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Valve's track record with non-VR hardware is, to put it politely, not good. Seven years after launching the Steam machine (2014) initiative, there are no Steam

• schmorptron 5y ago
  That being said, they did support both the Steam Controller and Link for a very long time, and the Steam Controller continues to be used by many (The configurator and services for sharing the configurations work all the same today). Steam Link has mostly been replaced by software solutions like an Android App, or it being straight up built into some TVs.
  • chimpansteve 5y ago
    I've got a hardware Link - it's still being supported now. It had an update a couple of weeks ago.
    • alias_neo 5y ago
      Yes, but I've had 4K monitors and 4K TV for almost as long as the Link has existed. It very quickly became useless to me the moment I upgraded to a 4K TV. The Steam controller is also an utterly horrible UX so the pair were just a waste of money that sat in a drawer until I stuck them on eBay. A 4K Steam Link should have been an obvious iteration, and a controller with actual buttons and sticks (I half-joke about the controller, I know some love its touch nature, I just hated it, could never keep my thumbs in the right spot).
      • DeliriumTrigger 5y ago
        Psst... PS4 and Xbox One rendered 90% of the games at 900p. It's just your pretentious self who thinks it needs 4k.
        • alias_neo 5y ago
          Ive been PC gaming at 4K for several years now. Who mentioned consoles? I'm not sure why you saw my want for 4k visuals in the single player, visual, story based games I prefer to play, as an opportunity to attack me personally. Perhaps read the rules or go back to Reddit or wherever that attitude is welcome.
          • DeliriumTrigger 5y ago
            No you have not. You pretend to have but you didn't.
          • joshschreuder 5y ago
            Didn’t the Steam Link stream video from a full on PC? I’m not sure the 4K encoding and streaming in near-realtime story is particularly good even today, let alone a year or two ago when a 4K Steam Link might have been a possible hardware iteration. Though they could have done 4K UI / other apps like an Android TV device I suppose.
            • alias_neo 5y ago
              That's correct, the Steam Link is a thin client for your gaming PC. From a consumer perspective, people have been rocking 4K TVs and 4K PCs for a few years, and even consoles have been outputting 4K (even if they're rendering less) for a while, so one would hope to have seen some sort of 4K offering. I can see discussions on the Steam forums as far back as 2016 of people streaming 4K in-home from PC to HTPC or similar, so it's certainly _possible_, even 4-5 years ago. I've done some 4K streaming from my gaming PC to laptop hooked up to TV in living room in the past without any (more) issues than I usually have being a purely Linux gamer. According to a topic near the top of the Raspberry Pi / Steam Link, Steam Forum, 4K is _possible_ (no indication of what it looks/feels like) with a Pi 4B these days.
• FemmeAndroid 5y ago
  To be clear, it's not like there were never steam machines for sale, but manufacturers stopped making them. Here, you can see five for sale in 2016. https://web.archive.org/web/20160225105722/https://store.steampowered.com/sale/steam_machines https://web.archive.org/web/20160225105722/https://store.ste... I don't know that Valve were ever going to make physical devices themselves (other than the 100 they made for beta testers.) From pretty early on, and definitely by Steam Dev Days 2014, it seemed to me like they were trying to make a platform for hardware manufacturers to build linux computers made for gaming, rather than manufacturing their own computers. As for the Steam Controller, and Steam link, I completely agree. Steam Link was a poor showing, and the Steam Controller, while neat, really could have used a V2 upgrade. More generally, I don't know that Valve has made a truly successful product or game other than maybe Halflife Alex in well over a decade. And even with Alex, the player base is so limited due to being a VR exclusive. It's pretty sad.
  • rightbyte 5y ago
    I was going to say Portal 2 but realized that it is from 2011 ... Dota 2 is atleast barely in a decade from 2013. But ye, it is underwelming.
