Steam Machine | A Casual Gamer’s Review
The Steam Deck got me hooked on PC gaming but was never powerful enough to wean me off consoles. Can the Steam Machine finally finish the job?
Can It Replace My Consoles?
The Steam Deck got me hooked on PC gaming, but it was never powerful enough to wean me off consoles entirely. Now the Steam Machine is here, and I want to know if it can become my go-to destination for all multiplatform titles. To find out, let’s look at how living-room friendly it really is, how it performs across a range of games, and whether it can truly replace a PS5 or even a Switch 2 under the TV.
Living-Room Ready
Unboxing the Steam Machine, it’s clear Valve has really stepped up its product design and production since the original Steam Deck LCD. We already saw how well Valve iterated with the Steam Deck OLED, which brought improved internals as well as a better display, and the Steam Machine is another example of how polished a Valve product can be. It’s true that it’s a mid-range gaming PC built from parts nobody else wanted to use, but Valve’s engineering team deserves real credit for how it all comes together in such a smart configuration. Plenty of PC enthusiasts have put together a competitive build for a similar or lower price, but I’d challenge them to make something this discreet and quiet that slots so neatly into a living room. My son is four and a half and notices every little change in the house, but he hasn’t batted an eyelid at the Steam Machine’s presence.
Setting it up is a dream, too. You boot into SteamOS, download your games, and you’re good to go, though it’s worth popping into the display settings to make sure the output is 4K at 120Hz. The SteamOS experience is near identical to the Steam Deck or any other SteamOS PC. If you keep games on an SD card in your Steam Deck, you can pop that straight into the Steam Machine and play immediately, and if you’re coming from console, it’s a welcoming environment to set games up and get going.
SteamOS isn’t perfect, and there are still bugs to iron out. A big selling point of the Steam Deck was HDMI-CEC integration, letting it control your TV, and that isn’t working perfectly yet. Putting the Steam Machine to sleep will sometimes cause it to restart, which is a bit annoying. You also need to avoid treating it entirely like a console. One day I switched mine on and it was really sluggish, with games misbehaving and even the interface lagging. It turns out that if you keep putting the Steam Machine to sleep rather than shutting it down, some background processes get throttled by sleep mode. I believe Valve is aware of this bug, but if you hit it, a cold restart brings everything back to full speed.
The Advantages of Being a PC
Being a PC brings real advantages, building on all the development work done for the Steam Deck, not just by Valve but by third-party developers behind plugin platforms like Decky. That means access to plugins like EmuDeck for emulation and plenty of other customisation tools. It also means you’re part of the same community as other Steam Deck owners, so if you hit an issue, there’s usually someone online who has already solved it.
How It Actually Performs
This is the 512GB Steam Machine, and it would be a squeeze without the SD card plugged into the front. Assuming your games fit, how well does it actually run them? A relatively lightweight title like Persona 4 Royal runs at 4K 120fps on high settings and looks beautiful and smooth. I had the same experience with Yakuza 4 Remastered. Pretty much anything from that era of gaming looks superb on the Steam Machine.
Despite Valve touting it as a 4K 60 machine, not everything hits those settings. A 2026 release like Yakuza: Kiwami 3: Dark Ties forces some sacrifices, needing 1440p at 60fps with FSR 3.1.5 turned on to run well. It generally performs extraordinarily well at those settings, though I ran into a few odd crashes and bugs that gave me second thoughts. This game is a useful benchmark for me, since I’m used to playing it on my Legion Go S with the Z1 Extreme chip and 32GB of RAM at 1080p and around 40fps. Although Valve has made much of the Steam Machine being six times more powerful than the Steam Deck, compared with a Z1 Extreme handheld it isn’t hugely more powerful. If I docked my Legion Go S and output to the TV it might slow down a bit more than that, but I wouldn’t expect anything game-changing moving from that handheld to the Steam Machine.
I mention that to temper expectations before a much more modern title like Indiana Jones and the Great Circle. With quite a lot of tinkering, I managed to lock it at 40fps and 1080p on mostly low and medium settings. Someone out there can probably optimise it further, but for games that force ray tracing and ask the Steam Machine to do things it isn’t well suited to, you’ll likely get a more stable, fuss-free experience on the PS5 or Switch 2. There’s plenty of potential for developers to start targeting the Steam Machine specifically, but going in, you have to accept there’s a hard limit on what you can play well right now.
