In a blog post late Thursday, Valve wrote that it planned to ship the Steam Machine with its upcoming Steam Frame VR headset “this summer.” No, it’s not the specific date we were expecting, but it’s more than what the company has offered to PC gamers recently, so we’ll take what we can get.
The blog post further details what players can expect from the Steam Verified program, which maintains a list of games, with Valve promising that the Steam Deck will work well on handhelds as well as its consoles and headsets. If a game does well on Steam Deck, it will also have a verified place on Steam Machine. Valve claims it has run tests on “thousands” of Steam titles to determine whether they deserve the Steam Machine Verified sticker.
The situation surrounding Steam Frame, an ARM-based headset running the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3, is a little more complicated. Valve will allow you to play 2D games in a virtual reality environment (any augmented reality passthrough features will be in black and white only), as well as available VR titles. Any title in the Steam Frame Standalone Verified Library must contain legible text, support the default controller configuration, and remain playable.
Without saying anything about pricing, Valve is keeping consumers guessing, and I’m sure some people are imagining the worst. I’d still hold out a spark of hope that we might see Valve’s console priced below $700, but I wouldn’t blame you for hoping it would cost more than that.
Last month, Valve launched its $100 Steam Controller as a kind of amuse-bouche for the rest of its upcoming hardware. Then, in May, Steam Maker raised the price of its Steam Deck OLED handheld by approx. 50% for 1TB models. The company is now asking $950 for 3-year-old hardware. This doesn’t mean that a more powerful Steam Machine will cost more than $1,000, but waiting all this time for information about pricing is definitely not a good sign.
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