  • loup-vaillant 5y ago
    > Halflife Alex Alyx. Sounds the same, but this spelling has the right gender. > And even with [Alyx], the player base is so limited due to being a VR exclusive. I have played it, and am currently replaying it with developer comments on. There's a reason it's a VR exclusive. There is no way this could transfer over a flat screen. VR interactions are fundamentally different. Motion sickness severely constrain how many players may move about (it gets better with practice, but Alyx is aimed at beginners). The ability to pick up objects and throw them about is crucial to immersion. The kind of weapons that work in VR are different (1 handed mostly). Pacing is different we move slower in VR than we do in a flat screen FPS, often by a factor of 5. This modify level design and how to manage tension. Even combat must be paced slower, especially at the beginning where players have yet to reload their guns seamlessly (requiring gestures is more immersive, but there's a learning curve, and doing it under duress requires serious training). A flat screen port of Half Life: Alyx would not be a good game. Most rooms would feel cramped. Some parts of the game would be cumbersome. Others like the Jeff chapter (Jeff is an unkillable monster with very good hearing) would swing between being overly punishing or way too easy. Many puzzles would have to be cut or replaced by something else. Some weapon features like an aiming laser would not even make sense (unless you remove the aiming dot at the centre of the screen, making aiming way too punishing). An inventory of 2 items (plus ammo) would feel limited for no good reason the player can see (one item per wrist is an obvious good reason in VR). Some games, like vehicle simulators (car, plane, spaceship…) can indeed have good flat screen and VR version. Standing first person games however cannot. The difference between a keyboard/mouse/gamepad and a pair of knuckles/Vive/touch is too great to compensate for, in either direction.
• maxsilver 5y ago
  I agree, Valve needs to better support hardware to build trust. But I think some perspective is worth mentioning. Every Valve hardware device has had a longer maintenance and support lifecycle than any Google Nexus/Pixel device ever sold. Valve has consistently been better than Google about their hardware + software lifecycles. It's totally fair to compare the two, but that doesn't necessarily make them equivalent. Valve's track record isn't good, but it's not bad either -- it's not like Google's.
  • TulliusCicero 5y ago
    That's silly. The point is that the series of products has been discontinued; if Valve had a v2 version of the Steam Link or Steam Controller, nobody would be talking about this.
    • maxsilver 5y ago
      A company is allowed to iterate on products, and yes that sometimes includes discontinuing a specific product, but that's not necessarily the same as abandoning a market. Nintendo has discontinued the GameBoy / DS line. Because they now sell the Switch Lite, which is their new way to solve that problem. You can argue "Nintendo sucks, they discontinued their handhelds, we can't trust them on hardware", and they sort-of have. But they gave that product line 10 years of support, and they haven't abandoned those folks, the Switch Lite exists for them now to bridge over to the new mobile gaming market. Not all "discontinuings" are of equivilant weight as Google's product-killings. Steam doesn't sell a Steam Controller, true. Because much of the Steam Controller stuff now supports nearly any controller (Switch Pro / DualShock 4 / Xbox One XINPUT, including the full accessibility controller / etc). Yeah, it's not quite the same as the Steam Controller (no touchpad joysticks), but they didn't abandon that market. And every Steam Controller ever sold is still fully supported in software, even in new games made this year (6 years after launch). Steam doesn't sell a Steam Link. But they didn't abandon it, they upgraded it. Steam Link now works on Windows, Mac, Linux, Apple iPhone, iPad, Apple TV, Android TV + Android Phones, Samsung Smart TVs, and such. They don't sell you their own box anymore, because that would be super redundant, most of the TV boxes people already own can run Steam Link already, and they continue to support Steam Link on many different clients to this day. Last time I checked, even original v1 Steam Links are still fully supported in all software + service (6+ years after launch). --- In comparison, Google often just hard up kills stuff. Google Reader died, replaced by nothing. Android Things died, replaced by nothing. Google Cloud Print died, replaced by nothing. There's an entire website dedicated to just listing random stuff Google's killed - https://killedbygoogle.com/ https://killedbygoogle.com/ . At least half of those products or services have no graceful fallover or upgrade path to anything else. I get that it's a fair comparison. But I strongly believe it's not an equivalent one. As someone who has bought plenty of Google and Valve hardware over the years, I'd be a lot happier with Google as a company if they put even just half the effort on the support and maintenance lifecycle for their products, that Valve already does for nearly everything they touch.
