From Steam Machines to Steam Frame: Valve's Hardware History

The cube Valve began offering through purchase invitations in late June is not its first Steam Machine. It is the company's second attempt at the idea, more than ten years after the first retail launch. Valve never published lifetime sales for the 2015 machines. By June 2016, however, Ars Technica could place them below 500,000 because Valve's controller total included every controller bundled with a branded Steam Machine. The true number at that date may have been far lower. Valve has not disclosed the size of its constrained 2026 production run either, so the two launches cannot be compared cleanly by unit sales.

The more important difference is not raw silicon. It is Proton, a single first-party design, and Valve's decision to own the product end to end.

Here is how the ecosystem got from one to the other.

2012 to 2013: the Steam Universe pitch

The groundwork was Big Picture mode, the TV-friendly Steam interface that became publicly available in December 2012 and made the ambition obvious. If Steam could be driven from a couch, the next question was what hardware it should run on.

Valve answered across one week in September 2013 with three announcements: SteamOS, a free Linux-based operating system; Steam Machines, third-party PCs built to run it; and the Steam Controller, an input device designed to make mouse-and-keyboard games playable from a sofa. The pitch was coherent. Consoles were closed, Windows was drifting toward its own app store, and Valve wanted an open living-room platform it did not have to rent from Microsoft.

That last motivation matters, because it is the same one Valve gives today.

2013 to 2015: prototypes, delays, and a redesigned controller

Valve shipped roughly 300 prototype Steam Machines to beta testers in December 2013. The Steam Controller unveiled that September was supposed to feature a central touchscreen, but Valve said up front that the beta units would substitute four physical buttons and require a USB cable. At Steam Dev Days in January 2014, Valve abandoned the screen entirely. By March, another redesign had moved the face buttons into a more conventional arrangement while keeping the two circular trackpads that defined the retail controller.

Valve's CES 2014 press sheet pictured 13 partner systems, ranging from roughly $499 entry models to a Falcon Northwest configuration quoted as high as $6,000. Then the schedule slipped. The controller and SteamOS were not ready, and Valve delayed the hardware into 2015. Some partners left before shipping anything, while Alienware released its box as the Windows-based Alpha months before the SteamOS version existed.

November 2015: the launch that did not land

Steam Machines reached retail on November 10, 2015, alongside the $49.99 Steam Controller and the $49.99 Steam Link streaming box. Machines came from Alienware, Zotac, CyberPower, and others, across a confusing spread of configurations and prices.

Seven months later, Ars Technica declared the program dead on arrival. Valve had announced more than 500,000 Steam Controllers sold, and a Valve representative confirmed that the figure included every controller bundled with a branded Steam Machine. Fewer than half a million branded machines had therefore sold by June 2016, and plausibly far fewer. Valve never published a lifetime number.

By 2018, Valve had removed Steam Machines from the store's main navigation. The Steam Link hardware was discontinued the same year. On November 27, 2019, the Steam Controller was discontinued and cleared out at $5 a unit.

Why it failed

Valve engineer Pierre-Loup Griffais gave the clearest post-mortem in Jason Schreier's July 17, 2026 Bloomberg feature on the new hardware. Two failures stand out in his account.

The first was the catalog. SteamOS ran Linux, and in 2015 the overwhelming majority of Steam's library was Windows-only. Buyers were asked to pay PC prices for a machine that could play a fraction of the games they already owned. Griffais framed the lesson as players needing their whole library to work, not a subset presented as good enough.

The second was the absence of a retail reference design. Valve had built its own reference hardware and shipped 300 beta prototypes in 2013, but it never sold a Valve-branded retail model. Instead, it handed the category to manufacturers whose systems often fell short of Valve's prototype while comparing badly with both consoles and self-built PCs on price. Nobody could answer the basic question of what a Steam Machine was, because there were too many contradictory answers on shelves.

A third problem was more sympathetic. The Steam Controller was genuinely inventive, and its trackpads solved real problems for strategy and simulation games on a couch. It also demanded that players relearn a controller, a hard sell attached to a platform that could not run their games.

2018: Proton changes the arithmetic

The turning point was not hardware. On August 21, 2018, Griffais announced a new version of Steam Play built on Proton, a compatibility layer derived from Wine and developed with CodeWeavers. DXVK translated DirectX 11 and 12 calls through Vulkan. It launched in beta with 27 games on Valve's whitelist.

Valve soon allowed users to try Proton beyond that initial list, and Proton matured into broad compatibility across much of Steam's Windows catalog. Easy Anti-Cheat and BattlEye added opt-in Proton support in 2021, although publishers still had to enable and maintain it per title. Every subsequent Valve SteamOS device relies on this work for Windows-game compatibility. Without Proton, the Steam Deck is a Linux handheld with a compatibility problem, and the 2026 Steam Machine is a more expensive version of the 2015 mistake.

Valve also kept accumulating hardware experience. The HTC-manufactured Vive, co-developed with Valve as the first SteamVR system, began shipping in April 2016. Valve then designed and sold the Index directly in June 2019 at $999 for the full kit, and Half-Life: Alyx arrived in March 2020 as proof that Valve would still build flagship software to expand a hardware category.

