The Steam Deck is here! Well, for some of us at least. As Valve begins shipping the first wave of its hotly anticipated handheld gaming PC, the dream of playing Steam games on the go finally becomes a reality. People are excited.
People are also skeptical. For as much as we associate Valve’s brand with quality, the PC gaming juggernaut has a long and fascinating history of experimentation and failure. In fact, those failures, how they’re connected, and the lessons Valve learned from them are what set up the Steam Deck for its potential success, at least based on our promising first impressions.
Steam-Powered Gaming
Valve rarely makes new video games; it has too many Dota 2 tournaments to run. So, how does it have the resources to produce something like the Steam Deck, a powerful boutique piece of gaming hardware? The answer is right in the name: Steam. If you want to buy a PC game, from indie titles to AAA blockbusters, chances are you’ll buy it through Steam—and Valve takes a cut of every transaction. With Steam padding its coffers, Valve is the closest thing PC gaming has to a first-party publisher, and the reason why only Valve can make the Steam Deck (even if Steam Deck alternatives exist).
But Steam began as a failure. When Steam launched in 2003, it was buggy, difficult to use, unstable when too many players logged on, and felt like an unwanted DRM layer. The Half-Life series isn’t quite as big now as it was back then; that’s what happens when a franchise languishes for 15 years before a VR revival. However, few games inspired as much frothing demand as Half-Life 2 in 2004. So, when Valve locked Gordon Freeman’s latest adventure behind Steam, people were incredibly upset. We didn’t want Steam.
Valve didn’t give up, though. Half-Life 2 may have given Steam a good foothold like any killer app launch title, but years of constant improvements turned Steam into a major player, the undisputed Editors’ Choice pick for PC gaming marketplaces. In fact, the average PC gamer owns so many Steam games, acquired for cheap during the app’s constant sales, that they’re intimidated by the idea of going through their backlogs. Animators use Steam to create incredible short films with Source Filmmaker. Even if I never buy a new Steam game, I would still want the Steam Deck just to leverage my existing Steam library. That’s what you call a redemption arc.
Ghost in the Machine
With Steam, Valve had PC gaming software on lock. Naturally, the company soon set its focus on hardware, where it once again encountered more failure. Valve sought to bring PC gaming to the living room, perhaps inspired by Microsoft (Valve founder Gabe Newell’s former employer) and its success with the Xbox console. We saw this in Steam Picture, a redesigned interface better suited for TV screens. But software wasn’t enough; Valve needed a box.
The problem is, Valve didn’t want to just make one box. Consoles, such as the PlayStation and Xbox, offer one convenient platform, but that also means they forfeit the modularity that PC gamers crave. Making a single Steam console goes against PC gaming’s philosophy. The solution? Make multiple Steam consoles, otherwise known as Steam Machines, which hit the market in 2015 after years of speculation.
Steam Machines referred to a range of home gaming computers, each with its own specs and prices. The one thing they shared was SteamOS, Valve’s Linux-based operating system tailor-made for the living room. You could make your own Steam Machine, or pick one up from Alienware or other manufacturers. For multiple generations, Microsoft, Nintendo, and Sony controlled the console space, but if anyone could make a dent in console gaming dominance, it would be Valve. I remember flying out to Valve’s Seattle office and returning with a Steam Machine review unit, one of my earliest PCMag assignments.
