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A decade ago, Valve attempted to bring PC gaming to the living room with its own ‘console' style mini-ITX PCs known as Steam Machines. Unlike the Steam Deck, Valve opted to pass off Steam Machine development to third-party partners and focused on the software side of things. This ultimately led to Steam Machines being branded as a failure. Now ten years on and armed with more experience in hardware products, Valve looks to be bringing back the Steam Machine.
According to eXtas1s, who has a reliable track record with leaks, Valve is readying a new Steam console to compete against Xbox and PlayStation. Apparently, this system will continue to use custom AMD hardware, this time based on the RDNA 4 architecture.
While the Steam Machines failed back in 2015, Valve has drastically improved its hardware capabilities since then. At this point, the company has sold millions of Steam Deck handheld systems, and the new version of SteamOS is far beyond what Valve started off with. On top of that, Valve has also been working on new Steam Controller designs, seemingly for a Steam Controller 2 launch. Chances are, a Steam console would ship with one of these new gamepads.
Whether or not a Steam home console could really take market share away from Xbox or PlayStation remains to be seen.
KitGuru Says: Would you like to see the Steam Machine make a return with new and improved hardware, combined with the latest version of SteamOS? Perhaps this is the kick some developers need to support SteamOS. After all, we still have major games like Destiny that don't support the Deck, despite the fact that the game's anti-cheat system can and does work with Proton, the compatibility took Valve uses to make Windows-only games run on SteamOS.
