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Steam Controller Hands-on
Ars Technica has posted their impressions from a hands-on session with Valve's new Steam Controller. The controller notably departs from standard practice of relying on two thumbsticks for precise movement, instead replacing them with concave touchpads. From the article:
"When used as a kind of virtual trackball, as most games did with the right pad, it was a revelation. When used as a virtual d-pad, as it was on the left pad, it was an exercise in frustration. Let's focus on the right pad first. There's definitely a learning curve to using this side of the pad properly; years of muscle memory had me trying to use it like an analog stick (minus the stick) at first. It only really began to click when I started swiping my thumb over the pad, as I've seen in previous videos (there was no one on hand to really explain the controller to me, so I was left figuring it out on my own, just like a new Steam Machine owner). When I say it "started to click," I mean that literally. The subtle clicking in your hands as you swipe along the pad is an incredible tactile experience, as if there was an actual weighted ball inside the controller that's rolling in the direction you swipe. And like a trackball slowly losing its inertia, the clicking slows its pace after you lift your thumb off the pad, giving important contextual information for the momentum imparted by your swipe."
More write-ups are available about the controller from Gamespot, Gizmodo, and Joystiq.
Well, it's not like you're being steamrolled into accepting this as an input device. With an open platform, you should be free to use whatever input device you want.
Ask me about repetitive DNA
There are barely any games for it, ...
This is fantastically inaccurate. As it will play all the games already available for steam on linux (452 at current count) it in fact already has more games than the sum total of launch titles for ALL OTHER CONSOLES EVER. Troll harder, why don't you?
Is it 3D printed? Then it's the future and you're a Luddite for not seeing that.
And how many 3rd party titles were out before the launch of other consoles?
Many of them are shitty, that's true, but that list also contains some diamonds-in-the-rough. Some of the Indie game dev houses are unsung heroes and are actually breaking new ground but you just haven't heard of it because there weren't commercials on TV when it happened. Most of these games are also quite cheap, especially compared to the 50-60$ price fixing lock-in enforced by the Big Three console manufacturers. The Valve games stand the test of time too, and if you count them up on their own also outnumber either the Xbox One or the PS4's launch title count, albeit they weren't "new" at launch per-se.
A very subjective opinion.
With games like Psychonauts, Bastion, Wasteland, Fez, Frozen Synapse, Brütal Legend, Aquaria, FTL, Super Meat Boy, Stacking, Shank, To The Moon, Hotline Miami, and so many other brilliant games, there are a huge selection of quality launch titles for the Steam Box.
I'd easily take the Steam Box and its library over current console launch titles.
With so many corporations focused purely on next quarter profits, not thinking even six months ahead, I suppose it's normal for people to not understand the decade-long plans of Valve.
First off, they're only competing with the PS4/Xb1 by being a couch+TV focused system. They're a fully open system - you can build your own Steam Machine and slap the OS on it. But you'll have a hard time getting a quality machine for less than $500. That's one prong of their long game - erode the Windows tax, and just as importantly, make sure that if Microsoft suddenly fails or turns hostile to PC gaming, they have a way out. But stop thinking of it as "$500 console" (which is basically normal now), and more as a "$500 gaming PC", which is really damn cheap.
I know what you're about to say - "that's just semantics!". Well, yeah, it is, but it's also the truth. You're not getting a console with fixed hardware being sold below cost so they can make up for it in games or even with later hardware revisions, you're getting an upgradeable, user-accessible system.
Second, their "launch lineup" is arguably bigger than the Xb1's and PS4's combined. I just did a search on Steam for games with Linux and full controller support - got 58 results, from Metro: Last Light to Super Hexagon. Sure, they're almost all indie or older games, but you know what? I had more fun with Brutal Legend than I did with the last Call of Duty, so maybe that's a good thing. And that's ignoring the fact that a lot of these boxes also have Windows preinstalled as dual-boot, to get you the hundreds of games *that* supports (even with the "on Steam with full controller support" requirement, there's 292 games that meet the mark, including aforementioned latest CoD).
