A Glorious Video Game Utopia For Parents Is Nearly Here
New announcements from Valve and Sony suggest a world where it's even easier to fit video games into your busy life.
This week, Valve announced a dream of mine: a mini-PC tucked under the TV. This week, Sony also announced you can stream PlayStation 5 games to a PlayStation Portal over the cloud. You don’t need to turn a PlayStation 5 on, you don’t even to own one!
Some important caveats with each:
No price for Steam Machines, but I’m guessing between $800 and $1,000. It’s due in “early 2026,” and there’s no way to put down money to secure a pre-order yet.
Streaming PlayStation 5 games to a PlayStation Portal requires a subscription to a PlayStation Plus “Premium,” which is damn pricey: $18 a month or $160 per year.
Folks, we’re quickly cooking towards an ideal world of games any where at any time.
I need games to be convenient. It doesn’t mean I’m only playing on easy mode (no judgement!), but it does mean I’m spending my time with games that easily fit my life.
I have a PlayStation 5 under my TV, but quite often, I play PlayStation 5 games on a PlayStation Portal. There are docks for both my Steam Deck and Switch 2 underneath the TV, but let’s be honest: they mostly function as chargers for a device that’s going to be removed. The game playing happens on the couch, or outside the gymnastics center. It’s increasingly rare that I’m sitting down in front of a game console the way I used to, and yet, I’m still playing lots of games—especially if they’re convenient ones.
How did I manage nearly 70 hours with Silksong in just over a month? My Switch 2 went with everywhere. In the car, outside an activity, on the couch. How did I play every episode of Dispatch in a week? Because my Steam Deck kept up with the rest of my life. I could sneak an episode in while my five-year-old was inside choir practice.
(The headphones came in handy when, all of a sudden, there was a sex scene.)
The TV remains part of this ecosystem, of course.
A TV is the best way to play co-op games with my kids, and some games demand a spotlight. Keeper, Double Fine’s gorgeous and weird new adventure game, is best played on a large television. It’s playable on a smaller screen, but damn, it looks so good on a TV that I’m willing to be patient and find the time to make it happen.
I’m already imagining a world where I start a game on my Steam Machine, then move over to my Steam Deck when the kids are hustling for the remote to watch something.
My version of this is convoluted, in which I’m stacking more and more devices that talk to each other in different ways, but it’s also not hard to believe that we’re in the transition point. In the future, you’ll only need one or two devices to make it happen.
Exclusivity is, interestingly, dying in several senses of the word.
It's now rare for a game to be exclusive to one platform anymore. In the old world, you bought a PlayStation for PlayStation games. An Xbox for Xbox games. A, er, Nintendo for Nintendo games. Hardcore gamers bought every single one. Now, games made by Microsoft are available everywhere and even Sony is, at least, bringing games to PC.
Nintendo lives and dies by the exclusivity of its games, but you can take those games anywhere you want. The TV used to be the exclusive home of games, and while there were plenty of terrific games for portables like the DS and Game Boy, if you wanted to play a game made for a GameCube, you needed to be in front of a TV. Not anymore.
It’s overlooked how transformative that change has been. The minutes add up.
And that’s before you get into cloud streaming, which is shockingly good these days. You can jack up an intense game like Cyberpunk 2077 and play it at the highest possible settings, either in the palm of your hand or on the TV, without needing a bulky PC nearby. (I use my Steam Deck as a hub for GeForce NOW on my TV, and will be happy when the Steam Machine arrives and makes that handoff an easier pitch.)
This is long way of saying games are becoming an art form that’s easier to engage with on your own terms. For decades, they have been confined to a specific format, to be enjoyed in a specific way, and that’s no longer the case. That’s great for everyone, but it’s especially great for busy parents who just wish they could play more games.
These are all steps in that direction, and I couldn’t be more excited.
Sometimes, the future is cool!
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Also:
I’m impatient for a new Steam Deck. Feels like the Steam Machine will be the step in-between. In theory, I’ll be able to “stream” games from Machine to Deck.
If Steam Machines are a hit, I can imagine there will be devices, like the ROG Ally, that cost way more but are also more powerful. That’s a good future, too.
“Hit” is relative, of course. Switch 2 has sold 10 million units in the months since summer launch, while Steam Deck has moved three million units in three years.
When my first kid was born, he had a rough bout of reflux and I spent a lot of time holding him. I picked up a Steam Deck before he arrived, in a bout of premonition. It turned out to be incredibly useful on those long nights-into-mornings where he would only sleep attached to me and I needed to stay awake.
Love this!