Future of Steam OS and Conclusion

Welcome to the Virgas, the flagship podcast of Ray Tracing. I'm your friend David Pierce, and today on the show, we're talking about the Steam machine. After months of waiting, the Virgish Sean Hollister finally got his hands on Valve's new living room game console. He's been testing it. He's been playing games. He's going to come on and tell us all about how he feels and whether this is the next big thing in PC gaming. I'm very excited about it, if I'm being honest. The Steam Controller seems to be great. I sort of accidentally built a big library of Steam games over the years, and I do too much of my gaming right now on a switch too. It's probably time to upgrade. We're going to get into all of that in just a minute, but first here's everything else happening at the Verge today. This is ninety seconds on the Verge for Monday june twenty second, twenty twenty six. Instagram just announced a bunch of new features specifically aimed at people who watch Instagram on their television, which I assume is currently no one. There are new interest based channels you can watch. You can watch stories and reels, and Instagram even says it's testing longer form content, episodic series, and even things like live streaming on TV's. The context here is that YouTu be has been growing like crazy on bigger screens over the last few years and Instagram wants to do the same. The other context here is that Instagram, TikTok and YouTube are all so desperately copying each other's features that they're just rapidly becoming the exact same scrolly video app, and I find it exhausting. The phone maker Nothing canceled an upcoming device which would have been a follow up to the CMF Phone Pro two. Nothing's co founder said that quote with memory prices where they are right now, we can't build a phone that feels like a genuine step forward at a price that makes sense for CMF. Yikes. This is bad news for CMF fans, sure, but it's also a sign of things to come. We've talked a lot about the rising price of gadgets over the years, but as prices go up, a whole class of these lower priced gadgets in particular cheap phones that billions of people rely on are just being priced out of existence. And finally, all your vibe coded projects might be a total security disaster. All of mine too, don't worry, and everyone else's. Verscontributor Yale Grower has the story of all the ways AI coding agents can screw up and all of the ways that can leave your data exposed. Cloud code is fun. Don't get me wrong, just be careful out there. You can read more about all of this at the Verge dot com. That's ninety seconds on the Verge for Monday, june twenty second. All right, let's talk steam machines. The Verge Sean Hollister is here. Hi, Sean. Hi . Tell me what games you've been playing the most over the last few days. You've been reviewing the Steam machine. What is like what are the first and second games you go to to review the Steam machine ? I always try to test systems like this with Indiana J ones in the Great Circle because it's really demanding and it can play on there. And from twelve feet away on my couch, it's a pretty good experience. I'm whip cracking some Nazis. It's great. That's very exciting. That's a good first one to start with because I also feel like Indiana Jones has reached the Assassin's Creed level of like you can almost certainly play it on anything that plays games. It's just sort of everywhere now. It's great . And then of course, I had to do a little bit of portal because everybody loves portal. This is a valve product we're talking about. I want to start at the beginning a little bit with the steam machine because the fact that this exists is sort of fascinating to me . We first talked about the SEA machine in November and I would be lying to you if I said I didn't half expect it to have been cancelled by now because of Ramageddon and the rising cost of supply chain things and everything is just getting harder for something like the steam machine . Are you a little surprised that this thing has actually shipped to you and is inside of your house right now? A little bit. I would say that the overarching valve strategy is they build things that they want to exist for themselves and they're totally fine if they're going to be trickling this out to early adopters for the next like two to three years, which I'm afraid they might have to because supplies are going to be low for this thing. We've been tracking their shipments overseas and they don't they don't have that many tons of steam machines going over the ocean . And so kind of love that in one way because it means that by the time this reaches lots of people, like the steam deck, took months, maybe a year to reach the people who wanted it , it'll hopefully be done. It'll hopefully feel like a game console experience where you just fire up your game and it works and it's beautiful. It is not quite that today . So tell me about that experience actually because my sort of most immediate big picture question for you is just fundamentally why this thing exists. And I think as much as I've come to understand it's what you just said about the particulars of the experience of sitting down on your couch and playing video games seems to be the whole driving force behind why this