Was announced 1 minute ago, discuss.
(Yawn :o) Not much to see with this announcement.
After the nuclear bomb they dropped on Monday, this Steam Machines announcement is pretty tame. The beta program is interesting, but expected. This puts the constant rumors of a “Steam-Box” to rest. There is never going to be a Valve-backed Steam console.
This just helps to clarify a few things about SteamOS, and reinforces that the whole effort is going to be an open platform. As far as the PC-building crowd is concerned, it’s business as usual, with a new OS to play with. We will see what various manufacturers can do in designing tiny PCs to run SteamOS on. But aside from seeing what designs they can come up with, there’s nothing to see here.
From some of the hints they dropped in this announcement, I’m thinking Friday we are going to hear about controllers/inputs.
I’m curious to see what the next announcement is. I’m fairly sure it’ll be controller related like RichardKain mentioned, since with steamboxes and steamOS, you’ll need some sort of unified way to control the console and games that all developers can count on.
I’m really hoping it won’t be just some boring Xbox type controller. I’m hoping they saved best for last and they blow our minds with the last announcement. Exciting stuff!
From what I can gather from this announcement, this is essentialy valves own “Steam Box”. Although there will be other manufacturers as well.
Valve has made no promises about their own box. For the moment, they are simply going to be sending out 300 prototype boxes. They haven’t made any announcement about producing or selling these units in the future. And the manufacturing partners the mentioned are all going to be designing and distributing their own versions. There is no one, official “Steam Box.” Any PC that runs the SteamOS will effectively be a “Steam Box.”
I’m more interested in what Valve is saying to manufacturers and developers, to convince them into dedicate precious resources to very small markets of Linux and small factor PCs. It must be very interesting speech about the future or Gabe dropping bags of $ and making it rain.
Which essentially makes it a higher end, Android-style platform for games consoles.
I can imagine this easily outstripping both the PS4 and XBone in terms of power and versatility only a couple of years into their lifecycles if it gets traction. Which means nothing in terms of its success (the mainstream market doesn’t buy stuff because of its specs) but is still sure to shake things up.
Exciting times!
Or they could work on emulators/replacement APIs. Such things already exist for Linux, and while they’re limited and/or breaky so far they’re largely the work of enthusiast hobbyists. On the other hand, it’s very much in Valve’s strong commercial interests to make those things work. And they don’t have to be perfect, and they have a very known library of software they have to work with. And they don’t even have to work with the whole library to give the platform’s software library a huge boost.
But even without that, there’s still going to be a strong and growing library of Linux compatible titles. And it the platform takes off then it’ll sell itself to developers.
You’re right, my bad. The article I read went up super quickly and gave the impression Valve had their own box.
Here is a tear down of a beta Steam Machine: http://www.designnews.com/document.asp?doc_id=270641&cid=nl.dn14&dfpPParams=ind_184,industry_consumer,aid_270641&dfpLayout=article
Wow, that is ugly. So basically a PC. In fact I think ALL the next gen consoles are all basically a PC!
And running a Valved skinned Linux AKA SteamOS… Man! The world is becoming LAZY! Where are those people who would make ground breaking CPU/GPU just for consoles?
I know exactly what’s coming in Next-next-gen consoles. ANOTHER PC. Maybe even a low end one.
This will be the reason why console will die.
It’s not “basically” a PC, it IS a PC. The case is the only part which is custom designed, everything else (CPU, Mobo, GPU, Memory, etc.) is all off the shelf. This is quite different to the PS4 Xbone, while they do use PC based components, the APU is customised, their memory interfaces are custom designed along with much of the architecture of the Mobo, they even both have additional custom made components such as the Data Move Engines and hardware decoders, all the custom hardware makes them far from just a standard PC. You couldn’t build one yourself if you had the case, but you could build an identical PC to these Steamboxes if you had the empty case.
People seem to talk about the Steambox like it’s a console competitor. It’s not, it’s a living room PC. They talk about SteamOS like it’s a Windows competitor, but it’s not, it’s just Linux which is designed specifically to boot directly into Steam and nothing more. You can get to the desktop, sure, but Valve aren’t paying much attention to that side of things and if you want to use Linux as a desktop OS there are far better distros available for that. The machines are hardly going to be cheaper than normal PCs of similar spec either, if you build it by hand you could probably even include a Windows license for cheaper than a retail steambox. What role does that leave it to fill, other than for the niche PC gaming enthusiast who isn’t bothered to build a machine himself and isn’t bothered about having access to all the games which won’t be ported to linux?
Ummmm… Good?
Ability to modify and upgrade hardware? Yes plz.
+1.
It seems that the death of the PC as a gaming machine was greatly exaggerated. 