f13.net

Apparently it's been confirmed, Valve is working on a steam home console system (http://www.theverge.com/2012/12/8/3744314/gabe-newell-valve-console-living-room-steam-box).

Most likely it'll be a Linux box (only reason their Linux push makes much sense at all, it would cost more for it to be a windows box, and would be much harder to lock down enough since they won't have full control of the OS), so that means they'll have to push devs to make more linux ports (or it'll be heavily indie based).

It has the potential to work both ways. They can use Linux as an operating system they have the freedom to modify, no licensing fees and it's not owned by their competition. And if the platform takes off it also helps make linux a viable steam platform elsewhere and helps weaken Microsofts PC dominance. Or it just fails and neither matter, since it seems a decent jump.

I assume the use of gaming middleware has made porting more viable though compared to the old days of programming directly to DirectX or OpenGL.

It's a ballsy move, but it's pretty well timed and playing the long game. The PC market is languishing, there's no leadership since Microsoft is distracted and has irritated the hardware providers. If they can put out a reference standard for a really integrated and open gaming console, media centre and lounge room social network via steam, plus potentially apps as well, it has a shot and it probably doesn't cost them that much to give it a try. And owning a slice of the living room would be rather nice plus some protection against the decline of dedicated PCs.

I don't care so much about the hardware but if they make a good OS I will drop windows on all my home PC's.

I only have windows around for games. If steam on linux has even a moderate range of games its gone.

I also think it's capitalizing on the fact that a lot of the tablet users and those with casual computing needs are realizing they really don't need windows. Microsoft has never been this vulnerable before.

Windows is sort of the big, clunky, Hardware Abstraction Layer for Steam.  I install it just so I can install Steam and use that to install games.

Microsoft is also toying with a more walled garden approach with their store stuff (most significantly on winphone and windows rt / surface), but still... maybe not the ideal time to telegraph to their users and content providers (like Valve) that they're thinking about making the platform more restrictive... just more reason for people to jump ship.

I still am seriously hoping Valve saves me from having to upgrade to Win8...

If they are aiming at PC gamers this will be an incredibly difficult market to gain critical mass with.

If they are aiming at Xbox/PS crowds then ekeing out market share will be a nightmare.

But if anyone can do it I guess it would be valve.

Godspeed to Valve if they think they somehow turn Linux into a gaming environment that won't require any technical knowledge to use. I mean who needs hardware sound support?

I don't think they are. I would suspect the market is a combination of media-PC, light computing and casual gaming crowd. The "serious" people will buy whichever console has the exclusives they care about and if they care about PC gaming have a real PC. But there's a lot of people who aren't going to have a dedicated PC and valve is moving to them. PC gamers will gain from it too.

The problem will be reaching a critical mass of games and installed compatible machines, since they pretty much have to go for linux or microsoft will price them out of the market.

So only competing with apple, google, and your home telecoms provider then.

Its braver than steam ever was.


I assume the Linux bit will be completely hidden from the end user, in practice this sounds like a brand new platform that has an easier path for indie development to transfer from the PC.

They might be competing with apple, or they might be collaborating. Both would gain a lot from breaking microsoft's stranglehold. I'm not sure how they're competing with google (though it would be funny if it shipped with google web-apps) and most of the telecoms providers don't have the scale or skill to make it work from what I've seen (though Aus is probably very different from the US).

And yeah, it will almost certainly boot into steam in big picture mode. But since steam is coming out for linux too there's little reason for linux people to care. The fact it's making nvidia and AMD write decent drivers is already paying off.

The real trick is their investment won't be that large because they don't necessarily want to own the platform in the same way MS does. More likely they come out with a spec and sign up one of the PC makers to put out a reference platform. Those guys are seeing very poor PC sales, weak windows 8 sales, they'd probably be keen for a new open platform where they don't have to pay microsoft for the privilege.

I've been using a self-built PC in the living room, attached to the TV, for a few years now. It's mostly been used for media playback and web surfing but for gaming it blows the PS3 out of the water.

