steam Frame subreddit's wild release date rituals. No, I'm instead feeling optimistic because both Lepton and FEX are now publicly available via Steam.

Both of these pieces of software are key for the Steam Frame and required for its operation. Lepton can be thought of as a 'container' for gaming on Linux that lets it run Android games inside of it. FEX is a similarly important tool for the Snapdragon-powered device, but a smidge more complicated.

At the risk of oversimplifying, FEX takes 32-bit and 64-bit x86 games and translates them so they can be understood by Arm-based systems. The Steam Frame uses an Arm-based Snapdragon SoC, hence why FEX is required. Without it, it wouldn't be able to play most of the VR games available on Steam.

To be clear, neither Lepton nor FEX have an easily accessible Steam store page. This 'public release' is mostly good news for developers. For instance, Android devs can easily create an Android depot containing an apk for their game on Steam (the first Android game to be purchasable on Steam popped up back in November, in the form of an apk file for Walkabout Mini Golf).

From there, devs can set the apk as the launch executable for players using the Steam client. Steam Cloud will even support save data stored in the external Android data directory—that's some thought out integration.

FEX could be handy for any Arm system. Besides Valve saying it's 'definitely' already investigating an Arm-based gaming future, Nvidia's recently unveiled RTX Spark 'superchip' pairs an Nvidia GPU core with a MediaTek Arm chiplet.

Though I personally doubt an RTX Spark laptop or notebook will be the most affordable option, the SoC seems set to be a disruptive presence in the space no matter what. Our Dave has already played a native Arm build of Alan Wake 2 on an RTX Spark laptop, but that still leaves plenty of games that will benefit from Valve's work on the FEX translation layer in the future.

If you've ever felt like your bike trainer has a disturbing lack of Rocket League or Forza Horizon, you are in luck. One app called Deck de France can let you use your bike as a controller for games, though it's pretty limited so far.

Shared on GitHub (via Hackaday), Deck de France is technically compatible with any smart trainer that broadcasts Cycling Power Service over Bluetooth Low Energy. That means it can work with the following devices:

• Tacx — NEO, NEO 2T, Flux, Bushido, Vortex, Satori, Booster
• Elite — Suito-T, Justo, Direto, Drivo, Rampa, Sterzo Smart (steering plate)
• Wahoo — KICKR, KICKR Core (broadcasts CPS — untested but should work)
• Zwift Hub / Zwift Hub One (broadcasts CPS — untested but should work)
• CycleOps — Magnus, H3 (broadcasts CPS — untested but should work)
• Garmin — Vector 3 power meter pedals
• Magene — S3+ Speed/Cadence sensor
• Power meters — Any BLE power meter pedals or crank-based meters (4iiii, Stages, Favero, etc.)

Effectively, the app can translate your pedalling power into actions. Sukolupo, the creator of the app, says the original use case is the Tour de France games. The harder you pedal, the faster you go.

That makes sense as it's the closest video game to actually cycling without actually cycling, which has always been a bit of an oddity to me—especially when cycling apps such as Zwift and Rouvy exist.

It also has some rudimentary functionality in other games. In Rocket League, pedalling activates boost. In the Forza games, pedal power is equivalent to acceleration. You can even control the throttle of cars in Grand Theft Auto.

The catch here is that you need a Bluetooth controller to do everything else. That means in the likes of Rocket League, you'd play as normal on a controller and pedal when you want to boost.

As of right now, it is shown working with the Steam Deck, but Deck de France technically works with any Linux PC. It actually seems strikingly simple to set up, with Sukolupo saying you can get it working in just five minutes. The instructions are all on the Deck de France GitHub repository and easy to follow.

So, if you're an avid cycler, or just want the weirdest way to hog all the boost in Rocket League, this seems like a fun way to add a little bit of exercise into a gaming session.

Last week PC Gamer's Andy Edser highlighted an article tracing a seeming massive drop in Steam Deck sales. I'm not entirely convinced by the maths involved—which was conducted by Boiling Steam—but whether the numbers are accurate or not, it does capture some of the anxiety around Valve's hardware and what kind of future it might have.

