Steam Machine interview full transcript: Valve engineers discuss $1,049 pricing, compact design, component shortages, and Windows support

Ahead of our review of the Steam Machine, we sat down with Valve engineers Pierre-Loup Griffais and Yazan Aldehayyat to talk about the compact SteamOS PC. We discussed the pricing, the design process at Valve, component shortages (how could you not?), and even Windows support. We published excerpts from this interview in a story alongside the review. Here, we’re presenting the full transcript of our conversation.

This transcript has been lightly edited for clarity.

Andrew E. Freedman, Tom’s Hardware: I think I’d be remiss if I didn’t talk about the elephant in the room, which of course is pricing. The Steam Machine starts at $1,049 in the U.S. for the 512GB option. How do you think that price is going to hit, and how do you think it reflects the vision of the Steam machine when you were building it?

Pierre-Loup Griffais, engineer, Valve: I think we’d be hard-pressed to make predictions on how exactly the market’s going to respond to it. I think it’s very different than what it looked like last year. And so in terms of what appetite people have to buy a gaming PC at a certain price, everyone’s going to have a different opinion on whether it’s a good value or whether the product makes sense for them. So I don’t know if we’re hazarding any predictions there.

But it’s definitely the case that our original design, of course, was based on memory and storage prices from two years ago or so, and so we were in a different segment than we were hoping to be, but I think it’s more of a reflection of where the market as a whole is than Steam Machine itself, right? So, I think if you’re looking at building a PC from parts, either comparable horsepower or more horsepower, you know, you’re probably looking at a similar price point here. At least that would be our expectation, right? That if you’re, if you’re looking at a trade-off of, “I want something that’s about as powerful,” you’re still looking at a price that’s roughly what we’re offering there. And then you have all the things that you can’t really build, like the form factor, the quietness, the CEC integration, the dedicated Bluetooth antenna for controller support. All that stuff is not really something that you can put in your own gaming PC and are still strong reasons that people might want to get the Steam Machine.

Freedman: Some of that definitely tracks. I’ve been going through our database, and things that were around the price point of the Steam Machine now are not the price of the current Steam machine anymore.

Yazan Aldehayyat, engineer, Valve: Yes, yes.

Valve speaks on Steam Machine compared to traditional consoles

Freedman: You’re very much calling the Steam machine a PC. You haven’t been calling it a console. Do you see that as a totally different audience, because the PlayStation 5 Pro is $899 right now, which is higher than it used to be? Do you see that as a competitor inside Valve, or are you looking at this like this is specifically a PC for a PC audience for people who already have Steam libraries?

Griffais: Yeah, I think it’s a pretty different offering, right? I feel like if you’re playing on PC, you’re not looking at something like a console system and comparing just the price and the specs, because you have a bunch of games on PC, and you would have to buy those games on the other platform, or you would have to factor in whatever subscription cost there is to play online. There’s a lot of factors there where it’s not really apples to apples, right? And so I think it’s an offering for folks that want to play on PC by definition or have some use for a PC that’s around that powerful, it’s probably quite a different decision than figuring out if something like a console is for you. There’s a lot of trade-offs there.

Aldehayyat: I think the value of the Steam Machine is inherently tied to the value of your Steam library in a lot of ways. The more games you have on Steam, the more valuable the Steam machine is to you, and the Steam Machine makes your existing library even more valuable. So, those two kinds of decisions are very much intertwined, and I think at least early on, for sure, we suspect that it’s for people who already have a big Steam library. The Steam Machine is just going to make a lot of sense to them.

Griffais: Yeah, and folks also have a lot of stuff on PC that’s not necessarily on Steam, right? Like, there’s a lot of different libraries on different stores, there’s downloaded games, there’s MMOs, all this stuff is also there, right, including productivity apps. There’s some desktop use you can do with it. So, I guess the value of it is a little bit harder to express than just, like, you have that price and you have that library.

Freedman: Do you see Steam Machine as a possible entry point for someone who’s just getting into Steam, or would you sort of advise those people to be starting elsewhere?

