![]() Many Steam games are already optimized for your devices. With touch control schemes newly-optimized for hundreds of top titles, you can now access and play games from your PC while on the couch, or on the go. The Steam Link was discontinued back in 2018, but the Shield is still going strong.Play your Steam games on your phone, tablet, TV, or other PC using Steam Link. But it's more expensive and limited to the 70% of PC gamers who run Nvidia graphics cards in their main rigs. It's a powerful streaming box, possibly the best Android-based box around, and makes streaming your gaming PC into your living room so much easier, and better looking too. The downside is that Nvidia made something far superior in the Shield. And that made it a lot more palatable than the oft-delayed Steam Machines, and meant existing PC gamers could essentially have that living room PC console experience without having to buy a whole other PC. I actually had a better experience with a bare Raspberry Pi board and Steam In-Home Streaming.īut it was cheap. The hardware itself is pretty poor using some low-rent Marvell networking chip that struggled to be able to deliver the inputs from your controller at the same time as streaming anything above 720p from your gaming PC. It was a streaming box designed purely to link up to a gaming PC and take the games into your living room via the power of your home network.įor a start, I don't think it's good. The Steam Link is something I'm kind of on the fence about. It feels hollow, with poorly machined, sharp-edged plastic, and the button feel is really not my cup of tea, Earl Grey, hot. It's not just the pads that make using the Steam Controller a mostly unpleasant experience, the build quality feels like a sub-$10 Amazon joypad. There are many, who I'm sure will appear in the comments, who will defend the Steam Controller and its thumbpads to the grave, claiming that you just need to 'git gud' and then you will appreciate it. It meant there was a staggeringly steep learning curve to gaming with the new controller, which I could not get behind. The idea of haptic thumbpads was innovative, and they have made a return either side of the Deck's screen, but on a controller in the place of an actual analogue thumbstick was a step too far. Unfortunately, the final release of the device felt very far removed from my first experience with the Steam Controller. I actually quite liked the prototype controller when I first tried it out at the pre-CES unveiling of the first Steam Machines. Which means there's almost nothing left of Steam Machines.Īlongside the Steam Machines, Valve developed its own controller specifically designed for use with PC games from the couch. That's arguably why Valve has opted to make the Deck itself first, hoping that is what encourages other PC manufacturers to take the plunge with handheld gaming PC sporting SteamOS 3.0, itself now based on a fork of a different Linux distro, Arch. Obviously part of the issue was that Linux was far from ready for mainstream gaming acceptance, but also because Valve had to encourage the wider ecosystem first, garnering support from key manufacturers who struggled to see a return on the investment they made. The Steam Machines realistically never got going and were removed even from the Steam Store after a few years. Unfortunately, the limitations of a SteamOS without the recent Proton compatibility innovations made for a living room console that wouldn't play 90% of the games already sitting in your Steam library. Have a simple gaming PC that sits under your TV and boots directly into SteamOS and Big Picture Mode, thereby giving you a living room console that plays PC games. But then, neither did Falcon Northwest or Origin PC. Unfortunately, there was a long gap between the announcement and the final release of the first Steam Machines, and when Alienware eventually released its Alpha units they didn't actually come with SteamOS as it wasn't seen as fit for human consumption just yet. Based on its own fork of the Debian Linux distro, the Steam Machines ran the first iteration of SteamOS. ![]() The Deck is arguably the latest Steam Machine, but the original ethos was for Valve to create the essential PC living room console.
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