Steam Machines Helped Bring Steam Deck To Life

Maybe it wasn’t a complete failure.

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As much as Steam Machines are considered a major failure for Valve in a hardware market, there wouldn’t be a Steam Deck without them. At least as far as Valve’s concerned.

During an interview with IGN, Valve’s Greg Coomer and Lawrence Yang explained how the team has learned from its past mistakes. The designers explained how the lessons learned from earlier hardware units, including Steam Machines, Steam Link, and Steam Controller, were instrumental in making the Steam Deck possible today.

“We didn’t really want to bring this device to customers until we felt it was ready,” Greg Coomer says. He goes on to say that he didn’t think the company would’ve made as much progress on Steam Deck if it didn’t have that experience with Steam Machine’s failure, as well as work on other devices in the past.

Lawrence Yang elaborated on this, explaining, “All of it is stuff that we’ve done before, and we’re just drawing on all that prior experience to make this device as good as we can make it.”

Designer Scott Dalton chimed in to explain the Steam Machines shortcomings. He says it was a “classic chicken and egg problem”, since it was a Linux-based PC before games ran on Linux.

In another recent revelation, we learned that Steam Deck early prototypes originally started as the combination of a Steam Controller with a Steam Link inside. Valve actually went on to prototype such a product back in the early 2010s, but technical hurdles prevented it from coming to fruition at that time.

As much as the Steam Deck looks promising and attractive to many today, it wasn’t always like that. According to the devs, at one point, the team created some “terrifying prototypes” nicknamed the Ugly Baby, leaving us to wonder how exactly the upcoming handheld console might have looked back then.

Despite having some similarities with the Nintendo Switch, Valve insists the Steam Deck is going after a whole different audience, aiming for “high-end PC gamers” first. Therefore, the device will be aiming at 30 FPS as the minimum playable target even for the heaviest modern triple-A titles.

Link Source : https://www.thegamer.com/steam-deck-inspired-steam-deck-valve/