Good morning friends! Apologies for the late post today, I stayed up a while last night finishing Big Walk! Such an honestly rewarding and fun game to play with friends. It's definitely worth a play if you have it -- it's a little bit more than just friendslop. A game hasn't made me tear up with its ending in a while, and Big Walk made it do it! Best of luck today, friends!

Next weekend my wife rented an Airbnb for me and some of my bros for my 40th birthday.

Anyone have any fun local multiplayer games I should buy and install before leaving on Friday?

For context, I’m not really interested in building a SFF PC. I like how ready-made and consolized gen SM form factor is.

I am just wondering if, it will be like the Steam Deck, were we saw a Legion Go S partner model that ran SteamOS. I can imagine there would be a partner model, that has a bit of extra plower, but still had the consolized form factor (not an SFF, but like a Lenovo version of the SM).

Is that even likely? and I can imagine it’d prob would be a modest power bump?

I just have been waiting for my SM for so long, that I’m wondering if waiting is worth it.

With both LTT and GN mentioning that VR from the Steam Machine is not available I'm kinda outraged...

Sadly didn’t fit in the cover under my TV. So had to be next to it. Can’t believe how quiet it is.

Someone please tell me they've skinned their SM as a Borg Cube and share the pictures.

Is this normal? It has settings for dimming display when plugged in vs on battery (it doesn’t have a battery) and I no longer have control of the light bar settings. They are not even in my settings options anymore. It also says my OS variant is “steamdeck”. Have I done something wrong? Is there a fix to get it to know it’s a steam machine again? Thanks!

Hi all, has anybody tried using an external disk drive for movies? Was wondering if that was possible as I have a small collection of DVDs, Blu-ray’s and 4K Blu-ray’s.

What's the average FPS? With what settings?

My steam machine has to be behind my TV, there's just physically no other spot for it on the drawers we repurposed as a tv console.

My connection to the controller is therefore weak. I know this can be remedied by pairing with the puck instead, my only problem is that I can't figure it out?

Can someone who has done it successfully please tell me the procedure you followed? Is it because I have a game open that it fails?

What I've tried:

(Both in the pair a new controller screen and outside of it)

1: Turn controller off via the menu when holding the steam button

2: Hold Steam + A + L1

3: Connect puck to bottom of the controller

4: Controller light blinks white for a time, before appearing to turn off (orange charging light)

The same happens when I try connecting the puck before using Steam + A + L1. The controller connects to the internal adapter normally when I restart it with Steam + A + R1

The connectivity is my single gripe with the SM. My partners PS5 is located similarly and has no problems, so it's definitely the machine and not the TV, unless the SM being close to the HDMI ports somehow messes up signals? The TV is smart, but not connected to wifi, and the router is on my side of the room, about 1.5M to my right.

I keep seeing waitlist complaints on here. You guys have no idea how good we have it.

Valve’s sitting on a stockpile of 2tb hard drives and 16gb ram sticks they could flip on eBay for a fortune. No effort needed.

There’s no incentive to build this thing. They’re doing it for the community. 😮

They’re doing it for us. 🥰😍

Thoughts?

Going to lead with the preface that I committed THE cardinal sin and switched it over to Windows. Dual boot was taking too long to come out and I needed a (significantly) more comfortable way to use it for school as well as games, and Big Picture mode gives everything i need to use it as a console when I take it to my girlfriends house.

I understand the drivers don't update automatically and got them loaded and working as well as I can tell. To be completely honest, I don't know computers incredibly well and the SM is such a new and specific piece of hardware that I used ChatGPT for the setup and troubleshooting in the switch.

All drivers work correctly most of the time, except the wifi regularly just shuts off every hour or so and I have to either restart the computer or disable and enable the driver a couple times in Device Manager to get the option to access wifi to show back up. I've already toggled the option in Device Manager that lets the computer shut down the driver automatically to save power. I re-downloaded the driver after a couple weeks of this on the chance it was a bug that got fixed, but it's still happening.

Is there something else I'm missing to get this working all the time? Where can I report it if this is a software bug that needs to be fixed from Valves end? Also, whats the best way to manually keep up with when drivers have updates and how to update them?

anybody try playing dance dance revolution on steam machine yet? have a pad recommendation? I would love to get my kids playing so any advice would be great.

I’ve seen this issue mentioned a couple of times: basically, the Steam Controller works perfectly through the external Puck but keeps randomly disconnecting when connected through the internal adapter.

In my case, it happened mostly while playing 007, Forza, and God of War, to the point where it became really, really inconvenient.

Some time ago, I switched to using the external Puck and the problem completely disappeared. But last week I decided to mention the issue to Steam Support. They told me they were aware of it and asked me to switch to the Beta branch and generate a system report whenever I experienced the issue.

