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Valve Announces Steambox, Sort Of
wbr1 writes "A new page has appeared over at Steam with this slightly cryptic text, a countdown, and an image of a console controller.
'Last year, we shipped a software feature called Big Picture, a user-interface tailored for televisions and gamepads. This year we've been working on even more ways to connect the dots for customers who want Steam in the living-room. Soon, we'll be adding you to our design process, so that you can help us shape the future of Steam.' It appears Gabe Newell wants to throw his hat in the console ring now with the Xbox One and PS4 about to be released. The countdown to the announcement is targeted at Monday."
XBone.. is that really what people are calling it, in a non derogatory way?
I think Valve has a very good shot at taking on the console market.
They have a recognizable and respected name.
Their online delivery system is tested and reliable.
Their software quality is generally good.
What I know of their test betas has been solid.
They have a huge catalogue of games for the platform before it's even released.
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
That controller appears to be made of corrugated cardboard.
That device is called a "gamepad" and has existed on the PC for years.
I'd love to be wrong but what would make me get a steam box over regular consoles? The regular consoles have exclusives I want to play. The steam box seems unlikely to have any exclusives.
Could it be a man-machine-cat interface to give you feline reflexes at FPS?
And obligatory: gaben.tv
Expecting a fairly small "console" running Linux and sporting hardware that is unsuitable for proper gaming.
At best, we'll see some midrange laptop-grade GPU (750M) but most likely the system will feature processor-integrated GPU with performance that will run 2-3 year old AAA games (and today's indie titles) but not much more.
I sincerely hope I'm proven wrong.
On the other hand, any system with a proper PC GPU would be far too expensive with the GPU alone costing $200 or so and the total cost of the system going well north of $500.
Kinda the same as the SOLEIL project:
http://boards.openpandora.org/index.php/topic/10894-application-soleil/
They will release Half Life Ep 4 just to troll people.
Soon, we’ll be adding you to our design process, so that you can help us shape the future of Steam.
Oh great, because I have some features I've been wanting for a long time, like being able to sell or trade my games to other accounts, or selectively appearing offline to different contacts on steam, or at least not broadcasting what I'm playing to certain people...
Oh, you don't want that kind of input. You don't really give a shit about what I want.
Well screw you then.
Valve is pushing Linux for gaming, and I assume that the Steambox will be a Linux OS. There is only a very small subset of the Steam catalog that has native Linux games, so I am wondering if they are planning on supporting streaming from a PC running Steam to the TV via Steambox? There might still be some latency, but on a local network it is not going to be nearly what it would be streaming over the Internet, such as On Live or Sony's Gaikai.
My biggest question would be how are they going to handle the shared Steam account? What if the wife or kids wants to play a game on the Steambox and I want to play on my PC at the same time? The only way you can do that with the current system on multiple devices is to have one of them in offline mode, which means only one can play an online game at once. What about multiple profiles so that that each user can have their own friends lists and own achievements such as the PS3/360 do on their consoles? Currently there are not any separate profiles on a single account, you need separate Steam accounts, and separate game purchases on each account to do so.
200 launch titles
...are certainly something to scoff at when you're talking about old games.
I beg to differ. Wasn't Virtual Console one of the reasons that Wii printed money?
There's no Nintendo GTA5
There's also no Nintendo Katamari, despite the Wii being more powerful than the PS2 on which the series debuted. Perhaps Nintendo just doesn't want the subject matter of GTA5 on its console.
From what I've seen, it seems that >90% of steam titles are various variants of FPS titles. On top of that the top sellers for XBox and PS3 are FPS as well. Eventually the market will hit saturation; we haven't really seen a technological jump in the genre in some time to the best of my understanding. What would Steam sell once the FPS fad is up and people want to play games that involve something other than shootting/stabbing high res people/zombies?
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
Linux takes over. It's a better development platform. It's a better operating system. It's easier to get things done.
Apple is a non-factor. Microsoft is fading. Sony is formidable, but has no mobile presence. This is a key inflection point in the market.
Linux will become the premiere indie platform, the premiere innovation platform and over time, it will move to the top of game platforms in general, including on mobile (where it is already dominant)
Don't look now, but Linux just leapfrogged the desktop into the living room. The rest is inevitable.
Congratulations, gentlemen. Success well deserved.
What?! Since Steam already runs on every major OS, what would the point of your imagined "steam" box be? Why on earth would Valve go to all the trouble of building a computer, and then say "Oh, go ahead and put whatever you want on it. We hope you install Steam and play our gamez! kthxbai"
Of course they're building a box. It will run Linux (probably a Valve-brewed distro). You can figure this out by the fact that they've been doing a lot of work getting Steam to run on Linux, which is like 1% of their userbase. Also, a lot of companies are releasing their backcatalog on Linux, which probably is happening because Valve gave the developers advance notice, and not because a bunch of companies simultaneously got the urge to support a tiny fragmented market.
