By Emily Johnson | Apr 28, 2026
According to Pierre-Loup Griffais, the SteamOS developer who has worked with Valve for many years and was responsible for porting both the Source Engine and Steam to Linux, things appear to be going well in terms of the pre-release pipeline related to the Steam Machine. When asked about the Steam Machine's development, Griffais stated that Valve expects to announce news regarding the Steam Machine's progress shortly.
He went on to say that logistics are currently the only hurdle that Valve needs to overcome in terms of bringing the Steam Machine (equipment) into the hands of consumers. This also suggests strongly that the hardware itself is complete and ready for production, with only logistics issues remaining.
To give people an idea of what they can expect with the Steam Machine, Griffais described it as having a very similar experience to using a Steam Deck while docked, but with a considerable improvement in the GPU performance relative to this experience. The Steam Machine is a considerable improvement in relation to raw specifications and will include 16GB RAM, an RDNA3-based custom GPU with 8GB GDDR6 VRAM, and a Zen 4 CPU with an overclock of up to 4.8 GHz. This improvement is very significant compared to the Steam Deck's RDNA2 graphical output and the shared 16GB of RAM.
Griffais continued by explaining that Valve intentionally released the Steam Controller before the Steam Machine because Valve views PC users as its primary market for the Steam Controller and did not want PC users to wait until the Steam Machine was released for the Steam Controller.
Since there is now an official launch date for the Steam Controller, the Steam Machine would appear to be next in line behind the Steam Controller in Valve's upcoming product launches, which would include the Steam Frame VR system, so all three products would be released sometime in 2026. When Valve originally announced all three products at once in November 2025, many fans assumed they would all launch together; however, it now appears that each product will launch based on its own timetable.
The Steam Machine and Steam Frame are both still listed as "coming soon" on Valve's website, and that status has existed since late 2025. Whether the Steam Machine will receive much advanced notification prior to launch is unknown; however, given that it is expected to be the most expensive of the three products, advanced pre-order expectations could play a significant part in creating early hype after the Steam Machine's release and may cause Valve to issue the Steam Machine's release successfully on the market with a longer lead time.