When Gabe Newell donated a smidge over $20 million to OpenAI back in 2018, he probably didn't anticipate that the industry arising from its tech would put a huge dampener on his company's future hardware plans. The Steam Deck OLED copped a dramatic price increase in May, with the 1TB model rising from $649 to $949 and the 512GB going from $549 to $789.

"These new prices reflect the current state of component costs and other global logistical challenges across the industry as a whole," Valve wrote at the time, alluding to the way AI datacentres are gobbling up the bulk of components needed for most of the hardware used to play videogames. In one fell swoop, the Steam Deck OLED—which turns three in November—morphed from a great entry level solution for budding PC gamers, into something only wealthy people can afford.

When Valve released that statement in May we didn't yet know how much the Steam Machine would cost, but anyone who hoped they might somehow hack the components crisis to ship an actually-affordable living room PC were, unfortunately, dreaming. As we now know, the Steam Machine is expensive and anyway, in extremely short supply.

As Andy Edser wrote in June just after publishing his 62 / 100 review of the box, the Steam Machine is "the biggest victim of the RAMpocalypse to date". What was predicted to cost around $600 in November 2025 comes bearing a minimum $1,049 price tag. I was with utmost certainty going to buy one if the price was closer to the former. But at the current going rate, there's just no way, and I'm sure there are droves who are in my position.

So I guess it's not surprising that the Steam Machine's "launch"—which was more of a waitlist launch—has been a bit muted. Even Valve's own compatibility module hasn't been updated to reflect the Steam Machine's existence: to see if something is compatible with the device you have to click on the Steam Deck Compatibility box, which then shows a nested result for the Steam Machine. That's the case in both desktop and Big Picture modes.

Browsing Steam, most of the time you wouldn't know the Steam Machine exists. Devs aren't talking about their games being compatible with Steam Machine either, like they increasingly do the Steam Deck. External forces seem to have demolished the viability of these things. It's sad, but true.

And yet! The Steam Deck consistently appears in Valve's list of Steam's top products by revenue: last week it hit 14, and the week before that, 9. That result is influenced by the fact that Steam Deck is much more expensive than your average game, but it still proves that people are buying them.

But I had hoped the Steam Deck and Steam Machine might mark a rapid shift in how PC gaming is perceived. Gaming on a PC is immeasurably easier in 2026 than it was even in 2016, but consoles are still considered the easier route by millions of people. With the Steam Machine and Steam Deck, Valve had a chance to prove everyone wrong.

From the vantage point of November 2025 the timing seemed immaculate, given the existential crises facing both Xbox and PlayStation. It's amazing how much difference three months makes. Steam Machine having any longterm effect on the industry seems hugely unlikely right now.

Top Steam games by revenue (July 21 - July 28)

Steam releases its top sellers charts on Wednesdays, so the chart below doesn't account for the sudden popularity of Mistfall Hunter, which released on Thursday. The "dark fantasy extraction ARPG" is currently third on the live concurrents list.

Counter-Strike 2 holds tight to number one despite the release of a new (albeit actually old) Halo game and the 1.0 launch of Palworld.

DragonSword: Awakening is basically a non-gacha take on Genshin Impact, so its popularity is to be expected. Shift at Midnight is yet another one of those indies that blends retail sim trappings with horror, though this time with online cooperative play.

And while Meccha Chameleon is far from "a dead game" (it appears at 13 this week) last week was the first time it didn't appear in the top ten since launch.

Last week's Steam deep cuts

Steam review of the week

"I now understand why people push people in front of trains. It's super funny."

Alien Kink VR, taking the wrong learnings from Machine Party.

First reported by Automaton, Spanking Exorcist developer Actor made a free "apology game" available to download after missing a planned July 24 release date due to overzealous Steam content moderation. In the simple apology game, you press a button to simulate spanking the developer as punishment.

