Watching the growth of Valve has been fascinating. The Washington-based company has gone from being a well-respected game developer to one of the biggest forces in video games, thanks to the popularity of Steam. Next year, Valve looks to be making a play to cement that position and entice new users into their ecosystem, with some superb-looking new hardware looming on the horizon.
From Steam machines coming back to new VR headsets, 2026 looks to be a huge year for the company, and there are even rumors about Half-Life 3 finally making an appearance. Let's take a closer look at what's coming from the PC gaming titan next year.
The Steam Machine is coming back
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If you cast your mind back just over a decade, you may remember the first attempt that Valve took at its own custom hardware. The Steam Machine (and if you can read that without Daft Punk getting stuck in your head, you're a better person than I) was Valve's first attempt to release a ready-built PC, and it was, frankly, dead on arrival.
Since then, Valve has gone from strength to strength with its hardware. The Steam Deck, Valve's answer to the Switch, has been a mainstay in my living room and sold millions of units according to industry estimates. Combined with the huge development of Proton, Valve's compatibility tool for playing Windows games on Linux, and it's got a much better chance of making an impact this time around.
So, what can we expect from the new Steam Machines? Resembling a small Borg cube, it looks to be attempting to compete with your consoles for space under the TV. Its hardware specs look impressive, too, with Valve boasting that it has "over six times the horsepower of the Steam Deck", and promising "4K gaming at 60 FPS with FSR". The current specs that Valve lists on the machine's page are:
- CPU: Semi-custom AMD Zen 4 with up to 4.8 GHz of power
- GPU: Semi-custom AMD RDNA3 with a clock speed of 2.45 GHz
- RAM: 16GB DDR5 and 8GB GDDR6 VRAM
- Storage: 512GB or 2TB, with both models coming with a MicroSD slot
The Steam Frame
Valve's new VR headset, the Steam Frame, is the announcement I'm most excited about. First off, there's the fact that it isn't just a VR headset; it's a whole PC in a headset. Its controllers also have input for non-VR games, so, in theory, it's another way to play your Steam library. How well supported and powerful it will be are yet to be determined, but it can also be used as a traditional VR headset, connecting via a small wireless dongle.
The biggest feature, – for me at least, in my cramped flat – is that the Steam Frame won't need base stations. That's right, no need to clear a space or tons of setup – the Frame tracks movement with four cameras on the device itself. I've been a longtime holdout when it comes to VR, but if this is executed well, it might be the device that finally makes me get into it.
A new Steam controller
The original Steam controller never clicked (trackpad pun not intended) for me, but as a paid-up member of the Church of the Holy Steam Deck, I'm cautiously optimistic about the new one. It has two thumbsticks, at least, rather than the weird GameCube abomination of the original, but there's more: it's got magnetic thumbsticks, which should help avoid stick drift, along with "high-definition rumble" for better haptic feedback.
It's also got a gyroscope for motion controls, but frankly, that'll be getting turned off in any game that dares to make me use motion controls. It also has a pair of trackpads, much like the Deck, so it should be a reasonable solution for those who want to play strategy games and other mouse-intensive genres with a controller. One to cautiously watch, I say.
Half-Life 3?
This should be taken with a shovel's worth of salt, since rumors about Half-Life 3 have been circulating for so long at this point that an actual release will make Duke Nukem Forever's development time look rapid. Still, some leakers have predicted that, at long last, Half-Life 3 will release in 2026 as a launch title for the Steam Machine.
It's always possible, of course, but don't hold your breath.
When's the new hardware coming and how much will it cost?
Valve hasn't put a firm launch date out for its new range of hardware, but says that it will launch sometime in early 2026 – presumably in Q1. The same air of mystery permeates the pricing of all of this tech, as we don't know how much any of it will cost yet. Speculation persists, of course, with some predicting that the Steam Machine will cost from $600-1000, which seems likely given AI's latest bad habit of causing RAM prices to shoot up. The controller will likely cost less than $100, while the Frame will likely be cheaper than the Index, according to Valve.
