- Larian’s publishing director says it’s “really pointless to create a high-quality steam engine.”
- This mini PC is aimed at casual gamers, he says, and Valve wants to create an entry point into that market and then see it flourish.
- Other PC makers will step in with beefier models, or avid gamers can build their own compact SteamOS PCs.
If you think Valve’s new version of the Steam Machine is disappointing and underpowered, you wouldn’t be alone – but you might be failing to see the bigger picture.
PC Gamer pointed out that more hardcore gamers are clearly unimpressed with the base specs of the Steam Machine – which runs an AMD Zen 4 CPU with an RDNA 3 GPU (semi-custom, 8GB) – and want it to come with a more robust set of components.
However, as Larian’s publishing director (from Baldur’s Gate 3) Michael Douse makes clear, that’s not the point. That point being, as the Douse post on
Value is probably betting that anyone who wants more demanding PC hardware on their TV is part of the audience who knows how to turn any PC into a steam engine. There’s really no point in creating a high-quality steam engine.November 13, 2025
In other words, the Steam Machine is aimed at more casual gamers who don’t care too much about the exact performance they’re getting – people who just want an affordable PC case to sit discreetly in their living room (hence the rather bland and compact cubic design) and allow them to easily jump into PC games on the TV.
Douse expands on this argument by noting that the bigger picture is that if Valve can establish the Steam Machine as an entry-level mini PC for home gaming this time around, third-party manufacturers (Asus, Ayaneo, and all the usual suspects) will build more powerful gaming cubes (probably a bit bigger than Valve’s, of course). That’s what happened with the Steam Deck and the many handhelds that followed, and Valve is hoping to replicate that success here.
The theory is that there will eventually be a whole ecosystem of mini PCs running SteamOS, and even if Valve doesn’t sell the hardware in all cases, it still sells the PC games through Steam for all of these devices.
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The dream will undoubtedly be that game developers start taking Linux more seriously and consider compatibility issues more – and problematic elements like anti-cheat tools for online games (which are currently a serious ongoing problem).
So it all comes back to the software: moving forward with SteamOS, while also accelerating game sales on Steam itself.
The obvious reason why the Steam Machine is relatively modest in terms of performance ceiling, judging by the hardware chosen, is that Valve wants to be able to price the cube at an affordable level.
This brave new world of a new way to play in the living room won’t happen if the Steam Machine seems expensive, and the big hope is that Valve will really attack on pricing. Mainly because it makes sense that this was the intended approach and angle, given that Valve certainly could have gone a bit further in terms of hardware specs.
However, we don’t have any real indication yet of what the price might be. The general hope is to get something like a $499 PC (in the US) here – although some are even more optimistic than that – but the actual cost could still be affected by some unfortunate winds currently blowing in the component space. These market forces are driving up the cost of memory, which means more expensive RAM and SSDs, which could be a pricing issue when it comes to the Steam Machine’s production time.
Valve must, of course, keep in mind that the Steam Machine will have to answer the question: “why should I buy this over a PS5 or an Xbox?” – based on the relative cost of these parlor game boxes. Although when it comes to game prices, there are plenty of cheap games (and big sales) on Steam, as well as a huge library of quality indie titles – all of which could be tempting selling points for more casual gamers, again.
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