exists. Can you just talk that out a little bit for me? The steam deck was you like the idea of games that just work , you shied away from PC because games don't necessarily just work. But what if you can have your games everywhere with you like a Nintendo Switch and those PC games kind of just work? And a lot of people were like, I am a PC gamer now and I didn't realize it or I'm coming back to PCs after years . This is that for your TV . So you're a console gamer, or you're a somebody who was used to think they were a PC gamer, you don't have time for that anymore. You don't want to mess with settings. You take this box, you stick it under your TV and it should be like the experience of a PlayStation. In this case, it has about the power of a PlayStation five , but you are technically loading PC games, this catalog, this back catalog going back decades and decades of PC games. You can run them on your catch and you do not need to plug a mouse or keyboard this box if you do not want to. You can just use a controller. You can use the st am controller if you want to have touch beds. You can use a random Bluetooth controller that you buy from Made Bitdough or whoever for thirty eight bucks on Amazon. It all should work . And it all does work up until you reach some weird bugs that they haven't quite ironed yet. Okay , still, it all does mostly work, strikes me as a pretty big achievement for something like this. Like you and I have spent a lot of time on this show talking about the way that Windows just continues to fail as a gaming platform in a whole variety of ways, right? It's too resource intensive, it's too complicated. It just is not the thing that PC gamers need. There's so much baggage. Despite the fact that it is literally what PC gamers need, right? So it seems like it seems like Valve it has to a large extent solved some of these problems. But the thing that is so fascinating to me is that this is the second time Valve has tried to do this. It first tried over a decade ago and it super didn't work and Valve changed nothing about its strategy and now it kind of worked. They changed one super important thing about the strategy , one thing. And that is this in twenty twelve, twenty thirteen, twenty fifteen, by the time they actually shipped the thing controller , their idea was we will build the hardware and they will come. And they was developers building Linux games. They thought if they just built the hardware, all of a sudden people would turn around and build games for Linux. They wanted to raight console , right? You're just being Nintendo at that point. You make a console, you make games for our console. Exactly. And they couldn't get the partners to do that. And the partners that they did have were not to be trusted to get the thing out there. And they screwed up the controller, timing and it took the hardware was ready, the controller wasn't ready, the OS wasn't ready, et cetera, et cetera. Developers were not going to build games for that. The grand thing that they have changed, the amazing insight is they don't need windows , but they do need windows games . So you are literally playing windows games ninety percent of the time when you're running a Steam Deck, when you're running them on a Steam machine. They are the same games. Developers don't need to modify them, but they're going through this layer. They're going through proton, which is built on wine. We've talked about this before. Nowadays, many operating systems are using layers like this. Your Mac can play run apps that were designed for Intel Silicon on its arms chip because of a translation layer. This is not quite the same thing, but it's got similarities to that. We're going to see the same thing happen with phones that are playing Steam am ges soon. You can already do this. If you know the right software, download, Game Native, Game Hub . And now we're putting this on this TV box where they've got a chip in it that is roughly the power of the PS five . Give or take . And unfortunately, if you were running games that were literally designed for the PS five and then brought to Windows on it, because Sony optimized those for the PS five, they look a little bit better on the PS five sometimes than they did on this than they do on the Steam Machine. The PS five is six years old . The Steam machine is brand new . You're playing games at roughly the same performance and you're paying about twice the price to get the Steam Machine instead of your PS five . But you get that back catalog of decades of games that the PS five does not have . And the thing is literally a PC two . Several Verge Editors right now are dual booting Linux or straight up running Linux as their desktop operating system that they do work on. I am dual booting it too. I now have Bazite and Windows in my desktop you see. Well, tell you what, I took this little box, I plugged in literally everything that was plugged into my desktop PC, my monitors, my speakers, my headset, my mouse keyboard, all that stuff . And it just worked . Wow, on this box, and all of a sudden I was doing work on the steam machine instead of doing it on my Windows PC. So you talk about one thousand forty nine dollars for this little box , if it doubles as a PC for you too , I think it's worth the money. If it doesn't, I