Following on from the success of the Steam Deck, Valve is creating its very own ecosystem of products. The Steam Frame, Steam Machine, and Steam Controller are all set to launch in the new year. We’ve tried each of them and here’s what you need to know about each one.
“From the Frame to the Controller to the Machine, we’re a fairly small industrial design team here, and we really made sure it felt like a family of devices, even to the slightest detail,” Clement Gallois, a designer at Valve, tells me during a recent visit to Valve HQ. “How it feels, the buttons, how they react… everything belongs and works together kind of seamlessly.”
For more detail, make sure to check out our in-depth stories linked below:
Steam Frame: Valve’s new wireless VR headset
Steam Machine: Compact living room gaming box
Steam Controller: A controller to replace your mouse
Valve’s official video announcement.
So uh, ahem.
Yes.
Valve can indeed count to three.
I mean like a v2 Steam Deck and Dock. Give the Deck a bump in CPU/RAM/storage specs and new external ports to facilitate having the GPU in the dock. It could technically even be an externalized PCIe connector instead of Thunderbolt/USB. In handheld mode you get the iCPU limited to 1080, but dock it on the big screen and now you get full 4k @ 60 FPS. Add an HDMI port so you do 1080 on a big screen without a dock.
At this point, you would think that if they wanted to go with an Occulink/Thunderbolt thing… they’d make it in the Steam Machine, the thing that doesn’t move around as much.
They… the Valve video says the Steam Machine is 6 times as powerful as a Steam Deck.
… I have no idea what that actually means, maybe its TFLOPs, who knows, but uh, yeah, if you’re making a 6x thing thats more stationary, I would think that would be the thing you’d make with an option or variant to just jam more compute into it via modularity.
I dunno. It seems like more news about the Deck 2 or whatever is coming, at some point, Valve’s whole actual video is basically making fun of how its not talking about the Deck… stay tuned, goth gamer nation…???
Either way, we always have this:
Oh god are there going to be some very very salty Nintendo fans, very soon.
I hadn’t heard of OCuLink before, apparently it’s an external PCIe connector! Eh, that would seem like a waste of engineering team to build that into a stationary desktop PC. They can just build the PC case to whatever size is needed to house the GPU and related cooling, which they did. This is the second desktop PC they’ve released, no? They had one like 10 years ago that was a commercial failure? My impression as a console gamer is that the Deck is very successful and popular, but it’s under-powered for playing on a big screen.
Right, my point was just bumping the chipset/CPU/memory would give a nice marketing tagline like that without designing a whole new desktop PC. Obviously, you can’t put a giant modern CPU and heat sinks and fans in a handheld. So spend that engineering R&D money on giving the dock a GPU so now the Deck performs as well as the Machine would have, and you have it using a successful branding rather than reviving a brand that already failed once.
Hope so.