Steam Machine is back, and with it comes a new Steam Controller! Valve made a number of exciting hardware announcements today, and ahead of the big reveal, IGN took a trip to Valve’s headquarters in Bellevue, Washington, to interview software engineer Pierre-Loup Griffais and hardware engineer Yazan Aldehayyat to find out everything we could about both next-gen devices (we’ve also got a separate interview on the Steam Frame right here!).
Read on to find out why Valve has decided now is the right time to go with new hardware, who the new Steam Machine and Steam Controller are for, and how it’s keeping everything affordable.
The next-gen Steam Machine
IGN: So you’re announcing a new Steam Machine, but this isn’t the first time Steam Machines have existed. The first iterations of Steam Machines were not commercially successful. They were widely regarded within the public sphere as a failure. What made you revisit the form factor?
Pierre-Loup Griffais: That’s a good question. I think for us between having shipped a Steam Deck and having made a lot of progress on game catalog compatibility with developing Proton and all that, it felt like it was the right time. We had done a bunch of different shaped PCs back in the day and we worked with third-parties. It told us a lot about what was working well with the experience of getting into your game and getting the PC experience into the living room. We were pretty happy with how that went. But the process by which game developers had to do some work to port their games over, we looked back at that and it didn’t seem like the right model.
So we started working on Proton and made a lot of improvements there to try and get to the point where games would just run without needing any of that extra work, or if any work was needed, we wanted that work to be additive to the experience. So when folks do any work to get to the Steam Deck verified stage, it’s usually work that either improves text legibility on smaller displays or is going to make the game run better on lower end PCs. Stuff that helps everyone.
We think we came far enough along with our work on the OS and the compatibility layer, and there has been enough of that work on the game developer side to get all those games working well, that it just felt like the right time. It felt like we could just have a really good product at this point in time. It was pretty natural.
Yazan Aldehayyat: Yeah, I think in a lot of ways the Steam Deck proved that to us, like the reception that we got from Steam Deck, people obviously love the portability and the handheld form factor, but one of the big pieces of feedback we got was that they also just love SteamOS and the convenience of SteamOS. And so getting that feedback essentially proved to us that we finally have the pieces needed to make the original vision of SteamOS a reality, if that makes sense.
IGN: Now that there’s going to be four products that officially support SteamOS, are there plans to make SteamOS more widely available beyond a try at your own risk kind of model the way it is now?
Pierre-Loup Griffais: Yeah, in fact to some extent that’s already the case today. We’ve seen enthusiasts in the community, both folks with existing products like other handhelds, but also people bringing their own PCs, actually get some measure of success installing SteamOS from the Steam Deck recovery image. Because we’ve been continually expanding hardware support so that you would have a better chance of success. So I think to some extent that’s already happening.
But definitely, just like Steam Deck paved the way for SteamOS on a variety of third-party handhelds, we expect that a Steam Machine will pave the way for SteamOS on a bunch of different machines in either similar form factors, different perf envelopes, different segments of the market and get to a good outcome there. We definitely want to encourage people to try it out on their own hardware, and we’ll be working on expanding hardware availability over time as well, or hardware support for the drivers and the base operating system. Just last week we fixed something that was preventing us from booting on the very latest AMD CPU platforms. Last month we added support for the Intel Lunar Lake platforms. We’re constantly just adding support and improving performance and we want it to be at the point where at some point you can install it on any PC, but there’s still a ton of work to do there.
IGN: So for the actual Steam Machine, now that it’s there in addition to the Steam Deck, how will you communicate performance levels and how they differ between the two systems?
Pierre-Loup Griffais: The Steam Machine is also going to have a verified program. Our intent is that if you’re using the Steam Machine and the controller together, you have essentially the same experience as the Steam Deck, where the Steam Store guides you to games that we know from testing that every part of the game will be playable with correct acceptable performance, but also every dialogue, every feature of the game will be accessible with the controls that you have at your disposal.
In fact, a lot of those test criteria will be common between Steam Deck and Steam Machine because things like SteamOS compatibility, any sort of Proton bugs that could be causing any issues in the experience, will be common across those platforms. But things like performance will be tested individually per product, and so we’ll be able to tell you if a new game that comes out on Steam that might not necessarily be a great experience on Steam Deck is going to be playable on Steam Machine.
Yazan Aldehayyat: So just to clarify, there’ll be separate badges, so it will be clear whether this is a Steam Deck verified or Steam Machine verified, et cetera.
