Valve commented on the recent removal of Steam Machines from the navigation menus on its website. The firm said that the page was only receiving a low amount of traffic so it decided to delist it.
Valve recently removed Steam Machines from the Steam Store navigation menus which naturally led people to believe that Valve was giving up on that initiative, also leading to concern about its operating system, SteamOS. In a statement posted on its blog today, the firm said that it’s still committed to SteamOS and Linux. It said the main reason for removing Steam Machines from the navigation menu was due to the low amount of traffic the page was getting.
It was also eager to point out that the Steam Machines page is still up, but not linked to from the menu:
The firm says that the Steam Machine initiative helped it better understand the gaming landscape on Linux, and allowed it to come to the decision that it needed to help Linux gain first-class support for Vulkan, and gain better tooling and driver support.
Valve says that it has other Linux initiatives in the pipeline but that it’s not ready to divulge information about those just yet. So while the firm says Steam Machines still exist, for how much longer is anyone’s guess; its focus has definitely pivoted to SteamOS and Linux now.
While Valve is not ready to come out with its plans officially just yet, Gabe Newell recently admitted he was jealous of Nintendo’s ability to design games specifically for their own hardware. The firm believes that it, too, can tackle any hardware projects now and says it has a number of new games lined up, so perhaps it will try again with a rebranded console powered by SteamOS.
Source: Valve
