Steam Machine tested on 25+ games: here's what actually runs well

Kotaku spent two weeks running over 25 games on Valve's $1,000 Steam Machine, treating it the way most buyers would — plug in, download, play. The default setup runs games at 1080p upscaled to a 4K display, with no manual tweaking unless a game demanded it.

The highlights are strong. Cyberpunk 2077 hits 60 FPS with light ray tracing at default 1080p, though pushing the resolution higher causes instability. Mouse: P.I. for Hire needed only a stick sensitivity bump and otherwise ran at a clean 60 FPS. Hades 2 — and Hades 1 — ran effortlessly. Left 4 Dead 2 works fine, as it does on essentially any hardware in 2026. Doom: The Dark Ages scales well on id Tech and plays perfectly, though it's a touch blurry at default settings. The low points are notable too. Borderlands 4's out-of-the-box experience was described as "an ugly mess" — only after manually adjusting FSR settings did it reach an acceptable state, and even then it barely matched a PS5 Pro, which costs less. Silent Hill 2 already looks rough on PS5 Pro, and the Steam Machine version looks worse.

The Steam Machine launched at $1,000 and runs a full desktop version of SteamOS, positioning it as a living-room PC that behaves like a console. Valve has been pushing Steam Deck Verified ratings for years, and many games on this list defaulted to Steam Deck-level settings on boot — which actually gave the reviewer room to push visuals higher and still maintain performance. That pipeline works well for well-optimized titles but exposes cracks in games that never got proper PC performance work.

The reviewer plans to update the piece with more games over time. The early takeaway: the Steam Machine is a capable box for polished, well-optimized titles, but at $1,000 it has little margin for error when a game ships in rough shape.