After months of rumors, Valve finally announced the new Steam Machine earlier this week. And while I may question the company’s decision to ship a system with only 8GB of VRAM in 2026, I believe the “GabaCube” will do more for PC gaming than anything Microsoft has done in the last decade.
With SteamOS and Linux, Valve has done away with many of the things that make PC gaming inaccessible to some people. Do you want to set a frame limit to extend the battery life of your Steam Deck? This is an easy to find option in the display overlay, not something you need to search through multiple menus to find. Do you want to suspend a game? This is possible on SteamOS.
And now with Steam Machine, Valve is ready to bring the fun of PC gaming to a whole new audience: home console gamers. Although I don’t plan on buying it, selfishly I hope it becomes wildly successful. I imagine that like a lot of PC gamers, I’m ready to leave Windows behind. Over the years, Microsoft has proven to be a poor steward of this platform. It appears that the company is more interested in advancing AI features rather than solving the problems that have plagued Windows for years. After all, Microsoft recently said it would be addressing shader stutter, a problem that has plagued many recent AAA games. What’s worse, that solution may take years to fully implement.
I want the Steam Machine to be the revolution that brings SteamOS to desktop PCs, but before that happens, Valve needs to solve Linux’s cheating problem. Right now, the Steam deck covers two of the three pillars of PC gaming: indies and singleplayer AAA games. For some people, that’s enough, but it leaves out a huge chunk of the PC market. Nearly four years after its release, you can no longer play some of the most popular competitive games, and it’s all because of how easy it is to create cheat software for Linux-based operating systems.
In an interview in 2024 The VergeRiot’s Philip Koskinas summarized the issue. “You can freely manipulate the kernel, and there are no user mode calls to authenticate that it’s real,” he told the outlet. “You can create a Linux distribution that is purpose-built to deceive and we will be deceived.”
When Valve releases Steam Deck in early 2022, some of the expected games are like Fortnite And rainbow six siege It will eventually be playable on handhelds, and for a while things looked positive. In late 2021, Valve announced Proton compatibility with BattleEye. A few months later, the company did the same for Epic’s Easy Anti-Cheat. It also has Valve’s in-house solution, VAC, which is fully supported and that means the company’s own games, including counter attack 2 And Dota 2, Are playable on Steam Deck.
However, despite Valve’s support for some of the most popular anti-cheat solutions on the market, many studios chose not to bring their competing games to SteamOS, citing cheating concerns. Some notable examples include Fortnite, valiant And pubgThose games have never been playable on the Steam Deck, In fact, last time EA withdrew Linux and Steam Deck support top legendsOne of the few competitive shooters you can play on Valve’s handheld.
“In our efforts to combat fraud topWe have identified the Linux OS as a pathway for a variety of impressive exploits and frauds. As a result, we have decided to block Linux OS access to the game,” the company said at the time. “We believe this decision will significantly reduce the incidence of cheating in our games.”
For EA, Riot, Epic, and developers of other popular competitive games, the problem is two-fold: Cheating software is harder to detect when it is used on Linux. More importantly, many of them do not have enough Linux players to justify the resources required to secure their games for each Linux distribution. For example, when Riot made it a requirement to run their Vanguard software League of Legends The studio said that in 2024, more than 800 users per day were playing the game on Linux. For reference, millions of people union Every day. To put it another way, it’s a chicken-and-egg problem.
The Steam Machine represents an opportunity for Valve. According to Are We Anti-Cheat Yate, a crowd-sourced database listing games that require anti-cheat software and whether they work on Linux or through Valve’s Proton compatibility layer, 682 games do not work for one reason or another. This means that more than half of the 1,136 games that require anti-cheat software cannot be played on SteamOS.
By the nature of Linux, it’s unlikely that Valve could make even the most popular kernel-level anti-cheat apps work into every Linux distribution, and based on the company’s vision, it has no interest in doing so. However, if Valve created a better sandbox for developers to secure their games, we could definitely see a SteamOS version. valiantFor example.
Studios will go where their players are. Steam Deck has proved this. And if the Steam Machine becomes popular enough to warrant companies like EA bringing their games to SteamOS and Linux, the PC gaming landscape will suddenly be very different.