Some Thoughts on the Steam Machine (Patreon)

The Steam Machine is a victim of circumstance. The consolized PC is a cool idea whose time has come, and Valve has been pushing in this direction in various ways for years. The most recent push has been extremely visible, with the Steam Deck carving out its own little space in the world, creating a wave of similar, competing handhelds in its wake. But Valve’s overall ambitions here seem somewhat higher-minded than just cranking out a well-liked handheld.

Instead of just packing up a small computer and putting the same Windows OS that most people are gaming on today, they’ve been doing an absolute ton of work to find ways to get those same Windows games to run on SteamOS, Valve’s own particular flavor of Linux. If you’ve ever, say, tried to run a recent console game on a PC-based emulator, you’re probably aware that things can happen when you try to run a game intended for one OS on top of another. This is certainly the case with the Steam Deck and, now, the Steam Machine. Valve’s OS has never been a 1:1 experience for 100% of Steam’s library. But the progress continues and plenty of games now run perfectly in this environment. It feels freeing. It feels futuristic, at times. I’m absolutely in love with what they’re doing, conceptually. But most people are probably a little less interested in the concept of getting away from Windows and they just want to, like, play games. Sensible. In a lot of cases, the Steam Machine will do just that, proving a console-esque experience that Just Works… until it doesn’t. Work continues, and Valve has come a long way, but there’s still more work to do.

To me, the compatibility work is the actual important thing about the Steam Machine and Valve’s continuing dedication to this process. While I’ll probably never fully embrace SteamOS until the anti-cheat issue is solved for more games (Marathon, Call of Duty, Battlefield, that crummy new version of Dead or Alive 6, and so on), it feels like something that’s getting better all the time. In a way, it feels like Valve is totally capable of getting there, provided game developers eventually get more interested in meeting them halfway.

Though Valve has announced future plans to make SteamOS work on more and more hardware over time, at the moment Valve’s OS is primarily built for Valve’s hardware. And Valve’s hardware, like just about all hardware these days, is extremely expensive. In a world where component prices didn’t drive up the cost of the Steam Machine by hundreds of dollars, their tiny little game cube becomes easy to recommend to plenty of players. But, unfortunately, the rest of the world refuses to play along, making the Steam Machine a pretty tough sell in both its $1,049 512GB configuration and its $1,349 2TB model.

At least the under-the-hood work continues.

OK, so if you’re familiar with the Steam Deck, the Steam Machine is a very easy concept. It’s a more powerful gaming machine that doesn’t have a screen, so you have to hook it up to a screen. That screen is probably a television, but there’s nothing stopping you from wiring it up to a monitor. Heck, you could plug a mouse and keyboard into it and use it for proper computing, if you want. But, if we’re being real, this is primarily built to provide a console-style experience, and most people will probably want to connect this thing to a TV. Valve made a new Steam Controller to launch alongside the Machine, duplicating the mouse-style touchpads found on the Deck. It benefits from all the work done to SteamOS and Proton over the years and, as a result, is launching in a much better place than the Steam Deck did on day one.

That said, I ran into a lot of game-specific issues almost immediately, which starts to draw a bit of a line through the Steam Machine’s best use case: A PC for people who don’t want to dick around with “PC stuff.” A console that plays PC games, letting you take advantage of Steam’s large library in a new way. A… hmm… what’s the nice way to put this? A PC… for Dummies? Anyway, it isn’t quite the “push button, make game go” box that it’ll need to become to truly delight a mainstream audience.

From a power perspective, the Steam Machine is not the top of the line. In fact, when you unbox it, the Steam Machine is effectively capped to a resolution of 1080p. The settings screens even remind you that 1080p is what Valve uses when testing games to see if they’re “Steam Machine verified.” This came as a bit of surprise, considering a lot of the talk leading up to the system’s release talked a little bit about 4K, but mostly about 1440p. It’s easy to override this resolution limit, but it’s also a pretty good indicator when it comes to what you can expect from the Steam Machine, performance-wise. If you’re playing older or less-demanding games then yeah, you can probably get a full 4K out of it without issue. Many modern games do not run especially well at that resolution, but I did find that 1440p (the resolution of champions!!!) made for a good middle ground, especially in many games that directly support AMD’s FSR upscaling technology.

Obviously, a lot of this comes down to the games you want to play and what sort of image quality vs. frame rate tradeoffs you’re willing to make. I’ve stumbled in a handful of games that I’ve just started installing on every single SteamOS, Bazzite, or similar “non-Windows for Windows games” machine that I’ve come into contact with, so here are the results of my early and highly non-scientific testing.

The First Descendant

On first launch, the Machine just locked up at a black screen, forcing me to hold down the power button to force a reboot. At one point Steam was listing this game as Verified (and it still technically says that it is SteamOS Compatible), but it has since dropped back to question mark status, which is more accurate. If you go and install GE-Proton (a fork of Valve’s compatibility toolset that includes codecs and other tricks that enable better video playback and some other tweaks that make some games work that don’t work with Valve’s standard libraries, the game boots up just fine. But installing a custom Proton library entails dropped to desktop mode and doing computer stuff, so if a person isn’t up for that, well, this ain’t gonna run.

Once I got it running, though, I couldn’t really find a particularly acceptable way to set up the graphics. Turning FSR on improves the frame rate, but the game takes on a ghostly, fake-looking effect as the resolution drops, making it start to look like you’re running it on a Switch 2 that’s been dropped in a swimming pool. At higher resolutions, the frame rate can’t keep up. It certainly runs better here than it ran on the Steam Deck, but I don’t know that I’d call any of the trade-offs here acceptable. That’s probably why it’s gone from verified back to “I dunno, dude, try it out I guess.”

