Phoronix article: https://www.phoronix.com/news/Steam-Machines-Frame-2026
Also listed here: https://store.steampowered.com/sale/hardware
Valve has already sent support for the new Steam Controller upstream: https://www.phoronix.com/news/New-Steam-Controller-SDL
I hope this somehow manages to convince fortnite / ea to support it or support linux. I want to get rid of my xbox so bad.
also i am excited for the headset, i am wondering how open source it is going to be and depending on that i definilty get one (Since it runs steam os, linux is possible atleast definitly)
FEX is the most exciting thing for me!
Im hyped for a new vr headset.
Time to sell my never used old steam controller
I’m curious about the “it’s a PC” aspect of the Steam Box. Because a device that plays all Steam games but isn’t a Windows computer is extremely appealing, but I admit if I can’t install a few non-Steam games on it, that’s a spoiler for me. But if the whole “it’s a PC” provides some avenue to that, I’m definitely ready to stop building a gaming PC every 5 years.
Glad Valve is making a console but that’s an ugly fucking controller
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Ah yes, the gabecube
Me in 2001 with a stuffed nose:
Stuffed because that cute person didn’t like me back cause they were busy blowing all their inheritance from their estranged uncle that died when the towers fell.
Oddly specific, but ok.
I was talking about the release of the GameCube 😬
Steam Deck was the Gabe Gear, this is the Gabecube, all we need now is a smaller Steam Deck - the Gabe Boy.
Well, you do have the Gabe Virtual Boy.
They really need to sell these in Walmart next to the Playstation. It’ll be the year of the Linux desktop!
I am European but no. That would increase the price and i believe valve wants to sell as cheap as possible.
I thought it was the okama gabe sphere. It’s spherical!
The announcement did not include Copilot? No mention of 300 useless AI features being shoved down our throats??!
It’s wild how by virtue of the fact that Valve isn’t a publicly traded company beholden to shareholders, the same Valve which has a history of putting out half-baked goods and which has an always-on DRM client called Steam, seems poised to surpass most of its competitors both in the user privacy and hardware hardware spaces with just straightforward products. They have a product to sell, and that’s it. They don’t need to micro-optimize for bullshit like seemingly every other large tech company does.
It feels like just yesterday that VR was the big hype tech.
VR is so fucking cool tho
To be 100% honest, I like Bitcoin and LLMs too. Could use some pigouvian taxes though.
BTC is neat and I do have some, but I didn’t get into LLMs, no use case for me at this point. But I think VR is in a completely different bucket. VR was so fucking awesome for my partner and myself to chill out in with our friends in 2020 when we couldn’t go out and see peeps. It’s also easily the best most fun form of exercise.
I’m sure you and your partner can think of a more fun form of exercise. 😉
VR has actual staying power though. It genuinely adds a lot to a game or a simulation. VRchat especially is like a deeply emotional thing to folks who don’t feel like they belong in their real bodies and can exist in VR a more true representation of themself
That’s because they make an insane amount of money by taking 30% of every sale on their platform, which nearly everyone uses because they’re a near monopoly and the alternatives are terrible. Around $3.5 Million per employee, nearly 5x the next highest company, which is Facebook at around $780,000 per employee.
I should note that 30% is incredibly standard in the industry, and Valve offers a LOT more for that 30% than literally any other digital publisher. Physical publishers take substantially more, and the only digital store that offers less is EGS, which is simultaneously absolute dogshite and also has been trying very, very hard to astroturd the ‘30%’ thing for ages.
Nintendo, Sony, and Apple all take 30%. I think MS does as well, but don’t quote me on that one.
don’t forget google. that applies to all paid apps, in app purchases and donations on the play store, not only for games. google also forbids you from showing any other donation option on your website if you link to it from your app.
I’m going to be honest, I have no idea how I forgot google. They also definitely take 30%.
Can confirm; my app was removed from the Play Store due to a donation link to my PayPal. Absolutely insane.
Fwiw, GOG has no DRM for their titles (its own niche space, not competition). Not sure if they charge 30% too, but even in such case they’re giving you more because of the lack of DRM.
Steam is quite virtuous, they gave us Proton. But is far from being based.
GOG has no DRM, but they also don’t offer the same kind of services, like workshop, updates, cloud sync, etc.
Not trying to say they’re worse or anything, I love GOG, but it’s really kind of comparing apples to oranges here.
GoG also sold the modern hitman games which have DRM.