IGN: Can you talk about how the Steam Machine is positing itself as the more approachable PC gaming machine, and a lot of the things that went into designing both the hardware itself and how you’ve modified or improved SeamOS to coincide with the idea of this being the easy thing to figure out and use?
Yazan Aldehayyat: Yeah. Our ultimate goal is to make the process of playing your games as easy as possible, and there’s a lot of ways we did that. So obviously the first thing is just make it faster to get back into your games. We heard a lot of good feedback on the fast suspend/resume from Steam Deck. Steam Machine has that as well, so you’re able to pause your games and come back even days later and basically jump right back exactly where you were. But we also added something where the software bits, like the OS and the games and the cloud syncs, updates in the background for you, so the game is always ready to play whenever you come back to it. That’s something that we want to do with Steam Deck as well. It’s just with Steam Deck, given it’s a battery-powered device it’s a little bit more challenging. We don’t want it to be burning a lot of power in suspend mode. It’s a little bit easier on Steam Machine since it’s always plugged in. Steam Deck Verified is also a good example of that, so people know whether the game is going to run without having to do a bunch of research, et cetera. Your carousel is always showing you the last game you played.
So really there’s a theme here of, how do we get you playing as fast as possible? We go through the whole process and eliminate all those friction points. Another one actually is the CEC support. So Steam Machine also can wake up your TV and your soundbar and set all those channels for you just by a single button press, again to get you playing, not waste any precious time you have for gaming and just get you there playing as fast as possible.
Pierre-Loup Griffais: Of course all the elements from Steam Deck and the general SteamOS experience are there, so you don’t have to update drivers. Everything’s always ready for you to play. There’s no third-party software required, you can just get directly into your games.
One thing that we’re doing as well is you have tools from outside the game to control performance, so you can control the internal resolution and the external resolution of the games from the operating system. So if you want to change the performance level, you can easily do that from convenient knobs inside the Steam UI settings, and also the same quick access menu with all the performance settings, framerate limit and all that stuff, exists in SteamOS just in the same way.
Something that happened shortly after Steam Deck released was that a lot of games started detecting that they were running on Steam Deck to pick exactly the right default settings for an experience that the game developer considered balanced, which is a pretty small amount of work for a game developer. We expect the same thing will happen with Steam Machine, and we’ll be providing APIs in Steamworks so that game developers can detect what platform they’re running on to be able to have the right amount of detailed settings and that corresponds to the balanced experience that they have in mind.
Yazan Aldehayyat: We definitely want the default experience to be as easy and friction-free as possible, but we also love tinkering. We’re tinkerers ourselves. We definitely make sure that the Steam Machine is designed with that in mind. You absolutely do not have to, you don’t have to do anything, you can just play your games, but if you would like to mod and tinker and do all that kind of stuff, we definitely want to support you and make sure you also have a good experience that way too.
IGN: Speaking of the system, obviously there’s a wide range of easy hardware available that you can build a system out of. Why did you pick the GPU you picked and why did you pick the CPU you picked when there are cheaper options or more powerful options?
Yazan Aldehayyat: We arrived at this in a variety of ways. We just triangulated our way via different directions. The mandate that we had was, you need to be able to play every game on Steam or at least have enough performance to play every game on Steam at 4K 60 hertz when using upscaling. And so that was the important thing, because we didn’t want people to worry about whether their Steam Machine supports whatever game they’re playing. We just wanted it to be a pretty simple message that yes, if it’s on Steam, this device will have enough performance to play at these settings. But we obviously also wanted to make the device affordable. We understand that affordability is really important, so we kept that in mind and made sure that’s a device that’s going to be reachable for a lot of people.
And another piece of information that we always had available is the Steam hardware survey. So we can essentially look at everybody’s devices, we understand what the medium performance looks like for people, we understand where the Steam Machine is going to be positioned relative to those. We think that the Steam Machine is going to be equal or better perf than the majority of people on Steam. So essentially we think it’s going to be a good upgrade path for a lot of people, especially people who are on older machines; a really easy, simple way to get more performance and get back into PC gaming.
IGN: So on affordability, what kind of considerations do you have to have to make an affordable gaming PC / console right now when everything’s getting more expensive lately?
Yazan Aldehayyat: If you’re trying to make a PC that has similar features and similar performance, I think the Steam Machine is going to be a really competitive price to that and provide really good value to it. The affordability piece you mentioned is one of the reasons why we think a Steam Machine makes a lot of sense right now. So it’s just something that we thought about every time we made a hardware decision, a feature decision, is to make sure that we keep it as approachable, as affordable as possible.
