valve

SteamOS continues its slow spread across the PC gaming landscape

AMD, ARM, gaming, Lenovo, NVIDIA, steamos, valve / Tim Belzer / January 7, 2026

Over time, Valve sees that kind of support expanding to other Arm-based devices, too. “This is already fully open source, so you could download it and run SteamOS, now that we will be releasing SteamOS for Arm, you could have gaming on any Arm device,” Valve Engineer Jeremy Selan told PC Gamer in November. “This is the first one. We’re very excited about it.”

Imagine if handhelds like the Retroid Pocket Flip 2 could run SteamOS instead of Android… Credit: Retroid

It’s an especially exciting prospect when you consider the wide range of Arm-based Android gaming handhelds that currently exist across the price and performance spectrum. While emulators like Fex can technically let players access Steam games on those kinds of handhelds, official Arm support for SteamOS could lead to a veritable Cambrian explosion of hardware options with native SteamOS support.

Valve seems aware of this potential, too. “There’s a lot of price points and power consumption points where Arm-based chipsets are doing a better job of serving the market,” Valve’s Pierre-Louis Griffais told The Verge last month. “When you get into lower power, anything lower than Steam Deck, I think you’ll find that there’s an Arm chip that maybe is competitive with x86 offerings in that segment. We’re pretty excited to be able to expand PC gaming to include all those options instead of being arbitrarily restricted to a subset of the market.”

That’s great news for fans of PC-based gaming handhelds, just as the announcement of Valve’s Steam Machine will provide a convenient option for SteamOS access on the living room TV. For desktop PC gamers, though, rigs sporting Nvidia GPUs might remain the final frontier for SteamOS in the foreseeable future. “With Nvidia, the integration of open-source drivers is still quite nascent,” Griffais told Frandroid about a year ago. “There’s still a lot of work to be done on that front… So it’s a bit complicated to say that we’re going to release this version when most people wouldn’t have a good experience.”

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Reporter suggests Half-Life 3 will be a Steam Machine launch title

gaming, half-life, Half-Life 3, hl3, rumor, steam machine, valve / Kris Guyer / December 16, 2025

If you can take your mind way back to the beginning of 2025, you might remember a fresh wave of rumors suggesting that Half-Life 3 was finally reaching the final stages of production, and could be announced and/or released at any moment. Now, though, 2025 seems set to come to a close without any official news of a game fans have been waiting literal decades for.

That doesn’t necessarily mean a Half-Life 3 announcement and/or release isn’t imminent, though. On the contrary, veteran journalist Mike Straw insisted on a recent Insider Gaming podcast that “everybody I’ve talked to are still adamant [Half-Life 3] is a game that will be a launch title with the Steam Machine.”

Straw—who has a long history of reporting gaming rumors from anonymous sources—said this Half-Life 3 information is “not [from] these run-of-the-mill sources that haven’t gotten me information before. … These aren’t like random, one-off people.” And those sources are “still adamant that the game is coming in the spring,” Straw added, noting that he was “specifically told [that] spring 2026 [is the window] for the Steam Machine, for the Frame, for the Controller, [and] for Half-Life 3.”

For real, this time?

Tying the long-awaited Half-Life 3 to a major hardware push that has already been announced for an “early 2026” window certainly sounds plausible, given previous leaks about the game’s advanced state of development. But there are still some reasons to doubt Straw’s “adamant” sources here.

For one, Straw admitted that the previous information he had received on potential Half-Life 3 launch and/or announcement dates was not reliable enough to report in detail. “I had been told a date. I was not going to report that date because they weren’t 100 percent confident in that date,” he said. “That date has since passed.”

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Microsoft takes down mod that re-created Halo 3 in Counter-Strike 2

counter-strike 2, CS2, DMCA, engine, gaming, Halo, microsoft, source 2, takedown, valve / Paul Patrick / December 15, 2025

Last month saw the release of Project Misriah, an ambitious modding project that tried to re-create the feel of Halo 3 inside Valve’s Counter-Strike 2. That project has now been taken down from the Steam Workshop, though, after drawing a Digital Millennium Copyright Act complaint from Microsoft.

