Valve warms up for the Steam Machine with a client update bristling with gamepad fixes and, oh, the betas UI is fancier now if you’re into that

We are an alarming way into 2026 already, and you know what that means: the precipitous decline of all of our institutions and the environment. Also, the soonish release of the Steam Machine, which will probably make all that other stuff go down a lot easier.

The Steam Machine’s actual release date isn’t known yet, but Valve’s said it wants to get its living-room Linux box out in early 2026, so I reckon it’s reasonable to say it’s due out in the next few months. Anyway, this is all to say that I think the most recent update to the Steam client—itself essentially a packaging of a bunch of fixes that have been pushed to Steam’s beta branch recently—is, stealthily, very much about prepping for Valve’s black box.