IGN: When you’re thinking about not just specs but also talking about it being easy for people to jump into, you’re doing one hardware spec for the Steam Machine. So talk a little bit about the thought behind that and also the fact that you’ll have two storage options and that’s kind of it. How did you arrive at that?
Pierre-Loup Griffais: It’s really the same idea as the Steam Deck. It was really important to us that the level of performance and experience that you get is the same across the board, so that it’s simple for developers to target and it’s simple for users to pick what platform they want to use. We think it’d be not a goal for a lot of different performance options to exist and for the first step to be for a user to have to figure out what can run on what, right?
And so just like Steam Deck, every single Steam Deck has the same level of performance and can run all the games on Steam and all the games that are Steam Deck verified, it was really important to us that even just the initial process of figuring out a Steam Machine is a product for you wasn’t already laced in a bunch of different choices based on what games you have to leave behind or other choices like that. So I think the unified performance spec is actually a strength of the product offering there. And similarly, we expect that’s going to have good side effects when developers are doing that work that we mentioned to tune the graphical settings, because they’ll be able to just focus on one spec.
IGN: You mentioned the Steam Deck, and that’s aging a little bit. Are there any plans to upgrade that in a similar way?
Pierre-Loup Griffais: Obviously the Steam Deck’s not our focus today, but the same things we’ve said in the past where we’re really interested to work on what’s next for Steam Deck… the thing we’re making sure of is that it’s a worthwhile enough performance upgrade to make sense as a standalone product. We’re not interested in getting to a point where it’s 20 or 30 or even 50% more performance at the same battery life. We want something a little bit more demarcated than that. So we’ve been working back from silicon advancements and architectural improvements, and I think we have a pretty good idea of what the next version of Steam Deck is going to be, but right now there’s no offerings in that landscape, in the SOC landscape, that we think would truly be a next-gen performance Steam Deck.
IGN: Can you tell me a little bit more about the data you have in terms of people using their Steam Deck docked, and how that feeds into the pitch of the Steam Machine?
Pierre-Loup Griffais: Yeah, it’s definitely informed some of our decisions around Steam Machine. Obviously Steam Machine is something we’ve been thinking about for a while, and like you pointed out, we’ve been at it for quite a bit longer than the Steam Deck. It’s been at the back of our minds. But in terms of the Steam Deck docked experience, we get a lot of feedback just organically from users talking between themselves on discussion forums or just doing game reviews that are happening on Steam Deck and other things, and we’ve seen a lot of feedback saying that the experience around getting in and out of game and how it’s connecting to the TV, all that was working really good. They just wished that they had a little bit more crispness and graphics horsepower to work with. And so that definitely helped us dial the right level of performance to get there.
But it also informed things like the Steam Controller, because we got the feedback that folks that were working back from a docked Deck, were sometimes missing some of the inputs they needed to play the same games that they could play in handheld mode, which informed development of the Steam Controller as well. We don’t have a ton of detailed data on what’s happening with the Steam Deck in real-time, but we have things like the Steam hardware survey. And when we look at that, it’s between 10 and 15% of Steam Decks at any given time are connected to an external display. So that’s about what we’re looking at in terms of docked use, which for us is encouraging enough that we think a product like the Steam Machine makes sense as well.
Yazan Aldehayyat: But it’s also more than just the numbers really for us. It’s like the fact that so many people are opting for that experience, it just proves that the software experience is already good enough that people are opting into it. So it’s really more about proving to ourselves that yes, the experience is already really good, we just have to make it even better, push it over the line and deliver it to those people. That’s what is so important to us about the Steam Deck docked experience. It’s just the proof of existence of the whole SteamOS being ready to be played on the big screen basically.
IGN: The next-gen Xbox is going to be a gaming PC rather than just a console, it’s going to be running Windows. Do you see gaming PCs being where consoles are evolving into, and is this kind of like you’re a part of that?
Pierre-Loup Griffais: When we think about what to work on next and working on things like Steam Machine and stuff, we’re typically not looking at consoles or other products in that direction. Everything we do is informed by what’s happening on the PC gaming side of things. Of course there ends up being quite a bit of overlap because we’re doing a bunch of stuff that helps PC gaming work better in the living room and that’s traditionally where consoles have been. But really I would say that most of our thinking is not informed by what’s happening on the console side, and so I don’t know if we have many theories as to where that might be headed. But in general it seems like people seem to be recognizing that there’s quite a bit of value in a more PC-like experience and the customizability and all that, and so we’re happy to see more of these elements being embraced by platforms in general.
