Jay Peters, reporting for The Verge:

The new headset is called the Steam Frame, and it’s trying to do several things at once. It’s a standalone VR headset with a smartphone-caliber Arm chip inside that lets you play flat-screen Windows games locally off the onboard storage or a microSD card. But the Frame’s arguably bigger trick is that it can stream games directly to the headset, bypassing your unreliable home Wi-Fi by using a short-range, high-bandwidth wireless dongle that plugs into your gaming PC. And its new controllers are packed with all the buttons and inputs you need for both flat-screen games and VR games.

The pitch: Either locally or over streaming, you can play every game in your Steam library on this lightweight headset, no cord required. I think Valve may be on to something.

Additional reporting from Sean Hollister, also at The Verge:

The Steam Machine is a game console. From the moment you press the button on its familiar yet powerful new wireless gamepad, it should act the way you expect. It should automatically turn on your TV with HDMI commands, which a Valve engineer tells me was painstakingly tested against a warehouse full of home entertainment gear. It should let you instantly resume the last game you were playing, exactly where you left off, or fluidly buy new ones in an easily accessible store.

You’ll never see a desktop or command line unless you hunt for them; everything is navigable with joystick flicks and gamepad buttons alone. This is what we already get from Nintendo, PlayStation, and Xbox, yet it’s what Windows PCs have not yet managed to achieve.

I rarely write about video games on this blog because I’m not much of a gamer, and the only games I do play are on PC. But this news is too significant not to write about: The Steam Frame and Steam Machine are consoles that can play virtually any PC game in virtual reality or on the television. Consoles have never differentiated themselves by specifications and usually have similar processors. They’re seldom updated, and when they are, they provide massive leaps in performance. The biggest differentiating factor between consoles is video game selection. Some games, like ones made by Sony, Microsoft, or Nintendo, are only available on their respective consoles. The “console wars” are really just game wars. On the opposite side of the spectrum, PCs play all games at much higher resolutions and frame rates than consoles, but they have a high barrier to entry. They require a monitor, peripherals, and competitive hardware.

The Steam Machine combines the best parts of PCs and consoles: a low barrier to entry and virtually unlimited game selection. It’s the perfect console. The popularity of the Steam Deck did the hard work of optimizing PC games for console players, and now, the Steam Machine can leverage that popularity to offer consumers a vast catalog of PC games in a console format. Valve, if the Steam Machine is priced competitively to the PlayStation 5 Pro and Xbox Series X, could probably eclipse a decent share of those sales. The games are already there (via Steam), they’re optimized for console play (via the Steam Deck), and the console is powerful enough to play them. If Valve can pull this off, it would be a truly remarkable disruption in the console wars. People wouldn’t even have to buy their beloved games again if they bought them on their computer, because the Steam Machine is literally just Steam.

I’m less bullish on the Steam Frame. The idea of consoles is that they’re cheap, i.e., they have low barriers to entry. People can just buy one at Best Buy and connect it to their existing television. VR, as I’ve established numerous times on this website, is a luxury purchase. People do not see an immediate need for VR in their lives, and if it’s a dollar more than $500, they’ll probably turn their nose up at it. Meta is the only company that has truly succeeded at VR because the Meta Quest 3S is inexpensive enough to buy as a gift. It’s not extravagant. If the Steam Frame costs anything more than the Meta Quest 3S, as it most likely will be, people won’t buy it, irrespective of the limitless game selection. The limited games the Meta Quest offers are good enough for most people. I think it’s a great idea, but price matters much more to VR customers because it’s such a burgeoning market. It hasn’t achieved maturation or commodification whatsoever.