The issues making consoles better for living room gaming are possibly easily solved, namely controllers and cost. Mouse & keyboard aren't ideal for non-table/desk gaming, but just using a £30 Xbox360 controller for the PC solved that problem for many games.

Steams Big Picture helped a lot with windows UI issues, but something more at the OS level would be even better.

The cost issue is a thornier one IMO. Decent PCs with good gaming graphics cards are expensive, a lot more so than consoles. If you can make gaming from the sofa on a PC user-friendly then it's awesome, but £800 PCs are always going to be a limited market in competition with £200 consoles.

This Steam Box will use exactly the same kind of parts as any other console.  NVidia will license them a cheap mass produced GPU.  It won't even have a graphics card.  They'll cook up a custom mobo and slap the GPU straight on it.  The HTPC market has made all the other hardware for this kind of thing dirt cheap.  I just built my mother a $150 box that would make the 360 cry like a little girl.

:oh_i_see:

There's like zero chance I'd ever drop Windows just for this, there are still plenty of games not available through Steam that I want to play, and there will continue to be.

What exactly do you call the GPU's that go into other consoles?  Expensive?

http://www.xbitlabs.com/news/multimedia/display/20051123214405.html

In 2005 Microsoft was already only paying $150 for GPU + video ram.  There's no way a modern console needs to spend more than $100 on a good GPU/ram combo.  Game development costs have almost completely bottle necked the idea of a super powerful console.  The idea that PC gaming systems have to be expensive is just flat out wrong now.

Put an xbox next to a good gaming pc. The bottleneck is console limitations.

But your opinion is right again.

Do you drink screw top wine? Whatever gets you drunk, right?

There's a lot of good screw cap wine these days.

Yeah, I was thinking that as I typed it.

Dammit!

I'm fine if you ignore my post but don't just make shit up and reply.  I never said anything about a performance bottleneck on current software.  I said development costs are a bottleneck on the IDEA of a brand new powerful console. 

Why exactly does Steam need to beat the Xbox 720/PS4 on hardware?

I'm pretty sure box wine is still a good go-to for that sort of comparison.

Ok.
Not even, the two wino librarians have found some good boxes, too.

I doubt they're worried about turning any arbitrary Linux distro into a gaming environment... and hardware sound support is not actually all that bad if you bypass all the crap audio middleware in Linux and just roll your own...

Think of Linux as a toolkit for building dedicated platforms (Android, Sonos, Roku, etc), instead of an end-user product and it makes more sense.

Linux is not paying 100$ on each console to compete with microsoft who doesn't need to and can screw you over since you are dependent on them. That's partly why the Microsoft surface was such a great way to irritate the hardware manufacturers.

I wasn't aware the linux audio system was crap, but even if it is you can roll your own or fix it and give those fixes back to the platform so someone else does the integration and maintenance work. Apparently valve's involvement is already helping getting some drastic improvement in Nvidia drivers (http://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2012/11/new-nvidia-driver-doubles-performance-on-linux).

Various hardware sites commenting on the fact that Xi3 is making an (extremely) small form factor system using an investment from Valve and to Valves specs. It's called the Piston (http://techland.time.com/2013/01/08/xi3s-piston-a-steam-box-emerges-sort-of/) and based on some of the tech used in their thousand buck, same form factor, top end system. Though I assume the piston will be dialled back a bit in specs because that price is too high, although building up their volume would probably help bring down costs too. It's pretty cute, but they never show these things with the power brick and external devices they need.

I hope this is going to be more a reference system for a valve-box PC standard other vendors can build to, though it seems rather specialized for that purpose.  Maybe valve is also trying to drum home the point that it doesn't need to, and indeed shouldn't, look like a typical PC.

Lot's of tech-porn videos but this one from machinima (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=isfqiYG7wiI) is short and too the point, if a bit breathless.

It looks super neat, dunno how useful it is in practice, but it looks cool!

While that does look awesome I'm starting to feel that there may be too many people chasing an increasingly crowded market over the next year or so.

Ouya, Project Shield, next-gen consoles from all the big players, Steam box, etc etc. Diversity is a good thing, for sure, but not all of these projects are going to succeed and with the sums of money being invested there may well be some big, big failures.

