Being a tech journalist, hell, even just being a PC gamer in 2025, means that you have to accept that every time you hear from a hardware company about some new product they're releasing, or feature they're adding, it will almost exclusively be something to do with AI. Whether directly, indirectly, tangentially, or just plain pointlessly.
So, thank you Valve, for offering up three new pieces of Steam hardware this week that made not one mention of the initialism de jour: AI.
Steam Frame: Valve's new wireless VR headset
Steam Machine: Compact living room gaming box
Steam Controller: A controller to replace your mouse
It's not even like it's just been this year, either. Ever since ChatGPT grabbed people's collective basal ganglia at the tail end of 2022, the swell of AI-ness being added to everything possible (and often irrelevant) in tech has exponentially increased. Every event, every launch, every show has been tailored around just what level of AI-ification the company in question has been able to jam (or pretend it has) into whatever it is they're showing off.
CES and Computex ever since have been 'brought to you…' or 'powered by…' AI. And every booth without end has had to plaster those two letters all over them. Graphics cards and CPUs are now being sold to us on the benefits they can bring to all the AI things we do every day (can you name one outside of upscaling and frame gen?), and Windows has decided that it's now an agentic operating system.
I'm not saying I don't ever use AI; I love me some DLSS and Frame Generation, Photoshop has become more effective than ever for my job, and Gemini's been making me HTML table code on the regular. I just don't want to have it jammed down my throat at every turn.
So it's immensely refreshing that the Steam Controller has no AI button to call up some little cutesy G-Man within SteamOS to ask 'Would you like help with that?' The Steam Machine, with its 16 GB RAM and 8 GB VRAM quotient, isn't going to be housing the latest local LLMs out of the box, and the Steam Frame isn't filling your eyeballs with AI slop as a default setting.
If Microsoft really is going to be pursuing the current trajectory to make Windows 11 an AI-forward OS, then I'm glad we've got Valve making PC gaming on Linux genuinely viable.
I'm not saying I want to jump ship to SteamOS right now—I actually had a better time playing with Bazzite in desktop mode on the Framework Desktop than trying to jam SteamOS on handhelds that really should be compatible by now—but the work it's put in with Proton (and now with FEX) is breaking PC gaming away from Windows more effectively than ever before.
In fairness, Microsoft is beholden to shareholders, and if you're in tech right now, you're going to be under immense pressure to deliver a slice of the billions being spent on AI back to your investors or face stern questions as to why not. Doesn't mean we have to like it as an end-user, though.
So, if you want an operating system and a PC just for gaming, and maybe for work, AND DEFINITELY NOT FOR ANY AI SHENANIGANS, then a simple Linux distro is going to suit you and I a whole lot better.
The somewhat inevitable caveat to all this is you are still going to be locked out of some of the biggest games with Linux. Fortnite, CoD, and Battlefield 6 aren't going to work on Linux—maybe ever—because Epic has no desire to benefit Steam by fixing up its anticheat software, and Activision and EA need to make its own one as robust as possible.
No one likes cheats, and no developer or publisher wants to see their online game get murdered by cheaters driving legit gamers out, so kernel-level anti-cheat software is going to be here until someone finds a better way that will include Linux distros.
But, screw it, I'm notoriously anti-social, so multiplayer gaming is no sell for me whatsoever. Not having to hear another company exec. extol the virtues of whatever AI MacGuffin they've jammed into their new thing, however, is a very big sell.
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