Griffais: For sure. Yeah, I think it could be. Usually, I guess it’s hard for us to reason around what someone that’s not on PC might or might not do, just because we’re not really used to talking to those users. But I think we’ve seen some people use something like Steam Deck as an entry point for PC, and it seems to have worked for a bunch of people. I would think that Steam Machine is the same between the verification program and the SteamOS experience, that, you know, whose sole aim is to basically get out of the way, so that you can get to your games as easily as possible. I think that it’s a good kind of niche for that.

Aldehayyat: I think it’s like just to emphasize that point, it’s we think it’s a good entryway in big part because of how easy it is to set up and play games, right, like if somebody who’s curious about PC gaming, and you’re interested in getting into it, but you’re a little intimidated by all the information that you need to know to build your own PC, or tinker with drivers, or whatever. The Steam Machine could be a really compelling offering for you, because then you can play those games with a lot less work, and maybe after you really get into it, you decide to build your own PC, and that’s cool, that’s great, that’s awesome. But if you’re a little bit intimidated, or maybe you’re a PC gamer. Your life got a lot busier, you don’t have as much time, that could be another way for you to get back into it. So the ease of use is something that we really cared a lot about was really important to us.

Griffais: We’ve heard that a lot for Steam Deck. People that are like, “I used to play on PC, I might have games on Steam, I might not, but I used to be a PC gamer, and you know, I have a family now, I have kids or something. I’ve been wanting to get back into it, but it seems complicated, or a time sink, or something.” A bunch of people seemed to have found Steam Deck as a good way to address that, and I expect it might be the same.

Freedman: I mean, I can tell you, I have a toddler. I just finished Resident Evil Requiem, and I played the majority of it on a Steam Deck, because I was able to do it after her bedtime in a place in our apartment, far away from her room.

Aldehayyat: Great.

Griffais: First-person or third-person with Grace?

Freedman: For Grace, first-person. So I’ve got one more price question, and we’ll get on to some engineering stuff.

Subsidizing hardware & the VRAM conundrum

Freedman: So you’re not subsidizing the Steam Machine, which Valve said would make the PC a more closed platform, I guess maybe more similar to some consoles. but it’s been said a lot that Valve subsidized the Steam Deck. I’m not sure I’ve actually found any definitive sources that say that. Did Valve subsidize the Steam Deck?

Griffais: Not really. If you look at certain SKUs at certain points of time, you know, it might be below or above cost by a small margin. I think there’s some comments that we made around it, you know, being painful and all that early on, that was more about being as close as possible to cost than anything. Same thing here, right? If you look at where we thought Steam Machine was going to be in terms of pricing, and where we are now, and where Steam Deck used to be, and what it is now, you know, as we’ve had to announce some price changes recently, we’re actually quite a bit more aggressive now, because we understand that the higher price is less accessible to people.

I guess we’re able to be very aggressive with margin, right? And so we’re even more aggressive now, trying to be as close as possible to the actual cost of the parts that we’re shipping up.

Aldehayyat: But it’s important that the Valve hardware is a self-sustained program; it’s not subsidized by software sales, so that’s kind of the piece to get across.

Freedman: So, on the hardware, one big worry back from the announcement was some of the hardware choices, which aren’t, for lack of a better term, current gen, either in terms of AMD’s technologies or in some cases compared to other modern graphics cards. The GPU specifically has 8GB of VRAM. How is Valve handling this internally, both your feedback and what you’re doing with SteamOS?

Griffais: So there’s a few aspects to that. One comes down to the system design when we picked the parts for it, and the GPU, and the amount of memory that was going to be available for the GPU specifically. I think we are very aware that, you know, eight gigs is kind of aggressive and could be kind of in the middle of what you would need there. But we made a lot of calculations on “what are you able to play with things like that?” and our conclusion was that for the stuff that you would want to play, and the level of details, and everything that you would want for that level of performance, you won’t be in the spots where you’re running out of VRAM.

The cases where you’re running out of VRAM are actually cases that you would not want to be playing on a system like that. It’d be too slow. It’s possible that there’s some games in the future where that calculus is going to be a little bit different, right? Like, they take more VRAM at the same performance or something. But right now I think we’re doing pretty good there. The cases where you’re exercising the VRAM limits are actually cases that you wouldn’t want to play as a real user, in my opinion. But that being said, between the Steam Deck release and now, we have done a ton of work on SteamOS to teach it about discrete VRAM.

