Valve has a new Steam Machine on the way next year, but if you have a long memory, you’ll remember that this isn’t the first time that the company has attempted to bring PC gaming to the living room. The original line of Steam Machine mini-PCs launched back in 2015, but poor sales eventually saw these devices fade quietly into the background. So what’s to stop history from repeating itself? According to Valve, a better video game catalogue and an effort to give developers an easier time when porting games over to the new Steam Machine are some of the key factors that the company has focused on.
“We learned from the first Steam Machines that we needed to make our developers’ lives a lot easier. So now we have Proton, right? Which is essentially just a compatibility layer that lets games run on Linux that are originally meant for Windows,” engineer Yazan Aldehayyat said to Rock Paper Shotgun.
“Yeah, I think it’s really about the games catalogue,” fellow engineer Pierre-Loup Griffais added. “Being able to control your TV, boot directly into the game, launch games, and install them in a way that meant you didn’t have to install drivers, or that you didn’t have to clean up your system after you installed and uninstalled a couple of games–all of those elements were there. We just didn’t have a really compelling games library.”