Third, game support is aimed at long-term growth, not a sudden burst at launch that fails to hold on. Remember how the PS3 was at launch? Decent set of launch games, I suppose, then nearly nothing for a few years. At times I felt like the Gamecube had better third-party support, although looking now the numbers don't back me up. They're not able (or perhaps just not willing) to bribe companies into developing for their hardware, so they basically have to convince them by showing that it's profitable.
Oh, and every SteamOS game intrinsically has Linux support. Remind me again, before Valve got involved how many developers were releasing Linux ports?
They've got the hardware guys rallying behind them because removing the Windows tax removes one of the bigger disadvantages from PC gaming. They've got the indie guys rallying behind them. You are correct in that the major third-parties have not yet committed to the platform, but I'm not sure your implied analysis that AAA games are necessary for a platform is correct. If this takes off, it will make new AAA developers from the indies. I wouldn't bet on that, but I'd also not bet against Valve's long game.
PS3 to PC controller adapters have existed for a long time. You can even pair them over Bluetooth if you don't mind using a shady, internet connected driver.
Much better to just use a 360 controller. No special adapter or driver needed and it's a far superior controller to the Sixaxis.
A solid 20 mins at the press event. I'm a big Valve fanboy, but this just didn't work for me. It didn't feel like a good gamepad replacement, nor a good keyboard/mouse replacement. Tries to replace both, masters neither.
Give it time, not everything can change extremely fast, especially on PC where things have pretty much been the same for almost 20 years now.
Cough sputter- What?! Are you seriously saying that the PC as a gaming platform is roughly the same as in 1994?
Here's a quick example of the sort of change that's happened:
In 1994, most PC gaming was still done in DOS, on computers without a dedicated graphics card. Games drew to a framebuffer. There was only a single processor, and there was only a single application running (ignoring Win3.1's cooperative multitasking, but most games required that Windows be shut off first anyway). The application had unfettered access to memory, and when it crashed it usually took the entire system along with it. CD drives were a novelty, and 14.4k modems were all there was in the way of "networked multiplayer", but they tied up the phone line so you couldn't stay on too long.
Oh, and also: USB didn't exist. God help you if you were trying to get a serial gamepad to be recognized by a game.
A spatial controller could be cool, like the Gyration Air Mouse, but I [w]ould bet Gor[i]lla arm fat[i]gue would be a problem...
Consider how Nintendo solved the problem of arm fatigue. The Wii Remote can be used with one end balanced on your chair or in your lap. As long as the camera in the controller can see the IR emitters next to your TV, the Wii Remote can detect which way it is pointed.
PS3 to PC controller adapters have existed for a long time.
It's called 'USB.'
You can even pair them over Bluetooth if you don't mind using a shady, internet connected driver.
That's not the only way to do it (and for the love of god, never install Motioninjoy, unless you like the idea of a Chinese program that can execute arbitrary code fetched from a remote server with elevated privileges), and it's only a problem with Windows (thanks Microsoft!)
And how many 3rd party titles were out before the launch of other consoles?
I don't have time to go into exact figures, but Wii was backward compatible with GameCube games that didn't use the network adapter. Wii U was backward compatible with all Wii games. Game Boy Color could play Game Boy games, Game Boy Advance could play Game Boy and Game Boy Color games, DS could play Game Boy Advance games, and 3DS could play DS games. PlayStation 2 and 3 could play games for the original PlayStation, and early PlayStation 3 consoles could play PlayStation 2 games. Adapters were available to play Master System games on Genesis and Game Gear, Game Boy games on Super NES, and most Game Boy, Game Boy Color, and Game Boy Advance games on GameCube.
And SteamOS is backward compatible with a small set of Steam (for PC) games.
Most [indie Steam] games are also quite cheap, especially compared to the 50-60$ price fixing lock-in enforced by the Big Three console manufacturers
What price fixing? I downloaded a few WiiWare games on Wii Shop, and they were around $10 each.
