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Chapter 1: What is the Steam Machine and why is it significant?
Welcome to The Verge Cast, the flagship podcast of Ray Tracing. I'm your friend David Pearce, and today on the show, we're talking about the Steam Machine. After months of waiting, The Verge's Sean Hollister finally got his hands on Valve's new living room game console. He's been testing it. He's been playing games.
He's going to come on and tell us all about how he feels and whether this is the next big thing in PC gaming. I'm very excited about it, if I'm being honest. The Steam controller seems to be great. I sort of accidentally built a big library of Steam games over the years, and I do too much of my gaming right now on a Switch 2.
Chapter 2: What games did Sean Hollister test on the Steam Machine?
It's probably time to upgrade. We're going to get into all of that in just a minute. But first, here's everything else happening at The Verge today. This is 90 Seconds on the Verge for Monday, June 22nd, 2026. Instagram just announced a bunch of new features specifically aimed at people who watch Instagram on their television, which I assume is currently no one.
There are new interest-based channels you can watch. You can watch stories and reels. And Instagram even says it's testing longer form content, episodic series, and even things like live streaming on TVs. The context here is that YouTube has been growing like crazy on bigger screens over the last few years, and Instagram wants to do the same.
The other context here is that Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube are all so desperately copying each other's features that they're just rapidly becoming the exact same scrolly video app, and I find it exhausting. The phone maker Nothing canceled an upcoming device which would have been a follow-up to the CMF Phone Pro 2.
Nothing's co-founder said that, quote, with memory prices where they are right now, we can't build a phone that feels like a genuine step forward at a price that makes sense for CMF. Yikes. This is bad news for CMF fans, sure, but it's also a sign of things to come.
We've talked a lot about the rising price of gadgets over the years, but as prices go up, a whole class of these lower-priced gadgets, in particular cheap phones that billions of people rely on, are just being priced out of existence. And finally, all your vibe-coded projects might be a total security disaster. All of mine, too, don't worry, and everyone else's.
Verge contributor Yael Grauer has the story of all the ways AI coding agents can screw up and all of the ways that can leave your data exposed. Claude Code is fun. Don't get me wrong. Just be careful out there. You can read more about all of this at TheVerge.com. That's 90 Seconds on The Verge for Monday, June 22nd.
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Chapter 3: How does the Steam Machine compare to traditional consoles like PS5 and Xbox?
What they told me is they are selling this at cost.
I mean, you can get a broad stroke understanding of it by looking at what RAM and storage costs now versus what they costed back then. The cost of the product is basically the cost of the components and what it takes to make it.
For instance, Steam Deck, we recently had to change our price because, not because Steam Deck changed, but because the price that it costs to actually make Steam Deck with those same components changed.
If you're looking at something like the Steam Deck and the Steam Machine where we were envisioning it and where we are now, I would say that the new price is actually much more aggressive on that. So we're trying to make it as fair as possible there. This whole industry has kind of transitioned to a model where you don't know what the cost is going to be ahead of time.
COVID paved the way for that a little bit. We might get more parts to make it, but the price might be double what it is today. At that point, we have to make the calculus of, should we still build machines with this and at what cost? We're thinking through all that right now. At some point, we were not even convinced we could build any significant quantity.
I think we ended up in a pretty happy spot overall.
Oh, yeah. I mean, well, it is still pretty aggressive for us to hit this price. So even though it's more than we wanted it to be, like, we're happy that it can be this at the very least.
So this is very much like a razors and blades model, right? That this company is confident that it will sell enough games to make not making money on the console worth it over time.
I think so. They wouldn't tell you that, though. They always say it's about the learnings. They're like, I don't know what to believe. Learnings don't pay the bills. Of the people I have talked to who say things like this, I would say I believe them 10% more than I would believe anybody else because Valve just makes so much money per capita that they can afford anything.
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Chapter 4: What challenges does Valve face with the Steam Machine's launch?
But part of me wonders, okay, we know it's going to be over $1,000. Let's bump it up another couple hundred bucks and make this thing, like, stupendously powerful. If they accidentally... sort of made the wrong price performance trade off in trying to make the right performance price trade off two years ago or whatever it was. Obviously, it's hindsight. It's complicated to know.
But like if this thing were vastly more powerful and 1500 bucks, would it be that much less compelling to a lot of people who are already willing to pay over $1,000 for it?
I don't I don't know if they could bump up the price $100 and have 12 gig of VRAM instead of eight, then it would not struggle so much to do 1440p 4K stuff the way it does. It'll play lots of 4K on older games. It'll look great. It's just when you get to the games that are really RAM intensive and they're starting to be that way, you know, Indiana Jones, Alan Wake 2, you start to run into things.
There's actually a bug that I guess I was one of the reviewers helped discover during the review period, where when it was running out of VRAM, when you were hitting that ceiling, It would spontaneously reboot. It would crash. It would do all kinds of crazy stuff. They seem to have fixed that. One day after I reported, they're like, hey, tell me if this is fixed, please.
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