Valve's Steam Machines Are More About Safeguarding PCs Than Killing Consoles

An anonymous reader writes "CES has come and gone, and we've gotten a chance to see many different models of Valve's Steam Machines. They're being marketed as a device for a living room, and people are wondering if they'll be able to compete with the Big-3 console manufacturers. But this article argues that Valve isn't going after the consoles — instead, Steam Machines are part of a long-term plan to keep the PC gaming industry healthy. Quoting: 'Over the years, Valve has gone from simply evangelizing the PC platform — it once flew journalists in from around the world pretty much just to tell them it was great — to actively protecting it, and what we're seeing now is just the beginning of that push. Take SteamOS. To you and me, it's a direct interface for Steam based on Linux that currently has poor software support. To Valve, though, it's a first step in levering development, publishing, gameplay and community away from their reliance on Windows and DirectX (and to a lesser extent Mac OS), systems that cannot be relied upon in the long term. ... As for Steam Machines, they are a beachhead, not an atom bomb. They are meant to sell modestly. ... The answer is that Valve is thinking in decades, not console generations.'"

Comments

Re:Oh, well

[Tom]

and still you'll end up with a full fledged PC with a serious OS (Linux) that can run lots and lots of 'serious apps'

*cough*

Sorry, but Linux is not a serious desktop OS. And I say that as someone who had hoped for almost a decade that it would become one.

Using it basically as a black-box OS where the end-user is only ever exposed to your custom app and never to the OS itself is precisely the right move, because that's what Linux is really good for (other than, say, windows which regularily graces bulletin boards or kiosks the world over with blue screen, "new software updates are available" windows and other "why the fuck can't the OS stay in the fucking background instead of jumping into your face?" bullshit.

Re:Let's be honest

[0123456]

Window 8 is malware.