It looks nice but I wonder how nice it is once it has a dozen cords and cables attached to it  :oh_i_see:
I have that problem with my computer case, all sleek and matte-black but the jungle of cables attached to its back just ruins the visual (unless you hide the back)

RPS.com has a good post on it with a bit more info:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=isfqiYG7wiI

I really love the idea of modular design, but I have no idea how they're going to fit a proper graphics card in there.  Maybe external graphic card too?


That's a really good point.  Its going to be a struggle to have a tiny box that is a 9" cube and then having all these cables sticking out of it.  Shit, my Apple TV practically gets lifted by just the 3 cables I have plugged into it.

There's pictures of it being bolted to the back of a monitor (it has a VESA mount) which keeps it out of the way. But yeah, there's a reason all the display artwork is of just the box itself. I'd consider it but I'd need it sitting on top some real hard-drives and worry that small fan is actually audible.


It has integrated ATI graphics. There's no space or ports for a traditional graphic card. Which is fine, the chip vendors are doing a lot of work on integrated graphics for all the tablets and ultrabooks, and it's probably more than powerful enough to run a console box. But it won't have enough power or ventilation to compete with a real PC I would imagine.

Interesting, but somewhat rambling, interview at The Verge (http://www.theverge.com/2013/1/8/3852144/gabe-newell-interview-steam-box-future-of-gaming). Pretty much confirms that the "steambox" is more about creating a new standard to push PC's forward. So the xi3 box is a third party supplier but they'll be coming out with their own, linux based, steam box at some point. There's even some picures of their prototype which basically looks like a compact media-PC.

So basically between PC's getting marginalised and Microsoft wanting to be apple I think he believes someone has to point a direction forward for it to survive, which is also pretty important to his business.

I think we're going to see some definite shakeups in the battle for the living room in the next year or two.   The existing strong platforms (Nintendo, Sony, Microsoft) are facing competition from the low cost space (inexpensive Android based devices like Ouya, media-playback platforms like Apple TV, Roku, etc, that could easily expand into gaming in their next generation), and the PC manufacturers are definitely interested in finding markets to expand into with mobile starting to eclipse the PC space.  Lots of opportunity for a strong contender with a solid content library (like Valve) to step in.  Harder for the tiny platforms like Ouya, or the oddball form factors like Shield, but who knows.

In theory I agree but in practice all these emerging competitors appear to be awful Frankenstein's Monsters of random technology put together with little thought.

The upside of a PC is that it is upgradeable, can be easily tinkered with and plays PC games. Steam Box variants appear to be not upgradeable (or at least not much) and being Linux-based don't play most Steam games...also we are at a point where a decent PC plays console games better than consoles do, but that is going to change relatively soon.

Then there are Android machines that aren't very portable and have a controller instead of a touchscreen. In theory they run every Android game, in practice most Android games are designed for touch screens and aren't the kind of games you want to sit down and play at a TV. Android / iPhone is all about playing games because they are cheap and you are taking a dump - I can't imagine a lot of people thinking "man if only I could play this Android game on a TV with a controller!!"

Then there is the whole copying of the WiiU streaming angle. The thing is a PC game designed to run on a large screen at high res, if you shrink that down to a 5-inch screen a lot of games are going to be unreadable. (Turbo Express had this exact problem) And PC games are designed for mouse/keyboard, but for these streaming devices to be portable they have a controller.

The idea of a lower cost console that plays steam games or android games and/or connects to a tv and/or can have games streamed to it makes some sense but it doesn't seem to me that anyone has hit on the right combination.

I'm also a little skeptical that with the rate of revision of mobile devices these aren't going to be dogged with "this isn't even released yet and already more powerful machines are just around the corner."

I suspect most or all of these are going to fail pretty hard. That said I also believe that either Sony or MS is going to fail pretty hard as well. Fails all around!

A good PC is expensive compared to a console despite the fact that building a good PC is cheaper than ever and gets cheaper pretty much every year.

Without customized hardware like a console has, being sold by a company with incredibly close contact with the companies that fabricate every part of it, how are you going to do better than a mediocre microitx PC?