Mostly short indie games
What makes "short" games necessarily inferior, especially at low prices? Even classics like Super Mario Bros. can be completed in six minutes. It's so short that people can run it and re-run it to improve their time for competition.
all available on better platforms.
What makes one platform "better" than another in your opinion? Does a gaming platform need a walled garden with restrictive developer qualifications, put in place ostensibly to improve median game quality on reasoning dating back to the 1983 crash, in order to be a "better" platform?
I thought an Xbox 360 controller needed an adapter to turn the controller's proprietary RF signals into USB signals, namely a PC Wireless Gaming Receiver.
Steam is a DRM-based platform, I cannot imagine any scenario where it resembles "open".
For one thing, the Steam DRM platform is designed to coexist with DRM-free games on the same machine. I could take a DRM-free game for Linux and install it on an Ubuntu PC that also has the Steam client installed or on a SteamOS PC. Console DRM, on the other hand, is specifically designed to reject anything DRM-free. For another, it's reportedly easier to get an indie game greenlit on Steam than it was on the seventh-generation consoles. Remember the issues that Robert Pelloni had with his RPG Bob's Game?
You should be able to plug your Linux box into a TV using an HDMI port today.
Provided you already have a Linux box with a gaming GPU and a TV-friendly slim chassis, and you already have another computer to use at your desk. A lot of families currently own one PC, and it's in a separate room from the big TV in the living room. True, a SteamOS PC is just a mass-produced set-top gaming PC, but the fact that it's marketed as a set-top gaming PC means it's more likely to come with an appropriate GPU and chassis than your average Office Depot special.
Few people are going to want a SteamBox because it is Linux, they will want it for the "Steam DRM Service" otherwise they would just use Linux.
Unless you want to run both commercial games that use Steam and games that aren't (yet) greenlit on Steam without having to buy two machines. Before this push to get Steam on the television, one had to buy two devices to connect to the TV: a PC for the indie games and a console for the major-label games.
And I can plug my Windows box into my TV today using HDMI
Again, provided it's in the same room as your TV. See, for example, adolf's comment.
from my perspective you seem exciting about plugging a Linux box into a TV
We're excited about manufacturers bucking long-standing tradition and widespread mental sets and actually mass-producing and marketing a Linux gaming box designed for the TV to the general public at a price comparable to current-generation consoles.
Steam OS can run a huge swath of emulation too. From MAME to 2600 to Dreamcast and more.
So how do you read the Dreamcast discs, Atari 2600 cartridges, or arcade PCBs on your PC so that you can create ROM images useful in emulators? I know about Retrode, but that's for Super NES and Sega Genesis games, and it seems perpetually sold out.
If Steam were just a service where I could just buy games, I'd be all over it. Unfortunately, what Steam mostly is is DRM. It's obstructionware that insists on being present. I don't like having to wait for it to load, having to wait for it to retry and fail to find a network connection, and having to check "Offline" every single time I run something. I don't like it blowing my mods away, forcing me to do updates, and randomly unsorting and resetting my list of Skyrim mods if I don't save my edits fast enough. Steam DRM kills the Steambox for me, which is very sad because the Steambox is a Windows 8-killing PC in spite of Valve's efforts to try to steer perception away from that.
...AMD GPUs, apparently. I haven't tried it yet, but I've been waiting to get it set up on a gaming rig I built for our living room.
Awesome, my enemies are forced to resort to puerile ad-hominems. That must mean they can't actually argue with my logic, which means I'm right.
Either that, or you're just trolling, but you made me feel better so you failed at that as well.
Motionjoy bad! Scarlett Crush Productions DS3 driver is where it's at! Even supports up to 4 controllers!
There's various solutions already for getting the DS3 to work under LInux
Georgia Tech, the leader in Chia(tm) technology.
Short indie games are short by design.
True. Compare to fiction: not every novel has to be Rand's Atlas Shrugged or Tolstoy's War and Peace or even Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings. Sometimes there's only time for a novella like Wells's The Time Machine or Malhotra's I Moved Your Cheese. And in the same way that one can pick up a short story anthology for the price of a novel, one can pick up a pile of indie games for the same price as a 50-60 USD AAA game.