(UPDATE: I figured out why it's not verified anymore. The stable branch of the Steam Machine software shows the SteamOS compatibility information, rather than info specific to the Steam Machine. The preview branch has direct support for Steam Machine compatibility listings. So this game either shows as Verified or Unknown, depending on which branch you're running. Not great?)

Virtua Fighter 5 R.E.V.O. World Stage

This game is currently listed as Verified for Steam Machine, Deck, and SteamOS. But it won’t run on any of those unless you go and add the magic words “SteamDeck=1 %command%” to a text box buried in the game’s settings page. Without that, running the game pops up an ugly, low-res box referencing whatever the game’s anti-cheat implementation is and effectively locks up. With that modified command line, the game runs great. This is, I suppose, not a big deal… unless you have no idea what any of that means and no idea that you might need to go visit protondb.com and search out some help from the community to get a game running. Not exactly the most console-like experience, ya know?

Assassin’s Creed Black Flag Resynced

On first run this threw out a Ubisoft Connect error, claiming that it couldn’t sync achievements. There was no way out of this screen, so I was forced to hold down the power button and force a reboot. Second time out it ran just fine. In fact, I’m pretty impressed with how well the game scales down to the Steam Machine hardware—you’ll certainly notice the lower resolution if you’ve seen the game on a more powerful PC or console, but it’s been pretty solid.

Borderlands 4

Similar to Black Flag, this one failed on first launch and I had to manually reboot it. The game took a quick little in-place patch at the title screen and then seemingly tried to run a .bat file to reboot the game after the patch completes. The Steam Machine has no idea what to do with this and crashes to a command prompt. Second boot was fine and for a game that got a lot of grief for how poorly it ran at launch, I was pleasantly surprised by how well it ran at the lower resolution. It felt like I was playing a Switch 2 version of Borderlands 4… it’d be interesting to compare this to the Switch 2 version of Borderlands 4, should it ever materialize.

Forza Horizon 6

Maintains 1440p60 with FSR enabled on High settings, for the most part, with dips down to 55fps or so when scenes get hectic. Overall I was most impressed with how well this one held up, and if you’re trying to eliminate those frame rate dips, dropping some of the settings down a tad will get you closer without dramatically impacing the image quality.

Doom: The Dark Ages

Ran really smoothly out of the box at 1080p. The image quality was a little hazy in spots, but overall this was very playable. Much like Borderlands 4 it made me wonder what this game would look like on a Switch 2.

Goat Simulator 3

My son’s played about five hours of this on a Steam Machine and never noticed that it looked a little more pixelated than he was used to seeing. Runs fine at 1080p and 1440p, even with the detail settings turned up.

Plenty of games also take forever to get going on their first launch and I’ve run into more verified games along the way that occasionally fail to launch, resulting in a black screen and forced power cycle. This is especially frustrating when I’m trying to play games with the kids, because these kids of mine do not understand why the game they want to play just isn’t working.

OK, I could go on and on, but I think you get the idea. Having the first three games I tried all fail to run on their first boot really got things off on a bad foot with me and the Steam Machine, but it’s all fixable. As someone who appreciates getting neck-deep in some of this shit, I don’t mind that too much. It’s fun to tinker, sometimes! But when that tinkering mindset collides with a device that seems like it’s designed for ease-of-use, there’s a real disconnect. Normal people shouldn’t have to know what a protondb.com is just to get a game running, especially one that’s verified by Valve.

So who should buy a Steam Machine, then? At these prices and at a level of performance that’s noticeably below modern consoles, it’s fairly tough to recommend. A PlayStation 5 Pro goes for $950 these days and it runs plenty of games at 4K60. But if you’ve already invested in a large library of Steam games, you probably don’t want to start all over again. Also, do you really want to buy into an ecosystem that makes you pay a monthly fee just to play your games online? OK, maybe you do, sure. But, man, that sure does sound awful when you say it out loud, doesn’t it?

It’s also worth considering that, at this point, Valve isn’t even really trying to reach new people. It’s a Steam Machine, sold on Steam to people who already have a Steam account, people who may already have a library of games on Steam. If that’s you and you either have a primary PC that’s struggling to keep up or a desire to bring your Steam games to a TV somewhere else in your house… the Steam Machine meets those needs, even if the experience isn’t as seamless as you might like. Either way, this was a much more attractive proposition before pricing on everything went haywire.

My recommendation doesn’t change that much for people who aren’t already experienced Steam users. On one hand, this is a really nice entry-level machine for people who want to get into PC games. Maybe you’re still rocking a PS4 and aren’t sure what to do from here. Or maybe you’ve fallen even further behind and are looking to get back into this whole video game thing. While it’s unlikely that such a person would ever even find this review, I think the increasing frequency of Steam sales combined with the lack of an annual fee to play online makes jumping into Personal Computing pretty attractive at this juncture.

Of course, this would be much easier to say if the device itself were a little more hardened against verified games that still don’t work for whatever reason. I can only hope that Valve continues to refine its verification program to prevent false positives and that developers take this opportunity seriously, as well. It would be easy for Valve to fall back onto its return policy instead of providing clearer messaging and more frequent check-ins to see if a game’s newest patch somehow broken SteamOS compatibility in the process. That’d be a real shame.

Price comes into play here, too, but it depends on your values, I suppose. A PS5 Pro costs less than even the least expensive Steam Machine, plus you’d never need to think about compatibility reports. Many games run at 4K, with stable frame rates and so on. There are no games on a PS5 Pro that aren’t compatible due to anti-cheat or whatever. If you are truly in search of a hassle-free experience, the Steam Machine might not be for you right now.

That said? It’s pretty rad. And it’s so tiny! I hope Valve sticks with it, if only so they’ll continue building out an exciting alternative to Windows. Linux on the desktop is for suckers! Long live Linux on the television!