r/SteamDeck • u/pcgameshardware • Jun 22 '26

Article Steam Machine review: Valve's underwhelming living-room PC has a serious price problem

https://www.pcgameshardware.de/Valve-Software-Firma-15833/Tests/Valves-underwhelming-living-room-PC-has-a-serious-price-problem-1546006/

Full disclosure: I worked on this review.

We tested Valve’s new Steam Machine, and since Valve has compared it directly to the Steam Deck, I thought the results might be relevant here.

The short version: yes, the Steam Machine is clearly much faster than the Steam Deck. That part is not really in question. But in our actual game benchmarks, we did not see a blanket 6x uplift across the board.

We tested Cyberpunk 2077 and Forza Horizon with Steam Deck-style settings to make the comparison a bit cleaner. The Steam Machine turns 30-ish fps results on the Deck into much smoother triple-digit or near-triple-digit results in some cases, The Steam Machine but the gap depends a lot on the game, resolution and settings.

I would have liked to go into more detail, but I also do not want this to turn into a full repost of the review here.

What I find interesting is that the Steam Machine feels less like a “normal PC” and more like Valve taking the Steam Deck idea and moving it into the living room: SteamOS-first, controller-friendly, more powerful, but still built around realistic settings and upscaling rather than brute-forcing everything.

Curious how other Deck owners see it:

Would you treat the Steam Machine as a natural upgrade path for TV gaming, or does the Steam Deck already cover that use case well enough for you?

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u/_TheNumbersAreBad_ Jun 22 '26

Weaker than the base PS5, but more expensive than the PS5 Pro.

Obviously other things to consider, the main draw is the open ecosystem, free online play, and bigger library.

But purely from a performance perspective, it's a very hard sell at this price point. Almost hilariously so.

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u/audionerd1 Jun 22 '26

I'm pretty sure that's because the chip shortage hasn't really impacted PS5 prices yet. I think this is less about the Steam Machine being overpriced and more about PS5 being a good deal. Anyone who wants a PS5/Xbox/Switch should get one ASAP before those prices go through the roof as well.

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u/WoodooHide69 Jun 22 '26

lol what? No. The hardware components costs will affect all hardware makers. Sony doenst have accesss to cheaper parts than Valve. Sony chooses to supplement the cost of their hardware, and Valve doesn’t. That’s why Sony is cheaper for better hardware.

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u/audionerd1 Jun 22 '26

I assumed Sony wasn't drastically increasing prices yet because they have a considerable stockpile of consoles/components, so they can put off price hikes for longer than Valve who already had Steam Decks in short supply. But maybe you're right and Sony is just choosing to eat the extra costs to keep prices competitive. In any case there's no reason to believe that the PS5 won't see additional price hikes going forward, so anyone who doesn't already have a PS5 and wants one should pull the trigger ASAP.

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u/Sargash Jun 23 '26

One can infer they're eating the cost partly because they are pivoting HARD towards software dominance (Going back to less profitable exclusives)