Modder Froddoyo introduced Project Misriah on November 16 as “a workshop collection of Halo ported maps and assets that aims to bring a Halo 3 multiplayer-like experience to Counter-Strike 2.” Far from just being inspired by Halo 3, the mod directly copied multiple sound effects, character models, maps, and even movement mechanics from Bungie and Microsoft’s popular series.

In the weeks since, Project Misriah has drawn a lot of praise from both Halo fans and those impressed by what modders could pull off with the Source 2 engine. But last Wednesday, modder Froddoyo shared a DMCA request from Microsoft citing the “unauthorized use of Halo game content in a [Steam] workshop not associated with Halo games.”

A trailer announcing Project Misriah, posted last month.

In a social media post sharing that DMCA text, Froddoyo ruefully said that players should “make sure to give your thanks to Microsoft” for the project’s fate. But in a comment on Project Misriah’s YouTube trailer, Froddoyo noted that, following the takedown, the project “will not be worked on or uploaded in the future. But hey, it was fun while it lasted. Thank you to all of the players and supporters of [the] project. We will use the knowledge and skills obtained from this to cook up something else!”

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Why won’t Steam Machine support HDMI 2.1? Digging in on the display standard drama.

AMD, drivers, gaming, steam, steam machine, steamos, valve, Windows / Kris Guyer / December 4, 2025

When Valve announced its upcoming Steam Machine hardware last month, some eagle-eyed gamers may have been surprised to see that the official spec sheet lists support for HDMI 2.0 output, rather than the updated, higher-bandwidth HDMI 2.1 standard introduced in 2017. Now, Valve tells Ars that, while the hardware itself actually supports HDMI 2.1, the company is struggling to offer full support for that standard due to Linux drivers that are “still a work-in-progress on the software side.”

As we noted last year, the HDMI Forum (which manages the official specifications for HDMI standards) has officially blocked any open source implementation of HDMI 2.1. That means the open source AMD drivers used by SteamOS can’t fully implement certain features that are specific to the updated output standard.

“At this time an open source HDMI 2.1 implementation is not possible without running afoul of the HDMI Forum requirements,” AMD engineer Alex Deucher said at the time.

Doing what they can

This situation has caused significant headaches for Valve, which tells Ars it has had to validate the Steam Machine’s HDMI 2.1 hardware via Windows during testing. And when it comes to HDMI performance via SteamOS, a Valve representative tells Ars that “we’ve been working on trying to unblock things there.”

That includes unblocking HDMI 2.0’s resolution and frame-rate limits, which max out at 60 Hz for a 4K output, according to the official standard. Valve tells Ars it has been able to increase that limit to the “4K @ 120Hz” listed on the Steam Machine spec sheet, though, thanks to a technique called chroma sub-sampling.

Why won’t Steam Machine support HDMI 2.1? Digging in on the display standard drama. Read More »

Valve’s Steam Machine looks like a console, but don’t expect it to be priced like one

gaming, pc, PC Gaming, price, steam machine, steam machines, valve / Mike M. / November 25, 2025

After Valve announced its upcoming Steam Machine living room box earlier this month, some analysts suggested to Ars that Valve could and should aggressively subsidize that hardware with “loss leader” pricing that leads to more revenue from improved Steam software sales. In a new interview with YouTube channel Skill Up, though, Valve’s Pierre-Loup Griffais ruled out that kind of console-style pricing model, saying that the Steam Machine will be “more in line with what you might expect from the current PC market.”

Griffais said the AMD Zen 4 CPU and RDNA3 GPU in the Steam Machine were designed to outperform the bottom 70 percent of machines that opt-in to Valve’s regular hardware survey. And Steam Machine owners should expect to pay roughly what they would for desktop hardware with similar specs, he added.

“If you build a PC from parts and get to basically the same level of performance, that’s the general price window that we aim to be at,” Griffais said.

The new comments follow similar sentiments relayed by Linus Sebastian on a recent episode of his WAN Show podcast. Sebastian said that, when talking to Valve representatives at a preview event, he suggested that a heavily subsidized price point would make the Steam Machine hardware into “a more meaningful product.” But when he suggested that he was imagining a console-style price in the range of $500, “nobody said anything, but the energy of the room wasn’t great.”

