Recently Valve announced multiple pieces of hardware which was received well due to the reputation that Steam has created with the Steam Deck. The Steam Deck has created a positive reputation for Steam in the console space by being an easily accessible handheld console, selling several million units.
Steam is a subsidiary of the Valve company, a game developer/publisher, which is the storefront that was originally created solely for the games that Valve made. Later on, after becoming a successful online games store, Valve branched out into not only selling games but selling the means to play them on. In November of 2015 Valve released the Steam Machine, their first attempt at a stand alone console. The Valve Index was released to be bought on Steam in June of 2019. Following, the Steam Deck released three years later in February of 2022. The Steam Deck was the first console that Steam released after the original Steam Machine was withdrawn from Steam in November of 2018. The Steam Deck is Valve’s handheld console which was initially released with only an LCD model but a year later an OLED version was released.
On November 12th of this year, Valve announced three new pieces of hardware; a virtual reality headset, a console, and a controller. The console, also named the “Steam Machine”, will run off of Steam OS. All currently announced versions of the Steam machine will have the same hardware apart from an option with four times the storage of the other Steam Machine, which only has 512 GB. The steam machine has dimensions of 152×162.4x156mm and weighs 2.6 kg. In addition, the Steam Machine features both a semi custom AMD graphics card and central processor; the processor has 6 cores with a maximum clock speed of 4.8 gigahertz. The graphics card includes a maximum clock speed of 2.45 gigahertz It features 16 gigabytes of DDR5 RAM and 8 gigabytes of GDDR6 VRAM. Furthermore, the Steam Machine features several types of ports such as: four USB-A, one USB-C, an HDMI 2.0, a DisplayPort 1.4, and an ethernet port that goes up to a Gigabit.
The Steam Machine, unlike most other consoles, will not require a subscription for online play. Other modern consoles, such as the Nintendo Switch, Xbox Series, and Playstation require a monthly subscription to utilize online multiplayer with the cheapest being Nintendo Online at $7.99. One reason behind this is that the Steam Machine is essentially a computer running an operating system designed similarly to one of a console. Additionally, the Steam machine will have access to all online features included in its computer application and the Steam Deck.