Well, most game controllers plugged in to the joystick port (often provided by the sound card). Sure, even that was a bit crusty solution, but worked perfectly for the era.
It's not size that matters, but how you play with it. ;-)
Who is to say that the Steam Box will not be a better platform than current consoles? Let's see what Valve come up with first, before judging.
Really? Because in 30 seconds I found 5 places selling it. Amazon can have one to my house by Thursday or i can drive to Frys 15 miles away and have it tomorrow.
Good-bye
No, it's not the games that are killing steambox, it's the competition.
Steamboxes start at $500 and go on up - the initial list I saw, you can get ones that go to $1400+.
Well shit, you know what? Everyone who wants to buy one (i.e., not you and me, who can install SteamOS on their own PC) will head down to Best Buy and look at it. You can get a PS4. An Xbone. Or a Steambox. Best Buy will probably carry 4 or 5 of them, all with technical gobbledogook of nVidia this, Core i5 that, blah blah blah. And no, Best Buy will not carry one that costs more than $500 because people will just laugh and walk by it.
And so you have the consumer having to choose the "best" $500 box out of the 4 or 5 in front of them. What will make the choice for them? How it looks. Because they can't make the choice!
And never mind the whole "Good" "Better" "Ultimate" strategy - the only ones most consumers will see are "Good" because they're priced like the PS4 and Xbone.
And sure, maybe the first units will sell. But take it two years later, and "Good" no longer is adequate - they're going to see people with PS4s and Xbones playing games, while they're stuck with a new SteamBox purchase or run in "Crappy" mode.
End result - developers will bitch about PS4 and Xbone graphics holding them back, but also first-gen Steamboxes as well,if they want the platform to be viable because the consumer is not going to be buying a new one in a couple of years. And no, they're not going to spend $100 to put in a new video card either ($150 with Geek Squad!).
We saw it this time around - the PS3 and Xbox 360 holding PC graphics back. The Steambox is an obvious attempt to revitalizing PC gaming (most AAA titles are ported from consoles, and if you're lucky, they release same day) as well as giving developers freedom to use high end graphics again.
And nevermind when instead of Tier 3 PC manufacturers (i.e., OEM assemblers) you have Tier 1 (they make it all - they design their own motherboards, etc) integrating all but the video card on a single board, removing excess parts, and selling what was a $500 SteamBox for $400. Or slapping it all together so its not swappable on a single board for $350.
The steambox is trying to put choice into consoles, which is the whole reason consoles exist - you go to the store, you buy it, you play it for many years and they're all the same. When you have now a dozen manufacturers with a dozen different models, and probably a half dozen more cheaper ones coming out, suddenly it doesn't look so easy for the consumer anymore.
attaching some additional pieces of hardware like some rubber, plastic pad, spring ,small stick to make it behave like real joystick? I remember that there were some hobby projects to make something attached to MSX numpad to make it work like joystick long long ago.
I don't see the big deal about running HDMI cables unless they are very long. I have no hassles with ten metres and really can't see any prospect of any unless there are a lot of machine tools or other sources of a lot of intense electromagnetic noise around. Washing machine motors etc shouldn't put out enough to be a hassle even if you loop the cable around it.
Not sure if emotionally stunted whiny cunt or troll...
Never heard of any of them. Are you sure they're as famous as you think they are?
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
That's fine and all, if you're ok with games that you have already been playing for years and shitty indie titles.
Maybe you should branch out. Just because a game doesn't have some shitty pre-movie trailer at the cinema doesn't mean it's not a great game. I highly suggest Bastion and Psychonauts for some actual unique and very intriguing story telling.
None of them warrant a $599 SteamBox purchase to play them. Most of them are laptop (with integrated graphics) material. Now if someone brought out a SteamBox in Ouya price range (at least for starters), it would make sense.
You can on Linux. I have enjoyed playing Fez and Super Meat Boy that way. For some reason Trine2 doesn't like it but so far that is the only game I've found that has any issues.
