For years, the rumours floated around: “Valve is working on a Steam Box.” It sat firmly in the category of gaming folklore, somewhere between “Half-Life 3 is definitely coming” and “Finding Mew.” Well, the rumour has finally materialised. Valve has officially lifted the curtain on the Steam Machine. And for once, the reality is just as interesting as the hype.
The Steam Machine is Valve’s answer to slotting full PC gaming power into your living room without the mess, or excuses from Windows about restarting at the worst possible moment. It’s small, quiet, plugs into your TV like a console, and runs SteamOS, an operating system built to do one thing properly: play games. Valve aims to launch two models at release a 512GB and a 2TB version, which come standalone or bundled with a Steam controller with the pricing yet to be released. Both support expandable storage through microSD, which is a polite way of saying you can keep installing games long after your backlog has spiralled entirely out of control.
In the end, the Steam Machine feels like the natural next step for Valve. It brings the flexibility of PC gaming into a neater box, adds a console like ease of use and keeps the full weight of the Steam library behind it. If Valve can deliver the performance it promises, this could become the living room option that finally bridges the gap between sofa gaming and the world of high end PCs. And if nothing else, it is nice to see a long running rumour finally turn into something you can actually play.
