Recently, Valve announced three new hardware products: Steam Controller, Steam Frame, and Steam Machine and they’re all coming out early 2026. No price information was included and Valve did state they’ll talk about the next version of Steam Deck later on.

The Steam controller is basically a standalone version of the controls for the Steam Deck. It looks robust and has all the bells and whistles of a fully decked out controller with back buttons, gyro sensors, TMR control sticks (no stick drift), and two track pads for specific pointer games. I like it and definitely will check it out especially if it has support for other systems like the Switch.

I’m not into VR at the moment so I have little to say about the Steam Frame except it does seem to be a technical beast. It’s a significant upgrade to the Valve Index with the main selling point being the built in eye tracking resolution called Foveated Streaming. This would allow devs to rely on the hardware (and OS) of the Steam Frame rather than building it out themselves which will save time and resources. This is pretty neat but it being a VR headset is still a hurdle from going mainstream.

And then we have the Steam Machine which is the glimpse into Valve’s foray into the console market. “Wait isn’t it a PC though?” you whisper to the computer screen reading this dumb blog. Yeah, sure. It’s a PC but the biggest draw is you can play games on the couch with this PC. That’s the biggest news for this lil’ cube.

It’s been no secret Valve used the Steam Deck as an experiment to expand the reach of their PC gaming ecosystem and as their SteamOS showcase. The Steam Deck is just fantastic as a handheld PC gaming device and a big part is due to the operating system Valve has been cooking on for several years. And now they can expand their Steam marketplace with a PC that’s dedicated to the console experience.

Wah wah wah PCs are better than consoles. There’s like a hundred million people that don’t give a fuck about that. They want something that can play quality video games and do it pretty easily. Not this tinkering the graphics settings or reinstalling the OS for the fifth time. And Valve making a dedicated operating system for their dedicated hardware so players can buy more games from their dedicated online marketplace is a win for them. They are doing well when the Xbox division within Microsoft continues to stumble.

Valve is now expanding their business by making consoles—I mean PCs that act like consoles—so they can grow their user base and players reliance on them. They don’t have to; they could have just relied on Steam for the foreseeable future since no other PC gaming marketplace can overtake Valve’s money printer.

To put it simply, Valve is going after the Xbox and PlayStation user base (mostly PlayStation). For the last several years, the digital ecosystem is the product. With libraries, gaming patterns, and reliability, and friends network, people will buy the system attached to the ecosystem they invested in the most.

Sony has sold over 80 million PS5s and Microsoft has sold 33 million Xbox Series X and S. That’s a lot of room to work with especially when the appeal is being able to just buy a Steam Machine so you can play your (future) PlayStation and Xbox favorites. It’s also why Nintendo is basically just competing with itself, trying to get the Switch 2 to match the behemoth the original Switch was (and kinda still is, devs are not going to forget that there are over 150 million Switches sold anytime soon).

Is Valve going to be able to sell 50 million Steam Machines? Probably not. But the point is to start getting more and more players hooked onto Steam and the ecosystem. And their best bet is to make a console. With the trajectory of how things are going, in some years time you’ll just need a Steam Machine and a Nintendo console and you’ll have access to almost every new game. The future of gaming is PCs acting like consoles.