Gabe Newell and his company believe that the previously sold Steam Machines computers helped significantly create the Steam Deck.

Steam Controller? While it was innovative, it did not bring a revolution (while the DualSense with the adaptive triggers and the haptic feedback did, which is why Microsoft wants to have a similar product, as we mentioned before…). Steam Link? While it worked, the app itself wasn’t beefy enough for it. Steam Machines? It’s rare to see anyone to this day own one of the pre-built computers.

Greg Coomer, Scott Dalton, and Lawrence Yang, Valve‘s designers, were interviewed by IGN. “Steam Deck feels like the culmination of a lot of that earlier work. Steam Link has proven valuable in establishing what it means to stream games from PCs. The Steam Controller was valuable; it taught us a lot about what’s necessary and valuable to a customer. So all those earlier products feel like they’ve informed this one,” Coomer said.

Dalton added that their biggest problem was the “chicken and egg problem.” Valve was pushing gaming on Linux (as the Steam Machines were Linux-based), but the devs weren’t keen on porting due to a lack of players on that platform, and the people didn’t feel like switching from Windows due to a lack of games.

This situation led Valve to create Proton (a compatibility layer that enables Windows-based games to run on Linux). “It was imperative for us to be able to talk directly to developers and say, hey, look, the Steam Deck runs your game. You don’t have to port,” Yang said. “Steam Machines was an excellent idea. The operating system wasn’t quite there; the number of games you could play on the system wasn’t quite there. We’ve looked at a lot of what we’ve learned as boxes that we needed to check if we were ever going to talk to customers again about that category.

We didn’t want to bring this device to customers until we felt it was ready and that all those boxes were checked, essentially. But, doing that, I don’t think we would have made as much progress on Steam Deck if we hadn’t had that experience,” Coomer added.

They do seem to have learned from their mistakes.

Source: PCGamer