If you're trolling, 10/10. If you're seriously that much of a sperglord, 2/10.
And that, sadly, is what their Linux collection on Steam lacks. They've got a couple gems in there, a few more decent indy games, and then a bunch of "meh". Also a number of those don't work well, or even at all, with controller so aren't really good Steambox stuff.
Unless they are keeping things a secret, they don't have any real good launch titles. They don't have anything they can really draw people in with. That can then have the danger of creating a feedback cycle: Few people buy it, because there isn't much to play on it. Since few people own it, developers don't want to invest resources to develop for it, and so on.
We'll see what happens but just tossing the Linux Steam collection at it really isn't likely to work very well. I mean if you have a look at the catalogue at the top sellers you have things like Kerbal Space Program which is cool, but unfinished (still in Alpha) and does not have controller support near as I know, and Left 4 Dead 2 which does support controller, but is quite an old title, not to mention one that was already sold on the Xbox 360 (and PC of course). You start scrolling the list of Linux new releases and it is mostly very small indy games, old titles, and DLC for a couple of larger strategy games (that don't do controller).
That isn't much of a catalogue to give people a reason to buy. Remember those big games are big for a reason. You may not like them, but many people do. GTA5 did a couple billion in sales its first weekend. You can laugh at the people that bought it, say they should have appreciated indy games instead, etc, etc but none of that changes the financial reality of what people want.
In case you haven't noticed, Valve has gotten a bit lazy with their software development. They can afford to, Steam makes them tens of millions of dollars PER EMPLOYEE just by being a middle man. So they don't need to worry about anything else, they make shit tons of money from it. They've always operated on "Valve time", hence the term, but it has only increased with the success of Steam and thus the removal of any financial constraints.
However, that means if you think they've been secretly working hard on 4 big titles, which would need an increase in the size of their development teams to make happen, you are deluding yourself. Trying to develop and drop 4 big titles at the same time would be a hell of a feat.
You might notice how it actually works, with other consoles: They sign on other developers to do a set of launch titles for them, while doing maybe one or two themselves (because that's all they've time for). Also they announce those things and hype them up because you need people saving their dollars for your hardware and your games.
Valve seems to be playing at consoles. They want to release some little Linux powered thing and hope their Linux library, which is largely made up of games that don't do controller, will sell it. That is not likely to fly for the console market.
My Xbox 360 is now a glorified Netflix player. I was looking at Battlefield 4 and the next gen consoles. Frankly I'm BSD fan and the PS4 intrigues me.
12 Years ago I switch to mac for my primary computer platform. As a computer, especially, for work it's done it's job extremely well as I worked around *iux environments and had MS Office. I own a total of 3 games: Knights of the Old Republic (bought on a may 4th deal), Wing Commander Privateer (GOG/Dosbox), and Falcon 4 Allied Force.
When I wanted to play games, that's what I got the Xbox for. But @ $500 for a console it begs the question of whether or not it's time to go back to the PC. Especially with Star Citizen coming out. SC runs okay on my MBP (I have Windows 7 via Bootcamp). But for $500 I can upgrade the home PC (new PSU & Graphics card, has a quad core 3Ghz CPU & 16GB of Ram) and get a decent quality HOTAS & Pedel set up.
"The problem with socialism is eventually you run out of other people's money" - Thatcher.
State of Decay - Third person zombie survival RPG
Total War: ROME II - Strategy
Payday - FPS Heist game
Company of Heroes 2 - Strategy
Godus - God/strategy game
Saints Row IV - Third person WTF shooter
Torchlight II - Action RPG
RollerCoaster Tycoon 3: Platinum - Sim
Music Creator 6 + Sound pack - Audio Production
Music Creator 6 Touch - Audio Production
As of 2:30 Eastern time on US Steam, there is only one FPS title in the top ten sales list. There are only three that can be classified as shooters (though there are guns in Torchlight). Looks like the most popular genres are strategies and RPGs. This idea that Steam is saturated with 90%+ FPS games is clearly wrong.
As I understand it, Steam's offline mode allows playing any single-player or couch-multiplayer game as long as you've previously played it online on that machine in the past 30 days. You have to go online once a month or so to renew the cached receipt, but it should still work even if you have to carry a device to another place once a week to get online. (I'm not a habitual user of offline mode; I'd appreciate corrections.)
