Valve's Steam Machine and Steam Frame set to ship this summer

Valve's Steam Machine, a PC aimed at the living room, and its new VR headset will ship soon

Valve’s next crack at the gaming hardware business is releasing soon. In a blog post, the company confirmed that the Steam Machine and the Steam Frame (its new VR headset) will ship this summer.

Beyond this, Valve clarified that its “Verified” program, currently used to determine whether games will run properly on the Steam Deck handheld, will also be implemented for the Steam Machine and Steam Frame. “The goal is to help customers understand the out-of-box experience for a given title on these new devices, and how smoothly a game will run with no user work or configuration required,” the blog post describes.

For those out of the loop on the Steam Machine, it’s Valve’s latest attempt at streamlining the experience of playing games on computers. It’s a PC running SteamOS designed to play games in the living room, meaning it supports menu navigation via a controller. Valve describes it as six times more powerful than the Steam Deck, and says it will use the same software as the company’s handheld. As for the Steam Frame, it’s a VR headset designed to stream games from a PC. It also supports running games locally via Steam OS without being connected to anything.

With the release window confirmed, the next big question about both pieces of hardware is their price. Just last week, Valve suddenly increased the price of the Steam Deck by a whopping $240 to $300, depending on the model. The company is just the latest to announce big price increases for pre-existing software, with Sony, Nintendo, and Microsoft having done the same in recent years in response to market conditions such as rising computer-parts costs and RAM shortages.

With the Steam Deck going for a minimum of $789 and the Steam Machine apparently having hardware six times as powerful, it is probably fair to assume that Valve’s latest system will go for a considerable chunk of change, very likely above $1,000.

It should be noted that this isn’t the first time Valve has released a piece of hardware called the Steam Machine; in 2015, it released another cube-shaped system. Unfortunately, it sold poorly enough (less than 500K units in 7 months) to be described as “dead on arrival.” While the Steam Deck has been much better received, the (presumed) steep price of Valve’s latest hardware will likely prove an imposing barrier to the system’s success.