Why a new Steam Machine when the first ones flopped? Because this time, Valve say, it'll actually have games

"The catalogue wasn't quite there"

Among the trio of new hardware devices Valve just announced for 2026 – which also include the Steam Frame VR headset and a redesigned Steam Controller – the new Steam Machine is probably the most surprising. Mainly because the original Steam Machines, a series of partner-built SteamOS mini-PCs, sank like rectangular stones upon launching in 2015.

Designed and built entirely in-house, the new model is a very different proposition, though it’s not so much the updated hardware that has Valve believing it’s time to give the Steam Machine another chance. According to engineers Yazan Aldehayyat and Pierre-Loup Griffais, the biggest problem faced by those doomed Machines was one that the Steam Deck’s Proton software has solved: a lack of SteamOS-compatible games.

"I think a big part of it was that the software was not quite ready," Aldehayyat replied when I asked what went wrong in 2015. "We learned from the first Steam Machines that we needed to make our developers’ lives a lot easier. So now we have Proton, right? Which is essentially just a compatibility layer that lets games run on Linux, that are originally meant for Windows."

Proton predates the Steam Deck by a few years, but the handheld was the first major device to show what it could do, allowing punters to play the majority of their already-owned Steam games right out of the box. During the days of the first Steam Machines, the only reliably-running games – unless you got lucky with other, less integrated compatibility tools like Wine – were those that had been manually ported from Windows to Linux, on which SteamOS is based. That meant a relatively tiny library compared to the thousands upon thousands of Steam games that the Deck could run at launch, all without needing any significant input from developers or publishers.

"Yeah, I think it's really about the games catalogue," Griffais added. "Being able to control your TV, boot directly into the game, launch games and install them in a way that meant you didn't have to install drivers, or that you didn't have to clean up your system after you installed and uninstalled a couple of games... all of those elements were there. We just didn't have a really compelling games library.

"Developers were kind of stuck between the equation of 'Do I want to do a bunch of work to port my game? But there's not an audience for it that justifies this work yet.' So it was a little bit of a bootstrapping problem.

"The catalogue wasn't quite there, but then once we released Proton, we started to see that tendency invert."

SteamOS still lacks native support for non-Steam launchers like Ubisoft Connect or the Epic Games launcher. But, the Steam Deck has also shown that it’s fairly easy to get these working regardless – in turn, further expanding the new Steam Machine’s compatibility umbrella over games that would never have played ball with the older models. And although an increasingly common blockade for the Steam Deck has been its struggles with squeezing adequate performance out of technically demanding games, Valve are sure that the brawnier Steam Machine won’t fall short on speed.

"For Steam Deck, we had a lot of work to do on performance, but it was kind of a different angle, right? Like it was power efficiency and stuff like that,” Griffais explained. "So even around the Steam Deck release, if you're running SteamOS on hardware like that, maybe the performance wouldn't be exactly on par as it would be on desktop. But [for the new Steam Machine] we've done a tonne of work on desktop performance, ray tracing, and all that stuff, and now we expect that all the same performance advantages are presented in more discrete GPU form factor."

Although I wouldn’t call the Steam Machine a powerhouse, it’s a damn sight quicker than the Deck: while Valve’s engies were telling me all this, I was using it to play Cyberpunk 2077 at 4K (upscaled with FSR 3 in Performance mode) on a combination of Medium settings and Low ray tracing. Between Proton and this added muscle, the new Steam Machine might be a few months off, yet it's hard not to agree that it'll likely avoid the compatibility woes that – in Valve’s eyes – doomed its predecessors.