Valve Just Quietly Redefined What PC Gaming Can Be All While An...

Valve has been loosening a desperate Microsoft's grip on PC gaming one gnarled finger at a time.

On the face of it, the latest announcement from Valve seems pretty straightforward. The reductionists will tell you all it's unveiled is a last-gen gaming PC (that better be cheap), a controller that's just two halves of a Steam Deck jammed together (like all the mockups that have been doing the rounds since the handheld first released), and a Steam-badged Quest 3 (at a time when no-one actually cares about virtual reality).

Steam Frame: Valve's new wireless VR headsetSteam Machine: Compact living room gaming boxSteam Controller: A controller to replace your mouse

But that's fundamentally missing the point. With this new ecosystem launch, Valve has just pried Microsoft's last little finger off the previously vice-like grip it once had on PC gaming. No-one needs Microsoft to play PC games anymore—not you, not the devs, not the manufacturers of gaming rigs. Heck, with SteamOS coming to Arm, you may not even need x86 CPUs, either.

Windows has long been the de facto operating system for gaming PCs; practically every PC game has been developed for it and the x86 chips that make up the vast majority of desktops and laptops the world across. But that hegemony is slowly being eroded and Valve is right at the heart of making that happen.

I'm not necessarily talking about the new Steam Machine here, despite that being essentially why Valve kicked off the whole SteamOS/Steam Machine push over a decade ago. In response to Windows 8 and its seeming desire to lock down all apps running on Windows to its own marketplace, Gabe Newell explicitly said "I think Windows 8 is a catastrophe for everyone in the PC space," before resolutely failing to get SteamOS working for the third-parties he'd convinced to build mini gaming PCs for him.

Still, having a cute wee companion cube as a PC console next to your TV—one that's capable of (upscaled) 4K gaming—is pretty tantalising. But the whole reason it exists is because Valve knows a ton of people are already doing this with their Steam Decks anyways.

"Our customers kind of beat us to it," says Yazan Aldehayyat, a Valve engineer who's worked on both the Deck and new Steam Machine.

So yeah, it's not revolutionary in and of itself. Nor is that controller. The new Steam Controller is certainly vastly improved over the original pad Valve released alongside the abortive Steam Machines push a decade ago, but it is just a controller des

Source: PC Gamer