Valve says Steam Machine won't follow Steam Deck's long timeframe

Valve engineers Pierre-Loup Griffais and Yazan Aldehayyat said the Steam Machine is being considered on a different timeline than the Steam Deck. "I don't think we're thinking about [the Steam Machine] with quite as long of a timeframe as something like the Steam Deck," Griffais said.

Griffais explained the difference: "The Steam Deck, by its nature, needs a little bit more of a fixed performance target for both developers and users to make sense of, 'What can I play on this?' and not have that picture change once every year, every two years." "Whereas the Steam Machine is very much in line with gaming PCs," he added, noting the wide gradient of CPU and GPU options.

That said, Valve isn't committing to an immediate cadence of new Steam Machine performance targets. "At the same time... we're actually really curious to see how things pan out… there's a lot of questions about the new systems generation, how that's gonna roll out, how games are gonna adapt," Griffais said.

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