Valve Believes Its New Steam Machine Could Open Up A Whole New...

"We're really interested to see what other companies do with the form factor."

The Steam Machine available in the new year is designed by Valve. It will be sold by Valve, and, as such, it cannot be hastily switched to Windows at the last minute to sell more units. But despite being burned in the past, Valve is keen for its Steam Machine to blaze a trail for other Steam Machines in future, whether they be made by modders, companies, or everyday PC gamers.

During a visit to Valve's HQ a few weeks ago, I'm shown around the new Steam Machine. Of course, the first topic of discussion is the aborted attempt to do much the same thing around 10 years ago now.

"We think [the original Steam Machines] were a cool product. Obviously, they didn't quite work out," Yazan Aldehayyat, a Valve engineer working on the Steam Machine, says.

"But, in a lot of ways, we feel like now is the right time for us to make this device."

That's down to SteamOS, Valve's Linux-based operating system; and Proton, the conversion layer that runs Windows games on Linux. Both SteamOS and Proton work great, as proven by their most successful manifestation to-date: the Steam Deck.

"We knew that our customers loved the SteamOS experience with the Steam Deck, and we just want to give them that same convenience in a different form factor. Something that's more optimised in your living room, connected to your TV, but also on your desk, with mouse and keyboard too," Aldehayyat says.

The Steam Deck played a big role in, first, realising the market potential for a handheld gaming PC, which had until then been a niche market; and second, going some way to inspiring high-end alternatives, such as the ROG Ally and Legion Go. I'd also argue that the availability of low-power, high-performance mobile chips from AMD also played a huge part in the sudden boom of available handhelds. Yet there's no denying that Valve's handheld has become something of a byword for handheld PC gaming.

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SteamOS, too, has been successfully ported onto a third-party device, the Lenovo Legion Go S, and in our own testing performs better than the same handheld using Windows 11.

Source: PC Gamer