Hold onto your butts and wallets, because the Steam Machine and Steam Frame are expected to ship this summer. This news come directly from Valve in a new Steam news posting about an expansion to the Steam Verified program.
Valve says that they expect both the Steam Machine and Steam from to begin "shipping this summer." Beyond that brief statement, they did not provide any specific date for either device. Valve has also yet to reveal a price for either hardware kit. Given that recent price increase on all Steam Deck models, one of which is now almost $1,000, the pricing on Valve's new hardware isn't expected to be cheap. The Steam Machine in particular may cost an arm and a leg when it's finally available for purchase.
The real focus of today's new Steamworks update has to do mainly with games being "Verified" on the new hardware, similar to how games can be Steam Deck Verified. Basically, Valve reconfirms that if a game is Steam Deck Verified it's also going to be Steam Machine Verified. That makes sense given that if the game can run on the lesser hardware of the Deck, it won't have an issue running on the Steam Machine. Valve even says this much.
Long story short: If your game already runs well on Deck, it will also run well on Machine with no extra work required from you. And if it doesn't run great on Deck because of CPU or GPU performance, it may still run great on Machine. If you have games like this, you don't have to take any action: We're already testing every title on Machine that fell below our performance requirements on Deck.
The criteria are similar as well: the default graphics configuration needs to perform well, text and UI elements need to be clear and legible on the built-in display, and the default controller configuration needs to work well with the Steam Frame Controllers. The same test criteria apply to both VR titles and non-VR titles.
