Steam Devices: Reference Hardware for PC Gaming

Okay, I want to talk about Steam Devices.

Valve just updated their devices list with three new entities: desktop/console, gamepad, and VR headset.

Gamers are angry as hell: the Steam Machine has “only” 16 GB of RAM, 8 GB of VRAM, and an “old” RDNA3 architecture-based CPU. “It is a mid-tier device,” they say.

That’s the whole damn point. It is not a PC for enthusiast PC gamers, who are ready to spend $2k on a top-tier PC every year. Game developers target them right now, but in 5 years, 70-80% of people will have hardware similar to the Steam Machine.

I’ve been using the Steam Deck for almost a year now, and it is a fantastic device. It was made by ~20 employees at Valve. Those stars obviously made a device for themselves. They play games, and they play different games. They know that PC gaming is known for (as we say in Russian) “PIERDOLING” (which translates to “tinkering,” “messing around” with a “farting” word root and a suffix meaning “hard-working, low profit”). They know that they would need to pierdoling, and they made a system to simplify it.

The Steam Deck is now almost the only PC device you can plug into your TV and get features like turning on the TV with console turn-on, powering the Steam Deck with a gamepad, volume sync, etc., with no pierdoling. Valve was making a device they really wanted to use themselves.

It is not meant to be powerful, it is not meant to be perfect, it is meant to be useful, and it is meant to be not too pricey. And it was a 100% success: gamers love it, developers love it. Oh, yeah, developers. Valve was not the first in this - GPD made handhelds for years before. But when Valve released the Steam Deck, it was a statement for developers: “This is an average handheld. If your game works fine on it, it will work fine on other handhelds as well.” The Steam Deck became a reference device for developers.

When Valve releases the Steam Machine and Steam Frame (oh, dogs, why “Frame”?), they will become the reference devices for PC and ARM-based VR headsets.

The Steam Frame is also an interesting device: it’s ARM-based, but Valve says that it can be used like an x86 PC. So the ARM-Proton project is alive, and it’s already somewhat working. Not as well as regular Proton, but it works in the most basic cases. I think that Valve needs to have both the Steam Deck/Machine on x86 and the Steam Frame on ARM to decide which CPU to use in Steam Deck 2.