Spanking Exorcist's trailer shows a game combining first person exploration, unsettling, sex doll-looking lady characters, and slightly less scary, Sadako-looking forsaken waif lady characters. It strikes me as a perfectly adequate, replacement-level gag horror game for streamers to react to, if a bit more risque than your usual fare.

"I consent," you say. "I consent," announces the anonymous Japanese developer, Actor. "Isn't there someone you forgot to ask?" asserts Valve. The uneven content moderation on Steam became a big story following controversial intervention by payment processors and the persecution of horror game Horses, but it's always been odd.

I'm fond of the theory that there's just one particularly zealous prude at Valve who really has it out for horny stuff from Japan. Anyway, you can still buy Furry Hitler (one and two), as well as Alex Jones' shitty videogame on Steam.

I was pleased to discover that Plantation Simulator was taken down (by its developer's request, not Valve's intercession) following negative reporting by Kotaku. Spanking Exorcist is fine by comparison. Harmless. Let my boy spank.

"We sincerely apologize for the delay in the release of Spanking Exorcist on this occasion," Actor wrote on X, "The Everything App" (auto-translated from Japanese). "As a token of our remorse, we've created a game where you can spank the butt of the developer, Actor … We would be delighted if you enjoy it."

In the interest of journalistic integrity, I followed the Google Drive download link and procured Apology.exe to try it out for myself, ignoring the protests of Google Drive and Windows. Computer, disable safeties, activate indie Japanese gag spanking game. Yes, I know the risks (I'm currently running a system scan as I write this).

There is not much to Apology.exe, just a cartoonish representation of a derriere viewed from overhead and surrounded by Japanese text. There's a link to Spanking Exorcist's Steam page, a button to quit out, and a button to make the butt jiggle in tune with a slapping sound effect. It is the slightest of droll diversions you could sample in this beautiful life, but I appreciate the bit.

And the story gets a happy(?) ending too. I'm thrilled to report that Spanking Exorcist proper is available for download on Steam, having released just six days after its initial target date. It's six bucks usually, $5.39 on a launch sale, and I'm probably not gonna get it.

After much anticipation, Valve has finally given Deadlock a proper ranked mode, and with it comes a major overhaul to how the game balances each match—a substantial enough change that might make playing it a little chaotic for the next few weeks.

Before today's update, Deadlock's ranked mode was pretty straightforward as it was the only standard way to play it (as opposed to the over-the-top Brawl mode). You picked your favorite heroes, queued up, and climbed up the ranks.

The basic structure remains the same in the new system, but there are a lot more rules in place to help keep the quality of matches more balanced than before—which is something that started to become a problem as the game's popularity has fluctuated.

First of all, the new ranked mode isn't the only way to play a normal match now. Standard mode is for anyone who wants to practice or avoid the stress of ranked. It's also where you'll need to earn the right to queue up for ranked by winning 15 matches on at least three heroes.

Once you qualify for ranked, you can queue up to see how the system thinks you measure up against other players. The old ranks have been thrown out for 11 new ones, each with subranks to work through before you've earned a promotion. Every match will update you on your progress toward the next rank up until you reach the highest echelons where the thresholds you have to meet will change daily due to the relatively small number of players up there.

Valve says the new matchmaking system underneath all of this will do its best to create balanced matches while also letting you play your desired hero. It won't always work out perfectly, which is why it's also introduced a way to swap heroes before the match begins.

The new ranked mode is available to play now, but Valve warns players that they should "expect the next week or so to be very rocky as the ranked matchmaking pool will start off very thin with most players not having the unlock requirements done yet." Queue times will be longer and match quality might take a nosedive as the system works itself out. "Given the large rewrite involved with this update, we are also expecting that it will take a couple of days to iron out bugs," it added.

This is another big step toward the presumed, eventual launch of an open beta for Valve's not-so-secret MOBA. The last few major updates have started to polish parts of the game that have been stagnant for quite some time. Some things are still being reworked on a weekly basis, but it's starting to feel like this thing might be ready to go public instead of invite-only soon.