don't know. That's super interesting. Yeah, and even whether this thing is expensive as a gaming device depends on whether you perceive it to be a console for your living room or a gaming PC, right? Tell me about this thing actually as a piece of hardware. Like spec it out for me like a gaming PC. How does it hold up? Okay, so this is a six core AMD Zen four processor. It's a lot like an AMD Ryzen five thousand five hundred and forty U, which if you have no idea what those alpha numerics mean, it's like a mid range laptop processor , which is more powerful newer technology than the CPU that's in the PS five. It has an RDNA three GPU, which should have more power technically than what's in the PS five, but it's only got eight gigs of GD R DR six VRAM. People have been out about this since the announcement, right? They really the VRAM was like the people had pitchforks that said they 're a VRAM about the steam machines. They did. And you can't, unfortunately, do a direct comparison to this GPU to basically anything else in the market because the only time AMD is shipped a GPU quite like this is an external GPU. It's like an external box that you would plug into a laptop. But if you know what those are, it's around on RX seven thousand six hundred , seven thousand seven hundred like M or XT somewhere in that realm . And so what you get out of that, because of that eight gigabyte VRAM, you can get this thing playing games on your four K screen , but you're talking about upscaling, super resolution upscaling from basically ten ADP. If you think of this as a ten ADP console that can output a four K image , that's the way to think about this. And there'll be some games like on the original PS five where you're running at a lower resolution than that internally . So Allan Wake, you know, that might be eight hundred forty seven p is the number of vertical lines you'd get instead of getting your ten eighty instead of getting your four K . So it's very similar to the PS five there. But if you take that PS five image and that steam machine image and you look at them side by side in like Sony optimized games, Sony has techniques like check erboard rendering where it can make things look a little bit crisper than they would be. Otherwise, if I look at Cyberpunk twenty seventy seven, it looks better on the PS five than it does on the Steam machine. If I look at Horizon Zero Dawn, it's a bit of a toss up. If I look at Returnal, Returnal looks better on the steam machine to me. I can get more resolution out of the steam machine there. So on balance , roughly PS five ish, graphics wise. I feel like that's a comparison a lot of people can probably hold in their head. That seems useful. But that PS five digital edition, that PS five digital edition was four hundred dollars , and now it costs six hundred dollars and this costs forty nine dollars . Yeah , the price has been the big unknown about this thing for a very long time. Tell me your first reaction when they told you what the price was going to be just a few days ago. My first reaction was actually that's not as bad as I thought. Same I was fully prepared for them to be like starts at fourteen ninety nine and goes up from there. I feel like they could charge what they want to for this out of the gate because it's early adopters that are going to be getting this. It's going to be people who are really, they really want the steam machine, they want the new hardware, they want to have the thing that nobody else is going to have. They want to experience in beta. My headline or my deck on my original Steam Deck review was early access memories 'cause it felt like it was a handheld in early access. It was fun to be there in early a.x Peisople are feel going to that way about this thing too. They're going to be printing new face plates for it. It comes with like these ones out of the box and that wooden one back there. I wanted a three D prints and they didn't get quite dumb down in time for the forage cast. They're going to be super into this . And they could charge a lot, but what they told me, what Pierre Lu Griffe and Lawrence Yang told me, the developers that perhaps let's call them the lead developers of this system. It's a team effort, but they're kind of public faces over at Valve. What they told me is they are selling this at cost. I mean, you can get a broad stroke understanding of it by looking at what RAM and storage costs now versus what they costed back then. The cost of the product is basically the cost of the components and what it takes to make it. For instance, Steam Deck we recently had to change our price because not because Steam Deck changed, but because the price that it costs to actually make Steam Deck with those same components change. If you're looking at something like a Steam Deck and the steam machine where we were envisioning it and where we are now, I would say that the new price is actually much more aggressive on that. So we're trying to make it as fair as possible there. This whole industry has kind of transitioned to a model where you don't know what the cost is going to be ahead of time . COVID kind of paid paved the way for that a little bit. The price that, you know, we might get more parts to make it, but the price might be double what it is today, right? And so