What Valve would need to do to make a Steam Console a success

While the most recent rumour of a Steam Console was complete junk, it did get me thinking on what Valve would need to do to make a Steam Console / Steam Machine actually successful.

Valve, thankfully, have a lot more experience now. We're a long way from the original failure of Steam Machines, with the Steam Deck selling multiple millions and continuing to go strong. It's spent multiple years in the top revenue lists on Steam at this point so Valve really did well there. Can they actually move their experience over to a new living room box though? There's quite a lot they would need to actually do, which is part of why I think it's still probably a long way off.

For starters: one single main configuration. This is the strength of the Steam Deck! Having one main model. Okay, there's technically two with the LCD and OLED, but in terms of performance they're basically the same. Different storage sizes is fine and something I would expect. Don't make Microsoft's mistake with the Series S and Series X, with the Series S causing issues. Sticking to performance one model would be the most obvious thing here. It's easier and cheaper for Valve on production and far less confusion for consumers then either.

Availability too is an issue. It's not good enough to be just available on the Steam store, they need to partner with some retail stores. This is something that holds back the Steam Deck a bit. At least they can finally ship to Australia now though. You need regular folks to be able to just walk into a store and pick one up.

Now we need to talk about Steam Big Picture Mode (Gaming Mode on the Steam Deck / SteamOS) and the Steam Store experience because — it's pretty rough. The UI as a whole is generally on the buggy side even on the best of days, this is something Valve would seriously need to put some dedicated full-time effort into sorting. This just wouldn't fly for the masses that go for living room consoles. The Xbox, PlayStation and Switch are all incredibly streamlined. Compared with the experience on the Steam Deck, it's just far messier.

Pictured - Steam Store on Steam Deck

I've lost count of the amount of times the UI has lost the position of where I was when flicking between screens, which is seriously irritating, or when it gives you that dreaded error screen where the UI has just crashed after Steam Client updates.

A better game Verified system. With the current Steam Deck Verified, Valve are basically doing what they can to at least give you some sort of idea of a game working or not. It has a fair amount of issues, like games clearly having the wrong rating here and there but the very idea of Verified or Playable for a living room box would probably need to be gone. Perhaps I'm wrong there, and the general masses would be willing to put up with more issues, but I wouldn't have thought so.

Valve don't seem to apply the ratings the same across various titles. Some note they're Unsupported on Steam Deck due to performance, yet we see Verified titles coming with massive performance problems. Valve's verification system would need to be more in-depth on their end, tighter and just better controlled for it not to cause a fair bit of outrage if a Steam Console went on to sell well.

Realistically, that's a tall order though. Steam has how many thousands of games? Just in 2024 alone Steam saw nearly 19,000 games getting released.

Thankfully, with their existing verification system, a lot of it would translate to new hardware. Something to remember here though is that unlike traditional consoles, games wouldn't be made specially for it. Just like the Steam Deck right now, you would be either running a game built for Windows PCs through Proton or a Native Linux game.

Pictured - Steam Library on Steam Deck

Still, a strength of Valve's compatibility layer Proton and their Linux Runtime, is that they do at least have a sort-of stable environment to do these compatibility checks. They already add various special game-specific tweaks, and if the game runs with Proton on Steam Deck or another Linux system, it should also work on a Steam Console. But this whole verified situation would only get more complex with another full system of their own thrown into the mix.

As incredible as Proton is, there's problems there as well. I just don't think it's quite ready for such a big push as a full Steam Console. We still see lots of games releasing with issues where they don't run in Proton, or end up breaking repeatedly with updates.

Thinking more on that point, pulling in various major developers for the launch and have them get their games ready for it. Something Valve tried with the original Steam Machines, but with Proton to run Windows games it makes that a whole lot simpler.

We don't even know how they plan to handle any compatibility listings for the Lenovo Legion Go S with SteamOS yet, if they plan to at all. I asked previously, and got no reply from either Valve or Lenovo on that. I assume it would be down to Lenovo, as Valve won't want to be responsible for every system from every vendor on compatibility ratings.

We come now to the biggest issue though — anti-cheat. If something like this is to be a true success in the eyes of the general public, this is the huge one. Right now, we have no solution to this issue. But with more users comes more support, so eventually game developers and anti-cheat makers would be forced to adapt somehow.
Note: We have our own page tracking anti-cheat compatibility.

Just imagine for a moment all the people picking up their fancy new Steam Console to find out they can't play GTA Online, Apex Legends, Fortnite, PUBG: BATTLEGROUNDS, Battlefield, EA sports games and the list goes on. They're all massively popular games, even if you my dear reader are not bothered by them, they're pretty much essential for this.

Pictured - PUBG: BATTLEGROUNDS, credit: PUBG Corporation

There's no doubt numerous other things I'm missing here, this is just me getting some thoughts down, some wants and needs. There's also the subject of streaming media apps like Netflix, Disney+, YouTube and so on. Yeah I know, it's supposed to be a gaming machine and the focus should be on that but people have come to expect support for all of it together.

Oh, of course, the essential part — a good bundled controller. You need something to actually play games. While Steam Input supports tons of different controllers from all sorts of hardware vendors, Valve will need something official to go with a Steam Console. That Steam Controller 2 leak looked pretty good to me.

Really though, I do think this is Valve's ultimate goal. Getting Steam everywhere they can having their own entire full ecosystem that you're hooked into.

A big question though: would such a machine even sell enough to make it actually worth it? Nintendo, Microsoft and Sony are all pretty well entrenched in the market for this type of device already.

For consumers it would be a good thing though wouldn't it? The same games available across PC, Handheld and the Living Room. Or am I just typing out my own dreams here? Anyway, if Valve don't do it, I'll have to resort to building myself a mini PC with some of these next-generation AMD CPUs / APUs and the eventual SteamOS release that's coming soon (or perhaps go with Bazzite).

What are your thoughts? Leave a comment and let me know.