In a new update on Steam Machine sales, Valve says it's "fulfilling orders on a daily basis," and that it expects that everyone currently in the reservation queue will have an opportunity to purchase the machine they've been waiting for—by, uh, the end of the year.

Announced in June, Valve's system for determining who gets first crack at a Steam Machine was essentially a lottery. Signups were taken until June 25, after which all entries were randomized into a reservation order: Those near the top of the list were added to the reservation queue and would have a Steam Machine reserved for them, while everyone else was put on a waitlist, where they'd linger until more stock became available.

"With each reservation queue and corresponding waitlist being per-product, per-region, they can move at different speeds based on demand," Valve explained in the latest update. "This means for some products in some regions, we've reached the end of the reservation queue and have started inviting folks from the waitlist."

Valve also noted that this does not mean anyone on the waitlist will leapfrog people who already have a reservation: "We're only dipping into waitlists if and when we reach the end of the reservation queue for that product and region."

Being moved into the reservation queue is actually the penultimate step in the process—once you receive the email notifying you of your ascended status, you've got three days to pull the trigger and actually buy the thing, or your reservation will go to someone else. So it's not necessarily that everyone will have their Steam Deck by the end of 2026, just that emails enabling purchases should be sent out by then. As Valve explained:

"If you have a reservation, you can expect an email offering you the chance to purchase by the end of the year. If you have a spot on one of the waitlists, there is a chance you could be moved into reservations depending on which product you're on the list for; in those instances we will email you about your new reservation status first, with a purchase email to follow once your spot in that queue comes up."

So it's good news to the extent that yes, they're coming, but not great news because, y'know, it's July. There's still a lot of 2026 left, and that means at least some of you eager Steam Machine beavers out there are in for long waits ahead before you can actually get your hands on your hot (well, warm) new rig. Here's to 2027, I guess?

Over on the Steam Frame subreddit, the top post at the time of writing is one declaring "this sub has lost its mind". It follows this up by acknowledging that, with Valve not releasing Steam Frame preorders on July 27th as the subreddit previously thought, "Now most of the new posts are just brainrot, and I'm here for it."

To take a step back a bit, users have suspected the Steam Frame, Valve's upcoming VR headset, is 'coming soon' for a good while now. Valve confirmed it will release this summer at some point, and with summer in full swing, it's likely to come out sooner rather than later. As well as this, we recently saw a new "Great on Frame" category on the Steam store, and tens of thousands of kilograms of VR headsets arrived in the US last month.

Some sleuths have noted that Valve tends to announce on Mondays or Thursdays and also noted that it would make sense to launch Steam Frame preorders in between Steam Fests so it isn't fighting for banner space on the Steam home page. That left them with the conclusion that Valve would announce preorders on July 9th or July 27th. Naturally, when it wasn't announced on July 9th, July 27th became the last hope for a July release. But the Steam Sale launch theory doesn't make much sense, as the Steam Controller was announced and released during a Steam Fest.

There was, however, one more anticipated release date in between. Last week, one X user reported on an unverified screenshot claiming that the Steam Frame rollout would begin on July 24. The Steam Frame subreddit was pretty sceptical of this claim, but it still became a point of conversation and hope for some.

Over the entirety of July, users have been posting prayers, pleas, and potatoes of luck (don't ask), in the hope that Valve would randomly announce the release date with little fanfare. As you might be able to guess, that hasn't happened. However, the months of anticipation have gotten to the subreddit, and now users are using that as a chance to post just whatever they feel like, including gibberish and a whole pile of memes.

The tomfoolery of the Steam Frame subreddit has made its way over to the main Steam subreddit, where one post asks, "What’s currently going on in r/steamframe." Yeah, I don't really know either, but it's fun to watch.

One comment says, "We've all collectively lost our minds. I sold my damn Quest 3 months ago for this thing, I'm jonesin' for some VR."