We only used to support APUs, where we didn’t have that problem — we had a whole other set of different memory management problems instead — and then improve the handling of VRAM under stress, under load conditions, and trying to get to the best outcome. So we’re still rolling out updates there, but I think in practice the experiences improved rapidly around those cases. And we’re continuing to do a bunch of work there.

Aldehayyat: I also want to just say that everybody sees that upgrade cycle for PCs have been slowing down dramatically. And more importantly, the new games coming out are able to scale generations of CPUs and GPUs a lot more gracefully than they used to. So, again, for us, the metric that we care about is, can you play the games on Steam? Can you play every game on Steam? And we think the Steam Machine absolutely can, right now, and we think the longevity for it is actually quite good, given the current reality of the upgrade cycles. I mean, maybe 10 years ago, a device like this wouldn’t last as long, wouldn’t have the legs to be competitive for as long. But given where we at now, even as of today, it can play your Steam library pretty well, and given what the market is doing right now, and the upgrade cycles, it still has the longevity to be a good device for people for many years to come.I think that one of the great things about the PC ecosystem is that games are not designed with a fixed performance target, they’re able to come up and down, and you can tune them to be a great experience on a variety of hardware,

Griffais: And in a way, things like Steam Deck, and the new-ish, you know, segment of growing PC handhelds has been helping with that too, because people have scalability more in mind, I think. And there’s been, there’s been games, you know, that have made adjustments to have you know different level details or different presets for lower-end configs that I think you know that same effect will happen in the future and will pay dividends for all of PC as well. You have people that you know are probably playing on old laptops and things like that that maybe don’t have to upgrade as much now because the developers, you know, have more scalability in mind, which is, I think, a good development for everyone.

4K capable, 1080p optimized

Freedman: I found that you know you can largely get playable frame rates on this thing. I mean, I’m someone willing to turn down settings.

But there was the 4K with FSR comment that had turned some heads initially in my testing. I found that’s largely true, that you know, if you’re willing to turn some settings down, you can get somewhere around 4K 60 with FSR. But why call it 4K capable, as opposed to really marketing it as a really solid 1080p or 1440p machine, rather than using FSR in the measurements, which kind of depends on which version of FSR the game is using?

Aldehayyat: A big part of that messaging actually came because we found a lot of people who are not as familiar with tuning their gaming settings want to just make sure that it’s compatible with their 4K TV. So, basically, it’s just our way of telling people that yes, if you have a 4K TV, you’ll be able to use your Steam Machine with it. Not everybody understands the difference between render resolution and your TV resolution, so yes, for a lot of games, rendering a 1080p or 1440p is definitely the sweet spot, but we kind of wanted to make sure people understand that it still can work with your 4K TV, and you have the ability to upscale your content to that resolution, basically.

Griffais: And I think generally it’s broadly true for the catalog as a whole, right? For sure, if you’re looking at the current segment of games and what’s coming out, then that’s going to be what’s stressing it out the most in terms of performance. Steam has a lot of games that extend decades into the past, as well. There’s a ton of games that are playing that are coming out right now that are going to play just fine at 4K native on the Machine. There’s there’s a wide variety of different performance targets that games have, but in general, I think there’s a ton of good experiences that you can have at 4K natively on the Machine. But for sure, for things that are coming out, or more recent games, I would personally probably pick, you know, 1080p render resolution, or 1440p, depending on how scalable it is.

Freedman: Speaking of 1080p, I noticed early on in the testing that 1080p seems to be the default resolution set across SteamOS on the Steam Machine. I was actually kind of surprised by it. I was going through, first on a per-game basis, boosting it up, so I could, you know, test multiple resolutions on my monitor. And I think very much like the sort of like the Steam Controller, there’s not a huge on-ramp, not a lot of hand-holding on how to work this type of thing, so is there going to be any sort of messaging or sort of tutorials from Valve elsewhere that explain how to adjust these settings so you can get exactly what you’re looking for?