• mobiledev2014 5y ago
  "Consistently positive reviews from users" are not enough. Steam Link became obsolete, and the controller just didn't sell (despite being excellent IMO!) This could see a similar fate, or it could be the breakout hit made possible by their learning from past hardware
  • reincarnate0x14 5y ago
    Steam controller suffered from doing too much, I think. People want plug-in and go from their couch games, having a fully programmable all-singing all-dance super controller turned out to be more effort than most wanted to deal with.
    • ThatMedicIsASpy 5y ago
      Steams built in controller customization features are worth it alone - for every controller. No digi pad makes them bad for retro games but I have others for that.
    • brundolf 5y ago
      The main value-prop for the steam controller was its touch pads, which allowed you to play mouse-based games from the couch (in an era when controller support for PC games was spotty). They were a cool idea, and they worked, but what ended up happening is all the games just added support for regular controllers, and that was just a better experience.
  • 22c 5y ago
    > the controller just didn't sell From my perspective, the controller was never sold. I could not buy it anywhere, I am assuming they were only made in a relatively small batch and sold mostly in mainland US. I had been looking since it was released for a place to buy it at a reasonable price, but could only find exorbitantly priced resellers that would ship from USA.
    • deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
• faitswulff 5y ago
  Valve has the same problem Google has: no new venture will ever have the same margins as their primary cash cow and therefore won't be worth maintaining.
  • hobs 5y ago
    And this is why you separate your business units so that your hardware peeps can manage their own P/L.
  • e_y_ 5y ago
    On the other hand, they need to protect themselves from threats to their cash cow. Hardware and operating systems play a part in that, which is why Google needs Android to ensure access to mobile eyeballs. Valve created Steam Machines as a hedge against the Windows Store becoming like the App Store (walled garden) but neither took off. Whether VR will become a major part of gaming is yet to be seen, although Facebook has invested heavily in their Oculus Quest ecosystem which does not require Steam or Windows.
• bryanlarsen 5y ago
  All of those are still supported. Pulling a Google would require them to stop supporting them. Everybody stops building things that don't sell well. Very few continue supporting them. I would not hesitate to buy hardware from Valve.
• tlhunter 5y ago
  Differentiation might include some sort of game+device compatability badge or certification, built in steam controller and all that customization, and game discounts/rental program when played on the device.
• CivBase 5y ago
  I own a Steam Controller, Steam Link, and a Valve Index. They're all excellent devices and I really wish I had purchased a second Steam Controller and Steam Link when they were clearing their inventory. Even after discontinuing the hardware, the devices have continued to function as well as they ever have (actually even better thanks to continued updates). I'm not surprised Valve has trouble continuing to produce hardware with low sales volumes. That said, they have certainly proven themselves to me with the quality of their devices so this one naturally has my attention. I don't buy products until reviews are out, but this one sounds pretty good on paper. The GPD Win 3, Aya Neo, and One Xplayer have all already proved the concept is viable and I'm excited to see Valve's take on it. Also, to be fair the whole reason they stopped making Steam Links is because there are many other products out there now which can run the Steam Link software. Their hardware offering simply became redundant. There's no shame in discontinuing a product which no longer makes sense for the overwhelming majority of potential buyers.
• michaelt 5y ago
  Valve's efforts in hardware (and Linux support) are motivated by getting leverage in negotiations with Microsoft. After all, Microsoft could pull an iOS and insist on a cut of all sales on Windows - or make the microsoft store the only way to distribute software. Like a pilot with a parachute, they'll dutifully maintain it - but they hope not to need it.
• baq 5y ago
  steam controller is amazing if only due to the backside buttons. these are apparently patented by a patent troll.