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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.
offer modular component updates, including the option to upgrade the PC's CPU and RAM.
I will *not* get back into that chase again, thank you very much. The whole reason I left PC gaming years ago was because I got tired of the specs chase. Consoles meant never having to look on the box and see if I needed yet another upgrade to play a game. I've even still got the stack of old video cards and MB's to remind me of how much money I wasted back then.
Not going back to that. And if I was, I would just build my own PC and connect it to my TV (why bother with Valve's box?). After all, if I'm going back to the chase, may as well get the freedom of a PC too.
What political party do you join when you don't like Bible-thumpers *or* hippies?
Word from Redmond is that Microsoft is going to attempt to clone Steam now.
They're working on a competitor called "Shaft."
CEO Steve Ballmer even said he "can't wait to Shaft his customers, it's going to be the biggest thing since squirting on the Zune. It's going to totally fucking kill Steam and Linux off."
Mod me down, my New Earth Global Warmingist friends!
Maybe won't be the year of the linux desktop, but with that, and a few android based gaming consoles could be the year of the linux game console.
yeah that xi3 box is actually pretty cool. I think there is some "yet to be released" info though about them because I looked at them a while back and no way they run games very well as they were then. Could be cool though steam could really help to move the market towards more linux gaming which would be massive for the linux desktop.
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.
Linux is an operating system, not a belief system. It lets me use my computer how I want to, and the day it gets in the way of that I will swap to something else. If I want to install DRM laden software onto Linux, who are you to judge?
Finally had enough. Come see us over at https://soylentnews.org/
Make enough of them, and that price will come right down.
If you think linux's only purpose is to create DRM free games, or anything else for that matter, you're kinda missing the point. The purpose of linux afaik is to create freedom....to do whatever you want with the OS. If I want to play DRM games on my linux install, then its doing its job because its what I want to do with the OS.
When Linus made Linux he did not say "it is going to be DRM free", he even said that DRM is ok with Linux not too long ago.
How is "Linux + DRM" a point? What is the point of Linux then?
You are able to run DRM software on Linux right now anyway. Even if Steam is going to be big, it doesn't require DRM for the games which are distributed on it.
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.
Article says you can buy an Xi3 now if you want to put FreeBSD on it. Looks like they start at about $500.
Interview with Gabe Newell linked in summary discusses how theirs is meant to be a locked-down console, not a general purpose PC.
Steam is a delivery platform with optional DRM. No game is required to use the DRM, and many indie games and older games do not. Once you purchase those games, you can move them wherever you wish and even delete Steam and still have usable games.
Word from Redmond is that Microsoft is going to attempt to clone Steam now.
They're working on a competitor called "Shaft."
So... new version of "Games for Windows â" LIVE"?
GLaDOS for President 2016! "Well here we are again. It's always such a pleasure." -- GLaDOS, 2011
Besides, having steam come out the top is probably a marketing feature.
When "more than I need" includes randomly blocking access to things I paid for, I damn well will dismiss it!
I am one of the unfortunate people who learned to hate DRM through experience. Are you aware that Steam locks you out if you play in "offline mode" for too long?
[Sir Garlon] is the marvellest knight that is now living, for he destroyeth many good knights, for he goeth invisible.
That's strictly true, but Linux only lets you use your computer the way you want to because of the belief system that underlies it.
[Sir Garlon] is the marvellest knight that is now living, for he destroyeth many good knights, for he goeth invisible.
Linux is an operating system, not a belief system.
Heretic! Heathen! Infidel!
If you repent and say three Hail Stallmans we'll let you off this time...
"Little does he know, but there is no 'I' in 'Idiot'!"
Isn't SGI one of those companies that has achieved eternal coolness by (like any self-respecting rock star) dying horribly before it could really ruin its reputation with a string of pathetic comeback attempts at 3rd string clubs?
My sense is that SGI's last gasp of genuine relevance was over a decade ago; but that they are forever enshrined in the datacenters of Valhalla(and every system today that uses OpenGL gives them praise)
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.
Consoles meant never having to look on the box and see if I needed yet another upgrade to play a game.
"Never" is a strong word. Several games for Sega Saturn and Nintendo 64 required a RAM expansion cartridge.
And if I was, I would just build my own PC and connect it to my TV (why bother with Valve's box?).
Valve is targeting the mass market, which has shown itself unwilling to connect a device marketed as a "computer" to a display marketed as a "television". To the mass market, computers are for desks and consoles are for living rooms. See previous comments.
How could you forget the Pioneer LaserActive? That bitch was rackable. How about the 3DO??? Huh? Ppfft... and you call yourself a gamer.
Damn it, Ray! Egon said not to cross the memes.
That is an unqualified opinion. No "good" desktop for what? For games? There's isn't because linux as a game platform has been largely non-existent. But there are plenty of environments with minimalistic UIs that could be good and I think that's what Valve is building here. I'd argue that there's no good desktop environment for gaming, period. Windows just is not and never has been a good gaming environment either, it's just the defacto desktop OS.
If this moves developers to make ports of their games for Linux more and more, I think you'll see people playing less and less on Windows as they'll have the option to run on a "free" alternative. This is good for the hobbyist market.
Steam's "Big Screen" mode is actually pretty good. I won't be surprised if that's what the SteamBox winds up running.
If you can't convince them, convict them.
There are lots of people claiming that the little SFF computer called the Piston does not have the power to adequately run Steam games under Linux. But I have Linux Mint KDE 14 AMD64 installed on an HP nx9420 laptop which is 5 years old. It only has a dual core 2.16GHz processor, the equivalent of an Nvidia GT 7900 GPU and 4GB of ram. I was playing Dark Descent, Team Fortress 2 and Killing Floor all weekend. It worked great. If this laptop will do this well, I'm sure that little SFF computer will be just fine also. I wonder if Valve will release them with a subscription like mobile phone companies do.
Oh, yeah! Wise guy, huh? Woob woob woob woob! Nyuk! Nyuk!
Except he's right. Steam is not DRM. Steamworks is the DRM, and it's not mandatory.
You're missing the point: it's not Steam or Valve's fault if the games you buy use DRM. It's the publisher's decision. If the game wasn't on Steam, it'd have another form of (likely much more annoying/shitty) DRM. What Steam provides is fairly mild DRM (yes, I say mild, because honestly I prefer having an account that adds a lot of value to my games versus limited activation, phone home schemes, or plain and simply unreliable bullshit ala StarForce).
But Steam doesn't force anyone to use the DRM in their games.
I think that the reason I can't switch to a Linux-only setup is the vocal minority who believe that, since Linux is FOSS, everything that runs on Linux should be FOSS.
This provides the benefit that for everything you need, there is a free version.
However, there are things I want, and these tend to be harder to find on Linux. That is, unless you're fine with suffering through a potentially unstable or severely handicapped version on Wine.
Sony and Nintendo seek only established studios with "financial stability" and "relevant video game industry experience".
True, because, bluntly put, they don't want a bunch of wannabe game developers making a ton of shovelware tetris/bejeweled/sokoban clones.
So that's why you "pay your dues" if you want to do a console game. If you're not willing or capable of doing so...you'll have to live with the reality of how things are.
You are referring to positive freedom, as in being able to go where you want etc.
Stallman's Freedoms are meant to be a protection of positive freedoms beyond just using it (being able to construct a bicycle to go where you want even faster etc).
Freedom and doing whatever you want are not identical. You may choose to blow your head out to cure a headache or other such things that are harmful to your freedom, even if it is what you want.
Stallman is idealistic and not very pragmatic. His message, however, is worth reflecting on.
I'm too tired atm but you get the point.
Defining Statistics and Social Research