Valve announces new Steam Machine console: Price, specs, release date

A few years after successfully expanding the portable gaming market with the Steam Deck, Valve is once again trying its hand at a console-like experience.

Valve announced several new hardware products yesterday, one of which is simply called Steam Machine. This is actually Valve’s second attempt with such an idea (the first being about ten years ago), but the terms seem a little more favorable this time around, especially since the future of Xbox is a little uncertain. The Steam Machine is essentially a console version of a Steam Deck: it runs the same software, SteamOS, and will play games from your Steam library while plugged into a TV, like a console.

There’s some bad news, though: we don’t have a price or release date yet. Stay tuned for that.

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The main difference between this and a Deck, of course, is that the Steam Machine will be much more powerful. According to Valve, it is six times more powerful than the Steam Deck. Here are the specifications released by Valve for the Steam Machine:

• Processor: AMD Zen 4 6C/12T semi-custom

• GPU: AMD RDNA3 28CU semi-custom, 2.45 GHz maximum sustained clock, 110 W TDP

• 16GB DDR5 + 8GB GDDR6 VRAM

• Two storage options: 512 GB SSD and 2 TB SSD

• 2x front USB-A ports

• 2x USB-A ports on the back

• 1x USB-C port on the back

Valve promises visuals and performance around 4K and 60 frames per second with this device. It’s hard to say yet how it will compare to the PlayStation 5 or Xbox Series Of course, he also has the advantage of being able to play a massive library of PC games spanning decades.

It might be a while before it’s released, but there’s plenty to get excited about now.