Valve's hardware products, aside from being awesome, are really an insurance policy. They ensure Valve cannot be locked out of their own market by platform owners like Microsoft or Meta using their leverage to either take a cut of their revenue or outright ban Steam in favor of their own stores (as it looked like MS might try to do in the Win8 days). By owning a platform of their own Valve always has a fallback option.
I mean.. it's pretty obvious such a thing would be immediately suicidal for them. If Steam stops being an open platform, it stops being a PC platform.
Seems unlikely because we believe Valve has integrity. But it's possible they have less integrity than we think, and they pursue this strategy to make some of those games with kernel-level anti-cheat available on the Steam Machine.
Microsoft has been trying to corner Valve. Valve is finding clever ways out by getting developers to finally make their games Linux compatible.
If Valve's consoles become broadly successful, that's an added bonus. The real win is to outflank Microsoft.
One of Microsoft's biggest mistakes was to give up on Windows Phone. One of Meta's biggest mistakes was to give up on their phone (they gave in early due to technical choices, not just lack of user demand).
Owning a "pane of glass" lets you tax and control everything. Apple and Google have unprecedented leverage in two of the biggest markets in the world. Microsoft wants that for gaming, and since most gaming is on Windows, they have a shot at it.
Valve is doing everything they can to make sure developers start targeting other platforms so PC games remain multi-platform. It's healthy for the entire ecosystem.
If we had strong antitrust enforcement (which we haven't had in over 25 years), Apple and Google wouldn't have a stranglehold on mobile, and Microsoft would get real scrutiny for all of their stunts they've pulled with gaming, studio acquisitions, etc.
Antitrust enforcement is good for capitalism. It ensures that stupid at-scale hacks don't let the largest players become gluttons and take over the entire ecosystem. It keeps capitalism fiercely competitive and makes all players nimble.
The government's antitrust actions against Microsoft in the 1990s-2000s was what paved the way for Apple to become what it is today. If we had more of it, one wonders what other magnificent companies and products we might have.
Valve actually encourages devs to only provide Windows builds compatible with Proton, or at least it used to, to the disappointment of some professional porters. Mainly because several devs kept leaving their Linux builds abandoned while still maintaining their Windows ones.
They had no other choice.
The technical foundation of the prior WP versions (aka, Windows CE) was just too dated and they didn't have a Windows kernel / userland capable of performantly dealing on ARM, x86 performance was and still is utter dogshit on battery powered devices, they didn't have a Windows userland actually usable on anything touch based, and most importantly they did not have developer tooling even close to usable.
At the same time, Apple had a stranglehold over the upper price class devices, Android ate up the low and mid range class - and unlike the old Ballmer "DEVELOPERS DEVELOPERS DEVELOPERS" days, Microsoft didn't have tooling that enticed developers, while Apple had Xcode with emulators that people had been used to for years, and Android had a fully functioning Eclipse based toolchain.
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/appsblog/2013/aug/15/...
This is the kind of shit regulators should stop. In the 90's, this would have gotten Microsoft broken up into several companies.
I don't follow the console market at all, but don't its players subsidize their hardware by keeping software (game) costs high? I didn't think they had anything like Steam's level of regular discounted sales. "Price is king" can cut both ways.
The prime Nintendo games (i.e. Animal Crossing, Pokemon and anything Mario related) are rarely discounted, yes - and Nintendo can do this because these games have borderline drooling fanbases and the games aren't available anywhere else.
But everything else? There's constantly something on sale on the Switch store.
What platform has more exclusives than PC?
It's also the most convenient by far, and the new Steam Family stuff lets you share all of your games with all of your siblings without any need for password sharing like you'd have to on e.g. GoG or Epic. I have 4 siblings and most of us are married. Our combined Steam library is well over 1000 games
ish. Sony/Microsoft/Nintendo likely have contracts locking down RAM prices whereas Valve will have to negotiate theirs based on current prices.
Turns out that the usual Microsoft incompetence-and-ADHD have kind-of eliminated that threat all by itself.
Also: turns out that, if you put enough effort into it, Linux is actually a quite-usable gaming platform.
Still: are consumers better off today than in the PS2 era? I sort-of doubt it, but, yeah, alternate universes and everything...
https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2025/06/games-run-faster-on-s...
If you're using nvidia like 75% of Steam's hardware survey reports, it's a mixed bag and 1% lows are fucking abysmal compared to windows.
But try getting nvidia to care about Linux beyond CUDA. They'd rather just stop selling GPUs to normal people before they do that.
It was astoundingly unusable for sharing Microsoft's own game within my own household with my own family members. Completely broken user experience.
It's not hard to believe that Steam was able to thrive because Microsoft has just done an amazingly bad job with this. I've been in software dev for 20 years and it still baffles me that companies with tens of thousands of engineers can produce such shitty software experiences.
