The holiday season is almost upon us, but the new gear on gamers’ wish lists won’t arrive until next year.<\/p>\n
Valve Corporation has pre-announced a range of three new gadgets to entice gamers, which will all arrive at some point in 2026. There’s a standalone gaming PC, the Steam Machine<\/a>, a new generation of the Steam Controller<\/a>, and an Arm-powered VR headset, the Steam Frame<\/a>.<\/p>\n It’s enough to induce a temporary bout of chronological uncertainty. The Steam Machine was first announced way back in 2012, as The Register reported at the time<\/a>. In 2013, El Reg returned to the subject with pictures<\/a>, and also covered the forthcoming Steam Controller<\/a> \u2013 although one version<\/a> of that did ship in 2015.<\/p>\n The 2010s version of Valve’s machine never appeared, despite multiple partner companies’ claims<\/a> and CES demonstration models<\/a>. The only third-party Steam hardware The Reg got its hands on was the Gigabyte Brix Pro<\/a>, and that ran Windows. One intrepid vulture did hack it into running the original Debian-based SteamOS<\/a>, though. Moving on, a dozen years later…<\/p>\n \n Youtube Video<\/a>\n<\/p>\n The 2026 Steam Machine<\/p>\n The Steam Store’s product page<\/a> has tech specs, and the machine is a black cuboid, measuring 6 x 6.5 x 6.1 inches (152 x 162.4 x 156 mm). It will have a “semi-custom” AMD Zen 4 processor, with six cores\/twelve threads, and an RDNA3 GPU with 28 compute units, coupled with 16\u00a0GB of DDR5 main memory and 8\u00a0GB of GDDR6 VRAM. It has five USB ports, Ethernet, DisplayPort 1.4, and HDMI 2 outputs, Wi-Fi 6 and Bluetooth 5.3. Buyers have the choice of a half-terabyte or 2\u00a0TB SSD.<\/p>\n The reason that this vulture is writing about it, of course, is that it’s a Linux box. It will run SteamOS 3, the same as the Steam Deck that the company launched in 2022. This is a retail computer that comes pre-installed with Linux, and it’s not locked down. The announcement page says:<\/p>\n The viability of Linux as a daily driver consumer\u00a0desktop OS is adequately demonstrated by annual sales of tens of millions of Chromebooks<\/a>, but SteamOS is a different sort of beast. We described some of the technology<\/a> in 2023, but the significant thing is that unlike ChromeOS \u2013 or any other distro \u2013 the primary purpose of SteamOS is to run unmodified Windows software. As we covered earlier this month<\/a>, something approaching 90 percent of Steam games run on Linux now.<\/p>\n The Steam Frame<\/p>\n SteamOS is even more versatile than we previously realized. Valve’s new VR headset, the Steam Frame<\/a>, also runs it.<\/p>\n Unlike its larger sibling, though, this 0.97 pound (440 g) headset is an Arm computer. That means SteamOS is already cross-platform and has an Arm64 version, and it also implies that Valve is confident it can run x86 games through CPU emulation fast enough to be enjoyable to play.<\/p>\n The specs say it’s a “4\u00a0nm Snapdragon 8 Gen 3,” although PC Gamer is more specific<\/a> and says it’s a Qualcomm SM8650 SoC. This is a fairly high-end chip. In benchmark tests<\/a>, it’s comfortably ahead of the Gen 2 part in Meta’s Quest 3 headset<\/a> from 2023, but pretty far behind the M2 chip in Apple’s Vision Pro<\/a> \u2013 although to be fair that device costs several times what the Steam Frame is likely to go for.<\/p>\n The Steam Controller 2026<\/p>\n The new version of the Steam Controller<\/a> upgrades the version from a decade ago in several aspects. The new model has two thumb-controlled joysticks, as well as two trackpads and a D-pad plus A\/B\/X\/Y buttons. It can connect wirelessly, obviously, but you will also be able to use it over a USB-C cable while it’s charging (so it outdoes the Apple Magic Mouse 2, then).<\/p>\n You don’t need special Valve kit to use it \u2013 it’s compatible with anything that can run Steam and talk Bluetooth 4.2. For lower-latency connections, it also has a direct 2.4 GHz radio connection via the optional charging puck \u2013 although that link is built into the Steam Machine. The company has even upstreamed Linux support code<\/a> already.<\/p>\n Where next?<\/p>\n The new hardware is notable in several different ways. These are Linux machines aimed squarely at a mainstream, non-techie, consumer market. That’s good to see. The AMD-powered machine is designed and built to run Windows apps under emulation, which is remarkable, but the Qualcomm-powered hardware is designed to do that including x86 emulation on Arm. That’s been a reality for productivity apps<\/a> for a while, but for gaming, it’s bold.<\/p>\n Valve’s move can be seen as trying to sell Windows games into the market for proprietary games consoles. Devices like the Xbox Series S and X<\/a> and Sony PlayStation 5<\/a> are already x86-64 based \u2013 in fact, both use AMD Zen 2 family<\/a> processors. Industry commentator Xe Iaso, author of the Anubis anti-LLM-bot crawling tool<\/a>, thinks that Valve is about to win the console generation<\/a>. Interesting times are coming in 2026. \u00ae<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The holiday season is almost upon us, but the new gear on gamers’ wish lists won’t arrive until…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":572281,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3162],"tags":[53,16,15,3243,3244],"class_list":{"0":"post-572280","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-virtual-reality","8":"tag-technology","9":"tag-uk","10":"tag-united-kingdom","11":"tag-virtual-reality","12":"tag-vr"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/115554460800914090","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/572280","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=572280"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/572280\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/572281"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=572280"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=572280"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=572280"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}