On the 15th floor of an upscale office building in Bellevue, Washington, security guards line the halls. They’re here to make sure we don’t stray — because I’m visiting Valve’s headquarters, a place few journalists ever get to go. The guards help escort me to a tiny demo room, where a pair of Valve engineers show me their pride and joy: a glowing 6-inch cube, barely bigger than a box of Kleenex, that they hope might be the future of video game consoles.
For a moment, I feel like I’m watching history repeat itself. Twelve years ago, in a different Valve office half a mile away, the maker of Half-Life and Portal showed me what ultimately became one of the biggest technology flops of the decade, a new gaming system called the Steam Machine. Back then, it also looked like Valve was building the video game console of the future. The company had combined its vibrant Steam storefront with the flexibility of PC hardware — a formula that appeared poised to wrest the living room away from Xbox and PlayStation dominance.
But the Steam Machines of that era suffered from being built on Linux, an operating system with a limited user base and an even more limited library of games. When the hardware finally launched in 2015, after two years of anticipation, the Steam Machines were dead on arrival.
The new Steam Machine, barely bigger than a box of Kleenex.
Now, Valve is once again announcing an alternative to PlayStation and Xbox. It’s once again calling it the Steam Machine. And the pitch, once again, is an open-source Linux PC for your living room instead of a proprietary box that only plays a specific library of games.
But the new Steam Machine is different from the previous console attempt in one key way: Valve isn’t waiting around for developers to lend their support. The company has spent the past decade building the underpinnings of a system that ought to make an enormous library of PC games just work on day one.
Five miles away from Microsoft’s global headquarters, Valve is preparing to steal gamers away from Xbox and Windows with a head-smackingly simple strategy — just let people play games.
The new Steam Controller.
The Steam Machine is a game console. From the moment you press the button on its familiar yet powerful new wireless gamepad, it should act the way you expect. It should automatically turn on your TV with HDMI commands, which a Valve engineer tells me was painstakingly tested against a warehouse full of home entertainment gear. It should let you instantly resume the last game you were playing, exactly where you left off, or fluidly buy new ones in an easily accessible store.
You’ll never see a desktop or command line unless you hunt for them; everything is navigable with joystick flicks and gamepad buttons alone. This is what we already get from Nintendo, PlayStation, and Xbox, yet it’s what Windows PCs have not yet managed to achieve.
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