With games like Psychonauts, Bastion, Wasteland, Fez, Frozen Synapse, Brütal Legend, Aquaria, FTL, Super Meat Boy, Stacking, Shank, To The Moon, Hotline Miami,
Aren't those games "already" on various consoles? So why favor the Steambox, which isn't even on the shelves yet, when you can already have those games on a PS3/Xbox360.
You forgot to mention boot floppies. Far to many /.ers still twitch when remembering having to tweak autoexec.bat and config.sys to get Tie Fighter to run.
Redundancy is good And also good.
Uhh, no, you're just wrong. They are being sold everywhere. Not only at Fry's, but at Best Buy, Walmart and Gamestop too, if you're stuck in the past and need a physical store for some bizarre reason.
I can only speak to the walmart and gamestop nearest me, and they don't stock new wired controllers and the gamestop seldom has a used one.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
QQ
Mod me down, my New Earth Global Warmingist friends!
The Best Buy, Walmart, and GameStop stores near me had wired controllers when I checked a month and a half ago, but they were all third-party. All first-party controllers I could find were wireless. And even if wired first-party controllers were more widely available, that doesn't help someone who already owns several wireless controllers.
An individual who runs pirated ROMs on a gaming PC is unlikely to get in trouble. A company that makes and sells gaming PCs and markets them on their ability to run pirated ROMs is far more likely to get in trouble for inducing copyright infringement. MGM v. Grokster.
I don't see the big deal about running HDMI cables unless they are very long.
From one room to another, they would be very long, and not everybody has both permission and inclination to cut holes in the wall to run the cable. The advantage of a console or set-top PC is that you don't have to negotiate with your landlord for permission to break the walls, and you don't have to pay an electrician to pull the cable through the wall if local laws require it, and you don't have to also pull USB, which requires a repeater every 5 m, for the game controllers, and someone else can be using the PC for surfing the web while you're gaming.
WRONG! You can play XBox 360 games on the Xbox one.
This is not true. They're completely different platforms with no backwards compatibility at all. Same as PS3/PS4.
Seriously? You've never heard of Tim Schafer? Double Fine Productions, previously LucasArts? Tim is responsible for absolute classic games like Secret of Monkey Island, Day of the Tentacle, Grim Fandango, and of course, Psychonauts, Brütal Legend, and Stacking, from my list.
Super Meat Boy and Fez? They are very high profile indie games. Creators and games were also the subject of an excellent documentary: Indie Game: The Movie.
Wasteland. Created by Interplay Productions, and used as the basis for Fallout. You must have heard about the Fallout series of games, surely!
Bastion, To The Moon. More high profile indie games.
Actually, I didn't create my list with the idea that these games were famous. My criteria was more about quality. These are _excellent_ games. Very much recommended to play. It's just coincidence that some are well known. Anyone with a decent knowledge of gaming culture would know the all. I didn't even mention any of Valve's own games.
True, you don't need a high powered machine to play these, although I'd recommend something more than integrated graphics for some of them. Valve's own games, which I didn't mentioned, would certainly benefit from more power.
Steam Machines will be created by many different manufacturers. So who knows, maybe one will be priced around the Ouya range. Time will tell.
Some of these are on consoles. Some are exclusive to specific consoles. Some are only available on PC.
They're all available on Steam, and playable on Linux.
It only came out on PC at all in 2013, which is when I played it. Mac+Linux support lagged only two months behind Windows support.
And I used it as an example both because it's still one of the bigger-name and higher-price Linux games, and because I really enjoyed that game and will name-drop it given the slightest excuse.
I think windows doesn't know how to handle standard Bluetooth devices. On osx you just plug up the controller and hit the PS button and it auto pairs.
Non impediti ratione cogitationus.
True, a PC maker could bundle something like Midway Arcade Treasures or Namco Museum with new PCs. But there are a lot of old games whose copyright ownership has become untraceable over the decades. And even for games whose copyright owner is still in business, there are still a lot of copyright owners who either are entirely unwilling to license or insist on unreasonable royalties, as Hairyfeet discovered when he tried to do much as you suggest.
