Valve, estimated at being worth more than sixteen billion dollars, aims to break into the video game console market. Valve is best known for owning the online video game marketplace, Steam. They have traditionally been known as a PC-focused company. In 2022, they broke into the video game hardware business when they released the Steam Deck, a powerful handheld PC. Now, Valve is expanding their hardware lineup, as on November 12th they released a video on YouTube announcing that they are adding three new pieces of hardware to their lineup.
The first piece of hardware they announced was the new Steam Controller. This is a controller that is supposed to be able to work with every single PC game, even those not designed with a controller in mind. It has cool features like dual track pads, gyro aiming, HD haptics, and an impressive 35 hours of battery life, as well as plenty of other small features. This controller wasn’t just meant as a standalone controller, as it was designed for the new Steam Machine.
The Steam Machine is Valve’s brand-new living-room console. This thing is a beast. It is a sleek cube that is roughly six inches in size. It is supposedly six times more powerful than the Steam Deck. It has semi-custom GPUs and CPUs, promising ray tracing and an impressive 4K 60 FPS with FSR for its games. If this is true, this thing would pack a punch. It runs the Steam operating system, meaning you can play any PC game on Steam on your living room TV. It has sixteen gigabytes of RAM for the system, which can be upgraded, and it has an SD slot to easily expand its storage. Pretty much what this all means is that this thing is going to give the Xbox and PlayStation a run for their money when it comes to power. Can this machine carve a place for itself in the console market? Only time will tell.
If that wasn’t enough, Valve ended its presentation with an announcement for a brand new VR headset. It uses a Snapdragon Gen 3 processor, pancake lenses with 2160 x 2160 resolution per eye and eye tracking. This headset can be played standalone, but it is mainly designed to stream games with low latency from your PC.
All of these products are going to be available in early 2026. We have no prices yet. While there is no way to know if any of these are going to be worth it, Valve is a company known for putting forth high-quality products and putting their customers before profit. I think we can expect some really fun and powerful hardware next year.
