Hold onto your mouse pads, PC gamers - Valve is apparently about to drop not one but TWO pieces of hardware, and a freshly leaked setup video suggests the Steam Frame might be hitting shelves before the Steam Machine does. According to PCGamesN, a setup walkthrough video for the Steam Frame has surfaced online, and that kind of thing doesn't usually get made unless launch day is dangerously close.
Valve has already confirmed both the Steam Machine and the Steam Frame are locked in for a summer release window - which, for a company that famously operates on Valve Time, is basically the most shocking commitment they've made since Half-Life 2 came out. The existence of a polished setup video strongly hints that the Steam Frame is going to respawn first in the release queue.
So what even is the Steam Frame?
For those not keeping score at home, the Steam Frame and Steam Machine are Valve's big push back into the living room gaming space - essentially their play to get your gaming PC to stop living in your bedroom cave and start hogging the TV instead. Think of it as Valve trying to unlock the "couch co-op" achievement for PC gaming on a mainstream level.
A setup video leaking is a pretty major tell in the hardware launch meta. Companies don't produce onboarding content for products that are still collecting dust in a dev kit somewhere - this is the kind of pre-launch material that gets finalized when manufacturing is already in progress and marketing teams are sweating through their final checklists.
Summer is coming, and so is Valve (apparently)
The big question now is just HOW early in summer we're talking. "Summer" as a release window is doing a lot of heavy lifting - that's roughly three months of wiggle room, and knowing Valve, they'll use every last second of it. Still, a leaked setup video essentially functions as a giant flashing respawn indicator that the Steam Frame is the closer of the two launches.
Whether this ends up being a game-changer for the living room PC market or another ambitious Valve hardware experiment that gets quietly discontinued remains to be seen. But hey - at least we have video proof it exists, and in the Valve hardware universe, that already puts it ahead of Half-Life 3 on the probability chart.
