It looks like Valve is lining up its next wave of hardware for launch, because the company has expanded its Verified program to cover both the Steam Machine and Steam Frame, the desktop and VR devices it first showed off back in November. The more useful news is tucked into that same announcement, though: both are still on track to ship this summer, after the pair slipped out of their original early-2026 window.
The expansion mirrors the existing Steam Deck Verified system, which rates how cleanly a game runs out of the box with no tinkering required, and applies the same idea to the two new machines. That matters most for the Steam Machine, a SteamOS desktop Valve pegs at roughly six times the power of a Steam Deck, since it runs the same software stack, Proton included, that the Deck already does. Valve says a game that runs well on Deck will run well on Machine with no extra work, and it is even retesting titles that fell short on Deck to see if the stronger hardware clears them. The Steam Frame gets its own Standalone Verified track that judges how games perform running directly on the headset instead of streamed from a PC.
What we are really curious about is the part Valve still will not talk about, and that is the price. Just last month, the company raised the Steam Deck OLED by as much as $300, pushing the 512GB model from $549 to $789 and the 1TB version from $649 to $949, pointing to the same memory and storage cost spikes that have been inflating hardware everywhere. The Deck did not get any better; it just got more expensive. When a three-year-old handheld on older silicon now costs more than a PlayStation 5 Pro, it is hard to picture a brand-new device Valve itself calls six times more powerful arriving cheap. Our money is on the Steam Machine landing a lot closer to $1,500 than it does to $1,000.
We should find out soon enough, since a summer launch puts pricing and final details presumably weeks rather than months away. Valve has already shipped the new Steam Controller at $99, so the Machine and Frame are the last pieces of that November lineup. Whatever number Valve settles on will say a lot about whether the Steam Machine is pitched as an accessible living-room box or a more premium piece of kit, and given how far the Deck has crept upmarket, we would not bet on the former.
