While we eagerly await the second coming of Steam Machines, it's worth remembering what a gloriously awful mess Valve got itself in over a decade ago

When I first learned that Valve was going to release Steam Machines again, I groaned inwardly. Although I never bought one myself, I briefly had the chance to use one about nine years ago and wasn't in the least bit surprised that the project failed. It was only when I got to try a Steam Deck for the first time that I realised Steam Machines weren't dead at all and now they're back again entirely. So what went wrong the first time, and will the new ones fare any better?

To fully understand the significance of the Steam Machine's rebirth, you need to go back to the year 2012. This period is important because it's when Microsoft released Windows 8, a version of the PC operating system that was supposed to be an OS for all devices, but mostly just succeeded at pissing people off.

Developed over four years, Windows 8 wasn't just a mild tweak of Windows 7, with a fancy new GUI slapped on top. Microsoft wanted to dominate the entire personal computing market (desktop, laptop, tablet, phones, etc) and the software industry tied to it. In the case of the latter, that came in the form of Windows Store, a new digital distribution service where vendors could sell applications that stuck rigidly to Microsoft's Metro design rules.

As you can imagine, the move wasn't exactly popular because if it took off, Microsoft could potentially have full control over what apps and games could be sold for Windows-based PCs. One of the most notable dissenting voices just happened to be Gabe Newell's, who said at the time that "Windows 8 is a catastrophe for everyone in the PC space."

More importantly, though, he dropped the biggest hint as to what Valve was contemplating behind the scenes: "We want to make it as easy as possible for the 2,500 games on Steam to run on Linux as well." To that end, the company released a Linux version of Steam, along with tools for developers to help them port games to the open-source operating system.

A few months prior to this, Valve added Big Picture Mode to Steam, a configuration for the GUI that made it more suitable for TVs and displays other than your average PC's monitor. At the time, we weren't entirely sure whether Valve was expecting us to just plug our gaming rigs directly into the back of our TVs or use some kind of streaming mechanism.

If it were the latter, would that mean Valve was planning on creating a streaming device or collaborating with hardware manufacturers to have 'Steam-approved' devices? As it turned out, it was both.

Throughout 2012, plenty of rumours bounced around that Valve was about to enter the hardware market directly, possibly with some kind of home console-like PC. The Linux port of Steam and Big Picture Mode certainly lent weight to this idea.

Everything became clear in September 2013, when Valve officially launched Steam Machines, along with SteamOS (a Linux-based operating system) and the Steam controller. These were all paper launches, though, as Valve and hardware partners wouldn't have anything physically ready for a good while. We did get our hands on beta versions of all three at the time, but it would be another two years before the hardware was retail-available.

The problem was simple: Valve wasn't making the Steam Machines itself; it wasn't even hiring another firm to build them for it. Instead, it worked with vendors such as Alienware, Falcon Northwest, iBuyPower, Gigabyte, Scan, Zotac, and others to freely design and build PCs that simply met Valve's Steam Machine requirements. Well, requirement, as there was only one: be able to run SteamOS.

And that was the crux of the issue. SteamOS really wasn't ready to be used by the general public. If you own a Steam Deck, you'll be very familiar with the latest iteration of Valve's operating system, but SteamOS 2013 and SteamOS 2025 are very different beasts. Where the latter happily runs thousands of Windows-based games with nary an issue, the original version of SteamOS could only run native Linux applications.

The limitations of SteamOS gave hardware vendors the heebie-jeebies, and while many of them were committed to the idea of Steam Machines in the public domain, behind the scenes, they rapidly realised that they just weren't going to sell many of them. Why would you spend hundreds or thousands of dollars on a PC that used a brand-new operating system and had a gaming library a fraction of the size of that of Windows machines?

In many cases, Steam Machines were being pre-sold with Windows, because SteamOS just wasn't up to scratch. By the time Valve finally got around to physically releasing its Steam Controller late 2015, practically a requirement for Steam Machines, the writing was already on the wall. By mid-way through 2017, it was all over.

Microsoft had long since banished the horrors of Windows 8 by giving us the superb Windows 10 in 2015, and it was clear that its attempt to corner the app market had amounted to very little. PC gamers saw little reason to abandon something that developers were fully committed to (i.e. Windows instead of Linux).

While Steam Machines were no more, Valve clearly wasn't done with its idea of having a Windows-free ecosystem for PC gamers, as evidenced by the fact that we got the Steam Deck in February 2022 (feels longer ago than that, doesn't it?). The key to getting it right this time was a combination of handling all the hardware aspects directly and making Proton for translating Windows code to run in a Linux environment.

The handheld gaming PC market is jam-packed with all kinds of different models, and the original Steam Deck does feel somewhat basic and dated now. However, the hardware and software ecosystem of the little device works exceptionally well, and I suspect this is what Valve envisioned for the original Steam Machines.

A decade later, and they're back again. This time, the hardware isn't standard PC fare: essentially, it's a Steam Deck on steroids, though still quite low-key by modern PC gaming standards. A custom AMD APU with a Zen 4 CPU sporting six cores and 12 threads, plus an RDNA 3 GPU with 1792 shaders and 8 GB of VRAM, won't be a rocket ship, no matter what the clock speeds are like.

But thanks to all the groundwork laid down by the Steam Deck, it'll be more than enough for a spot of big-screen PC gaming, thanks to a streamlined operating system and an enormous game library to dip into.

Whether the market will be happy to buy a console-like PC that has limited scope for upgrading remains to be seen, though. If the new Steam Machine is as well-received as the Steam Deck was, it could well be the hit of 2026. At the very least, it certainly won't be anything like as bad as the original.