How about that Steam Machine, 'ey? Consoles are now computers and computers are now consoles. What a topsy turvy world we're living in! I'm sure you have lots of questions, a lot of which I hope can be answered by James' hands-on look at the thing, but you may still be wondering how you'll know what games will actually work on it. The Steam Deck has its fancy verified badge that certifies that a game runs on the handheld, and it turns out that same badge is one that'll come in handy for the Steam Machine.

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Deckard lives. Valve have officially announced the long-leaked Steam Frame virtual reality headset, and as rumoured, it is indeed a hybrid VR kit: one that can play both high-fidelity games streamed from a PC, and simpler stuff that’s installed on the headset itself. A departure, then, from the Valve Index’s pure focus on cabled-up PC VR.

Yet neither is it a Meta Quest 3 with a Valve badge on it. Besides its smartphone-spec internals breaking new ground for the kind of hardware that Steam games can run on, the Frame is built with modularity in mind, potentially making it as upgradable and long-lived as an actual PC. As well as their other new gear, the refreshed Steam Machine and Steam Controller, I gave the Steam Frame a test run during a recent Valve visit, and mostly liked what I saw – though it’ll need to make sure its ambitions to do everything >in the VR space are more firmly realised than they are right now.

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Anyone who appreciated the weirdness of the original Steam Controller – and it still has its fans, despite ceasing production in 2019 – might look at this new version and think "Oi, that’s just a Steam Deck with the screen cut out." An accusation to which Valve, one suspects, might respond by slowly leaning forwards, eyes so wide they resemble the old version’s trackpads, staring the increasingly frightened sceptic in the face and whispering: "Yes.">

Except the new Steam Controller has more to it than merely transplanting the Deck inputs to a homebound gamepad. Having squeezed, caressed, and on a couple of occasions nearly dropped it on the floor of Valve HQ last month, I can tell it’s already boding well not just as a controller for mouse-minded PC games, but as a general purpose pad for everything else.

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Remember Steam Machines? Valve do, and they’re making a new one. The circa-2026 Steam Machine (it’s out early next year, date and prices TBC) seeks to cleanse the bad juju of that previous attempt at bringing SteamOS mini-PCs to the masses, bringing together a decade's worth of hardware and software improvements – including some lessons learned from the far more successful Steam Deck.

Speaking of, when I visited Valve last month to try the Steam Machine for myself – along with the matching new Steam Controller and Steam Frame VR headset – I repeatedly heard it pitched as an upgrade for Deck owners who plant their handheld in a docking station and use it as a living room PC. Also like the Deck, there's only one, entirely Valve-made design, ditching the partner-manufacturer model that produced a sometimes confusing multitude of different Machines back in 2015. Well, at the very least, that’ll make previewing it a lot easier.

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Ye gads, there’s three of them. You may have heard that a Valve hardware announcement was on the cards, but the Steam custodians’ biggest metal-and-circuits reveal since the Steam Deck actually concerns a power trio: a new Steam Machine, a new Steam Controller, and the Steam Frame hybrid VR headset. They're all official, and all coming (pricing and exact dates TBA) in early 2026.

I’ve had some quality hands-on time with them myself, having been mysteriously summoned to Valve HQ late last month (flying/accommodating on our own dime, before anyone gets clever). Full thoughts can be found in the links below, and I’ll say this up front: all three have a clear Steam Deck influence, be it the design language, the value of Proton-aided game compatibility, or simply the pleasure of a quality thumbstick. If you liked the handheld then... well, you might not necessarily> like the Steam Machine, Controller, or Frame, but you’ll have already read the shorthand on where they’re coming from.

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With as young a medium as games is (and it is young, as old as we all might feel), it's no surprise that it would burgeon new genres, and that said genres would be called into question. Metroidvanias! That's a potentially silly one, with a common argument being that it tells you nothing about the genre itself. I prefer Japan's search action as a name myself, though I am but one humble games journalist. A genre I hadn't called into question until today, however, is extraction shooter, a name that a former Bungie lead apparently disliked so much he tried to get the studio's marketing team to make something else up for Marathon.

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Not for the first time, there’s a new, wuxia-inspired RPG whose technical fortitude shatters faster than a bandit’s teeth. A few hours into the F2P, bear-brawling Where Winds Meet, it does at least seem to be arriving on Western PCs (it’s been out in China for nearly a year) in better overall shape than Wuchang: Fallen Feathers did. Even so, it’s beset by performance hitches and even basic visual nuisances, ranging from iffy translations to unplayable stuttering.

It's not all sad news. Where Winds Meet can hit high framerates on cheap or old graphics cards, possibly a positive side-effect of it also having a Genshin Impact-style mobile version, while its PC credentials are evident in its full mouse/keyboard support and a settings menu that decently covers DLSS or FSR upscaling and frame gen. For a game that’s been live and kicking overseas since December 2024, though, I wasn’t expecting to see so much of what would typically be day-one blues.

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Yesterday the handsome daredevils at Eurogamer, and in particular that arch-instigator of Discourse, Rick "also freelances for RPS" Lane, published a review of extraction shooter Arc Raiders in which they gave it 2 stars out of 5. I realise none of you treehouse regulars speak Eurogamish, so for clarity, I am not talking about massive hydrogen reactions in outer space. This is what they call a "scoring system", whereby videogames are transformed into numbers and symbols that are made to fight each other for our entertainment. Some say this is the Real Videogame.

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