The first thing that hit me after unboxing Valve's Steam Machine at home was: wow, this is small. I'd already seen this thing in person last November, but its size still impressed me.

Steam Machine is smaller than a PlayStation 5. It's smaller than an Xbox. It's a cube you could put next to your TV easily, or carry in a box on a vacation with friends, which is what I did. It's shockingly portable. But dense. And you do still need a power outlet and TV or monitor to plug into.

This isn't a Steam Deck. Steam Machine is Valve's return to trying to make a PC game console -- and unfortunately, it's arriving at a terrible time. Electronics prices for computer components such as RAM and SSD storage are going through the roof, and game consoles including the PlayStation and Xbox are seeing price hikes, even on 6-year-old hardware. The Steam Machine's starting price of $1,049 is already out of reach for many people.

Plus, while it's fun to see Valve making its own PC gaming hardware, there are already plenty of ways to play Steam on Windows PCs of all shapes and sizes and prices. The Steam Deck is unique because it's handheld and relatively small (and, originally, pretty affordable). The Steam Machine only has one of those things in its favor.

But as a demonstration of how approachable and console-like PC game hardware can be, I love the effort so far. Even if that effort is rough, incomplete and not as high-performance as you'd maybe expect for the price.

I'll have a full review of Steam Machine eventually, but for now I wanted to share some thoughts after a week with one at home and on the road.

The review unit I received from Valve is the top-end model: a $1428 package that has 2 TB of storage, two swappable magnetic face plates and a Steam Controller (which, by the way, I love). The starting $1,049 config has no controller and 512GB of storage. All models have the same AMD Zen 4 CPU, custom AMD RDNA3 GPU, 16GB DDR5 RAM and 8GB GDDR6 VRAM. There's a microSD card slot for expandable storage, too.

Steam Machine's gorgeously small design

I can't say enough about the Steam Frame's compact size because I really love it. I've felt repelled from home PC gaming rigs partially because of how much space they take up. But the Steam Machine feels tinier than any PlayStation or Xbox, and it's easy to perch on a shelf or a mantle. 

There isn't a big adapter brick either: A simple power cord just plugs into the back. That makes TV setup a lot easier.

It also makes me want to set it up in a living room to show off. But, as I'm doing now, it easily plops next to my laptop and my gaming TV in my office, too.

The whole box is a venting system, with intake in the front and a big fan exhaust covering the back. The front faceplate is magnetically swappable, and two included plates (red fabric and plastic woodgrain) are fun and easy to snap on to change its look. I'm also into the minimal power button and LED status bar at the bottom of the cube, which glow in various patterns for system status. The LED bar fills up to show download progress when you have the TV off and just want to see if your game's ready.

Things just work (sometimes)

The Steam Machine has no instruction manual. You just plug it in, walk through a few login startup things, download a software update and it's running. It felt like an extension of the Steam Deck as I logged in and found everything all ready for me, minus the game downloads.

The Steam Controllers work without their charge puck dongles via direct pairing with the Steam Machine, saving a step. But some firmware updates were needed, though they were relatively painless.

The Steam Machine's default support for games is 1,920x1,080, and while you can ramp the resolution up, Valve's settings warn that Steam Machine-verified games are tested for 1,920x1,080. Wandering outside that zone might not be great.

Steam Machine performance seems… OK

Honestly, 1080p is fine for me on my 42-inch office screen, but for a game console that starts at $1,000, it might seem pretty disappointing. (More soon on how 4K gaming feels.) It underlines the general sense I've gotten from the Steam Machine that, gaming performance-wise, it's… fine. Not amazing. Not terrible (though sometimes it feels a step below the PS5 and Xbox Series X).

But I've had some weird game issues. Star Wars Squadrons wouldn't let me log in -- maybe it needed a keyboard and mouse, but the Steam Controller wasn't recognized. A few games showed odd, pixelated pop-up graphics driver error messages that I couldn't easily exit, too. After several reboots of some of these games, the errors disappeared. Other times, not so much.

Generally, though, games play fine out of the ones I've been casually checking: Death Stranding 2, Spider-Man 2, UFO 50 (a bit of odd framerate issues), Stray, Subnautica, Team Fortress 2, Elden Ring, Hot Wheels Unleashed 2 and Baby Steps.

Valve did a lot of iterative improvements to game performance on the Steam Deck over time. And with the Steam Machine, it'll likely be the same. But as early reviews and Reddit forums are already reporting, your mileage will definitely vary on this hardware early on.

Machine vs. Deck versus Frame

The Steam Machine's total proposition just isn't as exciting as a portable Steam Deck that has its own screen, and while Valve is clearly proving out a future where PC game consoles can be as good as (or even replace) consoles like the PlayStation and Xbox, the price equation and similarity to other PC gaming options are hard to ignore. My son's friend was busy playing Steam games on his laptop as I played on the Steam Machine, and that's kind of the case in point: there are so many ways to play Steam stuff.

But the ARM-based Steam Frame VR headset, also expected this summer, will push Steam games to smaller chipsets. The Machine is expanding out the Deck's design in larger forms. There's a spectrum Valve is exploring, clearly. I'm curious how the pieces all play out. Meanwhile, I'll be finishing this review. But even when I do, I still want to experience and review the Frame in comparison to understand what the Machine's comparative value is for someone who wants and can afford to buy a New Steam Thing in 2026.