After perfecting Proton over the past two years, with the Deck OLED refresh out of the way, and given their previous talk about a ‘new Steam controller’ and their continued interest in VR, the scene now is set for Valve to release its Steam Machine console designed to wirelessly stream high-end PC games at 800p to your Deck (with working suspend/resume), or VR games to an HMD via foveated rendering, or 1080p upscalable content to living room TVs that can be played with a new Steam Controller.
I predict such a product (Steam Console + HMD + controller 2.0) to be available for preorder at the OG Deck’s 2 year release anniversary around February 2024.
This might also explain why Valve wasn’t too keen on increasing the rendering power of the Deck, with a powerful console on the way that can easily stream to it.
I just hope the first actual Steam Machine is powerful enough to fluently handle new tech like path tracing etc, especially at the lower resolutions needed for the Deck.
What are your thoughts? Is Winter/Spring 2024 too early for the Steam console?
If you listen closely Valve is already telegraphing their next move. They’ve been mentioning expanding SteamOS outside of the Steam Deck for a while, but they’re talking about it more definitively now, with a goal of bringing it to other handhelds, first, and then eventually PC.
The Steam Deck was strategic. It was a way to increase Steam sales by filling an existing gap in the market. It also served to prove the viability of SteamOS as a platform. They don’t need additional hardware now to expand further. They can take over the rest of the handheld market and then use existing HTPC setups to break into the living room.
Well they had the ‘Steam Link’ but you can remote in wirelessly with your PC on SD already anyway.