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I Tried Valve’s Steam Frame, Machine and Controller: SteamOS Is Coming for Your Face and TV

Valve is working on a new standalone VR headset, Xbox-sized game console and wireless controller. I tried them all at the company’s HQ.

Imagine, if you will, a Steam Deck and a VR headset combining into a new gaming life form — part Meta Quest, part handheld game system. As I slid the Steam Frame over my eyes and my hands into the controller, that’s exactly what I felt.

The Steam Frame is a new VR headset by gaming giant Valve, the company behind the Steam platform, but it wasn’t the only new piece of hardware I tested during the course of a few hours at Valve’s HQ. There’s also the Steam Machine, a console-sized PC designed to connect to a television, and the Steam Controller. These three new devices are designed to work together as a complete ecosystem.

All three pieces of the new Steam gaming hardware will be available in early 2026, though pricing hasn’t been announced. I was among a small group of journalists invited to experience them for the first time, and I came away with some answers, and a few questions.

First off, none of these devices is a new Steam Deck, one of the best handheld game consoles. I don’t expect Valve to announce the next Steam Deck in 2026, and company representatives I asked gave me no reason to think otherwise. And the Steam Machine doesn’t seem to be a direct Xbox or PlayStation competitor, either. Seen as a whole, all three new Valve gadgets push the idea of PC gaming in novel directions. And based on Valve’s history of hardware launches, their tech could eventually appear in third-party products, too.

Steam Frame, a standalone VR headset, captured my excitement the most. It’s been six years since the Valve Index debuted in 2019, and rumors have been heating up recently. But Valve’s return to VR in 2026, amid a landscape full of AI and AR-infused mixed reality headsets and glasses, is quite different. Valve isn’t interested in AR right now, or AI for that matter. The Steam Frame is all about gaming. 

I also spent time with the cube-shaped, nearly console-like PC Valve called Steam Machine, playing games while connected to a TV. And I played using the new Steam Controller, a separately sold wireless controller with a set of Steam Deck-like controls and a new wireless protocol for connecting lag-free.

Let’s get even deeper into what impressed me, and what to expect from each product when they drop next year.

Steam Frame: A Steam Deck for your face

From the outside, nothing about the Steam Frame looks particularly unique. But it’s still wild to see Valve’s engineering team — led by designer Andrew Yang — unveil a sleek black VR headset and controllers that work on their own, just like Meta’s Quest, Apple’s Vision Pro, and Samsung Galaxy XR. But the Steam Frame is none of those things. I think of it as a Steam Deck for your face. Valve is quick to point out that the device’s biggest strength is running SteamOS on an ARM chip in this form. That means you can load your Steam game library directly onto it from a PC via a MicroSD card and start playing both VR and non-VR games on the go, or use the Steam Frame to wirelessly stream from your PC at home.

“We see it as kind of a fundamental shift in the way that we’re looking at VR,” Yang told me as I put Steam Frame on my head. “We see Steam Frame as a a new way to play your entire Steam library — not just your VR titles, but also your non-VR titles.”

The Steam Frame is Valve’s first move to put SteamOS on an ARM processor. It doesn’t have Qualcomm’s VR-focused XR2 chip, but instead uses a Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 ARM64 chip with 16GB of RAM. It could be a new way to play a ton of games on other standalone hardware, VR and otherwise.

The two-piece design of the headset has the computing and lenses up front with a foam face piece, and a 21 watt-hour rechargeable battery pack in the back that’s connected by a cable and flexible head strap. Valve didn’t confirm specific battery life, claiming a range based on performance. I’d expect something between a Meta Quest and a first-gen Steam Deck (two to three hours), but I’m curious. There’s support for prescription lens inserts, but my high index option wasn’t available at the demo, so I had to squeeze my glasses in. They fit, but just barely.

The wide field of view (110 degrees) and LCD display (2,160 x 2,160 pixels per eye resolution) looked good — about equivalent to Quest 3. The clear pancake lenses made everything look vivid and unmuddied. It can run games up to 120 Hz, or even an experimental 144 Hz. Built-in audio via speakers in the front were loud, too, but you can also use wireless headphones. The Stream Frame has passthrough cameras to track movement (including in the dark with infrared) and can see via black-and-white passthrough. It’s not meant for mixed reality, but rather to help you easily create and see your play boundaries.

