The Steam Machine Is An Iconoclastic Computer Born In Unforgiving Times

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It’s difficult to talk about the Steam Machine in the abstract versus the Steam Machine that is in my hands right now. The one in my hands is intuitive and easy to use like a console, sets up fast and, for many PC games, it just works. It is one of the most unintrusive and charming pieces of console hardware ever to grace the living room, a tiny industrial cube that allows you to swap the front plates if you want. Design-wise it is in league with the Series X, the Sharp X68000 or Sony’s offerings in the PS2 era. It is also one of most mass market releases of a desktop computer to ship with Linux in history.

But it is also a computer released in 2026, when a bunch of useless jackasses have made the computer expensive. It costs more than the PlayStation 5 Pro for the entry level model without a controller, and is roughly what a prebuilt computer with as much RAM and memory costs. The math is much more charitable when you realize that the Steam Machine is an adult computer you can install your own software on, instead of a weird playpen like the PS5 Pro that charges you $79.99 a year to play games you already own online.

On a long enough timeline, the cost might not matter. What would normally be a debilitating launch for a console is sub-optimal but not ruinous for the concept of the Steam Machine. You can build a Steam Machine yourself, and I know because at present I have three Steam Machine-shaped devices sitting next to each other in my living room, all running Linux. The Steam Machine is meant for an alternate present but, barring that, it could lay the groundwork for a more interesting future.

Sticker shock

It’s worth letting the air out of the room about what the Steam Machine costs before talking about what it does: $1,049 for the base model with a 512GB SSD, and $1,128 for the same model with a Steam Controller. Bump the SSD up to 2 TB and that goes up to $1,349 and $1,428 with the Steam Controller. Bundling the Steam Controller separately is…

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