Steam Machine and Steam Frame will release this summer, but dates and prices are still unknown

Valve has committed to releasing both the Steam Machine and Steam Frame this summer, though are still holding off on setting a firm release date or publicly setting the price for either device.

The statement comes as the company expands the Verified programme on Steam, which gives a quick indicator over game compatibility for Valve’s hardware. It’s an extension of the existing Steam Deck Verified markers, which has been vital for consumers to understand if games they own or want to buy will run on the handheld PC.

The Verified programme tests games to see that they work via the Proton compatibility layer for SteamOS (or are native to Linux), and if it has a Steam Deck specific profile and minimum level of performance. Games are categorised as Verified for an out-of-the-box experience, Playable for a game that needs a bit of user tweaking or leans on keyboard text inputs, Unsupported for those that are incompatible (perhaps for requiring kernel level anticheat), or Unknown for not having been tested.

Valve notes that for the requirements for Steam Machine Verified are similar to Steam Deck Verified. The Steam Machine is around six times as powerful as the Steam Deck, so already compatible games could require no extra work from developers, while Valve are testing titles that they found fell short of performance requirements for Deck.

Steam Frame is much more bespoke, as a new virtual reality system and platform. While it can be used to stream games from PC for the full fat SteamVR experience, it can also run in a standalone mode, and so VR games will now have a Steam Frame Standalone Verified test. This once again focuses on the out-of-the-box experience with good default graphics that perform well, text and UI that are legible and default controller settings that work well with the Steam Frame Controllers. The added caveat on performance comes from Steam Frame being an ARM-based mobile chipset, as opposed to the full grunt of a PC, so more complex titles could fall short here.

While the Steam Machine and Steam Frame were announced at the end of last year, Valve’s plans for release were thrown into disarray with the massive leap in component costs for RAM and storage in particular over the past year. The AI boom (and arguable bubble) has seen AI companies buying up capacity and tranches of memory and other components in order to fill server farms that are planned for construction in the coming years, and that’s thrown the consumer electronics business into a deepening crisis.

This led to Valve letting the Steam Deck go out of stock for a period, before bringing fresh supply of the Steam Deck OLED to market last week… with an eye-watering price increase of around 35-40%, depending on the region.

When Valve had already been stating that the Steam Machine would be priced in line with comparable PCs, as opposed to trying to be a loss leader, we cannot expect it to be cheap whenever they are ready to talk price.

Source: Steam

Tags: Steam, Steam Deck, Steam Frame, Steam Machine, valve