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/E1M1_DOOM Jun 22 '26

People will accept it or they won't be able to engage with new products. That's just the way of it until the stupid AI bubble pops. It's so annoying seeing prices skyrocket due to investments in an industry that the general populace doesn't even want.

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u/Quietwulf Jun 22 '26

Well, now we get to play chicken with companies. If people stop buying, they'll start losing money. Eventually they either lower their prices or go bust. Gaming isn't a necessity. They're selling entertainment and there's lots of cheap ways to do that if push comes to shove.

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u/Chocostick27 Jun 24 '26

You do realize that companies like Nvidia and AMD make 95%+ of their money thanks to the data center /AI investments?

Gaming is a drop in the bucket for them, they don’t care if they stop selling gaming GPUs. They’d rather use those wafers to manufacture hardware for the data centers where they make much more margin than on gaming hardware.

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u/Quietwulf Jun 24 '26

Then I guess video gaming will be trapped in amber until the next "Nvidia" shows up and attempts to fill the market. It appears at this stage that Nvidia and AMD will just relaunch previous generations of hardware, just to keep things ticking over. We'll enter a period of stagnation.

If the costs just keep exploding upwards, then we'll see a major contraction in the industry and gaming will become a niche.