History of video games/Platforms/Steam Machines

Development
By early 2012 substantiated rumors of Steam Machines were being published on major gaming websites.

In 2013 Valve was publicly working with Xi3 to create a small computer called Piston. Also in 2013 was the announcement of SteamOS. In December of 2013 300 beta units were sent to testers.

Launch
Steam Machines were delivered to those who had preordered them on October 16th, 2015. General retail availability followed on November 10th, 2015.

By June 2016, less than 500,000 steam machines had sold.

Legacy
In 2018 Valve deemphasized steam machines on it's store, though they could still be purchased at that time.

Following silence on Steam Machines, Valve continued development of SteamOS till at least 2019.

The Steam Controller would result in a court case which started lasted from 2015 to 2021 and ultimately cost Valve a $4 million dollar fine for patent Infringement.

The Steam Machines were followed by the Steam Deck portable console, which also ran on Steam OS.

Technology
Steam machines came in a number of different hardware configurations by multiple manufacturers, and ran the Linux based SteamOS.

At launch depending on the model, systems could use an AMD or Intel CPU paired with either an AMD or NVIDIA dedicated GPU or an Intel integrated GPU.

At launch, systems from manufacturers could have from as little as four gigabytes of RAM to as much as 32 gigabytes of RAM.

Storage at launch was either based on using only hard drives, a small SSD used with a larger hard drive, or an SSD only.

Games
Steam Machines could directly run games on Steam that supported Linux.