Should You Buy A Steam Machine?

**SPEAKER_1** (0:00)
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**Jeff Gerstmann** (0:47)
Hey, what's going on, everybody? Hi, welcome to the program. It's The Jeff Gerstmann Show. It is July 14th, 2026 And welcome back once again to the world of video games. And whatever is going on around them, I don't know, it's pretty different things. Video games aren't the real world, everyone knows that. Video games are completely untouched by anything that's happening in the actual real world. Yeah, that's how that works, right? This is, it has been hot here, I don't know. We dodged the heat wave last week, that seemed to be sweeping through most of the rest of the nation. And then it has been, you know, 90s creeping up on triple digits around here, which has been fun. Everyone gets restless, the kids get crazy. My son had a crazy bad dream last night and came running downstairs at two in the morning, freaking out. He's okay, he's doing fine. But you know, it's been, it's been that kind of, that kind of set the tone for the mentality going around, I guess. Everyone's just going crazy. But we are here. We're doing our thing. And you know, we're living with the Steam Machine now. I got my Steam Machine that I purchased from Valve Corp. And the Steam Machine is pretty interesting. It is, it is, I wrote a review of sorts of the Steam Machine. You can find that over at Jeff.Zone. That's a free post, but that is the Patreon. If you want to support the show and get an ad free version of this very podcast, head over to Jeff.Zone. You get the podcast. If you join the advisory panel, you can suggest Nintendo 64 games for the Friday streams and everything in between. Head on over and check it out at Jeff.Zone. The Steam Machine is pretty much what you would expect it to be. I think if you've been following the Steam Deck or if you own a Steam Deck, then I think you have a really good idea of what the Steam Machine is and what it's capable of, and I think what its limitations are.
It's a more powerful device than the Steam Deck. I think that's obviously one of the things they said out of the gate, is that obviously the hardware, the internals are better than a Steam Deck. Obviously, it doesn't have a screen, so it's meant to be hooked up to a screen. They just made a computer, but really this is the sort of thing that you're supposed to be hooking up to a television.
You could certainly hook up a mouse and keyboard to it, and it has display port on the back as well as HDMI. So if you're looking to plug it into a traditional ass, regular ass PC monitor, you can totally do that. But I don't think that that's... I have to imagine that people doing that are going to be kind of in the minority because this is something that is... You know, the pitch to me has always been, hey, we're kind of, we're making a consoleized version of the PC platform and we're doing it without Windows, which is super exciting. And to me, that is the truly exciting thing about Valve's push completely into this hardware, whether it's the Steam Deck or the Machine or even Steam Frame, to a certain degree, from the sounds of that.
It is this idea that they are pushing ahead and finding ways to get Windows games to run really well on not Windows. They've got their own flavor of Linux and they're doing all of this compatibility work to make that, to shore that up. And that comes with caveats, obviously. You know, if you've been following this stuff, you know that there are going to be games that are incompatible with this set up. Games that require you to be running proper real Windows. Typically, that is games that have like anti-cheat technology built in. And so that's a list like Battlefield, Marathon, Destiny 2, Call of Duty. The new release of, the recent release of Dead or Alive 6, that replaced the other version of Dead or Alive 6, that is not compatible. And there are games that have anti-cheat technology built in that do work, though sometimes you have to jump through some hoops to make that stuff work. And so it kind of, you know, I think this whole thing is all fucked up, man. It didn't, it shouldn't be this way. The Steam Machine should not be $1,000. The power inside of the Steam Machine is nice. And, you know, if you haven't upgraded your PC in a long time, you know, Valve says that when they were speccing out this machine in the first place, they were looking at the Steam Hardware Survey and saying, actually, for a great number of players that are using Steam every day or using Steam, this is going to be an upgrade for them. This is going to be a better machine than the one that they're running. And so if you're in that boat, you know, this is it's kind of a different story, right? But it's not as powerful as a PlayStation 5 Pro and it is more expensive than a PlayStation 5 Pro. That to me is kind of one of the numbers that, you know, and again, there's so much nuance in trying to find a way, like writing about the Steam Machine and trying to figure out, okay, am I recommending this thing or not? And who should buy a Steam Machine and who shouldn't buy a Steam Machine? Like, there's so many different people out there in different situations that it is very difficult to just make a blanket recommendation. And so what I'll say is, I think the Steam Machine is really rad.