Steam Machine

Although gaming handhelds have been around since the days of the Nintendo Game Boy, the Nintendo Switch definitely kicked up interest by a notch, revealing a potentially profitable market for portable devices that can run AAA titles, even in medium or low settings only. That, in turn, has created a series of devices and concept designs inspired by the Switch, except running PC hardware and PC games instead. Given that trend, it's not surprising to hear that Valve, best known for the Steam PC gaming platform, is planning to jump into that fray and no later than the end of this year even.

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The folks at SCUF and Ironburg Inventions sued Valve a few years ago for patent infringement. They claimed that Valve's "Steam Controller" was made without the proper paperwork, working with SCUF to license their patents for back-facing paddle controls. But wait, you might be saying, the Steam Controller isn't the only controller with back-facing paddles, right? You're right!

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If you haven't heard the news yet, Valve has been clearing out its inventory of Steam Controllers by selling at its cheapest possible price (excluding shipping and taxes). But if you were still planning on getting one, perhaps for posterity's sake, you can forget getting it at that low price. Valve has run out of stocks of the controller that wasn't meant to be and since it won't be making any new ones, it is giving buyers their $5 back, hopefully, to put towards buying a proper game controller.

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Valve is perhaps best known for the Steam PC games store and Half-Life. Some may even know it for Team Fortress, the Source engine, and the first Portal game. What the company isn't really known for is its hardware, like the Steam Machines and the physical Steam Link. Now yet another such product is about to bite the dust as the eccentric Steam Controller's price drops as Valve clears out its stock.

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Valve took quite a risk with its Steam Machines which, for the most part, are meant to run the Linux-based SteamOS. While highly praised by Linux gamers, the dearth of notable titles on the platform was almost like a death sentence to the PC-turned-console product. Valve, however, refused to throw in the towel and assured believers that it is still working on improving the situation. It turns out that its solution might involve finding a way to run Windows games on Linux Steam Machines.

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Steam Machines have failed, at least commercially. There’s hardly any argument there. Even Valve itself admits as much. Valve, however, would not concede defeat and promises to remain committed to pushing Linux gaming forward. Some might see it as simple lip service to calm SteamOS fans. Others might see it as a pointless endeavor and business suicide. And yet, if Valve’s dreams are to become reality, it really doesn’t have much choice to stick to its Linux guns for the long term and these are the reasons why.

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Earlier this week, we ushered in the month of April by discovering that Valve had removed mention of Steam Machines - pre-built PCs that run SteamOS - from its hardware listings on Steam's main page. Many people, including me, took this to mean that Valve was moving away from Steam Machines, which haven't been heavily promoted for a couple of years now. Today, Valve spoke out about why it removed the PCs from Steam's main store page, and what that means for other products like SteamOS.

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Two days ago, Valve removed any trace of Steam Machines from its store. If it weren’t for the media coverage, people might not have even remembered they still existed. Except for the hardest core of PC gamers, most have probably presumed Valve’s overnight sensation to have been long gone. And now, it really is. What was first seen as the revolution of PC gaming has now become almost an embarrassing footnote in gaming history. What happened and why did Valve fail so miserably? It all boils down to trying to hit too many birds with just one stone.

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There was a time not too long ago when Steam Machines were an exciting component of Valve's emerging hardware business. Acting as a vehicle for SteamOS, the idea was that Steam Machines would make the process of buying PC hardware a lot more straightforward some folks, while at the same time giving PC gamers more options besides just Windows. While SteamOS has been seeing consistent - if not always visible - improvement over the last few years, the market for Steam Machines seems to have stagnated.

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As of today, there are 1,699 games on Steam compatible with Linux. That's just one game short of a 1,700 of a significant milestone. But why the obsession with numbers on a platform traditionally associated more with servers and render farms and very rarely modern games? Because Valve has placed all its Steam OS eggs in one Linux basket and the adoption of the operating system in this market will ultimately seal the fate of what is perhaps the company's biggest, not to mention riskiest, business venture.

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Valve has made some interesting moves over the last few years, first announcing their own Linux-based OS specifically tailored for gaming, and then stepping into the hardware business. So far, they have only released a controller, and a streaming box, but they have started partnering with a few different companies to make “Steam Machines.” These are small, yet powerful boxes that run their special SteamOS, and give you more of a console-like experience. Today, ZOTAC has shown off their first Steam Machine, dubbed the ZOTAC NEN.

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Don't bother going out and buying a several thousand-dollar Steam Machine, Valve says you already have one at home. Requirements for installing SteamOS on the computer you already have are relatively low - just so long as you've been upgrading over the past couple of years. Installing and customizing SteamOS will require that your computer be wiped out - but once you do that, you'll be ready to roll. In other words: the Steam Machine you have at home isn't going to be your main desktop - it'll need to be a machine you don't use that often.

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