Valve’s Next-Gen Steam Machine and Steam Controller — the Big Interview
“It felt like it was the right time.”
Valve on making the Steam OS more widely available:
are there plans to make SteamOS more widely available beyond a try at your own risk kind of model the way it is now?
definitely, just like Steam Deck paved the way for SteamOS on a variety of third-party handhelds, we expect that a Steam Machine will pave the way for SteamOS on a bunch of different machines in either similar form factors, different perf envelopes, different segments of the market and get to a good outcome there.
We definitely want to encourage people to try it out on their own hardware, and we’ll be working on expanding hardware availability over time as well, or hardware support for the drivers and the base operating system.
Just last week we fixed something that was preventing us from booting on the very latest AMD CPU platforms. Last month we added support for the Intel Lunar Lake platforms.
We’re constantly just adding support and improving performance and we want it to be at the point where at some point you can install it on any PC, but there’s still a ton of work to do there.
On enabling friction-free gaming
Can you talk about how the Steam Machine is positing itself as the more approachable PC gaming machine…
Something that happened shortly after Steam Deck released was that a lot of games started detecting that they were running on Steam Deck to pick exactly the right default settings for an experience that the game developer considered balanced, which is a pretty small amount of work for a game developer.
We expect the same thing will happen with Steam Machine, and we’ll be providing APIs in Steamworks so that game developers can detect what platform they’re running on to be able to have the right amount of detailed settings and that corresponds to the balanced experience that they have in mind.
On the million dollar question (8gb vram)
Why did you pick the GPU you picked and why did you pick the CPU you picked when there are cheaper options or more powerful options?
piece of information that we always had available is the Steam hardware survey. So we can essentially look at everybody’s devices, we understand what the medium performance looks like for people, we understand where the Steam Machine is going to be positioned relative to those.
We think that the Steam Machine is going to be equal or better perf than the majority of people on Steam.
So essentially we think it’s going to be a good upgrade path for a lot of people, especially people who are on older machines
On why a Steam Box?
the Steam Machine is just one option in the ecosystem of gaming PCs out there.
If you’re already happy with your PC gaming experience, that’s great. We love that.
We are a PC gaming company. We’re just trying to give you more options. And that’s how we view it.
It’s just something that we think is a really great addition to a living room or a desktop, but it’s just one other option that people can have available to them to play their Steam games basically.
“It felt like it was the right time.”