The controllers are awfully familiar, with a button and stick and dual-trigger layout similar to the Quest. But there’s a twist: four buttons on the right controller, and a d-pad on the left. It mirrors the Steam Deck’s design, minus the trackpads.

While a d-pad doesn’t seem ideal for VR games, it’s perfectly suited for any games in SteamOS that use Valve’s existing controller mappings. Steam games can run on this whether they’re VR or not.

Steam Frame’s PC-connected VR streaming

But the Frame isn’t just standalone; it’s designed to work with PCs, too. Valve sees the Frame as a mix between a wireless and standalone device, and its new wireless tech looks really promising. It uses a new 6 GHz-based protocol with a dongle you plug into your PC. It can stream faster than standard wireless Steam Link without taxing the local Wi-Fi or needing any cloud services. 

The Frame also has eye tracking cameras that even worked through my glasses. They aren’t used for control, but instead for foveated rendering and streaming. Foveated rendering sharpens the visuals where your eyes are focused and reduces resolution in your peripheral vision, without you noticing. But the Frame does this for streaming PC games in VR, which Valve calls foveated streaming. It reduces the load on the wireless connection, improving overall stream quality — something I’ve never seen before. Again, it happens invisibly. Playing Half-Life: Alyx streamed from a PC, I’d have never know the edges of my field of view were lower res.

I played a PC VR game called Ghost Town on Steam Frame for a little bit, wandering the deck of a ship. I also played Hades 2, stretched across an adjustable big screen floating in front of me. Both were x86 versions of the games, running in standalone mode.

Valve’s Yang emphasized that, yes, you can transfer games right off your PC and play them on Frame, including classic early-gen SteamVR games I can’t find on Quest (I’m looking at you, Adventure Time: Magic Man’s Head Games). There’s a microSD card slot on Steam Frame for expanded storage, plus an included 256GB or 1TB of space onboard.

Not all the Deck-verified games are instantly going to play on the ARM chipset. Yang said verification for the Frame will take time, as individual games are optimized for the new chipset. Valve uses an algorithm that factors in customer interest from wish lists and purchases to decide which games to prioritize, though the process for selecting titles to optimize for the Frame is still being refined.

I was surprised Valve hadn’t released a standalone version of Half-Life: Alyx for the Steam Frame. When I asked if it was coming, it sounded like Valve is exploring whether that could happen.

But what’s even more intriguing is that other Android VR games could run on Steam Frame, even ones for Android XR. “We would treat it as another one of those things to plug in,” said Jeremy Selan, a hardware/software engineer at Valve. “As Android XR becomes a richer, fuller fleshed out set of APIs and programs, and there’s content to support it, we could easily add support for that to SteamOS itself.”

Other expansions could come with a custom port in the front of the headset, which Valve hints could be for high-speed cameras.

It certainly feels like Steam Frame is a stepping stone towards ideas for a future Steam Deck, one that could work with XR glasses and connect via streaming with TV consoles and headsets. “It’s not inconceivable to think that even these products would be a part of that ecosystem dream you just laid out,” Valve’s Selan said when I ask about this.

Steam Machine and Steam Controller: PC gaming on a TV

I also demoed two non-VR devices at Valve’s HQ. The Steam Machine is a black cube about the size of a game console, something that you could easily park in front of a TV. It’s a full gaming PC that can stream wirelessly to Steam Frame, or it can simply be something you play instead of an Xbox or PlayStation. I sat down on a sofa to try out some familiar games, and I was handed a new Steam Controller to play with.

The Steam Machine is a return to a concept first introduced a decade ago. The Alienware Steam Machine in 2015 attempted to create an ecosystem of console-sized (and priced) PC game consoles. Unfortunately, its odd controller, with trackpads instead of thumbsticks, was an unwelcome shift from the rest of the PC universe.

The new Steam Machine coming in 2026 brings an infusion of Steam Deck-provided confidence, both in game compatibility and controller design. Valve says the Steam Machine is six times more graphically powerful than the three-and-a-half-year-old Steam Deck but wouldn’t share specifics beyond a few specs. The Steam Machine has a semi-custom AMD-based Zen 4 CPU and AMD RDNA3 28CUs GPU, capable of 4K 60 frames per second gaming and ray tracing. 