Good move. Getting to capture the console users should prove to be quite lucrative for them.
On the other hand I always wondered why the console manufacturers never even considered adding a keyboard option to their consoles. There's a ton of folks who just hate playing with controllers. Not to mention using the on screen keyboard to type is a humongous PITA.
Wuddooeyeno? IITYWYBMAD? Like nuts? eclecticallyincorrect.com
I was looking forward to the Valve box, but all this talk of linux has put me off. The reason a wanted a valve box is to break free of the proprietary xbox sony console paradigm. A valve flavor of linux is more of the same.
Intels new NUC coming out in a month or two is an appleTV sized PC with an i5 proc and onboard intel graphics capable of running all valve's source games in HD. Yeah!!! No rebuying anything, it'll work on the network nice, great web access / music choices. This thing is gonna be awesome.
Half Life Three confirmed
Are you sure there's no nostalgia for GoldSrc based games like Half-Life and Counter-Strike (or their Source remakes)? If there were no nostalgia for the first Half-Life, there would be no Black Mesa mod for HL2.
Why would anyone buy a locked-down box from a company that has the worst possible track record (the BBB gives them a straight F) when it comes to resolving issues with their customers? DRM is bad as it is, but combined with incompetent and slow customer support, it really is the nightmare we all have been talking about for a decade.
Or maybe there are a lot more closet masochists in our society than I ever thought.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
the countdown looks much better if you add little piece of css...: .countdown_digit { ...just sayin'
[code]
transition:background-position 1s ease;
}
[/code]
Both the PS3 and the Xbox have lifetime sales figures of under 80 million.
I think that 5-10 million in sales, first year would make them a contender.
While there have been a number of recent KS titles with Linux support pledged, they have by and large not been things suitable for the Steambox since they do not support controllers. PA would be a good example. That is going to be a mouse and keyboard affair.
The other thing is they are a good example of what I'm talking about. Have a look at Shadowrun Returns. It is the first of the bigger name KS games to launch. It pledged Win, Mac, and Linux support. So what can you have now? Windows and Mac. They are trying to get a Linux beta out the door, 3 months later. The reason? They are having trouble making the Linux version work. This isn't because they didn't plan on it, it was a pledge from the initial KS. This isn't because their engine doesn't support Linux, they use Unity. Despite all that, they are having issues making it stable.
Relating back to middleware and all that, this is a big issue for Linux. OpenGL doesn't just work. It just works if you have a modern nVidia card and the binary drivers. Otherwise, it works with caveats. So if you want a game that uses it, you have to consider what functions works on what drivers and what you are going to support. This isn't to mention other issues, just the biggest.
I really think you have a skewed view of how easy it is to do a proper port, to do debugging and QA, and to support it. It is certainly not an insurmountable task, it is done all the time, but it is also not inexpensive. If the returns aren't there, companies aren't going to do it.
" I am wondering if they are planning on supporting streaming from a PC running Steam to the TV via Steambox"
Well, if you click the first bubble, you get a page which states
"You can play all your Windows and Mac games on your SteamOS machine, too. Just turn on your existing computer and run Steam as you always have - then your SteamOS machine can stream those games over your home network straight to your TV"
So, the answer to that would appear to be: yes.
With that, I'd imagine that the Steam PC account won't be logged off, since it would likely be required for the streaming source...
The reason a wanted a valve box is to break free of the proprietary xbox sony console paradigm.
What exactly is proprietary about Linux? From the summary link (click on the first circle on the linked page):
Users can alter or replace any part of the software or hardware they want.
capable of running all valve's source games in HD.
It is true that the system won't be able to run all of the Steam library, however if you have another PC in the house that can you can stream it to the SteamBox again from the link:
You can play all your Windows and Mac games on your SteamOS machine, too. Just turn on your existing computer and run Steam as you always have - then your SteamOS machine can stream those games over your home network straight to your TV!
No rebuying anything
You don't have to rebuy games for Linux. Whenever you buy a game on Steam that is Mac/Linux compatible you can run it on all of those platforms for no extra cost.
"What exactly is proprietary about Linux? "
It will be Valve's version of linux. Can you get any more proprietary than a custom OS ? What CAN'T it run ?
I want the freedom to install anything I want. Not just what they sanction, not just what is 'valve OS' compatible.
Streaming games sounds like one of the worst ideas I've ever heard. Most peoples networks can barely stream music. Now I have to run two computers just to play a game ?
Sorry Valve, too little too late. I can buy a pocket sized pc that will play ALL your games RIGHT NOW. Plus anything else I want... itunes, Mame, Firefox, etc etc