Hardware development, much like games, is all about iteration. So, it's fair to say we wouldn't have the Steam Machine without the Steam Deck. We recently spoke to Valve engineers Yazan Aldehayyat and Pierre-Loup Griffais, and asked them whether they felt Valve's ongoing work on the Steam Deck meant there'd be less to fix with the Steam Machine.
"Oh, for sure, yeah." said Pierre-Loup. He goes on to acknowledge that the Steam Machine required a lot of focus on specific aspects Valve didn't have to worry about for the Steam Deck—things like the "discrete GPU, VRAM management, ray tracing performance, all this stuff."
But those unique features aside, the foundation of the two platforms is very similar. He says, "The other 99% of the work [on the Steam Machine was] already done in a sense."
Yazan also highlights that the way many people were already using their Steam Decks presented a compelling use case for the Steam Machine. "People were using their Steam Deck docked to their TV, and they're having a great experience without us doing any specific work," He says, "So, it was almost proven before we even started working on it in some ways."
Though our Wes rated the Steam Deck when it debuted back in 2022, the handheld gaming PC didn't enjoy the smoothest launch due to stock issues. The platform itself also had its share of teething troubles, including but not limited to a whiny fan, stick drift caused by a software problem, and a buggy dock. Valve continues to support the device and these kinks, plus a number of other quirks, have all been significantly ironed out. In other words, much of the foundation was already laid for whatever Valve would do next.
"We tend to want to work like that—incremental steps that always add up. When we worked on Steam Input, and just input stuff in general, the [original] Steam Controller, we were solving and kinda thinking around a lot of the same issues that we were trying to solve with Seam Deck," Pierre-Loup adds, "And we just kinda kept working on the same thing, just adding a little bit to it every time, right? It was very incremental and I think we're still working towards more increments, towards completing the experience overall."
None of that is to say it's been clear skies for the Steam Machine. For one thing, Valve feared stock issues would strike again at the start of this year. The impacts of the memory supply crisis on the Steam Machine cannot be understated, with 'Making it cheaper' sitting top of the list of things the engineers wish they could change about the hardware.
Getting back to Valve's further iterations, what can we expect from a Steam Machine sequel? According to Pierre-Loup and Yazan, the Steam Machine won't have as long of a timeframe as the Steam Deck, but new models are 'just a matter of when it makes sense.' In other words, with no end in sight for the RAMpocalypse until maybe 2028, don't expect to see a Steam Machine 2 (or a Steam Deck followup for that matter) any time soon.