Yeah, I briefly addressed that concern in the article as a comparison to Facebook; probably could've expanded on it, but it was already quite long and didn't feel like it fit naturally into the topic at hand
I find this framing to be beyond maddening. Sure, it wasn't an iPod, and if you measure it against that kind of expectation, of course it's a flop, because it wasn't an overnight success.
But I think it's more appropriately understood as a soft launch of an ecosystem, to strategically rebalance Valve away from the potential risk of being locked into Windows. It was also a thoughtful partnering with hardware vendors, so they weren't shipping hundreds of thousands of units to Walmart shelves was just sat there and lost them tens of millions of dollars, which is also what I think of when something's considered a flop.
But it was a thoughtful, intelligent long-term commitment to an ecosystem that bore fruit in large part due to the credible long-term commitment as the library of steamos compatible games grew and set up the Steam Deck for success. And now it looks like the wind is at their back with the new line of hardware, but I think it's best understood as a return on investment that begun those many years ago.
I think it reflects a kind of intelligence and long-term thinking that Google is pathologically incapable of, by contrast.
> I find this framing to be beyond maddening [...]
> It was also a thoughtful partnering with hardware vendors
As numerous post-mortems (some of which I quoted in the article) recount, the hardware partners themselves largely consider their experiment back then a flop as well.
> But it was a thoughtful, intelligent long-term commitment to an ecosystem
With respect, I think you're overselling it. It's hard to call a machine that basically didn't play any of the at-the-time hits well "a thoughtful, intelligent" move. If you read some of those linked post-mortems, I think you might agree as well.
> I think it's best understood as a return on investment that begun those many years ago
I think there's nuance here, which is that Valve made lemonade from the lemon that was the flop of the Steam Box. They turned that failed move into an initial investment through diligence and effort. In a sense, that's part of what I'm trying to bring attention to -- Valve didn't just write off the failure and abandon the market, but took signal from it and tried again.
Their original answer was a resounding "nothing" - Steam Machines solved a problem for Valve (fear of an impending "Windows Store" being added by Microsoft that would steal the battlefield from Valve), but very little for the customer.
I guess that same question needs to be asked again here: are there sufficient problems that the average game-player at home has that are better answered by a Steam Machine than a Windows 11 box? Are those real problems experienced by the broader market of people, or are those just tangential issues cared about by a more vocal few?
* Almost. Anti-cheat remains a big hole.
** No, I'm not going to use a keyboard or do Windows admin crap from my couch.
It fixes a lot of issues for me (I will buy a steam machine upon release):
I used to prefer consoles for the living room - put the disk in, and go. But nowadays consoles have the same issues: Giant downloads, patches, tweaking GUI settings and fear of not getting the best performance (PS5 Pro variants, Xbox S/X etc., performance vs. quality mode settings). PC games are now not only more price competetive through the sales, but consoles use now downloads at high prices to undermine the second hand market, or account-lock your game even when purchased as disk. Plus, I need a subscription to play online.
Game controller support has become superb on ALL OSes (I use a PS5 controller on macOS as well as Linux, and it is pretty much flawless.
Windows is annoying. I used Windows 10 for a long time as a glorified bootloader into Steam (on a dualboot Linux machine), but it become full annoyances and win11 worsens that ("You need a Onedrive account" - "oh, did you try Edge yet?" - "Your computer is at risk" - "We installed copilot for you!" etc.). I basically want a computer that boots into steam BigPicture and is quiet the rest of the time.
Can I build my own living room PC? Yes, but then without proper SteamOS installation, or finicky linux setups. With the Steam Machine I just buy the package, put it next to my TV and lets go. I will re-use my PS5 dualshock controller and be done with it.
When I fire up my linux workstation or steam deck and browse my library, there are countless games, marked as "platinum" in ProtonDB, but do not work OOTB. Sometimes it's a later Proton version that broke the compatibility, sometimes you still need to tinker in the settings in addition to choose the correct proton version. All in all, I've spent quite some time getting games to run I just wanted to play a single afternoon as nostaliga hitted hard.
As long as issues like this are not resolved, I don't believe in Steam Machines as alternatives for consoles in the living room space.
And yes, I'm still considering a steam machine for my living room, even though I will need to support my wife and kids in getting games to run on the TV.
I'm not a media outlet! Just some dope who noticed a thing and wanted to get the thought that wouldn't leave out into the world so I could use my brain for other things.
> as the reality is something different
That's fair. My anecdotal experience (as outlined in another comment) is that platinum has generally just worked for me. That's probably because I'm on Steam Deck rather than a "generic" Linux install (I also use Windows for my desktop gaming).
That said, do you think a parenthetical note is necessary for accuracy? I figured it might be getting too into the weeds since the article is primarily about the platform/ecosystem/hardware comparison between Apple and Valve...
Open source Mesa Turnip drivers fixes a lot of problems with Snapdragon GPUs, but the drivers don't cover every available chipset from Qualcomm.
