(Image generated with Gemini Nano Banana Pro)
In November 2025, Valve “unveiled” the Steam Machine – a living room PC designed to bring your Steam library to the TV. Gaming press covered it as news, but what was missing from the headlines was that this is actually Steam Machine 2.0. Valve already tried this a decade ago, and it flopped.
So why try again?
Because Valve learned from that failure. They learned what Apple had figured out years earlier – hardware, software, and services need to, to quote Jobs, “just work” (2011 WWDC).
This isn’t speculation. Take it from Valve co-founder Gabe Newell’s own thoughts on threats to PC gaming:
The threat right now is that Apple has gained a huge amount of market share, and has a relatively obvious pathway towards entering the living room with their platform [...] I think Apple rolls the console guys really easily. The question is can we make enough progress in the PC space to establish ourselves there, and also figure out better ways of addressing mobile before Apple takes over the living room?
(Talk at University of Texas’s LBJ School of Public Affairs, via Polygon in 2013)
Newell wasn’t worried about Nintendo, PlayStation, or Xbox; he was worried about Apple, who weren’t even in gaming then (and still aren’t today).
His solution? Run Apple’s playbook, but do it in reverse.
Trajectories Mapped
... continue reading