Valve’s Steam Machine is an interesting bit of kit, treading a fine line between high-end console and entry-level PC.
The Steam Deck has obvious appeal, allowing a wide variety of games to be played on a handheld for the first time. However, the Steam Machine is less obvious in its target audience, as at first glance you’d expect it to appeal mainly to console owners wanting to give PC gaming a go.
It’ll basically let you use Steam on your TV, eliminating the need for a desk, monitor, fancy chair etc. You just plug it in as if it was a console and it just works.
That said it’s not as powerful as an Xbox Series X or PlayStation 5 Pro, and it’s certainly not comparable to high-end PCs, so it’s currently in this weird grey area in terms of who should buy it and why.
As a console gamer myself I’m interested in buying a Steam Machine for one reason and one reason only, emulation.
Valve made it clear in the marketing that while it will run on SteamOS it’d be our console, and as such we could do what we want with it.
This means rigging it with all manner of additions and improvements, and the one I’ll be primarily doing is packing it full of emulators and getting my retro game files uploaded.
As much as I love my physical media collection I can’t have every console hooked up at once. There’s not enough space nor outlets to have them plugged into it.
This means if I want to plug-in my Sega Saturn and play some Sonic R I’ve got to go through the hassle of getting out the CRT TV, plugging everything in and playing for a couple of hours until I fancy doing something else. It’s not the worst but it’s not exactly ideal.
But, if I can get my games working on the Steam Deck and run them through emulators rather than my physical consoles, that my entire collection available to play digitally on my main TV, all optimised through the emulators too for the best, or at least better, image quality.
You have to be careful of the legality of course because while emulators are perfectly legal downloading ROMs for games isn’t, but as long as the files are coming from my own physical cartridges/discs that in theory is all good.
Once I’ve jumped through quite a few technical hoops.
The rumoured price is expensive, sure but it’s not confirmed. It’ll cost a pretty penny either way, but I’ll be using it to play a bunch of PC games I can’t get on consoles and the emulators if I can get them working.
It’s more than worth it in my book!
Value is subjective though, and if the Steam Machine isn’t the device for you, there’s no shame in that.
