When Valve launched the Steam Deck in 2022, the little PC handheld was released into an uncontested market. Its good, but not great, performance was easily overlooked because of its novelty, but saw fierce competition when the likes of Asus launched its first ROG Ally X and further cemented its performance advantage with the recent Xbox ROG Ally X last year. Yet despite that, the old Steam Deck is still selling out because it offers what most other handhelds don’t: SteamOS. It’s an advantage that has kept the Steam Deck in the conversation while more powerful alternatives are released around it–an advantage Valve’s new Steam Machine won’t share when it launches later this month.
SteamOS has been such an advantage for the Steam Deck because of how seamless it makes the handheld PC experience. No matter how hard it has tried, Microsoft has yet to crack the code on shaping Windows into a controller-friendly operating system. It’s closer than it has ever been with its recent release of Xbox Mode for both handhelds and desktops, but there’s still enough friction there to necessitate keeping a mouse and keyboard close when things go awry. That isn’t the case with SteamOS, which presents your Steam library and any connected apps in a slick, easy-to-use, console-like interface that just works in all the ways you want it to.
SteamOS
Having SteamOS as an exclusive operating system on the Steam Deck for so long contributed greatly to the sustained success of the Steam Deck, offering a straightforward, games-first, PC-second environment to enjoy your Steam library with as little fuss as possible. Valve eventually opened it up to other devices, but somehow also thread the needle of keeping the Steam Deck relevant by being selective with which ones it supported. There was nothing stopping you from overwriting Windows with SteamOS on unsupported handhelds, but not needing to was already most of the battle won. The majority of people buying PC handhelds likely just want to turn on the device and get to games as fast as possible, and the Steam Deck is still miles ahead in that regard.
With the Steam Machine launching with SteamOS, that advantage would logically make its way over to the living room PC. But even if you do manage to get a Steam Machine before the end of the year, its biggest draw–providing a seamless living room PC gaming experience–can be replicated today.
With the release of the Steam Machine, Valve has also announced that it’s finally bringing SteamOS to all PCs (with an AMD GPU, for now) via an official release, the first of its kind for its operating system. This means that you can construct your own Steam Machine today, replicating its ease-of-use if you have the patience to build a PC or install it on one of many prebuilt options out there. You’ll very easily match the Steam Machine’s performance for a lot less, or vastly exceed it for the same price, making this a compelling option that can, fundamentally, offer the exact same experience at the end of the day.
Like the Steam Deck, this is a route many might not want to go down, making the Steam Machine a more enticing option. But unlike the Steam Deck (at least, until the recent price hike), the Steam Machine is not a cheap device, coming in way more expensive than its performance justifies. It’s a problem the Steam Deck did not face, and one that fundamentally alters its value proposition in a way that SteamOS cannot paper over this time.
Valve’s commitment to making Linux as friendly as it is now for gaming is to be commended. Without the company’s support, it’s debatable whether or not Proton, the compatibility layer that allows games not natively made for Linux to run on the operating system, would be in the incredible state that it is currently in. To give away all this work for free aligns with the company’s goals to create an open ecosystem to support Steam. But it’s the same ecosystem that the Steam Machine slots into, without a compelling reason to own it outside of convenience. SteamOS is the reason the Steam Machine so seamlessly slots into your living room. It removes all the barriers that made PC gaming in the living room more hassle than it was worth in the past. Its diminutive size is just an added bonus; it’s not the reason it works as a product.
To Valve’s credit, it explicitly recognises this, going so far as to suggest you build your own SteamOS-powered machine should you not be able to get a Steam Machine at launch. It can do this because Valve doesn’t depend on sales of its Steam Machine to make it a viable endeavor. Its ultimate goal is to expand the ways in which users can play (and purchase) games from Steam. It doesn’t need the Steam Machine for that explicitly.
But that does mean you’ll have to think long and hard whether or not that is worth the premium price that Valve is asking for a device that is already not well-equipped for modern AAA gaming, when so many alternatives exist. The Steam Deck launched into a vastly different market that eventually caught up to it, but survived off the work Valve had done with SteamOS. In the pursuit of creating a garden with no walls, the Steam Machine lost the only thing that might’ve saved it.
