Valve is planning to launch a Steam Console in order to compete with PlayStation and Xbox, based on a new rumor.
Known insider and content creator eXtas1s has posted a new video on his YouTube channel, in which he claimed that Valve is currently working on a Steam Console to compete against the PS5 and Xbox Series consoles in the future. He mentioned that he received this information from a fellow YouTuber who specializes in Handheld gaming PCs.
According to the content creator’s source, Valve is contributing heavily in the development of drivers for the AMD 9070 GPU, which is set to be released for desktop PCs in the near future. It will be the very first graphics card to feature the manufacturer’s new RDNA 4 architecture as well as support for FSR 4 image reconstruction technology.
The insider believes that Valve’s involvement in the development of drivers for the AMD 9070 GPU is a sign that the company is working internally on a Steam Console that will come with the SteamOS. He also speculated that another reason why Valve may be working on AMD 9070 drivers is to support third-party manufacturers looking to offer their own desktop consoles alongside the SteamOS license.
Prior indications have also suggested that Valve is exploring the idea of bringing its ecosystem to the living room console space. An eagle-eyed enthusiast had recently spotted a change in the Steam Deck kernel by a Valve employee, who was testing HDMI CEC functionality for new hardware.
Earlier, the SteamDB tracking tool had found new Valve branding guidelines, including one for “Powered by SteamOS”. According to branding guidelines, the “Powered by SteamOS” logo indicates that a hardware device will run the SteamOS and boot into it upon powering on. The creator of SteamDB had also shared concept designs for Steam Controller 2 that is internally referred to as “ibex” at Valve.