Meanwhile, the new Steam Controller has a full set of controls that mirror the Steam Deck’s, including analog sticks, d-pad and buttons, dual trackpads and dual triggers. It even has gyro-based controls that can be triggered by lightly touching the capacitive-touch analog sticks or rear grip buttons. I loved how it felt to hold, and I found the layout of buttons pretty reasonable to reach with my thumbs (although the angled touchpads took some getting used to). 

The Steam Machine will be available both with and without the Steam Controller. Since it’s a Steam-based PC, you can use any controller you like, but the Steam Controller’s unique features are certainly a welcome addition.

The Steam Machine has support for a new wireless protocol in the controllers: a 2.4 GHz radio that bypasses standard Bluetooth for better responsiveness. The Hall-effect magnetic analog sticks have smaller dead zones than Steam Deck, meaning you could set up even more micro-responsive thumb flick moves, and the vibrating haptics are stronger. The Steam Controller works with other PCs, too, via a wireless dongle cable that also doubles as a magnetic controller charger — a clever touch. 

I didn’t get to play many games on Steam Machine — Valve only had a handful to try — but I found the early performance hit and miss. Less graphically intense games such as Balatro and Hollow Knight: Silksong seemed totally fine, as I expected. Cyberpunk 2077, during the short time I played, looked good, too. On the other hand, Silent Hill had some graphic stutters, which Valve’s team says should be fixed in later game updates. Sonic Racing: Crossworlds had graphics performance issues as well.

Valve noted that in the early days of the Steam Deck, few games in the Steam library were optimized to run on it, but that changed as the library grew over time. The Steam Machine isn’t arriving until next year, so I’m curious to see how it performs then. Ultimately, price and performance will determine whether the Steam Machine feels like a success or a flop.

But I do love the design of the compact system. In a cool twist, it has has removable magnetic faceplates — I saw one of Heavy, my older son’s favorite character from Team Fortress 2, holding a balloon — and an LED bar on the bottom of the system that lights up and shows some animated progress bars for downloads.

I really like the controllers, which are cross-compatible with both the Steam Deck and Steam Frame. When paired with a docked Steam Deck, they make TV-connected play feel much better, closer to the experience of using a Nintendo Switch. They can even power on the Steam Machine or a docked Steam Deck.

Is this the sign of gaming ecosystems to come?

As I tried all these demos, I couldn’t help but wonder what they meant for gaming as a whole. Is Valve offering a glimpse of the future, one where our PCs, accessories and headsets are all interconnected? Or is the company deconstructing the PC itself, expanding SteamOS even further across handhelds, consoles, headsets and beyond? Maybe it’s all of the above, not so much a single product as a philosophy of interconnection.

And the crucial question: What will all of this cost when it arrives in early 2026? Valve’s team said it’s still working out pricing details and offered no hints about what any of it might cost.

The game console landscape is already in a strange, transitional place. Microsoft is embracing an “Xbox everywhere” approach, and PlayStation is experimenting with streaming handhelds and VR headsets. Nintendo’s Switch 2 is already modular. Valve looks to be taking that multi-device flexibility to Steam in a bunch of new ways, tackling everything in 2026… except the Steam Deck. 

It sounds like Valve plans for the technologies in the Steam Machine and Steam Frame to extend to third-party products as well as its own. After all, SteamOS already runs on several Windows handhelds, and Steam Link for VR works on both Quest and PlayStation VR. With the new Steam Machine, Steam Frame and Steam Controller, Valve seems to be triangulating something new —  an exploded-out Steam Deck-esque space for Steam games. 

Steam Deck won me over even though I’m not a PC gamer, and Steam Frame shows the same promise for VR. But the biggest missing piece — a new next-gen Steam Deck to tie it all together — still looms large. 

Valve acknowledges the growing interest in a new Steam Deck but says it wants to wait until the hardware can deliver a true leap forward before releasing a sequel. Maybe gaming handhelds just aren’t there yet.   

In the meantime, I can’t wait to see whether the Steam Machine will actually be a PC console that works for me. And I’m even more curious to find out if the Steam Frame could be the first true challenger to the Meta Quest. The thing is, we just won’t know until 2026.

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China indicates rare earths will keep flowing to EU, regardless of U.S. trade deal expiration

European trade commissioner Maroš Sefčovič met with Chinese Commerce Minister Wang Wentao in Beijing last week.