Forget about $500

Based on these comments, we could start estimating a potential Steam Machine price range by speccing out a comparable desktop machine. That would likely require building around a Ryzen 5 7600X CPU and Radeon RX 7600 GPU, which would probably push the overall build into the $700-plus range. That would make the Steam Machine competitive with the pricey PS5 Pro, even though some estimates price out the actual internal Steam Machine components in the $400 to $500 range.

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Are you ready for a $1,000 Steam Machine? Some analysts think you should be.

Analysts, components, gaming, Hardware, steam machine, steam machines, tariff, valve / Tim Belzer / November 13, 2025

If you ask random gamers what price they think Valve will charge for its newly announced Steam Machine hardware, you’ll get a wide range of guesses. But if you ask the analysts who follow the game industry for a living the same question… well, you’ll actually get the same wide range of (somewhat better-informed) guesses.

At the high end of those guesses are analysts like F-Squared‘s Michael Futter, who expects a starting price of $799 to $899 for the entry-level 512GB Steam Machine and a whopping $1,000 to $1,100 for the 2TB version. With internal specs that Futter says “will rival a PS5 and maybe even hit PS5 Pro performance,” we can expect a “hefty price tag” from Valve’s new console-like effort. At the same time, since Valve is “positioning this as a dedicated, powerful gaming PC… I suspect that the price will be below a similarly capable traditional desktop,” Futter said.

DFC Intelligence analyst David Cole similarly expects the Steam Machine to start at a price “around $800” and go up to “around $1,000” for the 2TB model. Cole said he expects Valve will seek “very low margins” or even break-even pricing on the hardware itself, which he said would probably lead to pricing “below a gaming PC but slightly above a high-end console.”

A loss leader?

At the other end of the spectrum, Superdata Research founder and SuperJoost newsletter author Joost Van Dreunen predicted the entry-level Steam Machine could come in as low as $549, rising to $749 for the 2TB version (plus an additional $50 for bundles including a Steam Controller).

To Van Dreunen, Valve’s unique position as a private company with a loyal fan base means it can “price its hardware to hit its own strategic sweet spot rather than mirror the competition.” And in this case, he said, that could mean taking a “modest” loss on the hardware as a way to get more gamers invested in SteamOS.

Getting people to buy more games on SteamOS could be worth a lot more to Valve than any Steam Machine hardware profits. Credit: Valve

“Just like Sony and Microsoft, the real money isn’t in the box, it’s in the ecosystem you enter once you buy it,” Van Dreunen said. “To me the question isn’t whether Valve can afford to eat margin. It’s whether they want the SteamOS footprint to grow fast enough to justify it. … Strategically, this is about expanding the platform, not squeezing the hardware.”

Are you ready for a $1,000 Steam Machine? Some analysts think you should be. Read More »

Valve rejoins the VR hardware wars with standalone Steam Frame

gaming, headset, steam, valve, virtual reality, vr / Tim Belzer / November 12, 2025

Valve also tells Ars that streaming to the Steam Frame will be “as efficient as possible,” maximizing battery life from the included 21.6 Wh battery. “Standalone battery life will be much more variable, depending on the game and its settings,” Valve Engineer Jeremy Selan and Designer Lawrence Yang told Ars via email.

While a wired PC connection would go a long way toward addressing those battery-life and extra latency concerns, Valve said the Steam Frame won’t even support it as an option. “We’re focused on a robust wireless streaming experience, which is why we included a dedicated wireless adapter, have a dedicated radio on the headset just for streaming, and invented a new streaming technology to optimize the streaming experience (Foveated Streaming),” Selan and Yang told Ars.

A low-weight modular “core”

All told, the Steam Frame comes in at just 440 grams, a welcome and sizable reduction from the 515 grams of the Quest 3. Interestingly, Valve’s spec sheet also specifically calls out the 185 gram “core” of the headset hardware, which comprises all the main components besides the battery, headstrap, and speakers (e.g., lenses, displays, motherboard, cooling, processor, RAM, tracking system, etc).