But there's a deeper meaning behind some of this anticipation. The Steam Machine launched at a very high price point, so high in fact that Valve told us it wished it could sell the Machine for less. And Qualcomm has said it is planning to raise the price of its chips on September 1 (The Frame uses a Qualcomm chip), so some are worried that the Frame will be prohibitively expensive, and that's before mentioning the 16 GB of LPDDR5X RAM in it.

If it launches right now, it would be launching before the Qualcomm price raise comes into effect. Naturally, one can assume that Valve has a stockpile of headsets ready to go for launch, and presumably contracts of supply in place, though that wouldn't stop it from raising the price further down the line should it need to.

Many of those preordering a Steam Frame are preparing for the pain of that price, so they might as well get it out of the way early. And, obviously, the sooner the preorder, the sooner users will actually have their hands on the device.

But hey, maybe Valve will actually announce it today. It has no reason to do so, but that's never stopped anyone from hoping.

One saving grace of a flat mate is setting up 'family sharing' on each other's Steam libraries at the earliest opportunity. Another saving grace is leveraging local network game transfers to then have a go at whichever game has become your roommate's flavour of the month, and judging them accordingly.

Recently though, Steam's local network game transfers hadn't been working as intended. For instance, some folk would attempt to kick off a local transfer, only for Steam to download via the internet instead. That's less than ideal if your bandwidth is scarce or you're working with limited data. Thankfully, Valve shipped a fix to the stable channel of the Steam Client on Monday.

That means, you should now be able to transfer games between gaming desktops, laptops, and handhelds like the Steam Deck once more—so long as you've got the most up to date version of the Steam client installed. Stick with me, because I'll tell you how to check Steam is up to date on your PC and Steam Deck.

To check you're up to date on PC, open the client, click 'Steam' in the top left corner, and click 'Check for Steam Client Updates…' from the drop down menu. You may then need to restart the client to apply the update.

On Steam Deck, the settings cog at the top of the screen will usually display a bright yellow exclamation point to let you know you've got an update. You can also manually check for updates by clicking or tapping on the settings cog, or by pressing the device's physical 'Steam' button and selecting 'Settings' from there.

Once you're in the settings menu, you'll want to navigate to 'System' and check under 'Updates'. If there's a yellow exclamation point beside 'Software Updates,' you'll want to then tap 'apply' (if there isn't a yellow exclamation point already, you can simply tap 'Check for updates'). Once the update has been downloaded and applied, you'll need to restart your Steam Deck.

One more thing: Local Network Game Transfers may not work between devices rocking different versions of the Steam client, so you really will want to update everything when you can. Now that Valve has fixed the issue that was holding back the feature before, you can share whatever is already lurking on your SSD much more easily.

Now, if you'll excuse me, I'm going to give my flatmate a slide presentation on why they should play Cat Mail Co.—and immediately afterwards, they're going to give me a presentation on the virtues of finally finishing 007: First Light.

Have you ever been sick of your family using your electronics without asking, and thought 'boy, I should put spikes and a taser on this thing'? If the answer is yes, then you're like Redditor ConroyyJenkinss (presumably no relation to Leroy), who has done just that.

Taking to the Steam Deck subreddit, they recently announced "I Built a Security System for My Steam Deck", and it is one heck of a security system.

"I got sick of my family always draining my Steam Deck's battery and not recharging it", ConroyyJenkinss said, so they decided to 3D print a spiky case they made in Blender to snap onto the side of the device. That makes it tough to hold.

From there, they rigged up a Raspberry Pi with a speaker to an object detection camera, and wrote a Python script to "play a goofy audio clip" and set off a taser fitted to the top of the Deck after a few seconds. No, they don't say what the audio is. As far as I can tell, the taser is just there to scare would-be battery thieves, as it can't make contact from its perch above the Steam Deck.

You might be wondering why the Redditor didn't simply put a password on the Steam Deck and leave it at that. Jenkinss says, "This minimises the risk of them touching my Steam Deck at all, they are forced to ask for permission now."

