Second time lucky: rise of the (Steam) Machines?

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[The GameDiscoverCo game discovery newsletter is written by ‘how people find your game’ expert & company founder Simon Carless, and is a regular look at how people discover and buy video games in the 2020s.]

Well, thanks to a mid-week Valve hardware drop, we certainly have something to talk about for this end of week newsletter, right? Rise of the Machines, indeed. (And we’re also surveying this week’s Steam game debuts for our premium subscribers, of course!)

Before we start, as you order your 2026 physical wall calendar (we’re going either with Liberty of London or Hoodcats of Oakland), the best video game choice by far is Balatro’s 2026 calendar, with “13 photos of Jimbo, as portrayed by Ben Starr, in the guise of your favorite Balatro Jokers.” It’s very disturbing, but… GOOD disturbing?

[NEED MARKET CONTEXT? Companies, get much more ‘Steam deep dive’ & console data SaaS access org-wide via GameDiscoverCo Pro, as 80+ have. And signing up to GDCo Plus gets (like Pro!) the rest of this newsletter and Discord access, plus ‘just’ basic data & more.]

Game discovery news: GTA 6, ARC Raiders go big…

Chunkin’ up the game discovery info for your noodle, let’s unspool the drool rules:

• The latest Footprints.gg ‘trad media’ charts (from ICO) sees Grand Theft Auto 6 top due to its unexpected (expected?) delay to November 2026. It’s followed by ARC Raiders, which has hit 4 million copies sold, two dudes with guns (BF6 & CoD: Black Ops 7), and a girl with a saxophone (Fortnite x The Simpsons.)

• The Games Growth Guild launched, a Discord-first (physical soon!) community on ways to market & grow your game, spearheaded by the Firstlook.gg/Pragma folks. Here’s more on the initiative, and GameDiscoverCo is a partner, too. (Look for more info soon, and a discussion event during GDC 2026, among other things.)

• The Netflix game pivot continues, with this ‘Game Night’ announce a clear direction: party games on your TV, from Pictionary to Knives Out, using your phone as a controller. (With a side order of mobile games like Lego Duplo World, Red Dead Redemption & a 1 Vs. 100 Live-style gameshow title, Best Guess Live.)

• Xander Seren talks about the message from some devs that chasing trends is ‘selling out’, asking piquantly: “It’s not like players are dying to bear witness to [insert random developer]’s authentic self. Trends are trends because people like them. Players are pleased, even thrilled, to get more games in genres they love.”

• One surprising idea from ex-Humble folks launching new bundle site Digiphile: ‘If a bundle contains a game you already own, you’ll have the option of verifying that it’s already in your Steam library and then trading it in for credit to spend on another title from a different bundle.” This ‘exchange’ idea is clever, hopefully not exploitable.

• Microlinks, Pt.1: PlayStation is launching a 27” gaming monitor with DualSense charging hook; Aura Triolo’s top 2026 Independent Games Festival entries, from Condo to Sol Cesto; games with AI disclosures have grossed an estimated $660m on Steam.

• PlayStation’s been talking game hardware vs. software margins, with CFO Lin Tao flagging possible PS5 memory chip cost hikes, explaining: “Network services command higher profits than software. Especially with first-party software - if these games perform really well, we should be able to maintain a higher level of profitability.”

• A cavalcade of Roblox things: you can now capture in-game video ‘Moments’ and use it for linking or billboards in Experiences; The new In-Experience Creation interface allows UGC that lets you make cosmetic UGC (whoa?); self-serve IP licensing is now happening, with Skibidi Toilet - inevitably - coming soon.

• 2x neat new sites: Publisher Pathfinder uses an old-skool point ‘n click adventure interface to recommend publishers & investors to devs; TrendingNow.games uses the Steam real-time grossing charts to showcase trending & ‘hidden gem’ titles on the PC platform.

• December 11th’s The Game Awards is also livestreaming on Amazon’s Prime Video, with a e-commerce angle also bundled in: “Prime-exclusive, limited-time deals across nominated games, new releases, hardware and more, revealed in real time.” (In addition to the traditional free livestreaming & co-streaming.)

• Microlinks, Pt. 2: PlayStation made a cheaper language-locked PS5 console for the Japanese market (to stop ‘em being whisked to China!); Bob Iger mentioned integrating “game-like features” into Disney+ as output from its Epic investment; new PS+ Game Catalog entries inc. Red Dead Redemption, GTA V, Pacific Drive.

The rise of the Steam Machines, Part 2: boogaloo?

