The State of Gaming July (2026): Valve’s Steam Machine, Disc-Free PlayStation, Xbox Backwards Compatibility

It’s The State of Gaming Podcast, Calcopia’s in-depth look at what’s shaking up the gaming landscape! Listen as hosts Cory Galliher and Nate Evans guide you through the best, worst, and everything else making headlines and headway in the world of interactive entertainment. Valve launches their long-awaited return to stationary hardware with new and improved Steam Machine, an adorable mini-PC box running the company’s SteamOS and promising to easily bring your sizable library to your living room. It’s not their first attempt at a console-like player, after a disastrous try back in 2015, but the wild success of the Steam Deck – and questionable decisions by some of the industry’s biggest console makers – could give the Half-Life maker a chance to make their presence known Sony announces that 2028 will be the end of the line for PlayStation games shipping on physical media, and the news went over about as well as you’d imagine. Microsoft announces a new ‘backwards-compatability’ program for playing older Xbox games on your Windows PC! But is it really and truly backwards-compatability? The guys give their honest take on Valve’s latest hardware, including a mini-review from Cory that answers the question on everyone’s mind: is the Steam Machine too expensive? Will players care that the future of PlayStation will be digital only? Or is there room for a compromise, possibly something like Nintendo’s Game-Key Cards for the Switch 2? Is there even a future for a dedicated Xbox console anymore? All these questions and more when you take a listen!