Valve says Steam Machine failure gave way to Steam Deck

More than likely, I’m not the only person whose first reaction to the Steam Deck was something like, “Haven’t Valve already tried this?” Valve’s hardware products have really traveled the gold index spectrum from the VR Valve Index to the less impressive console-style Steam Machine. Sure enough, Valve says that “Steam Deck looks like the culmination of much of that earlier work.” They say Proton was the way to go in helping them solve the “chicken and eggs” problem the steam engine fell victim to.

In another interview with IGN, three Steam Deck designers sat down to discuss how the Steam Deck was a puzzle that required both hardware and software issues to be addressed. On the hardware side, they felt that it was only recently that a portable device like the Deck could really play the latest games at the intended settings. Even with handheld technology sorted out, software has been a sticking point for their hardware plans in the past.

“The steam engine was a great idea,” says Greg Coomer. “The operating system wasn’t quite there. The number of games you could play on the system wasn’t quite there.” Despite these flaws, Coomer says, “I don’t think we would have made so much progress on Steam Deck if we hadn’t had this experience.”

Scott Dalton talks about the Steam Engine “chicken and egg” problem, which required both enough playable games on Linux to make the device worth it and enough device owners to make the device worth it. the support is well worth it for the developers. “It got us down this Proton path where now there are all these games that actually work.” Proton is Valve’s compatibility layer allowing Windows games to run on a Linux machine like Steam Deck.

“It was really important for us to be able to talk directly to the developers and say to them, ‘Hey, look, the Steam Deck is running your game. You don’t have to wear it,’” says Lawrence Yang.

Indeed, there are a lot of games that work on Proton, although games with anti-cheat are still being sorted.

In other details of Steam Deck, we expect it to support PC game mods, make gyro aiming more common, and possibly bring Ubisoft games back to Steam.