Valve announcing new Steam hardware in 2025 and NOT ONCE MENTIONING AI

ing a tech writer—or honestly, just someone who plays PC games in 2025—means accepting one universal truth: whenever a hardware brand announces something new, it’s almost guaranteed to involve AI in some way. Directly, indirectly, barely connected, or slapped on just for marketing… it’s everywhere.

That’s why Valve’s latest hardware reveal feels like a breath of fresh air. Three new Steam-related devices launched this week and not one of them leaned on the buzzword dominating the industry: AI.

The closest connection was a comment from Valve’s engineers about aiming for 4K at 60 fps on the Steam Machine using upscaling. Even that doesn’t tie back to AI in any meaningful way, especially since the AMD hardware inside relies on FSR—and the newly released machine-learning-enhanced FSR 4 only works properly with Radeon RX 9000 cards, not the Navi 33 GPU powering this system.

And let’s be honest: this obsession with AI didn’t start yesterday. Ever since ChatGPT exploded at the end of 2022, the tech world has been cramming AI into every product presentation and announcement possible—relevant or not. Every conference, every keynote, every booth has turned into an AI parade. Hardware is being sold to us based on how well it can run “AI workloads,” even though most of us don’t actually do anything AI-heavy beyond upscaling or frame interpolation. Even Windows is marketing itself as some kind of “agentic” OS now.

It’s not that I hate AI. I enjoy DLSS, frame gen, and Photoshop’s new tricks, and I let Gemini spit out HTML tables for me all the time. I just don’t need the acronym shoved in my face every time a company unveils a new gadget.

So seeing that the refreshed Steam Controller doesn’t have an AI summon button, the Steam Machine isn’t built to run massive local language models, and the Steam Frame isn’t pushing AI-generated visuals by default—that’s genuinely refreshing.

If Microsoft really is steering Windows 11 into a full AI-first future, then I’m glad Valve is putting serious work into making gaming on Linux a real, practical alternative. I’m not saying I’m ready to ditch Windows today—I had a better time running Bazzite on the Framework Desktop than trying to force SteamOS onto handhelds that should already support it—but the progress made with Proton and now FEX is doing more than ever to free PC gaming from Windows.

To be fair, Microsoft has shareholders breathing down its neck, and any tech company right now is expected to show an AI strategy or risk investor panic. That doesn’t mean we, as regular users, need to love the direction.

If you want a PC and an OS purely for gaming—or even for work—without every feature being wrapped in AI branding, then a straightforward Linux setup is starting to look like a much better fit.

Of course, there’s the obvious catch: a few major online titles still won’t run on Linux. Games like Fortnite, Call of Duty, and Battlefield 6 rely on kernel-level anti-cheat, and developers aren’t in a rush to make those systems compatible with Linux. Epic doesn’t seem interested in helping Steam via Proton, and publishers like Activision and EA have zero reason to weaken their anti-cheat protections.

Cheating ruins multiplayer games, so until a better system is invented, some Linux limitations will remain—especially for competitive shooters.

But honestly? I don’t care much for multiplayer anyway. And avoiding yet another presentation where an executive tries to hype up whatever AI gimmick they’ve stuffed into their latest hardware? That alone is starting to look like a very compelling reason to switch.