It's Time to Bring Back the Steam Machine
It's Time to Bring Back the Steam Machine
With all the layoffs and industry volatility, I think now is a great time to consider bringing back the Steam Machine, with a few changes.
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It's called a Mini PC or a NUC. They already exist. Go buy one and slap Steam on it. Done.
The people who actually want this have already done it.
Yah. Makes more sense for Valve to spend their time improving Proton or working on their reference handheld device. A reference desktop device is a solution looking for a problem.
Valve's big advantage here is the same as it was with the steam deck: they can sell at a loss and make it back on software sales.
A lot of the appeal of consoles is a polished experience and that they're generally less expensive up front compared to a comparable power gaming PC. Many consoles are sold at a loss to hit that price point. Valve could actually make cheap gaming PCs that can compete in price and offer a smooth user experience.
Install steam. Run in big picture mode. Done. That's a steam machine. I don't get what you think a dedicated machine is going to do any differently. There is a reason Steam abandoned the idea themselves.
Install steam. Run in big picture mode. Done. That's a steam machine. I don't get what you think a dedicated machine is going to do any differently. There is a reason Steam abandoned the idea themselves.
Big picture mode on my windows PC and the gamescope-focused UI on the Deck look similar, but offer very different capabilities IME.
To name a handful: FSR support for all games - including those that don't support it, per-game hardware performance profiles, excellent hardware integration - not just limited to the instant sleep and instant wake. With the third party Decky Store you can also configure the fan profile to your liking, control music apps running in the background on the Deck, and more. On the PC BPM these sadly do not exist
I 100% prefer playing on the deck any day of the week - the OS simply makes it so straightforward to jump into a game and forget about needing to also think about maintaining a desktop: no Windows updates, no telemetry service CPU spiking, and no Windows resetting my customized settings or forcing Edge browser defaults after an update.
That said, I don't particularly have an interest in a full blown Steam Machine - for me the Deck works just fine when docked.
You can install Bazzite instead of Windows to solve the above problems.
Isn't big picture only 720p?