Yazan Aldehayyat: As far as we’re concerned the Steam Machine is a PC, so that delineation is not there. In our view, the Steam Machine is just one option in the ecosystem of gaming PCs out there. If you’re already happy with your PC gaming experience, that’s great. We love that. We are a PC gaming company. We’re just trying to give you more options. And that’s how we view it. It’s just something that we think is a really great addition to a living room or a desktop, but it’s just one other option that people can have available to them to play their Steam games basically.
The next-gen Steam Controller
IGN: Can you run down the philosophy of making a new controller and some of the features you needed to pack into it to pair with a Steam Machine?
Pierre-Loup Griffais: The pairing with Steam Machine, it’s a strong pairing. The experience is nice when you have all the controls that you need to play all the games on PC, and you can navigate through launcher screens and you can easily do everything that you need to do just like you could on, say, the Deck touchscreen or with the track pads and so on. So for sure we think it’s part of that experience.
But for us, the Steam Controller, the scope of it is a little bit larger than that. Just like the first Steam Controller was a great peripheral if you’re just sitting at your desk and just wanted to lean back and play games that were made for a mouse and keyboard, I think there’s a lot of people on a desktop PC that will get great use from the new Steam Controller as well. Because you might be playing games that are controller enabled, but now you’re able to alt-tab to your desktop and interact with it in ways that you couldn’t really, at least not as comfortably with other controllers.
And similarly, there’s a lot of remote play use cases where you might enjoy the extra inputs or just being able to just have higher performance aiming and responsiveness. So I think for us, a next generation Steam Controller that not only was able to play all the games on PC but also had the approachability of a regular controller is something we had been thinking about. We did it in a Deck, and for us that really showed that it was possible, just the same as a lot of these other things that we’ve discussed around Steam Machine and all that. And so it was the right time to make it standalone. But definitely the controller, I think great pairing with Steam Machine, but also with a docked Deck, a desktop PC and really anything that runs Steam, we expect that there might be a reason that someone would want to use the new Steam Controller with it.
IGN: Could you run down some of the key features of the Steam Controller for those who may be looking at this and saying, well I already have a gamepad or I remember the old Steam Controller, why would I use this?
Pierre-Loup Griffais: For someone that’s really used to gamepad and has a lot of experience with a traditional gamepad, the Steam Controller has all of the same controls in all of the same familiar places, but in addition it has high quality, next generation magnetic thumb sticks that offer superior feel and good performance over time and small dead zones. In addition to that, it has four grip buttons that you can use to use, for example, A, B, X, Y while you’re still aiming with a stick so you can reload while sprinting, and you don’t have to use claw grip if you’re playing a Soulslike. There’s a lot of advantages that are immediately there, even if you’re just using it like a traditional controller.
But then in addition to that, we have things like our new haptics feedback that is now able to also do rumble in very high definition. So we’re pretty excited about that. We think it’s an advancement in feedback and rumble. We have the track pads that are able to augment your aiming experience and be more comparable to keyboard and mouse. You have the full power of Steam input. You have a lot of macro buttons. You can have a 16-way menu on the left track pad that displays on-screen that lets you play a PC game that has lots of hotkeys, for example. So there’s a lot of extra things there.
And of course motion controls is something that we’ve been exploring and developing since the early days of the first Steam Controller, and we have a lot of features in the new Steam Controller. Not only are the thumb sticks capacitive, so they detect when they’re touched, so are the track pads and so are the new grip sensors on the back of the controller. All of those can be used to seamlessly toggle motion controls on and off, which lets you do ratcheting and aim correcting in a way that isn’t really there when you only have the gyro, but no easy way to toggle it, or if you have to use one of the main buttons on your controller to toggle it, it’s quite a bit of a different experience.
So I think all of these things together, there’s a lot of different reasons, like everything on PC. I think every user will have one of these reasons that maybe they’re using the controller for, or they will find new ones we haven’t even thought of. But I think that’s it at a glance
Yazan Aldehayyat: The wireless connectivity on Steam Controller when used with the puck is probably best in class. It’s really good, super low latency, really fast, really responsive, and pretty robust through a variety of wireless experiences, and you can use it for charging magnetically really easily. So that’s another thing that we think is really cool about the Steam Controller.
IGN: Tell me a little bit more about your wireless technology and what kind of performance people can expect from it.
