Quote:Yesterday, Valve announced that it has shipped more than 500,000 Steam controllers since unveiling them in November. While that number sounds initially impressive for a brand new console and operating system, a closer analysis reveals it’s actually pretty bad.

Said analysis comes courtesy of Ars Technica, who contacted Valve to confirm that the 500K figure includes Steam Machines, all of which ship with a Steam Controller. Toss in SteamOS users who may have purchased a controller separately and people who bought more than one, and the actual number of Steam Machines sold since the platform formally launched last November could be significantly lower than 500K. That’s an extremely low figure compared with the millions of PS4s and Xbox Ones that Sony and MS have shipped since last November. While it may seem unfair to compare a brand new platform to established franchises, Valve explicitly stated that it wasn’t competing with PC gaming, but targeting the living room console industry.
...
Valve and SteamOS have done great things for Linux gaming and encouraged the industry to support another major operating system. For most of the past 20 years, “Linux gaming” was practically an oxymoron, especially if you didn’t use Wine. Thanks to Valve, that’s no longer true; Linux gamers have a richer and more varied selection of games than they’ve ever had before.

The fundamental problem with SteamOS is that it’s trying to solve a problem that doesn’t exist. Back when Microsoft announced Windows 8, Gaben denounced the operating system in the strongest possible terms.

Quote:I think that Windows 8 is kind of a catastrophe for everybody in the PC space. I think that we’re going to lose some of the top-tier PC [original equipment manufacturers]. They’ll exit the market. I think margins are going to be destroyed for a bunch of people. If that’s true, it’s going to be a good idea to have alternatives to hedge against that eventuality.

OEM margins weren’t the only thing Valve was concerned about back in 2012. The entire push behind SteamOS was predicated on the belief that Microsoft might lock game installations to the Windows Store or force developers to sell through its own platform. Such a maneuver would have been a catastrophe for Valve, which currently controls a significant share of PC gaming revenue. When that threat failed to materialize in Windows 8 or Windows 10, some of the fire went out of SteamOS. It doesn’t help that the OS is also much slower than Windows 10 in many games, even when testing titles based on Valve’s Source engine.