'99% of the work was already done in a sense': Valve says it has less to fix with the Steam Machine because they already fixed it on the Steam Deck

Hardware development, much like games, is all about iteration. So, it's fair to say we wouldn't have the Steam Machine without the Steam Deck. We recently spoke to Valve engineers Yazan Aldehayyat and Pierre-Loup Griffais, and asked them whether they felt Valve's ongoing work on the Steam Deck meant there'd be less to fix with the Steam Machine.

"Oh, for sure, yeah." said Pierre-Loup. He goes on to acknowledge that the Steam Machine required a lot of focus on specific aspects Valve didn't have to worry about for the Steam Deck—things like the "discrete GPU, VRAM management, ray tracing performance, all this stuff."

But those unique features aside, the foundation of the two platforms is very similar. He says, "The other 99% of the work [on the Steam Machine was] already done in a sense."

Yazan also highlights that the way many people were already using their Steam Decks presented a compelling use case for the Steam Machine. "People were using their Steam Deck ...