That core weight is important, Selan and Yang told Ars, because “it’s designed to be modular so one could imagine other headsets connecting to this core module that bring different features.” So tinkerers or third-party headset makers could theoretically build modified versions of the Steam Frame with lighter batteries or streamlined headstrap/speaker combos, for instance. The Steam Frame’s monochrome passthrough cameras can also be accessed via a front expansion port with a standardized Gen 4 PCIe interface, Valve said.

It’s an interesting potential direction for new hardware that will launch into a more niche, less irrationally exuberant VR market than Valve’s previous virtual reality headsets. But with companies like Apple and Meta pivoting toward augmented reality and/or mixed-reality hardware of late, it’s nice to see Valve continuing to cater to the small but dedicated market of gamers who are still interested in playing in fully immersive VR environments.

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New project brings strong Linux compatibility to more classic Windows games

compatibility layer, gaming, Linux, Open Source, steamos, valve, Windows / Rejus Almole / November 10, 2025

Those additional options should be welcome news for fans looking for new ways to play PC games of a certain era. The PC Gaming Wiki lists over 400 titles written with the D3D7 APIs, and while most of those games were released between 2000 and 2004, a handful of new D3D7 games have continued to be released through 2022.

The D3D7 games list predictably includes a lot of licensed shovelware, but there are also well-remembered games like Escape from Monkey Island, Arx Fatalis, and the original Hitman: Codename 47. WinterSnowfall writes that the project was inspired by a desire to play games like Sacrifice and Disciples II on top of the existing dxvk framework.

Despite some known issues with certain D3D7 titles, WinterSnowfall writes that recent tuning means “things are now anywhere between decent to stellar in most of the supported games.” Still, the project author warns that the project will likely never reach full compatibility since “D3D7 is a land of highly cursed API interoperability.”

Don’t expect this project to expand to include support for even older DirectX APIs, either, WinterSnowfall warns. “D3D7 is enough of a challenge and a mess as it is,” the author writes. “The further we stray from D3D9, the further we stray from the divine.”

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CS2 item market loses nearly $2B in value overnight due to “trade up” update

counter-strike 2, CS@, CS2, gaming, items, Marketplace, trading, valve / Kris Guyer / October 23, 2025

Valve benefits from any panicked trading in the short term, with every Steam Marketplace sale carrying a 5 percent “Steam Transaction Fee” on top of a 10 percent “Counter-Strike 2 fee… that is determined and collected by the game publisher” (read: Valve). In the long term, though, making some of the rarest items in the game easier to obtain will likely depress overall spending among the whales that dominate the market.

Wild CS2 update tonight. I’ve spent the last few hours digging through market data and built this projection chart to show how I think things play out.

Knives and gloves drop fast (40–50%) as the new trade-up path floods supply, while Covert skins surge short-term as everyone… pic.twitter.com/8NOMIBPZ1F

— SAC (@SAC_IG) October 23, 2025

Using marketplace data, Irish Guys esports team owner SAC ran some projections estimating that, over the next few months, “the market settles about 5–10% lower overall, not a crash, just a correction.” But there are also more bullish and bearish possibilities, depending on how overall item demand and market liquidity develops in the near future.

Market tracker CSFloat also crunched some numbers to determine that the overall supply of knives and gloves could roughly double if every common item were traded up under the new update. In practice, though, the supply increase will likely be “far less.”

Massive monetary shifts aside, this latest update seems set to make it easier for new CS2 players to access some once-rare in-game items without breaking the bank. “I got burned a little [by the update]… but honestly, this is the way to go for the long term health of the game,” Redditor chbotong wrote. “[It’s] given me faith that Valve is actually steering in a direction that favors the average player than a market whale.”

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Meet the first person to own over 40,000 paid Steam games

Achievements, badges, collection, Digital, gaming, steam, valve / Tim Belzer / September 24, 2025

With those games excluded, SonixLegend’s collection actually encompasses the vast majority of the 45,000 or so “full profile” paid games tracked by SteamDB. But with thousands of new games being released on Steam every year, it might not be long until a badge for 50,000 owned games becomes a real possibility.

