Century of Steam

The Steam Machine is Valve's new piece of hardware entering the scene as a mini PC built for living room gaming. I love a lot about it, had some issues with it, but overall came away from my time with it feeling very positive. The big question mark has been around the Steam Machine price. After the Steam Deck had a jump in price, we knew that would be a major factor in who to recommend this to for PC gaming. The Steam Machine specs in coordination with how well it works with the Steam Controller being still make this an appealing PC rig to consider.

A wonderful design can't beat the ugly realities of pricing, performance, and consumer value.

After being announced in a Nintendo Direct two weeks ago, Deltarune Chapter 5 is live now and pushing Toby Fox's episodic RPG to new levels of hype. The update saw Deltarune's Steam concurrent player count jump to 291,816, more than double the game's previous peak. As fans check out the new chapter, Deltarune has jumped into the top 10 most played games on Steam--an unusual feat for a single-player RPG with concurrent players normally in the low five figures. The game's previous all-time peak was 133,930 players last June, when the first four chapters were released as a paid game on Steam. The

Valve opened Steam Machine pre-orders, giving you a chance to get your name down early for a reservation, though it may be a while until you get it .

Ever since the Steam Machine's price and release date was announced on Monday, there's been a lot of discussion about what the mini PC is actually capable of. And, seemingly in response to the discourse, Valve has updated the Steam Machine's store page, now claiming the CPU is capable of "up to" 4K gaming with FSR. Originally, Valve claimed that the Steam Machine's CPU and GPU combo was capable of "4K gaming at 60 fps with FSR." In my testing that is true, but only once you start tweaking the settings to hit that performance target. And, there are certain ga