While we continue to wait for Valve to launch the Steam Machine amidst painful hardware shortages at the hands of AI hyperscalers, the company has released some details on its verification program at GDC 2026.
Much like the Steam Deck, one of the big selling points for the Steam Machine is going to be the “Steam Machine Verified” program that’ll let you know at a glance whether or not a game will run well on the Steam Machine. We’ve known that this program was a thing since Valve announced its mini gaming PC back in November, but at GDC 2026, Valve laid out the actual requirements.
The biggest difference from the Steam Deck’s verified program is that for a game to be verified on Steam Machine, it needs to run at 1080p with 30fps. Beyond that, any game that’s verified on Steam Deck already will automatically be verified on Steam Machine. Valve can carry over that verification because, like with the Steam Deck, a game needs to be able to use a controller 100% of the time to earn that green checkmark.
Valve is also working on making more games playable on SteamOS as a whole. In the same presentation, the company claims that it’s working on improving SteamOS’s anti-cheat support. Developers should be able to opt in to bring their anti-cheat programs over to SteamOS, which should allow more competitive games to run on the Steam Machine, the Deck, or whatever other hardware people choose to install SteamOS onto.
This sounds like a good move to bring more multiplayer games to SteamOS, but Valve acklowledged that there are still issues with Kernel-level anti-cheat and Secure Boot.
What Happened to 4K60?
When Valve first showed off the Steam Machine, it made a big deal out of it being able to play most games at 4K with 60fps, as long as FSR is enabled. While it seems like that target is incompatible with the verified program only requiring 1080p at 30fps, it actually makes a lot of sense. After all, if you turn FSR to Performance Mode on a 4K display, the game is going to be rendering at 1080p anyways.
It might have been nice to see Valve stick to its marketing and say that the Steam Machine is a 4K60 machine, but with the GPU being the equivalent of a Radeon RX 7600M, 1080p at 30fps is a much easier bar to clear.
The Steam Machine will probably lose some of that performance upscaling to 4K with FSR, but as long as a game has some breathing room over that 1080p, 30fps minimum, it should have no problem being playable at that higher resolution, even if it isn’t the native 4K gameplay that we’d all like to see from a new gaming device in 2026.
Either way, unless a game doesn’t run on SteamOS or support controllers, these requirements should mean that most PC games should have no problem earning a Steam Machine Verified badge. But we’ll have to wait for the Steam Machine to actually get here to know for sure.
Jackie Thomas is the Hardware and Buying Guides Editor at IGN and the PC components queen. You can follow her @Jackiecobra
