With the Steam Deck 2 seemingly nowhere close to reality, in late 2024, rumors began to swirl that Valve was developing a streaming Steam box. Similar rumors pointed to a new Steam Controller and potentially a new VR headset.
The idea of a Steam Console has been kicking around in recent months, and fresh rumors are adding more fuel to those embers with a "spicy" claim that Valve is working on a new console that is meant to rival the PS5 and Xbox Series X.
Regular gaming leaker eXtas1s posted his claims on an open-source version of Twitter and put out a YouTube video with more details. The relevant portion starts about 9 minutes in.
I read Spanish better than I speak it, but based on the auto-generated transcript from YouTube, it appears eXtas1s is claiming that Valve is working with AMD on a new console, and he does provide a few specs.
According to him, Valve is working with an AMD 9070 graphics card and will feature RDNA 4 technology. Since the 9070s are currently desktop-only, he seems to believe that the two companies are working on a custom version that can go into a Steam console. In the future, it could go into more portable devices.
VERY SPICY with VALVE, it already seems that a new STEAM console is coming that competes against PS5 and XBOX in the future.
@eXtas1stv on xcancel (machine translated)
This says that the Valve is contributing to the card drivers to make them work with Steam OS. He goes on to speculate that Xbox is in a weakened position in the market, and Valve producing a console could slot into that position that Xbox seems to be vacating with its everything is an Xbox approach.
It is possible, though recently, we've seen that Valve's focus publicly has seemed to be on getting SteamOS to work on other devices like the recently launched Lenovo Legion Go S that natively runs a Valve-built operation system. And it is possible to turn the Asus ROG Ally X into a semi-Steam Deck using a custom Linux Image.
As always, when it comes to Valve, we need to take these rumors with a heaping pinch of salt. Historically, the company likes to keep its cards very close and often, the rumor mill for this specific company tends to fall more on the side of fantastical dreams than reality.
Still, Valve is working on something, and we already know the Steam Deck 2 is in the works, even if we won't see it for some time.
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