Griffais: Yeah, I think we want to make that more visible and make it pretty obvious to folks that know what it is that this is happening. There’s also different work that I think we want to do around that system. Another one is that when we’re testing the games, we can also flag them for different default resolutions. So for an indie game or a game that’s a little bit lower spec, or an old game, we should have the ability to say that game is actually just fine at 4K, or you know, other resolutions, so that you don’t have to go change that setting. A

The thing we’re trying to avoid is that some games, the way that they detect settings, you know, is all different. Games do that very differently, right? And it’s possible for some games to start at 4K very high ray tracing. And the experience with that is not great. You don’t want to start a game and have that sort of experience as a user, especially when you’re trying to get to a point where most people can run a game and expect, you know, to be able to play it and not tinker with it. So we’re trying to make sure the baseline is on the safe side, where you’re going to have a fine experience. But for the folks that want more detail, more definition, they can access those settings, and they know what they’re doing, right?

So I think that it could definitely use a little bit more visibility, so that you are very aware of what the OS is doing behind the scenes, and very aware of how you can go change that setting in a way that right now maybe is not as visible as it could be.

The verified program deepens

Freedman: Speaking of all this, there’s the verified program. I mean, obviously, the verified program made it very clear if you could play something on Deck. On Steam Machine, assuming you turn off that 1080p flag, you get into more resolutions, more potential settings that are supported, really, just more options and games all around, because you have more powerful hardware. So, when something is verified on the Steam machine, is that specifically verified at 1080p, or is it going to be more like a modular thing where you explain where it’s verified?

Griffais: The only thing that we want to make sure that a verified game gets at is that by default it’s above 1080p 30, right? So that’s really what we’re shooting for, and again, it’s all about the default experience, because I think all those things that you said are broadly true for the Deck as well. Like you can actually load up a game on deck, uncheck the resolution settings, set it to 4K, and set very high ray tracing. Look into all that stuff, and we’re not trying to have the verified system tell you, like, hey, if you do that, then you need to change the settings to X and Y to get to a certain frame rate. We’re just saying, oh, you’re changing settings — at that point, you’re outside of the realm of what the verified system is designed to do, because it’s for those users that are not really doing that., and we expect the same to be true for the Machine Similarly as the deck, I think we’ll see an effect where more and more games also pick settings that were intended for the Machine as time goes, as developers are putting those presets in, which will further make the default experience match the expectations of those users that are working from the verified system.

Freedman: I very clearly remember, I think one of those was Cyberpunk 2077. That was the first game where I saw that they had a Steam Deck setting. I was like, “Well, I know which one to pick.”

Griffais: And, of course, most users never had to pick that, because it was selected by default, right? And if someone can have played the game and never seen that settings menu, that’s a win in our book, right? But we also want to make sure that people that want to tinker with that can also do that, and every step of the way, we’re messaging to developers, like, hey, even if you know you’re running on a Steam Deck, even if you know you’re running on a Steam Machine, do not disable settings, do not hide settings, that’s not what people want to see. There’s a lot of users that you might not be aware of that are all going to have very different opinions on what settings make sense on the device that you’re playing, and we’re really trying to make sure that you know the SteamOS experience upholds that core principle of PC gaming.

Freedman: I know that quite a handful of places have resources online — all they do is go through Steam Deck settings, tinker, and try to make it the best they can.

Hardware design, repairability and limitations

Freedman: So, I want to move this a bit more towards the hardware design. So every major component is cooled by one big heat sink with the 120 millimeter fan. I’m curious, how did you choose that kind of design? What are the benefits of that?

Aldehayyat: There’s actually a couple of reasons. I mean, obviously, the first thing is that it’s the most compact design you could come up with, right? Like, if you have one thermal module, then you know you could make the device as small as possible. So that was the number one sort of factor that made us go into that path. But the other thing that is interesting about this is that if you have two separate thermal modules, then each one has to be designed for the absolute worst case for each one, so you end up with a combined volume that is larger than the device is ever going to be. But if you have one, then it can share, basically, right? So, if the CPU is not eating up its entire thermal budget, the GPU can use that, or if the GPU is not eating its entire thermal budget, the CPU can share that. So that’s one of the advantages, is that your ability to kind of allocate thermal headroom back and forth between the CPU and the GPU, and all that kind of stuff, independently.

