More from Steam Machines have returned: all the news about Valve’s new hardware universe
I told you security guards lined the halls during my Valve visit. CNET’s Scott Stein can back me up. But I’ve never seen guards during previous Valve trips — and maybe they were only there that day. Steve Burke (Gamers Nexus) told me he didn’t see any when he visited.
According to Valve, games are already Steam Deck Verified, they’ll “automatically be verified on Steam Machine.” There will be a Steam Frame Verified program, too.
[steamcommunity.com]
IGN’s Wesley Yin-Poole has an excellent interview with Valve’s Pierre-Loup Griffais and Yazan Aldehayyat, including one reason why they have no news about Steam Deck 2. It’s because yet again, the promised “generational leap” in performance is not yet possible. They haven’t found the right chip.
Griffais says:
“We’re not interested in getting to a point where it’s 20 or 30 or even 50% more performance at the same battery life. We want something a little bit more demarcated than that.”
The company confirmed it to Gamers Nexus in a statement:
APKs can also be side-loadable just like any non-Steam applications on Steam Deck. We expect that VR APKs that don’t leverage proprietary APls to just work.
Can Valve’s tiny box take on Microsoft and Sony?
This is what Valve’s new headset is all about.
Jon Bringus isn’t saying how he obtained this unicorn, but it looks completely legit!
It self-IDs as a “Valve Steambox,” fires up a Steam screen, makes Steam hardware sounds, and natively pairs with Steam Controllers! Intriguing components inside, like a presence-sensing front panel that fires up its iconic ring light. It appears to have a VirtualLink USB-C port, so it probably helped Valve designers test wired VR headsets before that standard failed.
Skip to 8:11 if you don’t want the preamble.
There were reasons to be skeptical of the turnkey, emulator-centric Steam Machine idea, and reasons to root for it too — but in the end, Sedano tells me he only got around 40 orders, and that he needed closer to 100.
He says he’s already refunded every backer, and did produce these two cases before shutting the project down:
Every desktop GPU should ship with four of these unholy things.
(Backstory: In 2013, Valve disavowed its involvement in the Xi3 Piston, a small gaming PC that was supposedly going to be a Steam Machine but shipped with Windows 7 instead. From the beginning, it had “DP/HDMI” stamped on its I/O shield — how did we miss it?!?)
