Steam Machines have returned: all the news about Valve’s new hardware universe

Valve’s new Steam Controller sold out quickly when it went on sale on Monday, and the company is going to open a “reservations queue” on Friday at 1PM ET for anyone who missed that initial run.

When the controller initially went on sale, many potential buyers experienced difficulties checking out before the controller went out of stock, and some sellers on eBay posted listings for the controllers that were considerably more expensive than Valve’s $99 asking price. “While we were happy to see such a high level of interest, the experience for a lot of you trying to buy it was incredibly frustrating,” Valve says. It’s making changes to “improve the purchase experience and to limit reseller activity.”

We still don’t know when Valve will launch the Steam Machine, but we may not have to wait too long. Valve just imported roughly 50 tons of “Game Consoles” into the United States in the two-day period between May 1st and April 30th, according to import records viewed by The Verge.

That’s on top of the “ton” of shipments that Valve watcher Brad Lynch mentioned late last week — and there’s reason to believe these containers have the new Steam Machine or Steam Frame inside, not just an extra batch of the Steam Deck handheld. (The Steam Deck was also designated a “Game Console” for import purposes.)

Valve’s new Steam Controller goes on sale on Monday for $99, and accessories-maker Mechanism will be ready. As far as we know, Mechanism’s new Basegrip is the very first way to attach a Steam Controller to your phone — as well as Mechanism’s lineup of accessories, including mounts for hanging handhelds and gamepads on the Ikea Skadis pegboard or just about anywhere else. The Steam Controller mount will go on sale the same day as the controller, since Valve gave Mechanism early access to the design.

When the Basegrip is paired with Mechanism’s phone mount, the company suggests that you can use the Steam Controller to remote-control your PC using the Steam Link streaming app. But, Mechanism notes that “the controller doesn’t work across all of iOS or Android yet” — and based on my own testing with iOS, there are some issues, so the Steam Controller with a Mechanism Basegrip and mount may not be your one-stop shop for mobile gaming for the moment. (For what it’s worth, playing games with the Steam Controller using the Steam Link iOS app did work for me.)

Hey hey, it’s Jay Peters, senior reporter at The Verge. Today, Valve finally announced that the second version of the Steam Controller — and the first piece of Valve’s slate of new gaming hardware set to launch this year — is finally going on sale for $99 on May 4th.

My colleague Cameron Faulkner and I have had the new Controller in our hands for more than two weeks, and we’ve each written reviews of it. For Verge subscribers, we have a treat: if you have any questions about the new gamepad, we’d be happy to answer them for you in the comments of this article.

Last November, Valve introduced the world to its new vision of living room gaming: the Steam Machine and Steam Controller. Then, RAMageddon. Memory shortages forced Valve to delay all its hardware and reset expectations.

Now, Valve is releasing the Steam Controller without the Steam Machine.

After my brief hands-on last year with Valve’s new Steam Controller, I said it might be my dream controller. I’ve been looking for a controller with the customization and sheer function available on Valve’s Steam Deck while I’m playing games on the TV. You, me, and a lot of other people have been waiting for this.

I’ve had the new controller in my hands for more than two weeks, and it’s already changing how I play at home. I used to make the Steam Deck handheld my go-to couch gaming experience because of how good it feels to hold, but the Controller has me docking my Deck to play on the TV because it feels even better.

Most PC gamers already have a controller they love using with Steam — a Sony DualSense, a 8BitDo Ultimate, a Nintendo Switch Pro, or something else. Part of that love comes from Steam treating them like “native” controllers. They can do the things that made the first Steam Controller worth buying. Namely, they offer a level of customizable control never before seen on PC and that you still can’t get on a console.

With Steam Input, any of those controllers can have multiple control schemes for different game scenarios (flight, on-foot, in menus), and you swap between them with a button press. You can also create onscreen menus that bloom when you press a button or touch a trackpad, revealing an array of custom commands — weapons, spells, consumables, you name it.

A blog post from Valve on Friday initially seemed to throw cold water on the idea that the Steam Machine, Steam Frame, and Steam Controller would arrive in 2026 at all. But Valve tells The Verge it did not mean to suggest that — and that all three pieces of hardware will indeed ship this year, despite challenges from the ongoing memory shortage.

Earlier today, Valve wrote that “we hope to ship in 2026,” which sounded like a downgrade from Valve’s earlier promises. As recently as last month, the company explicitly said it had not changed its plans to ship all three new hardware products “in the first half of the year,” even though that itself was a change from its original goal of “early 2026” or “Q1 2026.” Today, it seemed like the company was quietly delaying the product yet again, and Valve didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.

When Valve first announced its impressive-looking Steam Machine, Steam Frame, and Steam Controller hardware in November, the company said the products would begin shipping in early 2026. Some journalists were told “Q1 2026” specifically. But because of the ongoing memory and storage crunch, that launch has been delayed to sometime in the first half of this year, and Valve says it will reset expectations for how much they will cost “as soon as possible.”

“We planned on being able to share specific pricing and launch dates by now,” Valve says in a new post. “But the memory and storage shortages you’ve likely heard about across the industry have rapidly increased since then. The limited availability and growing prices of these critical components mean we must revisit our exact shipping schedule and pricing (especially around Steam Machine and Steam Frame).”

It’s a big deal that Valve is making a game console. But I’m beginning to think the Steam Machine may end up a footnote in gaming history. What if Valve could bring PC games not just to its own living room consoles, but also to the Arm chips that billions of people have in their phones? What if you no longer had to wait for game developers to do the hard work of porting PC games to your phone, Mac, or other Arm hardware, because games built for desktop PCs could just work?

If you wrote off the Steam Frame as yet another VR headset few will want to wear, I guarantee you’re not alone. But the Steam Frame isn’t just a headset; it’s a Trojan horse that contains the tech gamers need to play Steam games on the next Samsung Galaxy, the next Google Pixel, perhaps Arm gaming notebooks to come.

Valve is making a game console that might take on Sony and Microsoft. It’s also making a gaming headset to compete with Meta. These are big, ambitious, and messy efforts, and we have lots of questions. So do you!

We’ve gotten a lot of questions about Valve’s huge 2026 hardware push and entry into the console wars, and we’re compiling the answers we’ve got so far. Some of them are direct answers to your subscriber questions in our AMA; thank you for paying our salaries!