Any mention of the Steam Machines is gone from the website
A few years back, Valve’s boss, Gabe Newell, was saying that Windows 8 is a really bad platform for gaming, along with its store, and vowed to create a new operating system based on Linux. Soon after that, the Steam Machines were also announced, and it looked like both Microsoft, and Sony will get a run for their money.
It turns out that making a PC/console from scratch is not that easy, not to mention that Linux is still not in great shape to run the latest game. Simply put, Microsoft had DirectX for too many years and switching to an open source alternative such as Vulkan takes a really long time.
The new PCs that were supposed to be small, powerful, and fit somewhere in the living room never arrived. A few hardware makers released some models, but they were costly and even ran Windows in conjunction with SteamOS. It was a mess.
The guys over GamingOnLinux noticed that the Steam Machine page on the official website is gone. The sad part about it no one really knows when that happened. It’s still available if you have the link, but that’s about it.
Valve still has the SteamLink in place, along with the Steam Controller, but it’s impossible to say if they won’t drop that as well. The latest sale on Steam has the SteamLink at just $1 plus shipping.
The Steam Controller is an amazing piece of technology and is hands down better than any other controller from Microsoft and Sony.
We can only hope that SteamOS, based on Debian, won’t go down the same path. It’s also true that the development pace for SteamOS has slowed significantly, and all mentions of the Linux platform seems to have disappeared from Valve’s mind.
