Copyright Wccftech
After several rumors surrounding Valve, claiming that the company would be launching a new VR headset, controller, and potentially even a new console-like PC, those rumors were proven true today when Valve announced all three of the rumored hardware devices in one big swing. The Steam Machine, Steam Frame, and Steam Controller were all debuted at once, and they're all going to arrive sometime in early 2026. What has followed since the official reveal is a slew of interviews and videos from publications that got the chance to speak with Valve ahead of the reveal, including a particularly interesting interview with Eurogamer where Yazan Aldehayyat, a hardware engineer at Valve, spoke candidly about how the company settled on the design of the Steam Machine. Before you ask, no, it did not come from Valve wanting to make its own Nintendo GameCube (though that hasn't stopped people online from referring to the device as the Gabe Cube or Steam Cube). It began with Valve seriously considering the cooling and heat challenges that the Steam Machine would face, whether on a person's desk or, more likely, on a TV stand in their living room. "If you know how much heat you need to remove and what temperatures you're dealing with, then you know how much air you need," said Aldehayyat. "And if you know how much air you need, you can lock in a fan design pretty early on. And if you know how big the fan is, everything else kind of falls [into place] from that." Aldehayyat goes on to say that "Living rooms are actually one of the most challenging thermal environments you can think of," due to how devices, whether they're consoles or a small media box, are usually tucked into cabinets or surrounded by other sources of heat, and not just things like a TV, but potentially a fireplace warming someone's living room and giving devices like the Steam Machine a greater cooling challenge. Obviously, Valve can only do so much to try and accommodate for those kinds of variants, but it's not surprising that the design for its new console-like PC came from wanting to both improve on the performance capabilities of a Steam Deck, without shipping a massive device that might as well just be a desktop at a certain point. Besides, Nintendo proved years ago that consoles don't need to be these giant boxes or towering configurations of plastic and technology to be popular and perfect for the living room. Lastly, just as a comparison, the Steam Machine is 152 mm tall, 162.4 mm deep, and 156 mm wide, while the Nintendo GameCube is 110 mm tall, 161 mm deep, and 150 mm wide. It's flat-out impressive, and a huge sign of how far technology has come, that with a few more millimetres of space compared to a console that launched in 2001, Valve can make a device capable of playing modern games 25 short years later.