Most of the steam boxes we've seen so far are just manufacturers doing what they do and calling it steam-box compatible because they desperately need to pretend they have a large stable of content. Xi3 wants to make small PC's, Nvidia really wants you to stream video from some hulking PC with one of their grunt video cards and razor wanted to make a gaming tablet with a silly price tag. The box valve are using to demonstrate the concept is apparently an off the shelf mini-ITX PC. And they can pretty easily compete with the next gen consoles with that since most of those are PC hardware based anyway this time round.

But perhaps that's the point. Valve isn't going to / can't afford to spend the billions microsoft did on making the x-box stick and buying exclusives, they don't really want to own the platform (they just want it to run steam). They're more likely to point out some directions (eg. "PC's in the living room!"), have some sort of standardisation / branding process, and see if they can't convince other vendors to stop copying apple/google and see if they can come up with some products that stick. With Valve having a go themselves when they release their own steam-box (eventually).

I don't think being upgradeable is that core to the PC. With hardware being more integrated the only real upgrading that happens in most cases is a new video card or some more ram. And even that counts as enthusiast I suspect. The most important thing about the PC is that no one vendor owns it and gains a huge competitive advantage thereby. Which of course is why the really big names, who can compete head to head, have no interest in it.

Since I have to buy a new mobo whenever I buy a new CPU, PCs are somewhat less upgradeable now.

http://www.theverge.com/2013/1/8/3852144/gabe-newell-interview-steam-box-future-of-gaming


Looks promising to be honest.  Depending on price point I could see myself potentially getting one of these things.

No doubt about it, a lot of these things are not going to work, or at best remain niche, but I suspect one or two of the less-stupid attempts at taking over the living room content experience may find some momentum.

I also suspect whoever can deliver an inexpensive platform that can deliver TV content to rival CATV/Satellite (as far as shows people want to watch) but delivered over IP will be enormously disruptive.  The cable providers desperately don't want to be dumb pipes, but I think the writing is on the wall and it's only a matter of time -- mostly time to get a suitable set of content business deals done.  That's always been my theory on why Apple hasn't pushed hard on Apple TV yet.

I think one of the Steamboxes will probably do quite well, purely on the grounds of it being a PC-inna-box that you can plug right in to your telly.
Probably whichever one ends up being cheapest.

I also suspect MS throwing some sort of shitfit about it.  :grin:

If it has some DVR capability, I would consider it.

An impressively mangled Polygon article on a Gabe Newell talk (http://www.polygon.com/2013/1/30/3934112/gabe-newell-steam-boxs-biggest-threat-isnt-consoles-its-apple) in which he apparently said:


Which seems a valid point. Apple has a hugely valuable eco-system but their revenues are getting savaged by the smart-phone and tablet markets getting commoditised. They'll be looking for a new platform or extension of their system and the TV has to be a pretty tempting target. They really do have most of the pieces already if they get serious, though they'd try to keep their intentions a secret until they can drop a "revolutionary" (/cough) and ready to market product to try and build some hype.

Don't you mean patent a "revolutionary"?

I call horseshit on Apple coming anywhere near "Taking over the living room". They don't know how to make an affordable product. Phones can basically be subsidized by the carriers since they can wrangle you into contracts, and the only market Apple really dominates is the tablet market.

TV Panels are ridiculously cheap due to all the people producing the panels and assembling the TVs fucking slaughtering eachother in a race to the bottom in terms of prices. I'm sure Sony, Toshiba, Visio, etc. are all jerking themselves off however praying that Apple releases a fuck-off expensive gimmick TV so they can jump on the hype bandwagon and sell TVs for extraordinarily high prices again since 3D/204208580hz screens were an abysmal failure at dragging the price points back up.

The money is in software and content, not making the things. I expect he is more talking about apple doing something like the steambox by pushing the apple TV box up to the next level and integrating it with their other platforms hardware and software. Angry birds on your big screen TV, controlled by your tablet, there's lots of ways the pieces they have could be combined. Though they lost a lot of vision, direction and ability to sell technology at a premium price when they lost Steve Jobs.