There are also many games on Steam that are DRM free, you may need to use the Steam Client to download them (but possibly also Steam CMD) but then you can copy the files off as a backup and run them without Steam
Can confirm. Serious Sam Classics are copy and paste-easy to share
“Over 5,000 games released on Steam this year didn’t make enough money to recover the $100 fee to put a game on Valve’s store, research estimates”
It’s fucking wild. Like, I love Steam, don’t get me wrong, but holy shit just suck less (edit: than other stores do) and charge less (edit: of devs) and you could gobble up a lot of that market share. But none of them do.
Notably Epic charges less than 30% to try to get more of that market. They even give away games. But their app is still inferior so it gets less use.
Because Epic doesn’t care about end users and won’t add necessary end user features like reviews.
It’s cool that Epic wants to pay developers more, but the way they disregard the consumer makes the platform non-viable
company: “I want what steam is making and more” shareholders: “brilliant”
“I want what steam is making but I’m not willing to improve service OR charge less!”
Most other competitors charge less than steam, but steam has a clause which prevents devs from putting their games cheaper elsewhere. This is the real big shitty move made by valve, otherwise they do mostly everything right. I hope someone challenges this clause in a court of law someday, it looks very monopolistic to me
Except that is a thing only for selling steam keys outside steam. There are no price parity clauses.
https://partner.steamgames.com/doc/features/keys
Also here is a gamedev saying that they’ll sell their game for a cheaper price on EGS: https://twitter.com/HeardOfTheStory/status/1700066610302603405
https://store.epicgames.com/en-US/p/heard-of-the-story-ff3758
https://store.steampowered.com/app/1881940/Heard_of_the_Story/
If what you saying was actually the case I am 120% sure Tim Sweeney would be all over it lol.
Lastly, there was ALREADY a case like that (Valve vs. Wolfire). The courts couldn’t find anything regarding Wolfire’s claims and then dismissed the case.
Ho ok, my bad, I completely misunderstood the issue then. It seems reasonable to impose a price equivalence on steam key
No worries! And indeed!
It’s OK to run a discount for Steam Keys on different stores at different times as long as you plan to give a comparable offer to Steam customers within a reasonable amount of time.
https://partner.steamgames.com/doc/features/keys
Word that stands out is comparable. Which provides a lot of flexibility on discounts outside the steam store. And isthereanydeals data that tracks all the prices over the years shows steam keys going on sale for cheaper than the steam store. Steam also takes 0% of Steam keys.
Recent example is ARC Raiders. https://isthereanydeal.com/game/arc-raiders/info/
Current best price is 15% off for $34.16 versus $39.99 on Steam. And all time low was $31.92.
I do wonder how many people assume Steam store price is the best price, and end up paying more than they’d have to if they checked isthereanydeals. Since I’ve come across some comments that believed Steam did not allow cheaper prices as though it were fact despite reality not being the case.
Around $3.5 Million per employee, nearly 5x the next highest company, which is Facebook at around $780,000 per employee.
that’s a bullshit metric only useful to incite hatred. why the fuck do you want to say that valve is “this many times worse than facebook!”? it is obviously false.
only thing this proves is that they have relatively few employees. which also probably means that most of them do real work instead of being overloaded with managers
The numbers just show that they are 8x as efficient. I only referenced Facebook because they’re the next closest company for comparison.
I never said they were worse than Facebook. That’s your assumption, reading what you want, not what’s actually being said.
Their efficiency is largely due to their flat organizing structure. They have no real hierarchy to speak of.
Which is also one of the reasons so few new things get done, and why they (until now) haven’t been able to count to 3.
To get anything done you either have to be able to do it entirely by yourself which is unlikely, or get enough others organized and on board to make it happen.
What? Valve released CS2 like last year? They do stuff all the time. They have like three games they’re actively maintaining while making HL3 and three new pieces of tech? This is a wild, unfounded take and feels ideologically bound.
That was 2023, and one of very few things made not to specifically promote their hardware or as a cheap spinoff of existing IP. And define “actively maintaining”, because general bug fixes for decade old multi-player games and managing item marketplaces doesn’t require much manpower.
Going further back there’s Aperture Desk Job which was a tech demo for the Steam Deck in 2022. Then an extended cut version of Artifact originally meant as a sequel in 2021, which is a Dota 2 card game, but still remains unfinished, so effectively abandoned. Then Half Life: Alyx in 2020 which 90% of gamers can’t play because it’s VR only, and clearly made to further promote their VR hardware. Dota Warlords in 2020 which was originally a community game mode. The original Artifact in 2018, which had abandoned iOS and Android ports. The Lab in 2016 which was made to promote the launch of the HTC Vive. A zombie CS spinoff in 2014, Dota 2 in 2013, CS:Go in 2012, Portal 2 in 2011, and Left 4 Dead 2 in 2009.