2021 to 2023: the Steam Deck proves the model

Valve announced the Steam Deck in July 2021 and started shipping in February 2022, beginning at $399. It worked, and the reasons it worked read as a direct inversion of 2015.

Valve designed and sold it directly rather than licensing the concept. There was one device with a simple storage ladder instead of a partner matrix. Far more of buyers' existing libraries worked at launch than in 2015, while Deck Verified gave buyers a compatibility signal for games Valve had reviewed. The price was aggressive enough that comparisons with a self-built PC did not immediately sink it.

The Steam Deck OLED followed in November 2023 at $549. Bloomberg reports that the Deck's success unlocked faster internal work on the new Steam Machine. The handheld was not a detour from the living-room plan. It was the proving ground.

November 2025: three devices at once

On November 12, 2025, Valve announced the Steam Machine, Steam Frame, and a new Steam Controller, all targeted at early 2026. The Steam Machine was pitched at roughly six times the graphical power of the Steam Deck, a compact cube running SteamOS under a TV.

Then component costs intervened. Valve's February FAQ named memory and storage shortages as the reason it was revisiting both pricing and schedule. Engineer Yazan Aldehayyat has since told Bloomberg that conditions are still getting worse, with retail shelves lagging wholesale pricing by three to six months. Industry analysis points to suppliers prioritizing server memory, HBM, and enterprise SSD demand, leaving consumer hardware exposed to tight supply. Valve moved from an early-2026 target to a first-half goal; on June 4, it said the Machine and Frame would ship in summer.

Valve was not alone in raising hardware prices amid broader economic pressure. Sony raised US PlayStation prices on April 2, taking the PS5 Pro from $749.99 to $899.99.

2026: where the three devices stand

Steam Controller, May 4, $99. The cheapest piece of the trilogy went first, with TMR magnetic thumbsticks, dual trackpads, gyro, and grip sensors. The FPS Review reported that initial stock sold out in roughly 30 minutes, Steam's payment servers struggled, and resale listings reached triple MSRP. Valve said it had run out faster than anticipated. It was a striking reversal for a device whose first version ended in a $5 clearance six and a half years earlier.

Steam Machine, launched June 22; first purchase emails June 29; from $1,049. Its semi-custom AMD system combines Zen 4 CPU cores and RDNA 3 graphics with 28 compute units, 16GB of DDR5 system memory, and 8GB of dedicated GDDR6. Unlike the Deck's unified memory architecture, that split makes the Machine architecturally closer to a conventional desktop with a discrete GPU. Valve sells four configurations: $1,049 for 512GB, $1,128 for 512GB with a controller, $1,349 for 2TB, and $1,428 for 2TB with a controller. Both 2TB models include two extra faceplates. GamersNexus put GPU-bound performance around an RX 6600, Intel Arc B570, or RTX 3060, with effectively inaudible idle noise and roughly 20 to 24 dBA in tested loads. Valve closed the initial lottery window and randomized the reservation order on June 25, sent the first purchase invitations on June 29, and says it will keep working through the queue as units become available. Later signups join the back of the waitlist.

Steam Frame, still waiting. As of July 22, 2026, Valve has announced neither a price nor a firm release date for the standalone SteamOS headset, only a summer window. Reported import records, FCC records for the left and right Frame controllers—not the headset itself—and Valve's appearance of a Great on Frame store collection suggest launch preparations are advancing. Valve has not named the day.

What is different, and what is not

The structural fixes are real. Valve builds the hardware itself now, sells it directly, ships one design rather than a matrix, and stands on a compatibility layer that took eight years to mature. Griffais told Bloomberg that Valve is not interested in exclusives, instead treating the breadth of the PC catalog as its launch proposition. That position is coherent now because Proton makes the claim broadly credible.

Two things have not been solved. The first is price. At $1,049, the Steam Machine costs $150 more than a PS5 Pro after Sony's April increase, and Valve has said plainly that it is more than the company wanted to charge. Valve says it does not subsidize the Steam Machine, partly to keep the category viable for other manufacturers, so component costs pass straight through to buyers. It has not promised a price cut, and Aldehayyat said wholesale component conditions were still worsening in July.

The second is the catalog, again, in a narrower form. A commercially important gap remains among competitive multiplayer games. Current Call of Duty releases use Activision's kernel-level RICOCHET anti-cheat, and EA requires Secure Boot for Battlefield 6's Javelin system. Valve's Steamworks guidance states plainly that kernel-space solutions are not currently supported or recommended. GamingOnLinux maintains a community-reported compatibility list for competitive games. This is a far smaller hole than 2015's, but it is the same category of hole.

The most telling detail from the Bloomberg reporting is that Valve judges success less by raw unit sales than by whether the Machine proves a viable open PC-gaming option in the living room. That is a fair description of what Valve wanted in 2013 as well. The difference is that it now has the software to make the pitch honest, and more than a decade of evidence about what happens when it does not.

Track current pricing, stock, and specs on the Steam Machine, Steam Controller, and Steam Frame status pages, or see the full picture on the hardware tracker.