Sometimes a failure is just a good idea with bad timing. Consider the Steam Machine.

In 2013, at the height of the console gaming era, Valve, the owner and operator of Steam, the biggest PC digital video game storefront, announced an attempt to mainstream PC gaming with a “console-like” experience — and convert millions of console gamers to Steam shoppers along the way. At the time, consoles were thriving, home to exclusives and the assumed first stop for 90% of AAA releases.

The Steam Machine wasn’t one literal machine, but a conceptual blueprint for gaming PC manufacturers to create cheaper, itty-bitty PCs that fit comfortably under a living room TV.

Players would surf through their video game libraries in an operating system that looked less like a Windows desktop and more like an Xbox UI. And to do so, they’d use a special controller that blended the console controls of the past with the laptop trackpads of… well, also the past.

Despite the hopes of many industry analysts, the Steam Machine project, which promised all the benefits of PC gaming with no headaches, led to a paltry set of middling gaming PCs. Valve mothballed the strategy in 2018.

Of course, that’s not the end of the story. Far from it.

Though the hardware died, the dream nonetheless persisted. The Steam Machine has inspired more industry changes in its death than most video game consoles do in life. Valve’s primary goal was to get its storefront on more screens, but it was the Steam Machine’s secondary function — popularizing PCs — that resonated.

A decade ago, according to a chart by Visual Capitalist, PCs had managed parity with consoles after years eating their dust. By 2022, however, PC gaming accounted for $45 billion in revenue — 50% more than its console cousins. And in 2025, a decade after Valve launched the first Steam Machines, PC gaming will have its victory lap, thanks in large part to another piece of Valve hardware.

Here’s how PC gaming went from “hardcore” to mainstream, and why you should expect PC gaming culture to expand even further in the years to come.

In the 1990s and early 2000s, people who preferred console games had a fair and repeatable critique of PC gaming: You’d spend as much time fighting the machine as you would playing a game. PC gaming, its critics would say,........

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