at that point , we have to make the calculus of like, oh, should we still build machines with this, right? And like at what cost? And so we're thinking through all that right now. At some point, we were not even convinced we could build, you know, any significantant quity. So I think we ended up in a, I guess, a pretty happy spot overall. Oh yeah, I mean, well it is still pretty aggressive for us to hit this price. So even though it's more than we wanted it to be like we',re happy that it can be this at the very least. So this is very much like a razors and blades model, right? That this company is confident that it will sell enough games to make not making money on the console worth it over time . I think so. They wouldn't tell you that though. They always say it's about the learnings. They're like, I don't, I don't know what to believe. Like of the learnings don't pay the bills. Of the people I have to talked who say things like this, I would say I believe them ten percent more than I would believe anybody else because Valve just makes so much money per capita that they can afford to throw ridiculous amounts of money at projects that they think will give them learnings down the road. Do I believe it a hundred percent? I do not. But they do learn a lot from this and I do believe that there is some small part of Val that's like, I want this to exist in the world. We want this to exist. We want to play this. We want this in our homes. And we're happy to sell a few more to our devout fans along the way. Yeah, I mean, I think that approach is one that has worked extremely well for Valve over the years, right? Like the Steam Deck was very much that, especially at the beginning and that has turned into something pretty powerful and very popular for a lot of people. But you'd say Razor and Blade's model and that makes me think that they should subsidize this, right? Like Sony used to do with the PlayStation , like Microsoft used to do with EXBOXbox, Microsoft says it's not going to do that anymore. And they are not doing this. They are most definitely not doing this. They don't seem to be bundling a new half life with it, either is an exclusive. They say they're religiously against these things. They do not want to do that. And I think that's maybe a little bit of a shame because if this were priced less, it could be the console too not just the PC for your living room. Interesting. Yeah, part of me has been wondering if knowing what we know now about what this stuff costs, I'm so sure that when they initially speck this thing out it was not supposed to cost anywhere near one thousand forty nine dollars. I know they wouldn't tell you what price they wanted it to be . Boy, am I sure it was not ten forty nine dollars ? But I also at this point, given what we know about the market, I'm not at all surprised by the idea that the of su them part s of this box is ten forty nine. Like that actually sort of tracks. But part of me wonders, okay, we know it's going to be over a thousand dollars. Let's bump it up another couple hundred bucks and make this thing like stupendously powerful . If they accidentally sort of made the wrong price performance trade off in trying to make the right performance price trade off two years ago or whatever it was. Obviously it's hindsight, it's complicated to know, but like if this thing were vastly more powerful and fifteen hundred bucks, would it be that much less compelling to a lot of people who are already willing to pay over a thousand dollars for it? I don't know. If they could bump up the price one hundred dollars have twelve gigafe ram instead of eight , then it would not struggle so much to do one thousand four hundred forty p four K stuff the way it does. It'll play lots of poor K on older games. It'll look great . It's just when you get to the games that are really RAM intensive and they're starting to be that way. You know, Indiana Jones, Alan Wake II , you start to run into things. There's actually a bug that I guess I was one of the reviewers who helped discover during the review period where when it was running out of VRM, when you were hitting that ceiling, it would spontaneously reboot, it would crash, it would do all kinds of crazy stuff. They seem to have fixed that. One day after I reported, they're like, Hey, tell me if this is fixed. , please And it was, thankfully. Tell me about the out of box experience with this thing, because I think again, if you're a valve and the goal here is to make something that runs like a Windows gaming PC , but doesn't feel like you're sitting on your couch operating a windows PC . The very first ten minutes of the experience feels like it would tell me an awful lot about how valves succeeded or failed on that front. So what is the sort of initial steam machine experience like? Unfortunately, the initial steam experience we tried is not the final experience. I'm hoping that they ship the final experience by the time you're watching this video or listening to this podcast because I need to try it again . But how it is during your review period is you turn on your controller, it's not prepared like a PS five controller Xbox controller would be. You plug it in, you do this little dance where it's going to update the controller and then you unplug it and then you're