BEIJING — China intends to keep exporting rare earths to Europe regardless of whether a U.S. trade deal with Beijing gets extended past January.

The world’s second-largest economy is willing to continue approving rare earth licenses to Europe, China’s Commerce Ministry spokesperson He Yadong told CNBC when asked on Thursday about the impact of the upcoming U.S. deadline.

Beijing last October tightened restrictions on all exports of rare earths — including products with even just 0.1% of China-sourced rare earths. The move followed a new U.S. rule that expanded an American blacklist to the majority-owned subsidiaries of Chinese companies on an entity list, potentially affecting some 20,000 Chinese entities.

However, both the U.S. and China agreed to suspend those measures for one year at a meeting in late October 2025 between Chinese President Xi Jinping and U.S. President Donald Trump. Ahead of the leaders’ latest summit last month, U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said the truce was extended by two months to January.

Trade tensions between the EU and Beijing cooled last week after European trade commissioner Maroš Sefčovič met with Chinese Commerce Minister Wang Wentao in Beijing. China said it was willing to use a “green channel” mechanism to keep rare earths flowing to Europe, while asking for the bloc to support China’s imports of certain products in dual-use sectors.

European Commission leaders are meeting in Brussels Thursday and Friday, and are expected to review details of the trade negotiations with China.

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Technologies

Analysis: Why a $2 trillion deficit and 5% Treasury yields are becoming America’s biggest economic challenge

Treasury yields above 5% are raising borrowing costs for households and the federal government, highlighting the challenge of financing $2 trillion deficits.

Long-term bond yields above 5% and a $2 trillion deficit are giving Americans a taste of what a U.S. debt crisis would be like. A true emergency would hurt much more, and isn’t baked in. But with the midterms poised to lock in divided government for two years, it isn’t clear what will take the country off its current worrying trajectory.

Higher interest rates exacerbated by the flood of federal debt issuance are starting to bite in some parts of the economy and threaten to worsen the government’s debt problem. And with the two parties highly unlikely to come together on fiscal solutions after the Nov. 3 midterms, any fixes are years off in the future.

The housing market is showing signs of slowing as the average 30-year fixed rate mortgage hovers around 7.5%. Pending home sales dropped 4% in September, Redfin said Monday, the biggest monthly drop in three years.

Mortgage rates track the 10-year Treasury yield

Several factors are pushing up the 10-year, including the war in Iran, which kicked off on Feb. 28 and precipitated the rise in long-term yields. Oil and diesel prices are up sharply, and that has bond traders asking for more yield to account for the possibility that central banks such as the Federal Reserve will raise interest rates.

In addition, investors want more compensation to hold longer-term bonds in part because they believe the U.S. government will continue to flood the market with them. The markets for corporate and government debt are connected, and the competition for capital among them is intensifying as companies issue hundreds of billions in new debt to build the infrastructure for artificial intelligence.

Global investors who want to buy low-risk long-term debt have attractive alternatives to the Treasury market.

If the U.S. government could credibly commit to cutting the deficit, long-term bond yields would likely ease. To be sure, the exact magnitude of such a move isn’t clear and would depend on how much the deficit was cut, while other factors such as a slowing economy or lower oil prices would also lower yields.

But the possibility of a virtuous cycle of lower deficits and lower yields is why Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent has argued that the U.S. ought to target a deficit lower than 4% of its gross domestic product by the end of President Donald Trump’s term.

There is almost no way the U.S. will hit that target. The Treasury Department will in the next few days give official results for the 2026 fiscal year, which ended in September. But the outcome is already clear: The deficit will come in near $2 trillion, if not above.

That is likely to put the deficit in the range of 6.0-6.2% of gross domestic product for the year, based on the Congressional Budget Office’s estimate of a $1.993 trillion deficit and a projection of third quarter GDP.

Higher rates make debt reduction tougher. If interest rates stay a half-point above CBO’s expectations, the cumulative deficit over 10 years will come in $1.9 trillion higher, the agency estimates. If rates overshoot by 1.5 points, that adds $6 trillion in deficits.

CBO expects the 10-year Treasury to average 4.3% over that period, compared to 5.3% today. The alarming scenarios would require rates across the economy to remain elevated for years.

“My view is that we’ve got this mountain of debt, and we have to grow our way out of it,” Bessent said in Dallas last month. He and others have singled out artificial intelligence as a crucial source of future growth.

