I'm not convinced they have the core competencies required to pull it off. It seemed like they had the hype and market positioning to pull it off the first time around, but just expected 3rd party hardware vendors to do the work and make SteamBox a thing via the magic of the free market. I think it might have worked if they put together an excellent 1st party product and gave it a real marketing push.

It would've helped if the top titles were there. (If you bought/built a SteamOS box, you have a rough-looking thing that doesn't play top games, when you could instead just run Windows+Steam, or get a Sony or MS console, any of which would play most things.)

Valve seemed to not make the final marketing push on Steam Machines, that I could see. Maybe because they realized that it wasn't coming together. And/or maybe it was intended as a warning, to not be forced out when MS was grabbing the app store.

Your idea of Valve in making a console themselves is interesting. They did get some limited experience with hardware, with the controller and the thin device. I don't know what all would go into some kind of manufacturing and branding partnership.

One thing that I think didn't happen is an initial loss-leader on the console, to bring people into the lock-in ecosystem, like the console companies might do. I don't see how the third parties had that incentive. And I don't know how loss-leader works if whatever anyone builds is just a commodity PC.

Wine and Proton are exactly the type of solution that I want. It works and it will get better every year. Linux users can run software without explicit vendor support. (software freedom 0 [0]) It doesn't burden corporations with expensive Linux support. Everyone is happy.

[0] https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html

The FSF is frequently misled by volunteers into bad strategy moves for its goals. RMS's criteria of "is it Free" is insufficient, and also easily exploited, just by spinning your thing to check off the checklist boxes.