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Valve's SteamBox Gets a Name and an Early Demo at CES
xynopsis writes "Looks like the final version of the Linux based Steam Gaming Console has been made public at CES. The result of combined efforts of small-form-factor maker Xi3 and Valve, the gaming box named 'Piston' is a potential game changer in transforming the Linux desktop and gaming market. The pretty device looks like a shrunk Tezro from Silicon Graphics when SGI used to be cool." Looks like Gabe Newell wasn't kidding.
Parent: Missing the point of Steam entirely.
Steam itself is not DRM. My library contains lots of DRM free games. On the other hand it also contains certain games which come with the same DRM as the boxed version. If you want to make a point buy the DRM free indie games on Steam and and don't buy the DRM ridden ones.
Don't dismiss something just because it can do more than what you need. Nobody forces you to pirate with bittorrent or murder your wife with a kitchen knife either.
This is just *a* steam-box, just a few days ago Ben Krasnow (Valve hardware designer) said that steambox would appear at GDC.
Captain, I'm sensing a bitter old man. I suggest caution.
It's not bitter old man, but it is a little sad. SGI used to be the epitome of cool in the computer world. Cast your mind back to 1994. You had most people running DOS and Windows 3.11. A few people were running UNIX (tm) workstations with CDE.
Many of those systems were slow, clunky, had at most 8 bits per pixel of palletted horibleness, weak graphics ugly user interfaces and so on.
Then you had SGI.
1280x1024 trucolour displays with accelerated texture mapped graphics. Holy crap that 3D asteroid blaster game looked sweet. Oh and a really cool UI with scalable vector icons, webcams, TV out, video chat and excellent sound built in. In 1994.
Oh and you could get portable systems with a TFT screen back when they more or less did not exist for all practical purposes. And certainly not at that kind of resolution.
Seriously, SGIs were something out of the future.
How long did it take for PCs to get webcams built in?
SJW n. One who posts facts.
if this means more games for linux on the desktop then yeah it could be big.
Otherwise - it's just another locked down console and I'm not sure what benefit it will have for linux on the desktop.
Unless Valve has been lying through their teeth this whole time(certainly possible; but not obvious why doing so would be an advantage for them), their desire is to compete in the console space by offering one or more 'easy, just-works, fits in your living room, appliance' style PCs that will be churned out to spec by cooperating OEMs and running Steam-on-linux by default; but that they have no problem with people running Steam-on-linux on whatever oddball homebuilds they like, subject to the caveat that Valve has minimal interest in dealing with the rough edges of motherboard Z's shitty ACPI implementation or binary compatibility problems introduced by your Gentoo install's creative compiler flags.
Steam is, among other things, a DRM system; but not one that has ever depended on some crypto-lockdown-trusted-firmware(and, indeed, they seem quite worried that Microsoft, despite Games for Windows Live sucking pretty brutally, is well placed to be the ones offering such a system instead, same with Apple and its app store on the OSX side) in its Windows or Mac iterations. It would be odd if they were to go that route for Linux.
Obviously, they aren't porting stuff to linux just because they love penguins and freedom and whatnot(since the closed source Steam binary will still mostly dish out closed source game binaries); but the threat posed by both Microsoft and Apple having digital stores attached to their platforms, along with a desire not to add the cost of a Windows license to every 'console' they ship, gives them a pretty good reason to support compatibility of games with at least the most common Linux desktop systems.