Apple has been trying to dominate the TV set-top box market (I don't think they'd go after TV's themselves since the margins are SHIT). Apple TV anyone?

It hasn't panned out because they can't or won't get a price point that will make people stop and go "HMMMM." It's not like anything they are offering is better than anyone else, or is FIRST over anyone else - that's been part of the reason behind the success of the iPod, iPhone and iPad. They took over a market early with a product that was head and shoulders above (and most importantly DIFFERENT) than anyone else in the market. The tablet market is getting whittled away as well. The TV set-top box? I'm not sure what they can offer that the other billion products can't. They'd be competing against Tivo and all the cable/satellite provider DVR's, against all the cloud/streaming entertainment services like Amazon, Netflix, Hulu and OnDemand style offerings from cable/satellite providers, as well as PS3, Xbox 360, Roku and other existing markets. What are they going to offer that will crater that niche?

The content providers are the largely unbeatable obstacle in Apple's path. You can make wonderful hardware that no one will buy if they can't get the content they want on it for a reasonable price.

And I think the Wii proved the profitability of going for the super-casual gamer console market. After everyone went nuts over the Wii, bought one, and got tired of Wii Sports it became a debacle.

The biggest problem with apple tv is that the content is fucking expensive. It is much cheaper to have cable with an everything subscription than to try to get your five or ten favorite shows through the applestoresoftwarecrap, and that's if the bullshitapplecontentfuckingexpensive store even has what you want. Those fuckers charge per episode.

$99 for the box isn't bad, but until they can deliver content that rivals basic cable for the price and coverage, the living room is likely to remain unconquered.  I suspect they have a better shot than most to negotiate some kind of content deal, though, but I doubt it'd be trivial to pull off.  I think this needs to be more netflix-ish flat-fee-for-access to make it appeal to most people.  Pay-by-the-episode adds up fast.

They charge per episode because the content providers aren't going to cut their own throat and DEMAND they charge per episode.  We were on the road to a real revolution in content pricing before the famous, "Don't give up analog dollars for digital pennies" quote from Zucker.   That was the wake-up call and suddenly Hollywood realized they bought the line that because there were no physical costs they should sell for less.   However they didn't really have to because people would still pay analog dollars for digital content, the price point was already set in the consumers minds and now the providers could pocket the savings.

So now you pay ridiculous prices and they make even MORE money.  It's one of the reasons I refuse to pay for digital anything and still buy physical. Less profit for these fuckers.   (The other big two being you lose right of first sale and the possibility of wiping your collection out with digital is much higher than physical media.)

Of course they also provide an immense economic advantage to anyone who can break their control. Or encourage people to just opt out of the system they have built altogether.

That said I very much doubt steam will fight this battle. They're not aiming to control the system from the top down or profit from all aspects. They'll try and encourage netflix, youtube and the other streaming services to get involved. And let them feud with the media industry.

Pay per episodes sounds like paying per hour for internet access.  lol ok.

This is exactly right.

Honestly, anything more than .99c an episode or $10 for a season (in HD) is too much.

It is. It's also not going away, and paying per hour for Internet access is making a huge comeback.  After all, you own a smartphone, right?

I had infinite data, I don't know what your talking about.   :awesome_for_real:

(had to give it up for Poland)   :sad_panda:


Anyways, I always felt the console market was something Apple could break into and do very well with.  That's the sort of thing right up there alley, and the popularity of the iPhone and iPad for gaming only helps reinforce this.

Steambox may not be a reality after all:

Layoffs at valve (http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/186592/Several_out_of_work_as_Valve_makes_large_decisions_a#.URv4JKXC0sL)

Gabe N. Released a statement (http://www.engadget.com/2013/02/13/valve-gabe-newell-layoffs-statement/) which doesn't say anything except they aren't canceling any projects and aren't talking about why they laid people off.

Can we make wild guesses?

Half Life Three: CANCELED!

Valve rarely lets people go. This sounds more like a culling of the weak than anything else. They certainly aren't hurting for money.