To be clear, it was very, very challenging to make that design work, because when you’re trying to touch off of different things, tolerances really eat you up, so you have to come up with, because you know, good thermal module design requires you to have the absolute minimum gap between whatever you’re trying to cool and the thermal module itself, and the GPU die to the thermal module, the CPU die to the thermal module, they both have to basically have the smallest gap possible. Nut then in reality, like things vary and the CPU is tall and the GPU is taller and the motherboard bows and the thermal module has tolerances, so actually getting the design to have enough compliance in the right places to accommodate all those tolerances was by far the hardest challenge we had to overcome. But by overcoming it, I think we ended up at the most compact design, cost-effective design.

Griffais: It’s also the quietest. Having one big module lets us have a big fan, which then can spin lower and, or, you know, lower RPMs. So we’re pretty happy to have been able to make that work, because it turned out really good in terms of the ratio between how quiet it is and its normal performance.

Freedman: I opened it up to take a look, and I was able to take the whole thing out of the case with a single Torx T9 screwdriver. I don’t think this was built with the idea that a ton of people were going to open it, but was repairability like a serious consideration of the design?

Aldehayyat: I mean, yeah, absolutely. We care about repairability a lot, and we tried our best to make the device as repairable as possible while still making it compact. I mean, those two things, generally speaking, fight each other. The more compact something is, the harder it is to take apart. So, we think we found a good balance. It’s just kind of part of our philosophy, right? We think it’s your device, so you get to do whatever you want with it. We definitely did not put any artificial barriers for people to do this, but we actually go a step further and try our best to make it as easy as possible. There’s limitations to that, but things like the fact that the SSD is on the FPC that loops around to make the SSD accessible, that was not by accident, nor was it the easiest way to do this. We could have buried it under the thermal module, and that would be actually way easier, but we chose not to do that. It’s just kind of a part of our philosophy, even though it’s not necessarily the easiest or cheapest way to do things, we still think it’s the right way to do things.

Griffais: Yeah, there’s a few things that we generally try to have. You know, we can’t hit them all the time, but I think we’ve, we’ve done, you know, a pretty good job of it ever since Steam Deck OLED, especially, making sure that, all screws use the same type, that they’re machine screws, so you can take them apart and put them back without damaging some plastic or some wood receiver there. Also labeling stuff, right? Like, there’s a lot of labels on the little connectors on the boards that we could easily have removed in production, but it’s actually really useful; We’re also taking them apart, right? It’s useful for us, but I think you know, we definitely are not intending that most people will open this, like you say, but we want to make sure the people who do are not going to run into barriers.

Freedman: Yeah, I mean, there’s an awful lot of Steam Deck mods. I’m sure a lot of those same types of people will be very interested in this. So a lot of the ports — this is probably by the design of making it so compact — they’re attached via daughter boards and ribbon cables. Will those components be made available either for tinkerers or repair shops?

Aldehayyat: Yeah, so similar to how we did it with the Steam Deck, we’re going to work with iFixit to make the parts available. We’re going to basically try and make as many parts available as possible. I don’t know for sure the full list of components that will be available, but I believe all the FPCs, daughter boards, and ports will be available through iFixit. I’m not sure which ones they decide to sell, or whatever. But yeah, our goal is to make those parts available as widely as possible.

Freedman: Is it any more difficult to make those parts available because of just the general component shortage, or are you stacked up on those ones?

Griffais: It’s actually easier because they’re on daughter boards, right? If that stuff wasn’t the main board, then you’d be in trouble because there’s some soldered-down memory, the VRAM, right, is the only soldered-down; the system RAM isn’t, it’s SO-DIMMs. If anything, it’s a little easier for things like ports, and yes,

Aldehayyat: Believe it or not, right now, even things like the FR4, like the raw PCB material, it has shortages. But it just so happens that the memory shortage is way worse, so yeah, it’s not really a major challenge to make those parts available at this point.

Freedman: And I’m assuming if you work with iFixit, that also means I’ll be publishing maintenance manuals of some sort, right?

