Valve Says its Steam Machine and Steam Frame Will Launch This Summer

Valve’s new Steam Machine and Steam Frame, which were both originally announced in November of last year, are now set to launch “this summer.” Valve delayed the release of both devices in February due to the ongoing memory and storage shortages, and it’s still not ready to announce pricing details.

The company said yesterday that it’s expanding its Verified program beyond its Steam Deck gaming handheld, which just received a significant price bump. Valve’s Verified program indicates that a game has been tested by Valve and provides a good customer experience out of the box.

“Long story short: If your game already runs well on Deck, it will also run well on Machine with no extra work required from you. And if it doesn’t run great on Deck because of CPU or GPU performance, it may still run great on Machine. If you have games like this, you don’t have to take any action: We’re already testing every title on Machine that fell below our performance requirements on Deck,” the company explained.

It’s a bit different for the Steam Frame VR headset, which is powered by a Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 chip and 16GB of LDDR5X RAM. The headset will use a translation layer to run x86-based Steam games, but Valve says it’s “primarily designed” for streaming games from a PC.

“Like Steam Deck Verified, the Steam Frame Standalone Verified program focuses on the experience customers will have with the device out-of-the-box in standalone mode. The criteria are similar as well: the default graphics configuration needs to perform well, text and UI elements need to be clear and legible on the built-in display, and the default controller configuration needs to work well with the Steam Frame Controllers,” Valve said yesterday.

A month ago, Valve started shipping the new Steam controller, the first piece of its expanded hardware ecosystem. It’s priced at $99 in the US, and it works with any PC or device running Steam or the Steam Link app. It will also connect wirelessly to the upcoming Steam Machine, and it will be trackable by the Steam Frame’s cameras.