You are going to have to pry my Steam controller from my cold dead hands. And I love my steam link! I now do most of my gaming on my couch because of it. But SteamOS was always an insurance policy...
You are going to have to pry my Steam controller from my cold dead hands. And I love my steam link! I now do most of my gaming on my couch because of it.
But SteamOS was always an insurance policy against Microsoft monopolistic tendencies. What MSFT was hinting at during that time was very obvious, it wanted a walled garden much like the Google and Apple app stores. MSFT saw the money their competitors were able to generate from their app stores, and wanted a piece of that pie. Valve needed to prove it was willing to spend real money to move PC gaming away from the Windows OS to accomplish that goal. It needed to change the internal calculus for MSFT.
I feel like Steam machines were kind of like OnLive: the right idea, but implemented way too early. We are just now seeing cloud gaming take off, and OnLive was on the ball for that a full decade...
I feel like Steam machines were kind of like OnLive: the right idea, but implemented way too early. We are just now seeing cloud gaming take off, and OnLive was on the ball for that a full decade ago! Steam Machines, too, were a great concept that arrived well before their time.
With how great Proton is, the dream of a Steam Machine is still alive. It's not where it needs to be yet, but if they keep improving Proton like they have been, it's feasible that a few years down the road you could get a Steam Machine that plays mostly everything. People will point to that as its downfall -- it doesn't play everything! -- but my rebuttal is that I have a Windows PC hooked up to my TV and even it doesn't play everything it's supposed to. I've had plenty of frictions with it, and it's far from the "just works" solution that a lot of people paint Windows as.
You are going to have to pry my Steam controller from my cold dead hands. And I love my steam link! I now do most of my gaming on my couch because of it.
But SteamOS was always an insurance policy against Microsoft monopolistic tendencies. What MSFT was hinting at during that time was very obvious, it wanted a walled garden much like the Google and Apple app stores. MSFT saw the money their competitors were able to generate from their app stores, and wanted a piece of that pie. Valve needed to prove it was willing to spend real money to move PC gaming away from the Windows OS to accomplish that goal. It needed to change the internal calculus for MSFT.
I feel like Steam machines were kind of like OnLive: the right idea, but implemented way too early. We are just now seeing cloud gaming take off, and OnLive was on the ball for that a full decade ago! Steam Machines, too, were a great concept that arrived well before their time.
With how great Proton is, the dream of a Steam Machine is still alive. It's not where it needs to be yet, but if they keep improving Proton like they have been, it's feasible that a few years down the road you could get a Steam Machine that plays mostly everything. People will point to that as its downfall -- it doesn't play everything! -- but my rebuttal is that I have a Windows PC hooked up to my TV and even it doesn't play everything it's supposed to. I've had plenty of frictions with it, and it's far from the "just works" solution that a lot of people paint Windows as.