Fair enough in a lot of cases but I just don't buy the argument about electrical interference.
Laws that require hiring a bonded electrician to install HDMI, USB, or Ethernet likely exist as a safety (or safety theater) measure arising from the 115 or 220 volt (depending on region) AC lines in the walls.
The main reason I don't have a PC near the TV is if it has to have the grunt to play new 3D games (or even h264 when it came out) then it has to be relatively expensive and have plenty of cooling.
Manufacturers of SteamOS PCs claim to have solved the cost and cooling problems. This preview of iBuyPower's Steam Machine guesses a price on par with that of the Xbox One.
I really hope that Valve/Steam puts more pressure on publishers to just ditch their DRM options.
PCs that ship with SteamOS are probably pressure enough, as a lot of these third-party digital restrictions management libraries aren't ported to the Debian GNU/Linux operating system that underlies SteamOS. As far as I can tell, the only StarForce I can get on Linux is an early NES shoot-em-up by Tecmo, dumped from the Game Pak with the INL Retro copier.
However, I don't see this being possible w/o Steam being a monopoly.
Once the iBuyPower Steam Machine comes out, SteamOS will have a (temporary?) monopoly on mass-produced set-top gaming PCs.
Are you actually being serious or is that some hysterical "the other tribe is creating a nanny state" bullshit?
I lack the time to search through current city codes worldwide, but this answer to a question on Server Fault and this forum post and these comments to a Lifehacker article claim that at least one Australian state requires that even licensed electricians need or needed a separate data cabling licence.
Gosh. Tough crowd. Do you heckle professionally, or is it just a casual thing?
Of course I cherry picked! That was the basis of my list: show great games that are playable on SteamBox / Linux. Way to miss the point.
Interesting that you singled out Psychonauts, as that often gets criticism for the difficulty of the Meat Circus level, supposedly ruining the game for many. I didn't mind it myself, but I can see their point. The insane asylum levels, and Lungfishopolis, are some of the most blindingly brilliant and creative game levels! Blows my mind. What a great game!
As for the other games on the list ... they cover such a wide spectrum of gameplay, you can be excused for not having the good taste to appreciate them. ;-)
The people commenting on that article have got it mixed up with electrical cabling even though they pretend that they have not. My nephew has just started an apprenticeship as an electrician and he can run ethernet cable unsupervised. The voltage and current is far too low for the electrical safety standards to apply at all.
There is of course a training course for cabling but it's not a requirement. It's just a convenience for employers that don't want a fully fledged electrician but want someone with a clue about cabling. I can, and have legally run cable through commercial office buildings but it's usually more convenient to get electricians to do it since they have the ladders and are good at it.
Lots of people are too lazy to setup an HTPC.
This is exactly the problem that PCs that ship with SteamOS are intended to fix, by providing a home theater PC in a box.
Lots of people actually like Apple's walled garden
Why? Is it a perception that restrictive developer qualifications are correlated with higher median quality of applications, or is it something else?
or accept that Windows (8) PC as that's the only thing the big name store carries.
That and their pragmatist friends and relatives have told them that Windows 8 can be tamed. Windows Vista too had become acceptable after Mojave (Windows Vista Service Pack 1) shipped.
and when they say "I want to play games in the living room, the LCD response is PS4/XBONE or even the Wii U
So what is the response to "I want to play game X with mod Y in the living room"? For example, third parties have made mods to Oblivion and Skyrim that make the experience much more enjoyable than vanilla versions by nerfing certain annoying mechanics. But the console versions tend not to allow mods to nearly the same extent as PC versions. The only recent console game I'm aware of with thorough mods has been Super Smash Bros. Brawl, and that's because security on the original Wii was cracked so quickly.
Linux/SteamOS will be a more viable option alongside the other platforms, hopefully at least more viable than... the Mac (oh god the pessimist in me is now even more skeptical)
I was under the impression that a port to Linux would make a port to OS X more viable because both Linux and OS X use OpenGL graphics.
