Valve finally kills the Steam Machine

Was it only a year ago that I was writing about how Valve might not be done with SteamOS? Well, that was then, and this is now, and it turns out that Valve had only disappointment in store for me on the SteamOS front. From PC Gamer Magazine:

Remember Steam Machines? Valve seems to be trying to forget its bid to get everyone playing games on expensive little boxes from Alienware, Asus and the like, as it’s removed the Steam Machines section from Steam. It’s been a while since anyone really talked about the living room PCs, but this looks like the final nail in the coffin.

Steam Machines never really got their big moment. Valve envisioned a new ecosystem following on from Big Picture mode, where people would play PC games in their living room using a Steam Machine, Steam Controller and SteamOS, but the big launch at the end of 2015 only saw a handful of the boxes appear, and none of them exactly tempted people away from their desktops or consoles.

[...]

The Steam Machine launch wasn’t helped by Valve’s second bid for domination of the living room. While their Steam Machine partners were designing their first boxes, Valve was busy making their own device: the Steam Link. It essentially did the same thing: allowing people to play Steam games on their TV, but instead of being a desktop surrogate, the Steam Link was a streaming device. And it was much, much cheaper.

As someone who bought a Steam Link, I guess I shouldn't really be surprised by this, but it's still something of a disappointment. There was a moment in time, during the darkest days of Windows 8 & 10, when it really did look like consumers generally, and gamers in particular, might be needing a viable alternative to Windows, and I was hoping that Valve might put some actual weight behind SteamOS in order to help make that happen. It turns out that Valve really is too busy with SteamVR to care about SteamOS, though, and thus the end arrives.

Of course, we now know that Microsoft's Windows strategy is changing, and the first steps of that new direction are looking remarkably pro-consumer, so the death of Valve's SteamOS initiative isn't likely to have much of a real-world impact. It's not like anybody was using it, after all. Still, even though its time is past, and its purpose might no longer be relevant, it's a little sad to see that the dream of a viable Linux-like gaming environment won't be coming to fruition... in spite of PS4/Orbis having proved that it really can work. C'est la vie.

Farewell, SteamOS. We hardly knew thee.