Naturally, this defense mechanism isn't designed to actually serve its purpose. It's a goofy experiment that is done just to see if it can be done. Jenkinss even acknowledges in the comment section that disarming the taser and taking the spike case off is a hassle. I suppose there's more justification to keep the device safe, with it recently seeing a huge price increase.

One redditor in the comments section calls it "hostile architecture for gadgets", and now I'd love to see a tournament of the most abrasive and over-the-top defence mechanisms against the painful experience of having your family waste your battery life.

ConroyyJenkinss says it is "easily the dumbest thing I've ever built but it works, and nobody touches my Steam Deck anymore."

Yeah, I can see why.

The flood of retail simulators on Steam is nothing new: the trend seemed to land with torrential force in late 2024. But it's fascinating, to me at least, how many of these things are still being released every week, and how many of them seem to actually reach an audience despite their rudimentary appearance.

Last week, 14 retail sims were released on Steam. I'm being pretty picky with what I class a "retail sim" too. If it's an idle game with a retail or service industry theme, it's not included. If it's a horror game with a retail setting—and there are tons of these, including this week's Shift at Midnight—they're not included either. If it's a puzzle game with retail or service industry themes, like Nothing To Declare, I'm not including it.

No, I'm talking about those unfailingly first-person retail sims that extremely prolific Polish publisher PlayWay seemed to spawn into existence, and which have been copied relentlessly since (including by PlayWay itself). You probably know what I'm talking about: you unpack boxes, operate checkouts, purchase and receive stock. They all kinda look the same. Many are seemingly set on the same eerily quiet street. There is ostensibly a strategic "tycoon" element to most of them, but their focus on menial activities is part of their unusual appeal.

Here's what released last week, with the record concurrent player number listed for each game, just to get a vague sense of how popular it's been.

Of those, Boba Cafe Simulator is overwhelmingly the most popular with over 754 "overwhelmingly positive" reviews. Few professional reviews of Boba Cafe Simulator exist, though I can confirm a PR company has been distributing code. While reviews are scarce, plenty of streamers and YouTubers have played it, and the free demo launched in September has been marginally popular.

Meanwhile, Bookshop Simulator, which launched into 1.0 last week after a stint in early access, definitely looks like the most distinctive of the batch: it has a slightly more stylised presentation compared to the others. It also benefits from not having AI-generated capsule art, which is rife in this genre.

The only other entry to break the 1,000 concurrents mark was Mall Together, whose appeal seems to be the prospect of building a whole mall rather than a single outlet. It's the only "successful" shop sim from last week to bear an AI disclosure (for capsule art, of course).

What do all three of these more successful sims share at a glance? Not a great deal, aside from support for online cooperative play. I don't think that's necessarily the golden ticket: TCG Card Shop Simulator, which is probably among the most popular retail sims on Steam, is singleplayer only, as is Retro Rewind - Video Store Simulator.

If you feel like these things are being doled at on an industrial scale you're on the right track. Two of the retail sims released last week—Model Kit Shop Simulator and Wild West Miner Simulator: First Gun—were published by the aforementioned PlayWay, which published four games between July 20 and now.

PlayWay is a curious beast. According to SteamDB the publisher has 474 products on Steam, but well over 100 of those haven't been released yet: there's lots of TBAs and Soons among the Q1 2027s and vague 2026s. Some of these yet-to-release games don't seem likely to ever materialise. I mean, unless Train Mechanic Simulator 2025 gets a name change.

This could actually be a tactic, according to industry analyst Simon Carless in his great GameDiscoverCo newsletter. In a 2021 post he theorised that PlayWay announces loads of games but only bothers to actually make them if they amass enough wishlists. Wishlists aren't public, so it's hard to tell which of PlayWay's "announced" games have a high chance of actually releasing, but Low-Budget Repairs and Car Mechanic Simulator 2026 are both listed among Steam's most wishlisted, so you can probably count on those. PlayWay has announced that the former has passed a million wishlists.

According to Carless, "there is a centralized ideas machine at PlayWay and associated companies. It generates, vets and commissions a large amount of ideas for games, and then works with newer Polish game devs to put them into action."

