Steam Machine
- Jul 31
- 6 min read
So recently, I got my hands on a Steam Machine. I got it through the person who started @HardwareSteam on twitter who had a friend who got in the reservation queue and wasn't going to pay for it. I cannot stress how thankful I am for their friendship and assistance with getting this thing early on. I started following them back when the Valve hardware got announced in November of last year, and their growth is so incredible to see. Genuinely, I've been following Valve for so long and they know shit I didn't, it's nuts how quickly they started understanding things. Go follow them if you are at all interested in what Valve is doing hardware wise. Anyways, enough sucking up to my friends, here is what I think about the Steam Machine.
My big issue with console gaming
Let me go out on record and say that I have no issues with console gamers themselves, if that's how you like playing games go right ahead, who am I to tell you how you should consume your entertainment? For me, however, I've always been a PC boy. (Unless we count Nintendo cause their stuff isn't anywhere else.) Why is that? Well, among other things, the big reason is that consoles are just generally more locked down, and being so closed off poses a lot of risks to digital ownership that generally aren't as big of a deal on the PC side of things. (Very topical right now, I know! Looking at you, Sony.) When you buy into an ecosystem like that, you run the risk of the people who own that platform suddenly being able to yank your games from you whenever they feel like it. On the PC side of things, this poses significantly less of a risk and even if it were to happen on a wide scale, it would be much more trivial to work around this than it were to be on a console due to how open-ended PCs are.
On the Valve side, I can say from experience that whenever a publisher delists a game from the Steam store, it still remains in your library. They could axe the entire store page, making it unviewable, even unlisted, and that Steam app will remain available to the people who purchased it. (When I refer to a "Steam app" I am speaking about the app package that is licensed to your account that contains your game.) The case that comes to my mind is the older Sonic CD Retro Engine port from 2012. That port was later replaced by Sonic Origins, but the Steam app remains licensed to my account, and I can still download and play that whenever I chose to. I think it's safe to say that Valve has a good heart when it comes to preservation of games, and so long as Steam remains available as a service I doubt that's going to be gone anytime soon.
Unboxing, Setup, and General Experience
I opened this thing and set it up for the first time with the person who started @HardwareSteam in a Discord call. It was super fun, we were nerding out the entire call. Valve has always had a simple and clean taste for unboxing experiences, and the machine was no different. The package has a big paper seal with a little tab on it, and the entire thing has a carrying handle on it so it's easy to slide out of the box that came in. I got a pretty damn good rip on the seal by the way, here is that.
The thing is so small. I watched a ton of videos. That was kinda drilled into my head, and I was still incredibly shocked with how small it is. It's a really dense cube, but its size is so killer. It's clear Valve envisioned this thing sitting in the living-room, the design fits in with just about any other box you'd have sitting under the TV. Another thing Valve nailed with this thing is the setup experience. It was so easy to just plug in a controller and set this thing up, it's just like any other console, and all the boring work of setting up Steam of course is done for you. Set up internet, timezones, scan a QR code in the Steam app, and you're good to go. I feel like a lot of the reason why people don't get into PC gaming is because of how much you need to do yourself, it's not nearly as streamlined as having everything you need ready for you like on a console. Well on this, that isn't an issue.
For my first few sessions with this thing, I spent it solely in gaming mode, seeing what would work and what wouldn't. The experience I've had with this thing is unlike any other PC I've used. I think it goes without saying that consoles typically have the upper leg in user experience. Gaming PCs typically require more setup to get up and running, and not a lot of people have the time to commit to something like that. The Steam Machine is perfect for those individuals who want a more free open platform, while still getting the polished ease of use experience console gaming is known for.
But I wasn't going to stick in gaming mode for the entirety of the time. I wanted to see how this thing ticked, so I hooked it up like I would a standard PC and went to town. Let me say right off the bat that this thing is so damn refreshing for someone who uses Windows on a regular. There are times when Windows Explorer will just freeze and crash randomly. I have one of the most high end gaming pre-builts you can get your hands on right now, that should not be the case. Moving to SteamOS and seeing how snappy and smooth the experience with KDE Plasma made me so happy, everything just works. It's crazy what you can do if your software doesn't suck doo doo butt! I think that Linux has this stigma around it that makes people think you need to know what you're doing to get into it, and you just really don't at all. I barely know my way around it, I think if you find the right distro you're gonna be just fine.
Performance
I wish I could talk about performance fairly but I don't really have many performance intensive games. I absolutely gave this thing the easy way out, the most modern game of the bunch I tried first was probably Counter-Strike 2. With that being said, in my experience, you can get games running and looking pretty damn good here! Yes, you may need to do adjustments within each game to get it running as smooth as it could, but that's a one time thing and after that you'll more times than not get a game running as good as it can on console.
My verdict
Is it overpriced? Yes. That is objectively true. There isn't any getting away from that, it's just too damn much. But at the same time, Valve never intended for it to be this expensive. Valve said themselves that the price increases for the Steam Deck will give us a good idea of what price they were intending to hit with this thing, and that would've placed the Steam Machine's intended MSRP at around $750. That would've smashed! If this thing came out a few years ago, it would've killed so hard! But unfortunately, that isn't reality. The hardware crisis is getting worse, Valve is just barely able to find the resources necessary to produce these things, and now we are here.
As much as I believe the Steam Machine is overpriced, it isn't a bad device at all. If you know what you're getting into, and have the money to spare, I highly recommend looking into it at least. It's gonna be very difficult to get one for a long while, that's for sure, but if you can get your hands on one, it is one hell of a device. I've had a shit ton of fun with it despite having a computer with a 5090 and 64 gigs of ram, that is saying something. The quality and tuning of the hardware and software done specifically for this product is incredible, and makes this one of the most worthwhile purchases I've had in quite a bit.