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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."
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.
The problem is how to quickly refer to that specific console.
Right now, if I say "oh, it's a new XBox game" I'm probably referring to the XBox 360. If I want to talk about "the first Halo game on the XBox One" it's still kind of ambiguous whether or not I'm referring to Halo (the game released in 2001) or a new Halo game to be played on the XBox One console, slated to be released in 2014.
Since no one calls the Original Xbox console the "XBone", people have adopted it as the only non-ambiguous way to talk about the console without using extra random descriptors.
That controller appears to be made of corrugated cardboard.
XBone.. is that really what people are calling it, in a non derogatory way?
Some of us had assumed all references to XBone were derogatory, one way or another.
But it's hard to tell, as even fans of the XBone seem to use the same term. It's as if they somehow enjoy being boned.
Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. - Voltaire
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.
Either that or the XBox One-Eighty. It works non ambigously as well, but was most popular a few months ago.
Nicknames work best when they have humorous origin.
OP here. I meant it as derogatory.
Silence is a state of mime.
And what would you call the next one after that? Infinity+1? Infinity++?
You have to be careful with superlatives and absolutes when naming your product, unless you're pretty sure that it will be the swan song to your line of ...
You're right. XBox Infinity would have been fitting.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
They will release Half Life Ep 4 just to troll people.
I guess the formula would be 180*(2)^(N-1). Yeah, you're right. That's kind of pushing it.
Did you know 80 to 90% of the moderators on slashdot wouldn't recognize a troll even if one dragged them under a bridge.
Well, "stolen" is a bit harsh, considering SOLEIL themselves simply appropriated it and have no ownership to the public domain work produced by NASA.
http://www.nasa.gov/centers/goddard/news/topstory/2007/first_light_prt.htm
http://www.nasa.gov/centers/goddard/images/content/165490main_fl_blue.jpg
To be fair, you could Google a lot of other "Blue Glowing Sphere" images and get closer matches.
"The true measure of a person is how they act when they know they won't get caught." - DSRilk
Or they simply see it as a contraction of xbox one and don't even notice that it could be read as "x bone"
note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register
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.
Correction: I believe they enjoy being XBoned.
"If a nation expects to be ignorant and free in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be."
No, but I refuse to call it "The One", and it's full name's too long.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
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.
Infinity might have been appropriate if it was referencing Bioshock Infinite. As in "We had all these things we wanted to do but had to backtrack them all and it's simply a rehash of what's come before".
XB ONE
XBONE seems like a pretty reasonable name.
I mean, Microsoft chose it after all.
while(1) attack(People.Sandy);
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.
Instead of just looking at sales, look at which games are being played:
Dota 2
Team Fortress 2
Counter-Strike: Global Offensive
Football Manager 2013
Total War: ROME II
Sid Meier's Civilization V
The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim
Garry's Mod
Counter-Strike
Counter-Strike: Source
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
The next one gets called the Aleph One.
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
YBox.
;)
Finally had enough. Come see us over at https://soylentnews.org/
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.
What is wrong with 720?
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...
I was personally really partial to Xbox Unity. Felt like it fit the theme of what they were trying to do by unifying all of your devices into one with the pass through stuff and press of a button switching from TV to Games and such.
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
YAX - Yet Another Xbox