Valve has taken the Steam Machines page from the front of the store client, and they’ve removed the listing under the hardware dropdown. Although you can get to the page via a direct link, potential buyers without it may never find it on their own. A Steam death sentence for sure.
The kicker is that the catalog alteration may have occurred on March 20th. It took the fansite, Gaming on Linux to notice the change a week later! A sad indicator of just how few people cared.
I bought my wife a steam machine to use as a regular computer…(using it to type this) and I like it as a small portable computer. Tried to play some games on it and the fan goes nuts very quickly…and with my kids computer on, pops our circuit breaker. That never happens with his computer and my larger faster gaming desktop on.
so, gaming machine, no, personal computer with a very small footprint, very nice.
Speaking for myself, I always confused the Steam Machine with the Steam Link. I could not always remember that both existed. There is also Steam Play, the Steam Controller, etc. etc. Hard to keep track of.
Also, I guess I just don’t want a console for playing in front of the couch, period. At least, at that price.
ValveOS was always just a threat to Microsoft to back off on their iOSing dreams of Windows with the Windows8 release. As soon as it was clear that those dreams failed Valve no longer cared.
I think it doesn’t help that none of them, except the Alienware one with the big bright Steam logo, look like they have anything to do with Steam. There’s no unified look, or sense of style.
Dell/Alienware, to their credit, was the one company who seemed to “get it” regarding Steam Machines. It’s a shame they didn’t stick it out another generation and offer a refresh with 1000-series nVidia cards. Valve also did the machines no favors by forcing no real guidelines or spec targets to be a “Certified Steam Machine”, leaving a good vendor like Alienware lost in the shuffle of hot garbage that vendors like Syber offered.
Valve could’ve made these more attractive by bundling in a bunch of Steam credit (say, $100-150) or offering the manufacturers x% of sales from their hardware IDs up to a certain dollar amount. An Alienware Alpha form factor with a 1050Ti, i3, and 1TB of storage for $400-500 with some Steam credit thrown in would be a nice offer in-line with the deals the XboneX or PS4 Pro are getting these days.
I bought one of the Alienware Alphas right after they came out - I got it with Win 10, added some RAM and swapped in an SSD, and it’s been a great little workhorse for all kinds of indie games and even some AAA titles (at 1080p :) - one of the best PC purchases I’ve made, even if it wasn’t really a “SteamMachine” (not running Steam OS, no Steam Controller).
It certainly has paid off for Valve as we’ve spent a few hundred dollars on games and in-game purchases off Steam with this box. I was never totally sold on the vision (where the steam machine effectively becomes a console + controller) but I love the form factor and price point.
PC gaming is still a pain even when I have extra PCs dedicated to gaming: being on the latest NVIDIA Geforce drivers can help newer games but break older games at the same time.
We’ve noticed that what started out as a routine cleanup of the Steam Store navigation turned into a story about the delisting of Steam Machines. That section of the Steam Store is still available, but was removed from the main navigation bar based on user traffic. Given that this change has sparked a lot of interest, we thought it’d make sense to address some of the points we’ve seen people take away from it.
While it’s true Steam Machines aren’t exactly flying off the shelves, our reasons for striving towards a competitive and open gaming platform haven’t significantly changed. We’re still working hard on making Linux operating systems a great place for gaming and applications. We think it will ultimately result in a better experience for developers and customers alike, including those not on Steam.
Through the Steam Machine initiative, we’ve learned quite a bit about the state of the Linux ecosystem for real-world game developers out there. We’ve taken a lot of feedback and have been heads-down on addressing the shortcomings we observed. We think an important part of that effort is our ongoing investment in making Vulkan a competitive and well-supported graphics API, as well as making sure it has first-class support on Linux platforms.
Recently we announced Vulkan availability for macOS and iOS, adding to its existing availability for Windows and Linux. We also rolled out Steam Shader Pre-Caching, which will let users of Vulkan-based applications skip shader compilation on their local machine, significantly improving initial load times and reducing overall runtime stuttering in comparison with other APIs. We’ll be talking more about Shader Pre-Caching in the coming months as the system matures.
At the same time, we’re continuing to invest significant resources in supporting the Vulkan ecosystem, tooling and driver efforts. We also have other Linux initiatives in the pipe that we’re not quite ready to talk about yet; SteamOS will continue to be our medium to deliver these improvements to our customers, and we think they will ultimately benefit the Linux ecosystem at large.
There already was an alternative to DirectX on Linux and Android, OpenGL. MacOS/iOS has Metal (and technically OpenGL also, but not really).
The problem there is Windows games aren’t being developed on OpenGL and DirectX isn’t cross-platform. Vulkan is cross-platform, including mobile and consoles, and very high-performance too.
Vulkan runs on Linux, Android, Windows, PS4, and Nintendo Switch. It doesn’t work natively on MacOS, iOS, and Xbox One because Apple and Microsoft won’t allow it, but Khronos is building translation shims to fix that, and they’re supposed to be very high performance.
Well yeah, OpenGL has been mostly dead for years. Vulkan is a bunch of really smart engineers deciding to make it relevant for modern gaming again, with what look like really promising results.
I love my Steam Link + Steam Controller. I don’t think they’re just clearing inventory. I think they’re generally quite popular, much more so than Steam machines. Some of us prefer gaming from a sofa rather than a desk, and with the Link we also get the benefits of PC gaming over consoles.
Prices drop because that’s what electronic prices generally do over time.
Would that even work? I assume there’s some hardware trickery in the Link, because currently Roku can only screen mirror a PC via Miracast, which is useless for desktops. Not sure about iOS but I know they want you to use Airplay, and the only other methods I’ve seen use a dedicated server on the PC and are nowhere near as good as mirroring with the Link.
