Steam Machine

» see store.steampowered.com/sale/steam_machines as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

i had steam by then. i did not have a steam machine. by 2015 my gaming pc was a windows desktop with maybe four hundred games in the library, most of which were going to refuse to run on linux at all. the whole point of a steam machine was to skip windows. the whole problem of a steam machine was that skipping windows meant skipping most of the steam catalog.

valve announced steamos and the steam machine prototypes in september '13. the pitch had two halves, a debian-based os tuned for the tv, and a new gamepad called the steam controller. the consumer release slipped twice. it eventually shipped on november 10 '15 with fourteen oems making boxes at prices that ranged from $450 for an entry alienware to over $5000 for a falcon northwest tier-3 machine.

i remember reading the launch coverage on rps and ars and thinking the price-to-windows-box ratio did not make sense. for the cost of a mid-range steam machine you could build a better windows pc that ran every game on steam, not just the linux subset. for some reason the marketing kept implying this was the obvious living-room answer. it was not.

~ the chronicle ~

~ how it landed ~

the launch reviews mostly said the same two things. the steam controller was interesting hardware that took weeks of muscle memory to get along with. steamos was a debian fork that was technically a working linux distro and practically a way to discover that your favorite games did not run on it. people sent units back.

the underlying problem was the catalog. as of late '15 there were a few thousand steam titles with native linux builds, mostly indies and a slice of valve's own back catalog. the big windows releases of the year were absent, the new triple-a stuff in the pipe was windows-only. you could in theory stream from a windows pc in the same house through steam in-home streaming, which made the steam machine an expensive thin client. for the kind of person who already had a gaming pc in the next room, the steam link box at $50 was the same idea for an order of magnitude less money.

~ the decline ~

microsoft released windows 10 in july 2015, four months before the steam machine landed. it was a free upgrade. one of the founding reasons for steamos had been a public worry about windows 8's app store becoming a closed platform that would squeeze steam off the desktop. that worry mostly evaporated. windows 10 left steam alone. valve no longer had the same incentive to push linux as hard, the oems building steam machines started noticing that valve's enthusiasm was cooling.

by june 2016 the public-facing total was fewer than half a million units across all oems combined. most of the steam machines on shelves got remarketed by their makers as plain windows pcs with the steamos disc stripped out. by 2017 the steam machine page on the storefront had stopped getting maintained. on april 2 2018 valve quietly removed the link from the front of the steam store with no announcement, then let the page rot.

~ what got buried with it ~

the steam controller stuck around longer than the boxes did. it kept shipping until late 2019 and developed a small loyal user base for its haptic touchpads. proton, the wine-based compatibility layer valve started funding seriously in 2018, eventually turned into the thing that made the steam deck plausible in 2022. the steam deck is the steam machine with the actual answer to the catalog problem, run windows games on linux without telling the game.

the steam machine itself is now mostly remembered as a what-if. valve announced a second-generation steam machine in november 2025 for a 2026 release, this time built in-house instead of farmed out to oems. the joke writes itself, this is the third attempt at a console-shaped pc from valve, the first was a powerpoint and a dev kit, the second was a retail flop, the third is whatever happens next.

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