setting up your Wi Fi and then it's plugged it back in again so you it can to p theair intern al antenna and you start downloading a game and when you launch the game it's still downloading dependencies because Esta downloads some proton at some steam works . They advertise that you could stick in an SD cart full of games from your Steamck De and you could just play them. And you can after you download the proton dependencies and so on again. So it should really ship with all this out of the box. Then again, I mean, I have some dollars for things have to download when you first boot the thing. Like that's everybody's experience with all of these now is everything has some giant system download when you first turn it on and it sucks , but that feels like just kind of the state of things. They're fixing some of this . And then the window state of things, of course, if this was a Windows box , when you used to do a first time setup on a Windows box, you're sitting there for like forty five minutes. Oh yeah, it's awful. Yeah. As it's downloading, like, it seems like the entire operating system again . It's not really, it's slip streaming some things in, but it's a lot . And then you have to navigate the screen and then you have to set up your you can set up Steam Big Picture mode on a Windows box that you launch into it every time, but you have to set that up and on the valve machine, I mean, you're there in a controllable interface with your controller, with your game pad . And you just scroll it across the screen, my kid can figure it out. You know, she wouldn't like the waiting part of waiting for the stuff to download, but she could do it herself. I mean, that's a that's a big win. And I will say as a piece of hardware sitting underneath your TV, I'm just looking at the one behind you . It's pretty innocuous. Like it certainly does not look like you put a giant gaming PC underneath your television. That's the main. It's roughly size of the game. Let me pull them both out and I'll give you a look. Sean just reached back and yanked two things out of the way. I totally yanked it while it running. It was running portal on the CRT. So this is the Steam machine right here and then and now we have a game cube right next to it. So this is the game cube and steam machine. They are roughly roughly the same size. The steam machine's a little bit taller, and of course the game cube has that carry handle . So yeah, you can change these face plates. On the steam machine, the steam machine starts with a black one, not this walnut , color. There's the black one up here instead. It does pick up fingerprints. This finish picks up a lot of fingerprints, but it's gonna be under your TV so not thinking that's a huge deal. Okay, yeah, I mean the size of it is pretty nice . Like I'm just so used to this new run of consoles, particularly the PS five , which is just preposterously huge. Oh yeah. And so anything that actually will sit underneath my television , big vict ory. More importantly, this fan, they designed the whole unit around the fan. Giant fan goes all the way through the system through these big grates on the other side . And this is so cool and quiet and the frame rate is so stable. Yeah, it's not going to run everything at four K, but I'm running a game and I'm like, if the game is, you know, sixty FPS average , it might be fifty two FPS low . And that's like if you've got a variable refresh rate TV, that means it is smooth all the time. It also means that if I want to pump up the graphics a little bit, if I don't need that sixty FPS average, if I'm like, I could do forty five FPS, forty eight FPS . If that is the average and the low is like forty two , that experience at one thousand four hundred forty p Indiana Jones , that is smooth if you have a variable refresh rate TV. It feels really good. The overarching takeaway here is it is a console level console, right? Like pretty easy to use , pretty good gameplay, but you're not sort of blowing anything out of the water. And I guess the case here , if your valve is it's all of that with access to your SEM library of all of the games that you've already bought. So I feel like if I'm already a steam person and I'm already deep into this space this becomes very compelling because like rebuying the six games I play most is already going to make up the cost difference . But I'm particularly curious for someone who is just coming relatively fresh to this space. I don't have a giant library of games. I don't want a high end gaming PC. That is not a thing I'm interested in. I just want a thing where I can sit down on my couch and play games. Can the steam machine hang in that competition right now? It can for now right now, when I reviewed the PS five Pro, I'm like PS five versus PS five Pro, the PS five Pro has so much more horsepower. The games look so much better, if you're three feet away. If you are twelve feet away on your couch , I do not notice an important difference between the PS five and the PS five Pro. I also do notice an important difference at twelve feet away between the steam machine and the PS five Pro. It's hanging with them unless you're doing something like ray tracing, which this one's kind of sucks at, but not a lot of PS five games are using a lot of ray tracing anyway . So