I think that's what most people would call shovelware, and there's no doubt the majority of the retail sims on Steam are exactly that. But PlayWay does release decent, effortful games like House Flipper 2, Mr Prepper and the Thief Simulator games, and of course, they're far from the only publisher trading in rapidly turned out retail sims.

It seems like a gamble, albeit a low stakes one: If a publisher or studio announces a retail sim focusing on a yet-to-be-explored specialist niche, maybe it'll be a winner, maybe it won't be. If Lava Lamp Shop Simulator fails, maybe Tupperware Shop Simulator won't. Either way, it's not like a huge amount of time is put into their development.

That's likely the tact taken by "Business Tycoon", the studio responsible for Mall Together, Sporting Goods Shop, Tobacco Shop Simulator and Retail Company Simulator. Good luck finding any information about this so-called "Business Tycoon" studio, but all of their games are published by the ultra-prolific Chinese company Gamersky Games.

There are plenty of small studios not taking the scorched earth approach, such as the creators of Retro Rewind, Blood Pact Studios, and Boba Cafe Simulator's Caikemi. There is genuine demand for games like this, and evidence of studios putting a lot of love and effort in. But as has always been true in games, where there's high demand, you can bet on a deluge of rubbish clones.

Top Steam games by revenue (July 14 - 21)

Steam releases its top sellers charts on Wednesdays. Not much of note released late this week, save potentially a spike in pre-orders thanks to the Halo: Campaign Evolved embargo lifting.

It was pretty obvious that Palworld's 1.0 launch would catapult it up the top sellers chart but I'm surprised Counter-Strike 2 held out. I'm also surprised the Black Flag remake is still up there. It's a pretty conservative glow up for a game that's been super, super cheap for over a decade, but it's easy to underestimate the continued popularity of Assassin's Creed games.

The Mound: Omen of Cthulhu's appearance seems to suggest it's been a pretty quiet week on Steam overall. It released on July 15 and only as a bit less than 1,500 "mostly positive" reviews right now.

Last week's Steam deep cuts

Steam review of the week

"10/10. Would sledge hammer a rat to throw its meat at someone drinking gas out of the pump to then 360 a doppleganger before restocking the ramen."

John Tesco, proving that Shift At Midnight contains multitudes.

In a recent appearance on the Happy Sad Confused podcast, prolific actor J.K. Simmons dove into his relationship with the games he's acted in. While not much of a gamer himself, the script for Portal 2 (where Simmons voiced Aperture founder Cave Johnson) seems to have left its mark on the actor.

"Tom Britney from The Westies, he texted me a week ago, a little video text of my character from Baldur's Gate," Simmons said when asked if he gets recognized for his videogame roles. "He said, 'I'm about to kill you.' Okay, well, good luck with that."

Host Josh Horowitz followed up by asking if Simmons enjoys playing games at all, and the answer was a firm no. "My hands don't work on those controllers," said Simmons. "I've tried⁠—my kids, of course, my twentysomething kids play them a lot. My wife, she'll actually get in there and play some Mario Bros. or whatever with them. I just, I cannot. No. Sorry."

But even if he doesn't play, Simmons does have a firm favorite among all the games he's acted in. "It was Portal 2, for me," he said. "Just because it was such a hilarious script. I could have done the feature film, or the play, or whatever. It was just such fun writing."

Simmons did, indeed, reprise his role as Cave Johnson for the 2022 Steam Deck tie-in game, Aperture Desk Job. Portal 2 writer Eric Wolpaw, who is credited with creating the character, also returned to the series to write for Desk Job.

Given the more siloed nature of their work on games, actors often have a wide range of engagement with the hobby. Deus Ex, Marathon, and Starfield actor Elias Toufexis is all-in on games, for example, while Silent Hill f actor Konatsu Kato streamed her first playthrough to much fanfare. Grand Theft Auto 5 actor Steven Ogg, meanwhile, thinks you should put away childish things and read Dostoevsky instead.

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.

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.

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.