Aldehayyat: Yes, we’re going to partner with them too, and they’re going to create a lot of the repair manuals, replacement parts instructions, and things like that.

Freedman: Because opening it is super simple, but getting to the RAM, to the SO-DIMMs, that’s got a lot of ribbon cables.

Aldehayyat: Yeah, we’re aware of that, and I’ll be honest, it is something that we really wanted to improve, and we tried to make the RAM more accessible, but there was just no real way to. I don’t say it was impossible; it was just given the time and engineering resources we have, we just could not come up with a solution that worked. With the SSD, we were able to put on the flex and just read it around. With memory, you just can’t do that because of signal integrity reasons. And trying to make an access hatch through the power supply just wasn’t possible for safety reasons. So there’s really no way. We couldn’t come up with a solution, but maybe in the future we can come up with something,

Reckoning with hardware shortages and pricing

Freedman: I know in the blog post it says that there were some components you were barely able to source at all. Outside of memory, which components have been the most difficult to get for the Steam Machine?

Aldehayyat: Storage, obviously,

Freedman: You mentioned PCB, PCB materials.

Aldehayyat: Yeah. I mean, honestly, it’s a little shocking right now. There are some shortages in plastics. There are some shortages in FR4, some capacitors. But all of those kind of pale in comparison to the memory and storage shortage. If this was a normal time, people would be concerned about these things, but given the memory and the supply shortage, this just doesn’t really crack the top ten of problems. It’s just kind of to show that really everything is constrained, but the memory and shortage overtake all of them. So that’s really the primary focus.

Freedman: And the other interesting thing I found in sort of sourcing and building a design is that the blog post suggests you started sourcing parts somewhere in 2022, which suggests you’ve been at the Steam Machine for a few years. Are you able to talk about the general timeline of product development for the Steam Machine?

Griffais: The process starts very early. I mean, in terms of specific time frames, it’s a little hard, you know, just because our memory is fried from working hard on trying to ship this thing. But you know, the design process, I think, probably started like three years ago, or so, when we were building machines from parts, trying to get at the right performance target. And then we started progressively moving to the next step, building it up as, like, a whole all-in-one thing, and then refining the form factor and all that. But from that point on, you’re already starting to test the waters and getting in touch with suppliers, making sure that you’re going to have multiple suppliers for the things that you’re sure you’re going to have, so it’s definitely a long pipeline. But I would say plans for full-scale production of the object that you’re looking at now is probably like a year or so.

Aldehayyat: I also think that the research and development, I guess we take more seriously here at Valve, and potentially some other places. Things don’t go from “here’s a presentation for a device,” and then we start planning to make it. We first start by making some prototypes to convince ourselves that this actually makes sense, and there’s an actual research phase that it’s like, “OK, here are the technologies that we need to prove out, here are some prototypes we need, we think we need to make to make us believe that this device makes sense.” There was never, during that phase, there was never really a plan to make a product. It was just kind of like gathering information, doing prototyping of critical technologies, proving them out, stuff like that, so that takes a while. And then after you do all that, you decide, OK, we want to make this thing happen. Let’s start actually doing the development part of that, then that takes a year and a half, or something like that. So, depending on which, how you want to count things, it could have been three, four, five years, it could have been a year and a half, you know. But I would say it’s just that we’re constantly investigating different things, so it’s kind of hard to put a timeline on it.

Griffais: For us, working on these things is very incremental and very gradual. So, in a sense, this all started 15 years ago when we got into hardware, because Steam Machine is actually one of the first things we worked on. The work on SteamOS that we started back then, you can draw a straight line through from that to where we are now: the work on inputs, even you know, the work on Steam Machine with OEMs, they taught us a bunch of stuff that we’re leveraging right now. We’re always trying to make sure that when we build something, we can reuse it in the future, and we don’t have to start from scratch. And so, even back then, everything we were doing with SteamOS is fully represented in the current experience, and we’re just building from here.

Windows support incoming

Freedman: Is Windows support still the same on Steam Deck? Will you be issuing new drivers?