[Most gamers don't see lack of selection and lack of mods on Apple, Microsoft, Nintendo, and Sony platforms as] a serious enough problem to be fixed by upgrading/switching
New games not coming out for PlayStation 3 or Xbox 360 anymore is another problem. Should a gamer solve that by upgrading to PlayStation 4, by upgrading to Xbox One, or by upgrading to a Steam Machine? The Steam Machine would solve not only lack of new games for the old platform but also lack of selection and lack of mods.
And this is where "games and Office" tips in the favor of Windows.
LibreOffice is available for Windows and Linux. If you meant specifically Microsoft Office, that costs hundreds of USD extra anyway. And if you're going to be naming names, you could make the same argument about iWork or Final Cut: a PC isn't good enough, and you have to buy a Mac. And once you've bought a Mac mini, you already have something that can run Steam games for Mac and can be connected to a TV.
I suspect many parents will be skeptical of the Steam machine as a living room console (I'm switching context to consoles now) as (AFAIK) there are no discs.
How does Apple's iPad get away with not having discs? How do a lot of laptops? Do most people still prefer to buy a USB DVD burner for a PC and use it to rip CDs in iTunes? I know there still exist 70-year-old grandmas who prefer to use mix CDs as the physical embodiment of a playlist because it's something they can hold in their hands. But you can't even do that for books, video, or apps.
there are people (so many that MS relented) who just wants to walk in a store
Getting to the store depends on whether your city cleans up the road after a major snowstorm faster than your Internet provider restores service after the same snowstorm. I, for one, didn't lose power or Internet during the recent storm, but a snow emergency was declared in Fort Wayne, Indiana. And if you do end up losing power, you're screwed either way. But I'll grant that disc-based consoles are better for rural gamers, who usually can't get cable or fiber Internet.
Well, in my definition of gamer, a gamer should upgrade to as many systems he can afford that has the games he wants to play. And keep his old ones around if they still work, removing them only after emulation/backwards compatibility is available
How many daisy-chained composite and HDMI switch boxes would it take to keep a PlayStation 2, GameCube, PlayStation 3, PlayStation 4, and Wii U running, as well as an NES, Genesis, Super NES, and Nintendo 64 for games not on Virtual Console?
This means, a person sticking to a PS4/XBONE can get his Sony or MS exclusives, but not miss out on "SteamBox exclusives", as that's not a thing.
There are plenty of games that are exclusive to Steam, such as games from a developer that is not yet licensed for PlayStation 4 or Xbox One. Is it easier to get a game greenlit on Steam or on the consoles? (This ties into your comment about using Steam to gain experience.) Besides, like other X11/Linux PCs, SteamOS PCs run non-Steam games made for X11/Linux, such as the X11/Linux version of a PC game that uses multiple gamepads from a not-yet-console-licensed developer.
The value added from mods is extra, on top of the value that the original game has.
Tell that to anyone who bought Half-Life just for Counter-Strike or a Source game for Garry's Mod. Or are you claiming that this demographic is financially insignificant?
How does Apple's iPad get away with not having discs? How do a lot of laptops?
They aren't sold to be used in the living room with a big screen?
I'll consider that once you explain what screen size has to do with software distribution media. Netflix, Hulu Plus, Amazon Instant Video, and video on demand from the cable company doesn't use discs yet play on a TV.
Ouya launched with 104 indie titles, way more than XBone or PS4, and nobody cares because 90% of gamers only care about AAA titles, and 9% of gamers mostly care about AAA titles. Bully for Steam if this does take off, but as it is currently it would be a very poor choice as your principle gaming system, and it doesn't show particularly much promise to develop into something larger than the Ouya. Maybe if they can get a box out for $200, and a selection of popular games, non-nerds would be interested. Until then, it's a solution in search of a problem, where the principle attraction is old-ass games you could play on a laptop, but still costs a lot of money and is a bear to set up.
Also, "long term thinking" is basically how the console industry works, with consoles sold at a loss to corner the market over the long term. Even a very successful console isn't expected to earn money for a few years.
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