Valve Announces New Hardware: Steam Machine, Controller, and New VR Headset

By Elijah Gonzalez | November 13, 2025 | 12:30pm

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Valve Announces New Hardware: Steam Machine, Controller, and New VR Headset

Following the relative success of the Steam Deck handheld, it looks like Valve is doubling down on its hardware business. The company announced a trifecta of devices yesterday: the Steam Machine, a cube-shaped gaming PC that’s also sort of a console, a new Steam Controller, and another VR headset, this one titled the Steam Frame. An exact release date hasn’t been announced yet, but the hardware is scheduled for early 2026. Pricing hasn’t been revealed yet, either.

When it comes to the Steam Machine, Valve boasts that it is six times more powerful than the Steam Deck and claims that it can handle 4K gaming at 60 FPS with AMD’s FSR image upscaling tech. It features a semi-custom AMD Zen 4 6C / 12T CPU and a semi-custom AMD RDNA3 GPU, 2.45GHz max sustained clock with 8GB GDDR6 VRAM. The AMD RDNA3 GPU means it’s part of the 7000 series, which began releasing in 2022. That said, it being a custom build means that it won’t be directly analogous to existing graphics cards. For RAM, it has 16GB DR5. As for storage, it will have two options: either a 512 GB hard drive or a 2TB SSD. The device will run on SteamOS. Honestly, it’s hard to make much of the specs without knowing the price and seeing some benchmark testing that shows how it runs some graphically-intensive games.

As for the Steam Controller, it has “high definition rumble” gyro control capabilities, four grip buttons on the back of the controller, a trackpad, and “next-generation magnetic thumbsticks.” It will charge and wirelessly connect to devices via the Steam Controller Puck, a little doohickey that connects to the Steam Machine via USB. It will also support Bluetooth and a wired connection.

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Lastly, there’s the Steam Frame, Valve’s latest VR headset. Much like Meta’s Quest headsets, it will be a streaming-first device that allows you to play VR and non-VR games. The company claims it is lightweight and compact, doesn’t require wires, and provides a “high-quality streaming experience.” As for specs, the headset is a PC that also works standalone without streaming, running SteamOS with a Snapdragon 8 Series Processor and 16GB of RAM. It will come with motion-tracking Steam Frame Controllers as well.

The Steam Frame also introduces an interesting new feature called “Foveated Streaming,” which will optimize detail based on where your eyeballs are looking. As Valve puts it, “Behind the scenes, we’re using low-latency eye tracking data to steer the best quality pixels only to where you’re looking. This is all happening without you noticing, and works for your entire Steam library.” If it functions as marketed, it’s admittedly a pretty cool concept.

Taking a cue from other tech companies, Valve is heavily pushing the concept of a “Steam ecosystem” where you can easily access your Steam library and sync it with your other Steam devices, like the newly announced hardware, along with the Steam Deck.

Of course, something worth noting is that this isn’t Valve’s first attempt at entering the physical hardware business. Beyond the Steam Deck, the company released its first Steam Machine alongside its initial Steam Controller almost exactly a decade ago. The project did not go great.

It sold fewer than 500,000 machines in its first few months and was promptly described by Ars Technica as “dead in the water.” Valve’s last VR device, the Valve Index, performed much better and sold out ahead of Half-Life: Alyx’s launch, but was discontinued with the announcement of the Steam Frame—if it wasn’t true already, VR headset producers seem to be going all in on cheaper streaming models over selling $1K+ hardware with more built-in power.

Considering the Steam Deck has gained a solid degree of popularity, it will be interesting to see if Valve’s second major push into the hardware space will yield better results than the first. Once we hear more about pricing, we’ll have a better idea about how likely that will be.