So, the ones that didn't make it through the Testing Chambers then?  :grin:

That's the attitude I gleaned from Valve's follow ups on it.

Yeah, in that talk he just gave at UT, he said you needed to be aggressive about firing people who aren't working out.

Which is totally bizarre from the atmosphere they created.

If you don't work hard to keep THAT job, you really do not deserve it.

You can get "fired" without a manager being involved. It would happen when every employee in valve doesn't like you, declines to work with you and doesn't value the work you are doing. At that point the formal firing would be acknowledging something the community has already decided and is acting on. Indeed in the low management model it's probably easier to be fired since you have to keep your peers happy rather than just a manager who is probably somewhat disconnected from the work.

The "no projects cancelled" line basically suggests there's no one reason behind the current firing.

No, I think it fits in perfectly.  From what I've seen, Valve is very much in the 'We trust you, go and do something cool and make money'.  For some people, that is brilliant.  But I bet there are a lot of people who that doesn't work for, either because they're slackers, or because they need direction from someone.  And then you add in the requirement as Kageru says of your peers trusting you and respecting you - and I think it fits in perfectly that the model is a huge amount of personal freedom and responsibility, and if someone isn't working out, they cut them as fast as possible, since they don't have a traditional management structure for performance plans and monthly coaching and ultimate responsibility by a person's boss for their wellbeing (at least from a perspective of their output for the company).

I'd be willing to bet it's a lot more "need direction" than it is "slackers."  Valve doesn't strike me as a company that would get conned in to hiring too many slackers. 

However, given the way education and most jobs work you're not going to encounter a lot of people who can think on their own and create big projects without some greater direction or goal. 

Now tack-on that Valve's total philosophy requires you to work and play nice with people.  In a way that a lot of geeks simply don't have within them.  Sales folk, designers, tradesfolk, sure. I see it in those fields a lot.  From this field all I ever get is, "People suck go away."

So if they can't produce a project on their own AND they can't work within a team I imagine they'll quickly be weeded-out.

I'm not against firing people for cause. Maybe they were given direction and totally failed.

The whole thing is great for some, but I think it's a minority of the workforce, which is why they try to hire those types of people. If anything, this indicates that either their system wasn't working, or their hiring process wasn't working.

The only think this is indicative of is that in life a system can't be perfect one hundred percent of the time.

I disagree. I think that's a copout, tbh. If it's one or two people? Sure, nothing is perfect and a few may sneak through.

Up to 25 people? Something needs to be reevaluated. This isn't a huge company with thousands of employees.

The 25 number is unconfirmed. Valve is in the range of 300+ employees. I can easily see trimming the fat occasionally if the company needs to pool cash for new projects especially when projects that earn cash are in a lull phase. This i all conjecture though. I still have no issue with Valve's hiring process and chosen management environment. Don't forget about an important factor about people, they change over time. Just because somebody worked well in the structure doesn't mean that they are permanently going to be right for that structure. People change, their lives evolve, their goals change, etc. I imagine that you have to cull people who no longer fit or have been stagnating for a while.

Pretty sure the Wii is still considered one of the most successful consoles of all time, not a debacle.

If Wii was a debacle, Nintendo is only hoping to have 10 more such failures in a row.

The console sales were growing thanks to Smash, Mario Kart and Wii Fit. Sure these were titles that came out in the first year and a half but it took a few years for overall sales to crater. The software library was stronger for casuals than insinuate by only claiming Wii Sports was a system seller that attracted them.

It was successful for quite a while...for Nintendo. Notsomuch anyone else if their 3rd party support and title line up meant anything.

The attach rate on the Wii was shit and it only really made money for Nintendo. Quick, name any successful third party Wii game in its entire life cycle.

Just Dance?

Also available on every other platform.

Quick, name any developer outside of Nintendo that took the Wii seriously, even after it kicked Sony and MS' butt on sales numbers.

Wii had it's issues, people not taking it seriously being chief among them.

I absolutely agree. It's one of the biggest disappointments of the system. I thought it had huge potential but was pissed away by developers not giving a shit.

Developers are myopic idiots mired in the past. Film at 11.

