Steam Machine was inspired by Steam Deck owners who play docked to a TV

The Steam Machine was mostly inspired by gamers who hooked up their Steam Decks to TV sets, showing an interesting hardware innovation crossover.

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While Nintendo created consoles first, handhelds, second, and then finally a unified handheld-console, Valve's own hardware journey has been a bit different. Valve tried Steam Machines in 2015, which failed due to lack of content. Then Valve pushed the Steam Deck, leading to major learnings, and now 10 years later after their first introduction, the Steam Machine is back in the limelight.

This time around, Valve has taken everything it's learned from the Steam Deck, most notably the significant SteamOS advancements and Deck Verified software spec. The current Steam Machine was ultimately informed by a specific part of the Steam Deck userbase--those that ended up using their Decks as makeshift PC consoles.

• Read more: Valve clarifies that battery life is just as important as next-gen performance for Steam Deck 2

In a recent interview with Skill Up, Valve software engineer Pierre-Loup Griffais and designer Lawrence Yang describe the iterative process between the Steam Deck and the Steam Machine, and how both devices are inextricably linked.

Below we have a quick transcript of what was said:

Valve software engineer Pierre-Loup Griffais

As you can imagine, the idea wasn't really groundbreaking. Everyone understood it was something that we could do, even before the Steam Deck. I think after shipping Deck, and seeing a year or two go by and watching all the catalog become closer to Deck Verified and all these tweaks like having default graphical settings--I think that seeing all these great experiences that people were having with it really proved to us that we should be able to pull this off.

Valve designer Lawrence Yang

We shipped the Steam Deck dock around the same time. We saw basically 20% of people who bought a Steam Deck also have a dock, and that doesn't even include the people who got a third-party dock. So there are a lot of people who are actually playing Steam Decks docked to a TV.

This is what actually led to the Steam Controller, because it's like 'oh this kind of sucks, I want to play my Steam games but I don't have all the inputs that I'm used to with my Steam Deck.' So that kind of led to Steam Controller, and then it became 'oh, I'm playing all my games in my living room, wouldn't it be cool if this had a little more power to it.

Pierre-Loup Griffais

Working back from an existing audience of users that are using the thing, the experience, in the way that we're proposing to improve, they are giving us immediate feedback on what works and what doesn't work.

That's really our preferred way of going about it. We're not trying to build something because we think it's a good idea.

We want to make sure that users are into it. For us, having Deck users that were docked that were telling us things about the level of performance they're getting, but also having to leave their controller behind when they're docking the Deck and having to use a third-party controller...all of that really gave us a crisp direction on what we want from that experience.