when you're in that experience, yeah, but the PS five's also from twenty twenty. It is six years old. This is just coming out now. How long is it going to be before we have a PS six ? Xbox , you know, the next Xbox. How long is it going to be before that next wave of consoles come out . In that way, the RAM crisis is actually helping Valve a little bit here , because what the Grapevine says is Sony and Microsoft are going to bide their time, rethink their strategy, possibly delay a year or two . So the Steam machine has a little bit of time to hang the same way the Steam Deck had some time to hang. Steam Deck was not as powerful as other handhelds, not as powerful as consoles. It was four hundred dollars for an entry level Steam Deck when you could buy a PS five for four hundred dollars . Is it worth spending for much less graphical horsepower if you get to take it with you is the Steam Deck value proposition? Is it worth spending so much more for the same graphical horsepower? But now it's under your TV. It's also a PC. It has access to all these games the PS five doesn't have. That's the Steam Machine value proposition. Right. And I think you're right about the timing because I think about it it wasn't that long ago that Microsoft was talking about how basically no one is going to be able to afford Project Helix, that they're the next upcoming Xbox, that they're already preparing people for this thing is going to be prohibitive ly expensive to the point where we maybe have to rethink our entire strategy of how games work because consoles are going to be so expensive that most people are not going to want them . Which brings me to one of the things I've been thinking about a lot with this, right? Part of the Steam Machine playbook at least back in the day was for it to be kind of an ecosystem, right? That Valve didn't want to be the only company making this kind of PC slash console. Is that still in the roadmap for Valve? They still say that. And as a matter of fact, as part of this announcement, they are saying , maybe not very forcefully, but they're saying lightly that if you want to put Steam OS on your desktop PC . If I only want to put desktop PC parts against it, you can do that now as long as you have an AMD GPU. I think you can do it if you have an Intel GPU too, not NVIDIA yet. Okay, so you can hack and talk your way into a steam machine, basically is the idea. You can.'t If you know what you're doing, it's not something where they're going to help you do the dual boot or the installer necessarily yet. It's something where you don't have to free up space on your own drive or wipe it or start with brand new hardware. But you can do this if you want to , you've been able to do this. It hasn't worked very well with Intel GPU's, still does not work with NVIDIA GPUs. Intel's kind of a new addition fairly recently that it seems like it's getting there . But they've done the work for years now to get all the controllers and peripherals and stuff you can imagine. If you have any kind of game pad, mouse, keyboard, I plugged an optical drive into this . I can play a blue ray on this by plugging in blue ray drive into it. You know, it does all this stuff. It will work on here and it's just a matter of GPU . And so not NVIDIA yet. They are not saying it super, super forcefully yet. It's kind of like if you want to go ahead and experiment kind of thing. Okay they maintain tight control over who can ship a box with pre loaded steam and preloaded steam o's. Manufacturers cannot just go do this. They need to have a technical partnership. They say it's not a license agreement, they say it's not a business deal. They call it a technical partnership. They want quality control. It's what Valve wants over the end result. They don't want just anybody to be able to ship one and it's terrible and it stains their reputation . And that kind of is what happened in twenty twelve through twenty fifteen when they tried to do it the first time. It's partly Val's fault but it's also partly the manufacture r's fault. They did not deliver stuff that really worked well with this. There was a company that said they were doing SteamoS and they didn't have any authorization whatsoever and it wasn't going to work on that machine for instance . So if this all works , cast this out a little ways. Isn't this exactly the same playbook that Xbox is trying to run right now? You have a library of games, you have a bunch of different hardware you can play it on, some of which we'll make, some of which we won't make. You can already run it on your phone. Aren't we just doing Xbox everywhere, but it's Steam? Like am I missing something? I'm grinning ear to ear right now. You can see me gritting ear to ear because this is the right question and it's like absolute ly one of the thoughts in Microsoft's mind except Microsoft seems to have contradicted itself almost every day over the past three weeks about what it plans. I mean, true. They're like, we don't think we can have a we don't think we can sell one thousand dollars consoles. So we're going to find new business models and maybe those business models are going to be partnering with other companies, but those other companies can't ship hardware that's less than a thousand dollars. We have seen repeatedly with these