If you remove the spinoff and niche stuff from the list you get game releases in 2023, 2020 (arguable since it’s VR only and thus inherently niche), 2013, 2012, 2011, 2009.
That’s a pretty big gap of not much for the last decade game-wise. Its been previously documented and published that Valve has issues getting games developed because of the flat organization structure. Articles like this.
You‘re getting downvotes for no reason. Also anyone who ever had to contact Steam support felt how criminally understaffed they are so it makes sense they make tons of money per employee I guess.
As if normal for companies to say you know what we are getting enough profits lets not monetize things even more.
They need their products to be as clean as possible to hook people into microtransactions and their proprietary platform. Valve is a for profit company and the ceo owns a fleet of mega yachts
The VR headset is going to be standalone??
That’s pretty nuts right?
even more nuts is that it will support pc games via FEX, an emulation layer that runs x86 windows games on ARM in Linux
In addition to streaming from your battlestation
Crazy…
But does it have a crazy price?
Im guessing Vive prices. Id be suprised at less than 1k, but no word on it yet.
Valve said they expect it to be cheaper than the Index, so it shouldn’t be more than 1k
Frankly it all three are logical next steps. With the way windows is going, valve needs to decouple it’s store from the windows dependency. The deck was the tester, now we get the not so cheep next generation
I mean, that was the goal of the original steam machines from 2012 or whatever
I just want them to let me isolate Anticheat BS like the virus it is. All of these hostile Game Studios are full of shit for forcing it. Not happy with BF6 over it still.
I’m sure they’ll be as aggressive with price as the Steam Deck was. The tiny battery and knuckles hand tracking being an optional accessory this time suggest that.
Any ideas on Linux support?
They talked about streaming VR games from the SteamOS based steam machine to it.
So with that I’d assume we’re finally getting some much needed progress to SteamVR on linux.
Yeah, this is what I’m most looking forward to in the immediate sense tbh. It’ll be nice to play HLA without crashing every time it loads a new level as it currrently does for me in SteamVR (Monado doesn’t have this issue, but I can’t use my left-handed controls without Steam input :-|)
The headset itself is running linux and it is meant to be used with the steam machine, which also runs on linux.
pretty sure it’s SteamOS, an Arch Linux derivative, on a fairly popular Snapdragon platform. probably not too difficult to hack on it.
It days right in the marketing text that the headset is “a PC” which to me implies full SteamOS distro with no limitations on installing a different OS, if you can get the many hardware drivers to work.
It says that it can run Windows applications so it might be the first VR headset that you can actually develop a game on.
My understanding from the video is that the headset will run SteamOS itself.
Its a standalone headset that runs steamos.
There are a lot of specs missing from what the streets were hoping for from the holy grail of VR headsets, but I’m starting to believe that they are not going for that. It seems they want to win in the mid-range market competing directly with Meta. Honestly, “Quest 3 without Meta” is already very compelling. I guess it’s not all down to how competitively they decide to price it. “Cheaper than Index” is already good news for my wallet at least.
I believe the cost of Meta devices is also subsidized by surveillance capitalism, so if this costs more, doesn’t spy on you, and lets you do whatever you want with your own hardware, then it’s worth voting with your wallet. If Valve somehow is able to price this similarly to a Quest 3 while having better specs and without exploiting their customers like Meta does, then all hail the great and mighty Gabe.
Personal privacy is always worth the cost. The ‘subsidies’ can go away anytime, so better to not be locked into an expensive spyware platform to begin with.
”Quest 3 without Meta” is what I’ve been dreaming about. I feel like Steam Frame could be my entry to the VR space, if the price is decent.
I just recently upgraded from my OG Vive because I didn’t want an inside out tracking or wireless, but… let’s see what the price is and if the thing is actually as good in real world conditions as Linus makes it look. I might just try those pancake lenses (because the Vive Pro 2 lenses are bad).
And yeah, I will never give Meta money. Not directly, and indirectly as little as I can.
I don’t see it in the hardware design, but from a software perspective the groundwork is there for modularity. Offloading the core compute to the PC frees up onboard processing to run peripherals like full color front cameras (onboard are black and white / IR) and more advance proximity detection, hell hook up lidar and go nuts with full body tracking.
That said, all of that would depend on decent I/O. 2x USB4 ports would go a long way.
Welp, looky there, an expansion port right on the bridge of the headset with PCIE compatibility.
Fuck you Microsoft!
I used to work with a guy who worked at Valve prototyping stuff like the steam controller. He was a boomer so he complained about how people were always playing games in the break room and what not. Said he hated that job, his reasons might as well have been a wishlist for my future career. If he wasn’t so damn helpful I would probably hate him to this day.