Yazan Aldehayyat: We are basically using a 2.4 gigahertz protocol. It’s a proprietary protocol. Basically what we did is to kind of simplify it and remove as much of the overhead as we can. The closest analogous thing would probably be Bluetooth, which is also 2.4. But for us, because we control both the transmitter side and the receiver side and we basically have a single use or single profile, we can make it as lean and as simple as possible and remove as much overhead as we can, so that you’re transmitting the minimum number of packets possible as fast as possible.
Pierre-Loup Griffais: I think our actual real world latency numbers that we’re showing is like eight milliseconds, which we consider best in class. I think it’s really high performance there. But more importantly, compared to Bluetooth where the latency gets doubled every time you add a controller, our performance remains consistent even with up to four controllers per puck, and then you can add more pucks if you want. So we’re really proud of being able to maintain that eight millisecond effective latency even with multiple controllers. And so that’s what the wireless puck protocol is all about.
The Steam UI lets you re-pair a puck. And one of the interesting things about that is, say you buy the Steam Machine plus Steam Controller bundle, you’re going to have a puck in that bundle and the Steam Machine already includes the receiver in it. So then it opens some interesting options, like the one we’re demoing here where you have the puck by the couch and you can just use it like a charging station while the controller’s connected wirelessly. But what I expect a bunch of people will do is they’ll connect the puck to their desktop computer and the pairing information will be on both, and you’ll just be able to seamlessly switch the controller between your Steam Machine and the desktop PC you might have without needing to go into any UI or reprogram anything.
IGN: Another big question is about battery life. Do you have estimates on how long it’s going to last off a full charge, and how do you balance that with all the technology that you’re packing?
Pierre-Loup Griffais: Yeah, the battery life was always a very important part. Even for the first Steam Controller, I think just like Yazan was talking about with budget and pricing for Steam Machine, power usage is very much something that you have to keep in mind throughout the development cycle. So every time we’re thinking about firmware, new features, what kind of sensors are on, we’re always thinking about power usage. That was one of the factors that made us select this particular magnetic stick, because the power usage was also very conducive to having a high battery life. I think we’re saying 35 hours.
Yazan Aldehayyat: Yeah, it obviously is going to depend significantly on what you’re doing, right? Like the haptic motors do consume a lot of power. But we think the 35 hours would represent a pretty conservative estimate. That would probably include a lot of haptic and track pad use. If you don’t use those, you’ll probably get significantly more than that as well. We think 35 hours is a pretty great place to be and we think most people get more than that.
IGN: How easy is it to customize all these different features with the SteamOS backend?
Pierre-Loup Griffais: It’s as easy as you want it to be. So by default, we expect that people will just have a good experience out of the box because of all the work we’ve done on Steam input. The developers can set a Steam input template. The community can contribute to a lot of configurations. A lot of folks will never have to go deep into the menus and change anything. And the template that will be selected by default or another base configuration that they select will do what they want out of the box. But for folks that want to customize that, there’s a lot of menus you can get into to customize every aspect of the experience. Every binding slot could be remapped to any keyboard or mouse or controller binding. Every sensitivity, response curves, haptic feedback setting can be configured on pretty much every single aspect of the controller.
So if you’re trying to customize things, reverse things left to right, if you’re trying to use a south paw, if you’re trying to have a multi-step trigger with different bindings, with different levels of haptic feedback, if you’re trying to be programmable and have the controller switch modes based on what mode the game is in, you can do all that. And that whole ecosystem has existed for 10-plus years at this point. So there’s a vast array of features that are being used by enthusiasts to create configurations that folks that are not enthusiasts can just consume and then they’re good to go out of the box. So we’re pretty excited.
IGN: For the Valve Index and for the Steam Deck, there have been games put out to show what those devices can do. Can we expect a third version of that?
Pierre-Loup Griffais: I believe that we’re tweaking [Aperture] Hand Lab to work on the controller. We’re thinking about it. We had a nice tutorial for the Steam Deck and obviously the Steam Controller has a lot of the same controls, so we’re looking at doing that. I think right now there’s one screen in that experience that you used a touchscreen or something, so we just need to tweak that, but we expect that’s probably going to be what we have.
IGN: So no new game that’s getting put out with it?
Pierre-Loup Griffais: We have no plans for that right now.
Wesley is Director, News at IGN. Find him on Twitter at @wyp100. You can reach Wesley at wesley_yinpoole@ign.com or confidentially at wyp100@proton.me.
