{"id":194167,"date":"2025-11-22T10:13:10","date_gmt":"2025-11-22T10:13:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/194167\/"},"modified":"2025-11-22T10:13:10","modified_gmt":"2025-11-22T10:13:10","slug":"valve-says-steam-machine-isnt-a-console-but-it-is","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/194167\/","title":{"rendered":"Valve Says Steam Machine Isn’t a Console\u2014but It Is"},"content":{"rendered":"

It’s set to offer two internal storage capacities, with 512GB or 2TB SSDs, with storage further expandable via microSD. Valve seems to be approaching the external storage format as a glorified game cartridge, as players will be able to move a single card<\/a> between Steam Machine, Steam Frame, and Steam Deck. That also indicates that current gen SDXC format cards will be usable, rather than requiring the newer, faster microSD Express format that the Switch 2 does<\/a> to run games.<\/p>\n

It also features 16GB DDR5 RAM, 8GB GDDR6 VRAM, a host of input\/output options\u2014DisplayPort 1.4. HDMI 2.0. One USB-C and four USB-A ports\u2014and crams even its power supply into \u201ca roughly 6-inch cube.\u201d That’s about the size of Nintendo’s classic GameCube<\/a>, or half an Xbox Series X<\/a>. It’s cute! If you want to make it cuter, you can swap out the front face plate (not unlike the range of cosmetic PS5 shells<\/a>, hmm \u2026).<\/p>\n

That’s all a far cry from the original Steam Machines, which stood out by not having a specific form factor. The Valve of 2015 instead set a minimum spec that any manufacturer could meet to label a device as a Steam Machine, a degree of confusion that no doubt hurt its wider adoption. The new generation is 100 percent a Valve product.<\/p>\n

About the only commonality is that both generations have been designed around using SteamOS to navigate your game library (it’s set to run KDE Plasma<\/a> for its desktop environment). Valve adds that it is expanding its “Deck Verified” program, which certifies games as being compatible with the handheld Steam Deck, “to include ratings for Steam Machine, so customers can understand how their games will run.”<\/p>\n

So. A gaming PC that seems to offer only minimal hardware customization options, in a fixed form factor, produced by one manufacturer, with games designed to run on it. You know what that looks a lot like? A console. And that should be celebrated.<\/p>\n

Convenience Wins<\/p>\n

It’s easy to understand why Valve may not want to embrace the “console” label for Steam Machine. As arguably the biggest driving force in PC gaming, it’d practically be tearing up its own street cred to do so.<\/p>\n

However, consoles remain popular precisely because of their comparative limits\u2014for many players, being able to plug a box into their TV and enjoy games on a couch is just a nicer way to play. It’s more sociable, too, especially for local co-op games. Even hooking my gaming laptop up to a TV to play PC games with friends is more of a faff than turning on a console. Plus, given the extraordinary volume of games released on Steam\u2014more than 18,500<\/a> in 2024\u2014why wouldn’t you want to make them more comfortable and accessible?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"It’s set to offer two internal storage capacities, with 512GB or 2TB SSDs, with storage further expandable via…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":194168,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[74],"tags":[32809,42964,18,31515,19,17,9684,56521,82,3880],"class_list":{"0":"post-194167","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-technology","8":"tag-console-games","9":"tag-consoles","10":"tag-eire","11":"tag-gaming-culture","12":"tag-ie","13":"tag-ireland","14":"tag-pc-games","15":"tag-pcs","16":"tag-technology","17":"tag-video-games"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@ie\/115592823258770474","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/194167","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=194167"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/194167\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/194168"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=194167"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=194167"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=194167"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}