Steam engines were a great idea on the way to the steam bridge, Valve says

When Valve announced the Steam Deck, its concept for a portable gaming PC, many couldn’t help but think of the Steam Machines.

Announced in September 2013 and finally released in November 2015, these were small, prebuilt PCs that ran Valve’s SteamOS and came with the Steam controller. Initially, Valve gained support from various PC vendors such as Alienware, Origin PC, Zotac, and Maingear; However, most of them had already ditched steam engines by the end of 2016, and it is believed that less than half a million units have been sold in total (although Valve has never released a official sales figures). Even Valve itself finally pulled steam engines from Steam in April 2018.

Steam Deck is something Valve is for the “long haul” in, opening up the PC is its “superpower”

Speaking to IGN, however, the engineers behind the Steam Deck explained that the steam engines, alongside other products, helped Valve pin down the next handheld.

Greg Coomer: Steam Deck looks like the culmination of much of this earlier work. Steam Link has proven to be very useful in establishing what it means to stream games from PC. The Steam Controller was really valuable, it taught us a lot about what is necessary and valuable for a customer. So all of those previous products really feel like they informed this one.

Laurent Yang: When we say climax, we really mean it’s not just the combination of the hardware we’ve built, but also the experience our team members have gained from making hardware products. These are all things we’ve done before, and we’re just building on all of that past experience to make this device as good as it can be.

Greg Coomer: Steam Machines was a great idea. The operating system wasn’t quite there, the number of games you could play on the system wasn’t quite there. Really, we’ve looked at a lot of what we’ve learned as boxes that we need to check out if we’re ever going to talk to customers about this category again. We didn’t really want to bring this device to customers until we felt it was ready and all of those boxes were checked, basically. But definitely, by doing this, I don’t think we would have made that much progress on Steam Deck if we hadn’t had this experience.

Considering the steam engines, do you still trust Valve to deliver a great product with the Steam Deck? Tell us in the comments.