Streaming from Elsewhere
None of that necessarily matters if you have a bigger gaming rig elsewhere in the house and can stream games running on it over to the Steam Machine in front of the TV. I think that’s a brilliant use case, though I don’t have that setup myself. What I do have is a lot of handhelds, so I looked at it the other way and tested how well the Steam Machine streams to my Ayn Odin 2 Portal and my Legion Go S.
A SteamOS handheld like the Steam Deck or Legion Go S is by far the easiest route. You just go to remote play in your handheld’s settings and connect to the Steam Machine over Steam Link. I wasn’t too impressed by the stuttering and latency I got on the Legion Go S in this mode, and if your handheld’s display differs in size from your TV, you’ll need to adjust the display settings to get the right aspect ratio.
Streaming to my Android handheld went noticeably better. The Steam Link app is again the easiest route, and performance is okay, if not as stable as something like the PS Portal streaming from a PS5, but it’s definitely playable. There’s a better route if you’re willing to tinker: install the Moonlight app on your Android handheld, then go to your Steam Deck or Steam Machine and install the Decky Sunshine plugin. There’s likely a bit more troubleshooting to do in desktop mode, but once it’s set up, it’s the best way to stream from the Steam Machine to an Android handheld, with under 10 milliseconds of latency at a really stable frame rate.
Having that set up has got me questioning whether I need a handheld gaming PC at all, when the Odin 2 Portal is so much lighter, has a beautiful OLED display and far more battery life than something like a Steam Deck or Legion Go S. Not everyone loves streaming, but the combined cost of a Steam Machine and an Android handheld like this actually comes in lower than buying a brand new handheld PC these days.
The Steam Controller
One thing you miss out on if you stray from Valve hardware is the controls, and the Steam Controller is a brilliant example of how it all comes together. I don’t think it’s as premium or comfortable as the Switch 2 Pro Controller or the PlayStation DualSense, but the accessibility features and customisation are genuinely impressive. Near-complete parity with the Steam Deck’s controls makes it seamless to move between handheld and desktop, the trackpads and gyro let you play anything that needs mouse support on your TV, and there are nice touches like pairing the controller with multiple devices and switching between them with a button combination.
There are things I dislike, too. Being lightweight helps with gyro use, but for me it feels jarringly light, and since I rarely use the back buttons, they just get in the way and give the controller a slightly hollow feel. I’m also a fidgeter, so I keep pressing them by accident, and sometimes that causes a mistake mid-game. The controller’s connection to the internal adapter also seems to need line of sight, so another Bluetooth device even slightly in the way can disrupt it. My phone in my pocket has weakened the connection and caused dropouts, and pointing the controller in a slightly different direction can do the same. If Valve fixed one thing about the Steam Machine and controller, this would be it.
Final Thoughts
Valve’s promise of a PC-console hybrid that seamlessly fits into your living room, in terms of build quality, ease of setup and flexibility, is absolutely delivered. Every so often, though, something drags you back into the mire of PC gaming, and going in, you have to know this isn’t going to be a tinker-free experience. With modern games like Indiana Jones already struggling to hold up, it’s a valid concern what this device will look like in three or four years, especially since the Steam Deck is already starting to show its age.
My dream for the Steam Machine was for it to become my go-to device for all multiplatform games, because I really value that my Steam library isn’t tied to a specific piece of hardware. With the PS5 and Switch 2, I’ll always be locked into those platforms with no guarantee of forward compatibility. At the same time, if I buy a game on PS5, I know it’s going to run there, even if I have to trade off between performance and quality modes, and that’s the limit of the tinkering required. Seeing how well the Switch 2 handles ports of games like Indiana Jones and Elden Ring makes it a massive competitor to the Steam Machine too, especially at half the price.
The Steam Machine is a PC, and you can do far more with it than just play your Steam library, but setting those edge cases aside, the real decision comes down to this: do you want your games to live with Sony and Nintendo forever and benefit from how well optimised they are for that hardware, or do you want your games to move onto whatever PC you pick up in future, accepting a slightly less performant machine than a PS5 or Switch 2 for now? I haven’t talked much about price here. The Steam Machine is still an expensive investment, but everything else is only going to get more expensive too, and I wouldn’t be surprised if other hardware eventually catches up. It might just become a new baseline we have to get used to.
My recommendation: If you value an open, portable game library over locked-in optimisation, and you’re willing to tinker occasionally, the Steam Machine is a genuinely impressive living-room PC. If you want the most stable, fuss-free experience with the newest releases, the PS5 or Switch 2 will serve you better for now.