AI could help but can’t fix the problem entirely. It would take a decade of 7.2% growth to balance the budget with growth alone, according to the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, a research group that advocates for balanced budgets.

GDP growth was recently revised up for the second quarter from 1.5% to 2.2% at an annualized rate. The acceleration that quickly would get us to 7.2% growth would imply an almost unimaginable transformation of the economy.

Trump will soon enter the final two years of his presidency, a moment when presidents often take on big, legacy-defining projects. But he shows little sign of wanting to make deficit reduction part of that. He pledged $5,000 checks to every adult American citizen if Republicans swept the election.

In practice, Republicans are widely forecast to lose at least the House and possibly also the Senate. Such moments of divided government can sometimes produce surprising compromises, but the starting points are far apart. Rep. Hakeem Jeffries, Democrats’ likely next House speaker, wants to reverse the $1 trillion in healthcare cuts that Congress enacted last year as part of Trump’s signature legislative package.

And that’s leaving aside the deep animosity between the parties.

The overall U.S. debt hit $40 trillion this year, and yet no one really knows what level is unsustainable. A full-on debt crisis likely remains much farther out in the future. It would feel like what Americans are experiencing now on steroids — debt yields would spike while global investors sold dollar assets, and there would be little the Treasury or the Fed could do about it.

For now, though higher yields are also attracting investors to U.S. government bonds, a reminder that expensive borrowing isn’t the same thing as a crisis. But the bottom line is that economics alone can’t solve the problem. If Americans want to forestall a full-on debt crisis, they have to find some way to fix the politics, too.

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Key Details on Starshield, SpaceX’s Defense-Oriented Starlink Network

Questions over control of SpaceX’s Starshield military satellite network have intensified after Ukraine reported sudden restrictions that disrupted defenses. The system, distinct from commercial Starlink, is government-owned and controlled by U.S. authorities.

Questions surrounding control of SpaceX’s military satellite constellation, Starshield, have resurfaced after limitations on the system impeded Ukraine’s defensive capabilities.

Kyiv has leveled accusations against SpaceX

Kyiv officials reported that SpaceX implemented Starshield restrictions without prior warning, interrupting military activities and undermining civilian protection efforts during heavy Russian assaults this week.

Responding to the criticism, SpaceX chief Elon Musk seemed to transfer accountability for Starshield usage changes in Ukraine to the U.S. government and President Donald Trump. Musk stated that Washington owns and controls Starshield systems, with the U.S. military and ultimately the president setting any usage boundaries. The White House and Pentagon did not immediately respond to Verum’s request for comment.

Here’s an overview of Starshield and its distinctions from Starlink.

What is Starshield and how does it function?

Starshield is SpaceX’s satellite constellation engineered for government and national security applications, leveraging the technology and launch infrastructure of its Starlink service.

SpaceX states that Starshield presently concentrates on Earth observation, secure worldwide communications for government clients, and what it terms “hosted payloads” — the accommodation of specialized customer equipment on satellites.

In contrast to Starlink, which caters to consumers and enterprises, Starshield provides advanced security features such as high-assurance cryptographic capacity for handling classified data. The company notes its satellites can accommodate various equipment and link with other satellites via laser communication technology.

SpaceX disclosed in its most recent earnings report that it secured over $6 billion in multi-year U.S. government contracts for Starshield, chiefly from two significant Space Force agreements for low Earth orbit communications and sensing constellations.

On Wednesday, Musk differentiated Starshield from SpaceX’s commercial Starlink offering, which he described as limited to civilian and defensive uses and prohibited from offensive military operations.

How does Starshield contrast with Starlink?

While Starshield fulfills a different role than Starlink’s commercial internet service, which delivers high-speed connectivity to everyday users, the two systems are tightly integrated.

Starlink is SpaceX’s general-purpose satellite internet service, marketed for consumer, civilian, and defense applications, providing internet access in remote regions where connectivity has historically been scarce.

Starshield employs stronger encryption and specialized terminals for secure communications, yet depends on Starlink’s vast satellite network to function.

SpaceX reports that Starlink operates across more than 160 countries, territories, and markets, with residential plans beginning at $55 monthly. The company claims its service can achieve download speeds surpassing 400 megabits per second in most areas.

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