That's only true for the later entries; the series made it's name on the Wii.

Future console devs should thank their gods that the Wii existed - it provided a gateway for those not familiar with consoles to start paying with one.

You give someone who hasn't played video games in the last 10 years an Xbox controller and they'll look at you blankly, while a Wiimote is usable pretty much instantly.

Huh. I found the wiimote to be terrible in the one game I tried while at a friend's place. I don't remember which game it was, but it was used to unlock some lock or something.

Wii was a brave but limited idea but the kinect did it better.

The following generation usually does.

Oh yes. The Kinect brought ridiculous hand-waving to a whole new level of ludicrous that the Wii could not even hope to compete with.

Not always true though, for example : popular music.

Newell claims prototypes could be ready in 3-4 months (http://arstechnica.com/gaming/2013/03/valves-newell-steam-box-prototypes-could-be-ready-in-three-to-four-months/)

There's an article at The Verge (http://www.theverge.com/2013/5/18/4343382/technical-illusions-valve-augmented-reality-glasses-jeri-ellsworth-rick-johnson) suggesting part of it was an internal competition between AR and VR, and Valve went with the software approach. Which probably makes good sense, they need to keep some degree of focus and they're not really a huge hardware company.

Allowing the employees who developed some of the tech the legal rights to it is quite a generous gift though.

Gabe @ linuxcon (http://arstechnica.com/gaming/2013/09/gabe-newell-linux-is-the-future-of-gaming-new-hardware-coming-soon/)


I don't expect anything impressive. They don't have the money to compete with Sony / MS but they might be able to provide some focus for the PC hardware companies.

I would say they probably DO have the money to compete with Microsoft / Sony since all they have to do is shove a PC in a box and make the OS itself STEAM. Microsoft AND Sony probably put more money into software / platform development than they do hardware. They still aren't anywhere near the quality of Steam and Valve already has the software covered (for the most part).

I'm trying to think of a way the Steambox really works without being tied to windows since pretty much every AAA title people want to play uses DirectX.

Since games are going multi-platform and a lot of the graphics is probably handled by higher level libraries I would think it's pretty possible. It's not like games on Mac or PS4 are using directX. I assume they're using openGL but as long as it's not proprietary it should be possible to get it onto linux.

Indeed I think there is linux support for directX to some extent. Pretty sure Killing floor on linux offered me a selection of drivers including openGL and directX.

The driver was pretty spazzy though, which is always going to be a headache. But that's fixable, especially if they put some boundaries on what hardware constitutes a "steambox" and can convince Nvidia/ATI to take it seriously.

Well, WINE kinda works but "kinda" is the operative word there.

How can the industry get away from drivers/Directx/Open GL?  My acute lack of programming basics is obviously at the core of that question but it does seem like a problem that could be solved. 

Wine is terrible.  Not sure how it will improve.

Also, no one has invested a lot yet in Linux friendly controllers.  Be interesting to see what pops up (bluetooth LE) for this.  Think Valve is also building a controller set? 

The *nix crowd can't even decide on a common audio stack.

OpenGL is fine; it's open source and is in very wide use since it's used for 3d by literally everything that doesn't run windows.

Video card drivers are a big thing however. Nvidia and AMD (ATi) drivers for Linux have swung wildly back and forth from "Pretty good!" to "Absolute unworkable shit" over the years.

I know valve is doing some work on controllers, but not sure if that's supporting existing controllers better or doing something a bit more flashy and forward looking.

Wine is not really relevant, I don't think these games depend on the windows desktop API that much / at all.

Prepare your bodies...

http://store.steampowered.com/livingroom/

THREE BUTTONS ON THE CONTROLLER

HALF LIFE 3 CONFIRMED

That, and maybe the Linux gaming revolution we've been waiting for.  A SteamOS that can replace Windows?  Bring it.

Would certainly explain the diversity of software they have on the apps section.

GUYS

VALVE HAS 3 ANNOUNCEMENTS NEXT WEEK

HALF, LIFE, 3

Half Life 3 as a launch title for the Steambox that is due out December this year.

