SteamOS

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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This current generation of consoles, both the PlayStation 4 and the Xbox One, did something substantially different from their predecessors. For the first time, they sported desktop PC components inside, practically making them special purpose PCs fine-tuned for gaming. That fact, of course, has piqued the curiosity of many modders and hackers in actually making those machines run a different operating system, usually Linux. One such modder is OsirisX, who has not only successfully loaded Linux on the PS4, but was able to get SteamOS games up and running at decent performance.

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Earlier this month, sad news was delivered to Linux gamers everywhere. Arkham Knight was canceled on their OS of choice (as well as on the Mac). Of course, with all of the issues that PC gamers encountered with the game since its original launch, it really wasn't much of a surprise to see it get canned on other platforms. Thankfully, there are other, better games that will see Linux releases.

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Some things that sound too good to be true sometimes do turn out to be such. A SteamOS PC gaming handheld might sound nice, offering the ultimate PC gaming on the go, but turning that dream into reality is going to take a lot more than just a nice idea and a couple of hundred thousand bucks. That's the reality that the team behind SMACH Z is now facing as they cancelled their Kickstarter campaign in order to re-evaluate their goals, requirements, and financial needs. In other words, back to the crowdfunding drawing board.

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While Valve has done a lot of work trying to push their SteamOS, it's still far from popular. And while we've seen a lot of games make their way to the platform, it's still missing a lot of big names. Today, Capcom announced that they are working closely with Valve to bring one of their biggest titles to the Linux-based OS.

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Wouldn't it be great if you could take and play your game anywhere? That has been one of the holy grails of gaming, which gave rise to handheld consoles and, now, mobile gaming on smartphones. Technology, however, may have reached a point where even PC games can be played on something as small as, say, a PS Vita. That's definitely the motivation behind SMACH Z, a handheld gaming device on Kickstarter that's taking the Steam Machine concept and SteamOS on the road.

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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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You have to admit that Valve is a pretty interesting company when it comes to the world of gaming. They could have easily just been another great game developer with a strange fascination with hats. But instead, over the last decade, they have completely changed the way we play games on a PC. This started with their release of the Steam client, and more recently by developing an entire OS just for playing games. But how well do games perform on their SteamOS?

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