It’s inescapable: we presume most of you noticed Valve announcing three new pieces of hardware this week: a new Steam controller, the Steam Frame next-gen VR device, and perhaps most importantly, a second iteration of its Steam Machine ‘gaming PC in a box’, which it originally tried back in 2013-2014.

There’s been plenty of great coverage of these already: SteamDB did a giant round-up that explains all of the new hardware in some detail. And The Verge’s hands-on Steam Machine preview is nice and comprehensive. (BTW, we do know a Steam Machine release date: early 2026. But we don’t know a price yet. Cue much speculation!)

We’re not dismissing the other items announced by Valve. The new Steam controller is a nice iteration, and Steam Frame is a well-done, compact headset that is its own PC, but also supports WiFi streaming from another device. (Valve is careful to emphasize both VR and non-VR gaming on it, given VR’s recent stall in popularity.)

But it’s really the Steam Machine that stands out as the device that could sell as well as - or even possibly outsell - the Steam Deck, Valve’s handheld that’s been available since February 2022. Here’s our thoughts on why the second Machine coming is better:

• The OG Steam Machines were battling with incomplete Linux emulation: as SteamDB notes: “SteamOS [back in 2013] was nowhere near its current maturity. Since then, Valve has invested heavily in Proton, an open-source project for running Windows games on Linux, which has dramatically improved game compatibility on SteamOS.”

• Other platforms are preaching the wins from ‘one platform, lots of devices’: yes, there are plenty of ‘Steam Machine is an Xbox’ jokes out there. But Microsoft is also pushing the idea that your experience moves around with you from device to device, and with good reason. Players want shared catalog, and no rebuying!

• Steam Deck has made players comfortable with ‘console-ized Steam’: Valve’s PC handheld has concentrated devs’ minds on getting the SteamOS and controller compatibility right across a huge catalog. It’s both a push (from devs) and pull (from emulation) approach, and we just linked to analysis on how well it’s going.

We also suspect that hardware companies are more excited about making Steam Machine-likes than Steam Deck-likes, because a) SteamOS is still 100% free to include b) a ‘PC box’ is a way easier engineering job than having to design a whole freakin’ PC handheld. (Which the Lenovo Legion Go did, but there’s been no flood of devices yet.)

There are still a few hitches, though. One is kernel-level anti-cheat tech not working on SteamOS, which means that key multiplayer games like Battlefield 6 won’t work on Steam Machines. Eurogamer did get a quote from Valve about this, though:

“We think the incentives for enabling Anti-cheat on Machine to be higher than on Deck, as we expect more people to play multiplayer games on it. So ultimately we hope that the launch of Machine will change the equation around anti-cheat support and increase its support.”

The second hitch? It’s not a hitch, so much as an acknowledgment of the more modest extra market share Valve is trying to reach with devices that they:

• don’t do much (if any) paid marketing for.

• don’t even try to place hardware in traditional retail stores (with the exception of some super-limited deals with an Asian partner.)

In other words, in a market where PlayStation 5 hit 84 million units sold since 2020 (alongside 119 million monthly active PlayStation users), Valve just doesn’t have that ‘dedicated hardware or bust’ gene. It’s built a cool new way to play your Steam library on a TV. And if you want to buy one from their website, great. And if not... that’s fine.

That’s because Valve already has 170-200 million (or more?) trad PC MAUs on Steam, a perfectly peachy ecosystem. To augment that, we reckon Steam Deck has added 5-7 million units to the list of Steam playing devices since 2022, and we think Steam Machines could sell 7-10 million+ units over the next 5 years - all very pleasant.

There’s been a steady build towards this Windows-independent Steam ecosystem offshoot for 15+ years. (Gabe Newell and his Valve co-founder were former Microsoft execs, and not wild about the speed of innovation at his former company.) But it’s just not ‘make or break’ for Valve - it’s another shrimp on the (Steam) barbie.

This contrasts, I’m afraid, with platforms like Xbox, where you can feel the pivot ‘flop sweat’ pouring off the company. Why? Valve has been meep meep-ing (gradually!) in this direction for the past decade plus, whereas Xbox is Wile E Coyote-style skidding around the corner to catch up. (And yes, there’s a lot of falling anvils to dodge.)

This week on Steam: Black Ops x Inazuma Winds?

Finally, for our GameDiscoverCo Plus & Pro subscribers, let’s take a look at the big new releases on Steam this week. Can you name all of three above games? (If you can’t, just subscribe, and we’ll tell you below…)

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