*EDIT: This is a guess, obviously.

Just what I always wanted, Half Life 3 to be designed with a controller in mind.  :ye_gods:

Valve would be the last company I'd expect that to be a problem with - as such, I believe that even being a worry is totally unfounded.

It would make sense for them to use Half Life 3 as a selling point for the Steam Box though.  Valve originally used Half Life 2 as a way to force everybody to install steam back in the day (back when I and everybody else I knew was very against this whole crazy 'no disk, digital download' thingy.  They only got away with it because HL2 was litterally the most hyped/expected game in history at that point, so valve had everybody by the balls.  I'm not sure if steam would have been the dominate success it is without them doing that (or at the very least, it would have taken them a lot longer to get to the point they're at now).

So, it would make sense for them to cash in on HL3 to give it a boost somehow.

Yes, it sure would make sense. :awesome_for_real:

Instead of HL3:
(https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/85916/bobbing_heavy.gif)

"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!"

Huh.  Wonder if any current consoles enable this.

I wonder how the latency is over wifi.

Deserves it's own thread.

Sony's doing it in the other direction with PS4 -> Vita or VitaTV.

But I don't think either they or Microsoft have ever discussed streaming PC content to the console.

There's almost no way Microsoft would actually want to compete with Valve on the gaming front. Valve is loved. Microsoft is, ahem, boned.

End of the day, Valve gets to make all the plays here because no one really CAN compete with them. For Steam, and gaming in general, their coffers are basically bottomless at this point. Also they have the largest delivery platform for _actual_ games on the planet. They get to make all the plays, other people are off dicking around on another court.

Sony has their own ecosystem - but even Valve plays nicely with them. Maybe we'll see Sony TVs with built-in Steam TV some time in the future.

You've gotta think that being local it'll be orders of magnitude than that thing where you're streaming everything over your Internet connection (the name'll come to me right after I hit Post), and that thing was allegedly very close to playable.

I watched someone at work playing an FPS on OnLive a couple days ago. The latency didn't seem to be a big issue.

Wired lan delay is sub millisecond, so it shouldn't be an issue when you have 16 milliseconds to display the next frame. Wireless lan can have latencies around 5 or 10 milliseconds if there's some interference, but I don't see that as a problem as far as input goes. The real issue is how fast the video output can be compressed and decompressed. Given how easy it is to stream from your computer to a service like Twitch (And how many extra cores modern PCs have to do the encoding work), I think the most common problem you'll have is figuring out how to set your big screen into game mode to get it's signal latency down to something reasonable.

Oh, here is a reasonably recent article on TVs with some latency numbers: http://reviews.cnet.com/8301-33199_7-57587317-221/game-mode-on-cnet-tests-tvs-for-input-lag/ (http://reviews.cnet.com/8301-33199_7-57587317-221/game-mode-on-cnet-tests-tvs-for-input-lag/). Yep, it looks like the vast majority of the latency apparent to the user is going to come from that.

Do Twitch and OnLive support 720p streaming?

I think Twitch is primarily 720p streaming. I didn't check the resolution when we were playing with OnLive, but I didn't notice any video compression artifacts on the big screen, so it was probably about that resolution, as I can definitely tell on Twitch when I'm viewing at 480p.

Twitch can do 1080 or whatever the insane one is, it's just most streamers don't have the upload to actually stream that themselves.

... does anyone actually want on-live though? Their library was small, their prices not that great and they'll always have some degree of latency / bandwidth issues. And from memory the other secret was they were bleeding money to offer that service.

I'd rather buy a console or HTPC Steambox. The streaming from PC is just a freeby and bonus for early adaptors when the library is thin.

When they say that this will stream dirct to your TV, does this mean something like Chromecast or AppleTV? Because if so, I'm already sold; we're trying to eliminate all the wires at home because our TV is wall-mounted and wires are an eyesore. The lack of wireless streaming for the PS5 or Xbone is a real nuisance.

They mean it will stream video from your main PC to the steambox. Unless you have some kind of wireless dongle thingy to stream from the steambox to your tv, you'll still need to plug the steambox into the tv.