The dream of the Steam Machine might not be dead after all. Now that the Steam Deck is a bonafide hit, it looks like Valve is paving the way for devices from third-party hardware manufacturers to make their own SteamOS devices. Valve has quietly just pushed some new brand and logo guidelines for SteamOS devices.
Valve's public partner website has just been updated (as noted through SteamDB and shared by GamingOnLinux), linking to a new brand guidelines document telling the companies Valve works with how they're allowed to use Steam logos on their products.
The most notable thing in the new document is a badge indicating devices that are "powered by SteamOS." "The Powered by SteamOS logo indicates that a hardware device will run the SteamOS and boot into SteamOS upon powering on the device," Valve explains.
Valve has made clear for some time that it intends to offer SteamOS 3.0, the version of the operating system that currently powers Steam Deck, to other device manufacturers and the public at large. In 2023, Valve's Lawrence Yang told our friends at PC Gamer that a wider release of SteamOS was "very high" on the company's to-do list, and would likely be made available first to the makers of handheld devices similar to Steam Deck. More recently, Yang told The Verge that support for the Asus ROG Ally in particular was in the works.
This would be Valve's second attempt at getting SteamOS spread across a bunch of third-party devices, as we're coming up on the 10-year anniversary of the launch of Steam Machines. Those devices failed to offer a compelling reason to ditch the traditional PC, though, and support dried up within a couple of years. But now that Steam Deck has proven just how good a SteamOS-powered machine could be, it might just be time for the Steam Machine idea to live again.
When the Steam Deck was still just an idea, Valve says some staff were like, "I just want that for me" and "the point wasn't even to make a product out of it."