Griffais: That’s our goal. Right now, we’re still working on certain drivers, you know, around Bluetooth and stuff, but that’s definitely our goal. And we’ve been talking to AMD about the best way for users to get the graphics drivers as well, because I think it’s pretty important that they can get at the latest fixes.

Aldehayyat: Yeah, but the model will be very similar to the way the Steam Deck Windows drivers work. It’s going to take us a little bit of time after launch to get all the drivers lined up, but the general process of us publishing the drivers on our website will probably be the same.

Freedman: Is Valve still working on dual boot with Windows 11? I mean, the Windows resources page I just mentioned, it says the Steam Deck is capable, the OS installer wasn’t ready yet.

Griffais: So it’s something we’re working towards. We don’t have dual boot, an easy dual boot wizard plumbed right now. There’s a few ways that you go about it, but right now, most of them include some manual steps where you repartition your disks and resize stuff by hand. We want to make that process easier in the future. But the thing that we’re doing right now with SteamOS is we want to make sure that if someone builds a PC like a Steam machine, so something that has an AMD discrete GPU, and then whatever other parts they pick, they can choose whatever segment of GPU they want.

We’re going to have a SteamOS USB install drive that they can just install SteamOS onto, so that they can have basically the same experience as the Steam Machine. It’s pretty similar to how you would re-image a Steam Deck. But we want to make sure that if you’re building from parts, that you have that option. So, we’ll also be making that available at the same time.

Freedman: Will that mean at the same time as the Windows drivers, or—

Griffais: Just the product launch.

There’s already SteamOS images out there that will work there, but we just want to make sure that we have one that has all the latest OS components that we’re shipping at launch with Steam Machine, so that everything is ready from the get-go for that sort of experience.

Valve’s new reservation system

Freedman: The reservation system you’re using, I think it’s the most radical one I’ve ever seen from Valve. I totally get why you’re doing it. How’d you come up with that internally?

Griffais: Just lots of discussion. The reservation system that we originally came up with for the Steam Deck was also born of the same sort of discussion. We’re talking about, “OK, here’s the situation: how many units we have, what the user experience is going to be on purchase. Working back from that, how can we improve the user experience?” We see a lot of users stressed out about trying to secure supply for other products. We just see what’s happening in the wild, and how people are frustrated with, like, not knowing where to get something, or having to periodically just recheck online retailers, trying to figure out.

I mean, my experience trying to buy PS5 kind of painted a lot of that stuff, in a sense. But the current iteration on the reservation system here, was just similar. We worked from, OK, we think the broad strokes of the system are good, but there’s still an effect where people are rushing at the door, trying to refresh. Our websites might have problems, and then that seems unfair to people that run into that, right? We want to make sure that there’s an even playing field initially, and then work from there. So, yeah, it’s all I think based on discussions and user feedback.

Freedman: The blog post says that the people who get on the reservation queue, separate from the waitlist, could last through the end of the year. Is that all the first production run?

Griffais: We’re constantly producing and trying to secure additional parts and stuff. There’s not really discrete, you know, different runs and different segments, so it’s a very linear thing. But for sure, depending on how many people sign up, it might extend into time frames that we’re not really even sure of, because supply is so interesting.

Aldehayyat: It was just six months, as far as we were willing to make a prediction. As Pierre-Loup said, if there’s more demand, we obviously are planning to make more, and so maybe there’ll be another waitlist or something. But six months, we felt, is the appropriate amount of time to kind of put a cap on the waitlist, essentially,

Griffais: The interesting and I guess hard thing is that getting supply right now also means getting a wide variety of different prices, right? So it’s possible that you would be able to make more, but in a way that the pricing ends up being different. And so we’re still trying to figure that out, because if there’s ever a bunch of people that want the machine, but the supply is not there on the back end, we’ll have to make hard decisions about what are we doing to secure more supply, and does it still result with the product at this price, or would we have to rethink that.

Because we don’t really know how the situation is going to continue to evolve. You know, maybe things are going to go back down, and then it’s all good, and it can continue to go like that. But maybe not, and so I guess what we’re trying to convey with this blog post is that it seems like all bets are off, and we’re going to work through it just with the users as well.

[Interview ends]