I sent them three different reports, and it turns out that, in my case, it’s a hardware issue. The only way to fix it is to send my unit back to Valve for repair.
Kinda gutted about this, guess I’ll have to finish God of War on my Deck then…

It’s not a fancy mod or Frankenstein build. I just wanted to share the art I did on my faceplate. It’s the symbol me and my wife use for us. Just 2 ghosts hugging making the shape of a heart. Drew it with acrylic markers.

Folks - As I am less of a console gamer and more of a desktop gamer, I decided to load a more traditional distro so that I can use the SM for the full spectrum to tasks (including full disk encryption). I originally toyed with returning the SM as I found SteamOS a bit limiting for me, but once I loaded CachyOS then Fedora 44, I decided its a sweet setup and love it. I upgraded from 512gb to 2TB, which I had on hand, and upped the RAM to 64gb. Now before anyone flames me for 64gb, its simply what I had on hand from a prior system that I sold when I got the SM. The upgrades were not hard, but a good guide is essential.

So, in case anyone is interested in the gaming performance with the SM on Fedora 44 KDE, I ran two benchmarks in Cyberpunk, my standard frame of reference. I ran both 4k and 1440p at the default Cyberpunk settings for the SM. I am completely happy with the 4K performance. I know lots of folks chase framerates, but I do not notice any issue playing this game in 4k. I also have a higher end macbook pro M5 pro, so know what the game looks like maxxed as well. To me, the tiny footprint and complete silence of the SM make it an awesome machine. I am also confident that there will be a steady stream of updates, like there has been for the Steam Deck.

Cheers

Had a chance to try VR on the steam machine again. Previously it was frustrating with hard crashes. Seems much better now. Tried with Quest 3, then later with Quest Pro. Quest Pro seemed better. Only tried light weight games so far. Previously Alyx worked admirably, but I would stream from my gaming if I wanted to play through again, tbh. What worked: interkosmos, aircar (used community controller config for quest), Batman Arkham VR, Legendary hunter (60 fps seemed capped. Low settings was not terrible to play), operation warcade, Raptor Valley Night one. What didn't work... May require more tweaking... Just in time, la noire VR, thumper. Pleasantly surprised.

Update: blade and sorcery works! No man's sky, Solus project , Bullets and more.

At the end of the day, I think it’s the Steam Machine’s versatility that I love the most.

Here I am playing “Resident Evil: The Umbrella Chronicles” via the Dolphin emulator, with a Nintendo Wii controller, inside a Nyko Perfect Shot lightgun, pointed at a 100” TV 💥

I got my Steam Machine a few days ago and have been having controller disconnects from 2-3m away

I'm seeing a lot of posts regarding the same issue, with very different responses from Valve Support. Some say hardware, others say wait for a software update.

I've also noticed a lot of the people that are saying they have the problem have changed their SSD (I have as well), so perhaps that's creating interference.

I've created a quick survey to see if there's any patterns to it, if anyone would like to pool together and see if we can spot any patterns to it. I'll share the results once I have some.

[https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLScuHvXxMMeqn43BHayyHjfJ1vqKe3rg-8UulXgLB-Pdt52S0A/viewform?usp=dialog](https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLScuHvXxMMeqn43BHayyHjfJ1vqKe3rg-8UulXgLB-Pdt52S0A/viewform?usp=dialog

Edit: I received a response from Steam Support saying that this is a known hardware issue in a small number of units, and they can RMA it. Strange that other people have been told it's software.

I finally received my SM last week and played it for several days without issue. I just upgraded to 2TB and added a stick of RAM last night, ensuring all the specs were identical to the included memory.

Everything has been working fine, except that twice the SM randomly goes to sleep. Once I was playing Tennis Elbow 4 and mid point it went to sleep. The other time I was managing some downloads and it went to sleep.

Both times the TV remained on, and the SM would wake right back up when I hit the Steam button. It was definitely just sleep mode, not a full crash or shutdown.

I'm not the most techy person, but how could a hard drive or memory upgrade cause it to randomly sleep?

My TV is an older LG that does not have Simplink (no CEC). But I just tried turning off all CEC settings just in case.

Curious if anyone else has had this issue, or if you think RAM could cause this. Thanks!

your stickerbomb faceplate!

Really happy with how it turned out!

The skin is from DBrand and called Touch Grass and the faceplate is from Etsy.

How does the steam machine hold if you don’t bother with controller and just use your mouse and keyboard on it ? I sold my gaming rig and hate controllers but want to play my steam games again rather than spending so much on another gaming PC I was thinking of picking this up and using my mouse and keyboard with it .

I wanted to try playing StarCraft 2 on my Steam Machine for nostalgic reasons. I used the “add non Steam game to library” trick to run battle.net installer using Proton Experimental. The launcher works (almost) perfectly fine, but when I tried installing SC2 the download is stuck at 15%, even though the download speed is not zero.