The living room PC is a certified thing now, and not just for those of us with extra long HDMI cables. The Steam Machine is “out” for the dozens of people who’ve picked up the $1,000 cube, but before that, folks were already making their own living room machines that run SteamOS.
Anyone can make a Steam Machine, which is exactly how Valve likes it. That’s one reason it priced its GabeCube roughly at cost (which has skyrocketed thanks to the AI-driven memory crisis), and why it has no interest in making games exclusively for its Linux-based devices.
“We want it to still be viable for other hardware manufacturers to offer things like the Steam Machine either with higher performance or a different feature set,” Valve engineer Yazan Aldehayyat recently told Bloomberg’s Jason Schreier in an interview.
Valve is capable of selling its hardware at a loss to boost its adoption, but its goal is to grow the PC platform as a whole by maintaining an open spirit.
“We look at it from a long-term perspective,” Valve engineer Loup Griffais told Bloomberg. “Someone that is creating one of those PCs might actually create some meaningful innovation that is really important for things to come on PC that becomes so universal and brings the experience forward by that much that now the experience is better for everyone and then people might buy more games.”
To that end, Valve also sees no need to fight the ‘exclusives’ war that Sony and Microsoft have recently recommitted to.
“We’re much more interested in having the whole PC catalog as our ‘launch exclusive,'” Giraffes said. “Restricting where people can play a game I don’t think is a great model, at least for us.”
I had to check to make sure, but even the Steam Deck’s free pack-in game, Aperture Desk Job, doesn’t require the device to play it (just a controller).
While Valve’s hardware is good, it’s the freely available SteamOS, with its console-like interface and relative ease of use, that has truly legitimized the category. Last year, we scored a Lenovo Legion Go handheld that runs SteamOS instead of Windows higher than the Steam Deck itself—an example of Valve embracing other companies making a better Steam machine.
But it’s also the savvy business call for Valve, whose marketplace dominance and sizable 30% cut from all sales on the platform (with some exceptions) means it shares in the profits no matter what.