Is the Steam Machine worth the wait?
6/22/202638 min
Valve has been trying to crack the living room for more than a decade, and the new Steam Machine is its best attempt yet. It's a little bit PC, a little bit console, and a lot pricy — starting at $1,049, it had a lot to live up to. The Verge’s Sean Hollister has been testing the device, and shares his findings on whether the Steam Machine can hang with PlayStation and Xbox. He also explains why, despite a never-ending list of challenges, Valve is still trying to make this device work.
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First 90 secondsDavid Pierce· Host0:00
[upbeat music] Welcome to The Vergecast, the flagship podcast of Ray Tracing. I'm your friend David Pierce, 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 gonna 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, uh, I do too much of my gaming right now on a Switch 2. It's probably time to upgrade. We're gonna 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 22, 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've been a follow-up to the CMF Phone Pro 2. Nothing's co-founder said