What a silly premise for an article.
They aren’t putting exclusives on the steam machine because it’s a fucking PC and not a console.
This article is stupid as fuck.
Anyone who posts an article claiming something like a console concept of “exclusives” either misunderstands or is an idiot. Steam machine is a prebuilt gaming Pc not a game console. To ensure it only ran certain software would ruin the whole purpose
Bloomberg was the actual news outlet that interviewed Valve, og link: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/newsletters/2026-07-17/valve-s-14-year-journey-to-make-the-steam-machine
Bloomberg doesn’t know shit about PC Gaming, so that’s expected. RPS is only cashing in by drawing traffic through stupidly controversial headlines.
That’s no-brainer news. How would an exclusive title just for the Steam Machine even work? It’s a PC. Launching it on Steam but forbidding everyone but Steam Machine users to buy or download it? How would they even check that accurately? This would probably be easy to get around.
They could release it on Linux only, which would exclude most PC users.
But this would still not be a Steam Machine Exclusive then.
I have seen people dualboot linux just for extra minecraft performance, there would definitely be people dualbooting linux for those exclusives
And if popular enough, someone would for sure make a “Play Half-Life 3” bootable Live CD with just enough Linux to boot Steam and run whatever exclusive without needing to actually install Linux to the drive.
It would be very hard and probably very easy to spoof.
I have a question maybe dumb to ask because I don’t consider myself a gamer as such but do gamers really want exclusive games? To me, it seems terrible to the end consumer because it means you get locked into their ecosystems bit by bit, or maybe even you bought a whole console, spending 500 bucks just to play one game that codt you another 70 bucks
Yes you’re right it sucks. And yes, I have bought many Nintendo consoles and PlayStation for exclusives. I’m not smart, but if there’s a story or gameplay I’m in love with, I’m going to do it. I don’t think I’ll be buying a ps6 for Horizon though, as I did with the PS5.
How would that even work if they did make excusives since it’s just a pc? Run a hardware check and stop the game from launching if it doesn’t detect steam machine hardware?
There were some games that can be run on Steam Deck, but will not run on other Linux systems, I think they might be able to do similar stuff for the Machine.
IMO I think it is just limited the game’s visibility, but ultimately it’s up to the game devs. (Like tech support or “fairness” reasons)
EDIT: This list show games that only run on Steam Deck or SteamOS, but not other Linux systems https://www.gamingonlinux.com/anticheat/status/steamos/
It were possible but it’s more on the developer side at that moment.
What games?
Didn’t BG3 do this? They made a Linux version of the game but it only allowed itself to work on steam deck
I think he might be referring to infinity nikki, or at least that’s what i thought of when making my original comment. Idk if it ever got bypassed though.
Yeah, one of the game I thought is Infinity Nikki, another one is Delta Force.
I updated my comment to include a link to the list about which games have restricted Linux system(s) support.
That’s simply not true. Steam deck is nothing special hardware wise. You can use proton on any Linux distro to run the same games that will run on steam os. Valve is not in the proprietary console market.
It was true but it wasn’t done by Valve and not in hardware. Just some developers deciding to explicitly not support Linux, but wanting to support Steam Deck, so they added some naive checks for that. Unfortunately I don’t remember the specific titles as I wasn’t interested in any of them.
I think it was infinity nikki
I know Proton has to fool the windows binary to some degree to make it think it is just running on windows, but I wonder if it is possible for a game developer to offer a “Played this game on a steam deck / steam machine”, or less specifically, “under SteamOS / Proton”, achievement without resorting to a separate Linux binary?
- Check for the existence of
Z:/etc/os-releaseand parse it - Check for the
steamDeckenvironment variables set by Steam - Check that the current account’s username is “deck”
- Use assembly to directly perform a Linux syscall that would crash the application on Windows but not on Linux.
It still can’t guarantee that the system is a Steam Deck, but combining all the above is reliable enough to that it would be easier to write an assembly patch for the game than to spoof all of those checks to pass.
That being said: any developer who adds an achievement just for playing on a specific piece of hardware deserves to be kicked in the groin.
7000 achievements available, one for each specific RAM kit. 6344 of these achievements earned by 0 people.
Achievement: kicked developer in the groin.
- Check for the existence of
I know Proton has to fool the windows binary to some degree to make it think it is just running on windows
That’s phrased a bit more adversarily than warranted. The game isn’t trying to only run on Windows and Proton isn’t trying to trick it; the game just uses Windows APIs and Proton reimplements them for Linux. It isn’t like circumventing DRM or anticheat or something like that.
they’re not wrong
I know with other hardware they’ve included a free game, but it’s been something generally available that the hardware just comes with that usually shows off the features or serves as an orientation of sorts.
I can’t really think of what features they would want to show off with the steam machine.