So what’s good?

It’s hard to gauge just how much of SonixLegend’s massive Steam collection officially counts as a “backlog” since their private account doesn’t offer a public breakdown of playtime for most individual titles. That said, there are only 261 games for which SonixLegend has earned at least one achievement and only 16 that were good enough to merit a user review (they all ended up as “Recommended”).

The implications of SonixLegend trying to actually work through their Steam backlog can be more than a little intimidating, though. HowLongToBeat data suggests that finishing just the “top 2,500” games in SonixLegend’s Steam collection would take over 2,463 days, or nearly seven years of 24/7 gameplay.

Ironically, SonixLegend’s favorite game isn’t even one that counts toward their record-setting badge. The user’s Steam profile page lists 551 hours spent playing Valve’s 2010 free-to-play overhead shooter Alien Swarm. In a way, it’s nice to know that, even with access to nearly every paid modern PC game in existence, the one game this user keeps coming back to is a 15-year-old title that doesn’t cost a penny.

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Steam will wind down support for 32-bit Windows as that version of Windows fades

32-bit, gaming, steam, Tech, valve, Windows 10, windows 10 22h2, Windows 11 / Kris Guyer / September 19, 2025

Though the 32-bit versions of Windows were widely used from the mid-90s all the way through to the early 2010s, this change is coming so late that it should only actually affect a statistically insignificant number of Steam users. Valve already pulled Steam support for all versions of Windows 7 and Windows 8 in January 2024, and 2021’s Windows 11 was the first in decades not to ship a 32-bit version. That leaves only the 32-bit version of Windows 10, which is old enough that it will stop getting security updates in either October 2025 or October 2026, depending on how you count it.

According to Steam Hardware Survey data from August, usage of the 32-bit version of Windows 10 (and any other 32-bit version of Windows) is so small that it’s lumped in with “other” on the page that tracks Windows version usage. All “other” versions of Windows combined represent roughly 0.05 percent of all Steam users. The 64-bit version of Windows 10 still runs on just over a third of all Steam-using Windows PCs, while the 64-bit version of Windows 11 accounts for just under two-thirds.

The change to the Steam client shouldn’t have any effects on game availability or compatibility. Any older 32-bit games that you can currently run in 64-bit versions of Windows will continue to work fine because, unlike modern macOS versions, new 64-bit versions of Windows still maintain compatibility with most 32-bit apps.

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Hollow Knight: Silksong is breaking Steam, Nintendo’s eShop

bandwidth, gaming, server errors, silksong, steam, team cherry, valve / Paul Patrick / September 4, 2025

An influx of players excited for this morning’s launch of Hollow Knight: Silksong are encountering widespread errors purchasing and downloading the game from Steam this morning. Ars Technica writers have encountered errors getting store pages to load, adding the game to an online shopping cart, and checking out once the game is part of the cart.

That aligns with widespread social media complaints and data from DownDetector, which saw a sudden spike of over 11,000 reports of problems with Steam in the minutes following Silksong‘s 10 am Eastern time release on Steam. The server problems don’t seem to be completely stopping everyone, though, as SteamDB currently reports over 100,000 concurrent players for Silksong as of this writing.

Ars also encountered some significant delays and/or outright errors when downloading other games and updates and syncing cloud saves on Steam during this morning’s server problems. The Humble Store page for Silksong currently warns North American purchasers that “We have run out of Steam keys for Hollow Knight: Silksong in your region, but more are on their way! As soon as we receive more Steam keys, we will add them to your download page. Sorry about the delay!”

The PC version of Silksong currently seems to be available for purchase and download without issue. Ars was also able to purchase and download the Switch 2 version of Silksong from the Nintendo eShop without encountering any errors, though others have reported problems with that online storefront [Update: As of 11:18 am, Nintendo is reporting, “The [Nintendo eShop] network service is unavailable at this time. We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause].” The game is still listed as merely “Announced” and not available for purchase on its PlayStation Store page as of this writing.

Hollow Knight: Silksong is breaking Steam, Nintendo’s eShop Read More »