The GPU driver issues leads to situations like the Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 (released in 2022) + Mesa drivers often getting better gaming compatibility/performance than the newer Snapdragon 8 Elite (released in 2025)
Here’s the latest copy of the original article in The Cambridge Student:
<https://web.archive.org/web/20220924191721/https://www.tcs.c...>
First-gen product that seemed to not know where it's going? Check.
Continued quiet iteration behind closed doors despite first-gen being a flop? Check.
Sticking with the product line over many years, where most other companies would have written off and thrown in the towel? Check.
Multi-pronged GTM strategy where other products prove out key bits of next product? Check. (see: SteamOS and Proton setting the stage for Steam Deck, which in turn sets the stage for Steam Machine 2)
Deep software-hardware integration in ways that are highly salient to users? Check (see: foviated streaming for Steam Frame, Steam Deck "just works")
And sometimes, the competition is just plain brain dead. Just take EA Origin, which my wife sadly requires because her entire Sims 4 library has been purchased through that and its predecessor.
With Steam, she can easily have the Steam Client open on both her laptop and her user account on my gaming rig simultaneously. No big deal, in fact it is required for Steam Remote Play - the only thing that keeps annoying us is that you can only have one Steam client open on one machine which is annoying on a multi-user machine.
But Origin? That piece of shit software doesn't just log you out on one machine when you log in on another - no, it opens a fucking modal window telling you "you're in offline mode". Yeah no shit, my wife knows that, she just turned on the other machine!
That's utterly fucking basic user experience stuff and yet EA doesn't seem to be able to fathom that people might want to own more than one machine. As long as they can be sold FIFA lootboxes, eh?!
This is not true. It was true in 2019 when the PS5 was initially announced, but PS5 has been sold at a (slim) profit since 2021. Xbox probably sold at a loss for longer, but it definitely isn't sold at a loss in 2025.
The Switch & Switch 2 have always been profitable.
The BOM cost of the Steam Machine has been estimated at $450. They could sell for $500 and still be nominally profitable and still undercut XBox & PS5.
(That BOM cost estimate was before RAM price silliness so you have to adjust upwards a little bit).
No iOS, no Android, just raw SteamOS with gaming and privacy focus, and fully customizable by users if they want.
Make it look really sleek and cool, and dockable.
CuriouslyC•1h ago
kemayo•57m ago
Valve could branch into Apple's areas, but they don't seem particularly interested in doing so yet.
EDIT: rather, Apple cares a lot about phone gaming, but that's an area that Valve has shown few signs of moving in on.
CuriouslyC•48m ago
deltoidmaximus•41m ago
bigyabai•37m ago
It doesn't have to be. Proton runs fine on Android.
entropicdrifter•30m ago
bigyabai•29m ago
phantasmish•44m ago
I’d love someone to actually compete with Apple at the specific kind of thing they do, but I don’t see it in the cards for Valve. Too much distance, with things they don’t have to solve to hit other (apparent) targets of theirs.
As for Microsoft, what is Valve threatening? Home no-business-use-case (mostly gaming and maybe light web browsing) PC owners, and I suppose x-box? The former has got to be negligible at this point, and the latter… I guess maybe, yeah, they could threaten that.
[edit] to soften this somewhat, I do love what Valve is doing and their micro-PC thing they’re releasing next year is likely going to be an instant purchase for me, provided supply issues don’t drive the price insanely high or otherwise mess with the release. I happen to be in the exact niche of people who are thrilled to have a good low-tinkering option that lets me ditch my last Windows machine, so this stuff’s my jam.
fragmede•13m ago
With the broader job market being not-great, and everyone trying some sort of side hustle with the aims of making it big, it's definitely the bubble I'm in, but the "home" case has a lot of Google free office suite business looking usage, and even if there isn't a side hustle, maybe my friends are super weird but they use Google sheets to organize things even for non-business life things when things get complicated. Eg planning a wedding. That's Google and not Valve, but if customers get Steamboxes to access that vs Windows laptops (or Chromebooks), it looks like a threat to Microsoft to me. (But it's been the year for Linux on the desktop for decades now, so I'm not holding my breath.)
CuriouslyC•8m ago
CuriouslyC•10m ago
The third party Mac software is often better, but not always.
CharlesW•36m ago
And yet, Apple controls the world's largest gaming economy (~$78B in 2025), dwarfing Sony's (~$31B) and Microsoft's (~$24B).
kemayo•31m ago
dartharva•38m ago
From what I see, Microsoft is the only one they have been gunning for, and even that behemoth is looking to get out of the way. Their Xbox platform has practically imploded, and they have specifically designed Windows 11 to be less of a PC operating system and more of an ads platform and a cross-selling channel for their AI/cloud offerings indicating that they've lost interest in the consumer market as a whole.
CuriouslyC•14m ago