- Larian Publishing Director Says “There’s Really No Point in Making a High-Spec Steam Machine”
- This mini PC is aimed at casual gamers, he argues, and Valve wants to create an entry point for this market and then watch it flourish.
- Other PC makers will step in with beefier models, or keen gamers can build their own compact SteamOS PCs.
If you think Valve’s new version of the Steam Machine is underwhelming in power, you wouldn’t be alone, but you might be missing the bigger picture.
PC Gamer highlighted that hardcore gamers are clearly unimpressed with the Steam Machine’s core specs, which runs an AMD Zen 4 CPU with RDNA 3 GPU (semi-custom, 8GB), and wish it came with a more robust set of components.
However, as Larian’s editorial director (of Baldur’s Gate 3 fame) Michael Douse makes clear, this is not the point. That point is, as Douse posts on
Value is probably banking on the fact that anyone who wants more demanding PC hardware in their TV is part of the crowd that knows how to turn any PC into a Steam Machine. There’s really no point in making a high-spec Steam Machine.November 13, 2025
In other words, the Steam Machine is aimed at more casual gamers who won’t worry 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 cube design) and allow them to easily play PC games on the TV.
Douse expands on this argument to point out that the broader view is that if Valve can establish the Steam Machine as a mini-PC entry point for living room gaming this time around, third-party manufacturers (Asus, Ayaneo, and all the usual suspects) will build more powerful gaming cubes (probably a bit larger than Valve’s, of course). That’s what happened with the Steam Deck and the group of handhelds that followed, and Valve hopes to mirror that success here.
The theory is that an entire ecosystem of mini PCs will eventually emerge with SteamOS, and even if Valve doesn’t sell the hardware in all cases, it still sells PC games through Steam for all of these devices.
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The dream, no doubt, will be for game developers to start taking Linux more seriously and give more consideration to compatibility issues, and problematic elements like anti-cheat tools for online games (which are a serious issue in the works currently).
So it all comes back to software: moving forward with SteamOS while accelerating game sales on Steam.
The obvious reason the Steam Machine is relatively modest in terms of its performance limit, judging by the hardware chosen, is because 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 put some effort into pricing. Mainly because it makes sense that this would be the intended focus and angle, given that Valve certainly could have gone a little further in terms of pushing the hardware specs.
However, we still don’t have any kind of real clue as to what the price could be. The general hope is something like a $499 PC (in the US) here, although some are more optimistic than that, but the actual cost may still be affected by some unfortunate winds blowing in the component space right now. Those market forces are driving up the cost of memory, meaning more expensive RAM and SSDs, which could be a pricing issue when it comes to Steam Machine production time.
Of course, Valve has to keep in mind that the Steam Machine will have to answer the question: “why should I buy this instead of a PS5 or Xbox?” – based on the relative cost of these living room game boxes. Although when it comes to the price of games, there are plenty of cheap games (and great sales) on Steam, and a vast library of quality indie titles, all of which could be tempting selling points for more casual gamers, again.
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