handhelds. They have no idea how to ship it without hands. Microsoft would love it if all of a sudden everybody was making the Xboxes for them and they never had to build hardware again. To that end, Microsoft is like, we want to make and provide games . And we will we will make hardware to the extent that it enables that, but also if there's a rich, huge hardware ecosystem, we don't really need to be part of it. And Valve seems like it might as well be running down the exact same road at the in the exact same way. It just doesn't have it may it may have, like you said, taken a tighter grip on who gets to do what and how it partners in order to make sure all this stuff works, which I think is the right thing to do, but like steam everywhere feels like it is just coming right for us. Every time I talk to Valve, they tell me that other manufacturers that they see themselves as paving the way for other companies to do this thing, that they are like, this is the example of what you can do if you get off your bum and do it. And we don't think anybody will do it unless we do it first , but once we've done it, others can . The reality is once Valve has done it , they require a partnership in order for anybody else to do it and valve is a three hundred part person company, three hundred and fifty person company that the other OEMs out there do not think they can rely on. And if I talk if I talk to through the grapevine, you know, I'm here and I'm here and through the grapev ine that these companies have established relationships with Microsoft that bear fruit that send dollars their way , that get responses quickly , and they do not feel they have that relationship with Valve yet. Valve has started this relationship with Lenovo. Lenovo has put out one device with Steam OS, it theoretically had a second one before market conditions made it impossible to release that device for a price that anybody wants to pay . It was supposed to be out, I think this month. We'll see if it still is . The Legion Go two with DMOS in case you're wondering. And I just don't know like is Valve Is Valve going to make the time for more companies? When is Valve going to make the time for more companies? Will Valve change its mind and just say Steam OS is here, go ahead and use it. You don't have to pay us a cent. I don't know. Yeah . So we're recording this a few days before your view comes out. You have a lot of testing left to do. But what is your early sense right now? Is this is this thing ultimately a success? Did it work? Did it do the job? Is this the steam machine we've been waiting for? Oh not quite. I really wanted it to be a console not just a PC. And it might be in a month. It could be like the steam deck shipped broken, buggy utter mess . A month later, it was something that I could recommend to my friends. Six months later, it was something I could recommend to tech heads. A year later it was something I could recommend to anyone. I'm hoping the Steam machine is on the same path. Valve is the only company I trust to put it on that path because they are religious about software updates and even bringing new features to things years down the road. There's new functionality for the original Steam Deck LCD coming out this month where it'll be able to do proper hibernation, you know, instead of just sleep. That could be pretty cool . Like they really believe in that and they really deliver on that. And so I believe they can . It is not that yet right now it is in a better place than the original steam deck was , but it is in a place where it is early access. They have delivered for the kind of people who will jump in as an early access adopter who want to be there for that ride. The price is not excessive for that , particularly if it's going to double as your PC , but it's no playstation. That sounds about right. All right, go back to playing Indiana Jones. Thank you for coming on. Good to see you. Oh, you bet. All right, that's it for the show. Thank you to Sean for being here and thank you as always for watching and listening. If you have thoughts or feedback or strong feelings about the thousand forty nine dollars price, if there are other things you wanted to see from the Steam machine , we are all ears. Call the hotline eight six Virgin one, send us an email, Virgast the Verge. com . I really am curious if you're a person who is like actively making a gaming buying decision, you're looking at a switch to or an Xbox or a Steam Deck or a Steam machine or a PS five, how you're thinking through that decision right now. Call us, email us, tell us all about it. As always, a reminder that the best thing you can do to support the Verge and all of this stuff that we're up to is by subscribing. The Verge. com slash subscribe. It gets you all of our podcasts ad free, including this one. It gets you all of our exclusive newsletters. It gets you all of our coverage of the Steam Machine. Shawn has been writing about the Steam Machine for like thirteen years. You can read all of it at the Vergeot d com slash subscribe. Thank you in advance. The first cast is a Verge production and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. The show is produced by Josh Cahas, Eric Gomez, Brandon Kiefer, Travis Larshuk, and Aaron Lecascio. We'll see you tomorrow , rock and bowl