The Pee-Ess Four: It's a PC FFS.

[Xuri]

(snip...)For starters it'll cost about a third to a half as much as a decent gaming PC and won't need you to buy a monitor, mouse, keyboard.(...snip)

This is true. Instead you'll need to buy a (more expensive?) TV.

[Kageru]

Take a PC and lock it down like the valve steambox will be and you have a console.

I'm not sure what you've read that would make you think the Steambox is going to be as locked down as a console.

Because as people have observed here that market segment wants low price and doesn't care about expandability or general purpose application. Those who do already have a PC. So I do expect the steam box to be standardised and integrated hardware that does little other than boot into steam in big picture mode. They might not care as much if crazy people use it as a general purpose computer, since they're probably not going to massively subsidise the hardware.

But if you like you can consider that silly Nvidia shield thing as a steambox (they identified it as such) and also a locked down device.

For dedicated games, the difference between PCs and consoles is at this point largely price cheats and interface (handheld/motion controller vs. mouse and keyboard).

There's one other fairly important thing that should probably not be overlooked, which is that consoles still have single-device multiplayer games. There's a social dynamic there that just doesn't exist with PC games for the most part.

That's mostly historical and already changing. We're starting to get MP games like castle crashers, magicka and dungeon defenders even at this early stage. And if there was the interest the PC could probably learn to use the console peripherals or evolve it's own version. Heck, the PC even has an upgraded motion controller.

The main difference is having a "champion" and owner. Sony is committed to making the PS4 work, though their power has faded a lot. On the PC side valve is the closest and they're not nearly as powerful, and the PC industry as a whole is prone to self destructive behaviour. Whereas microsoft wishes the PC was a tablet for some reason.

[HaemishM]

You also forgot about MP games like Madden, FIFA and other sports games. Those tend to work well for local multiplayer too.

[Margalis]

The Valve Steambox is not "locked down", it apparently comes in a bunch of different configurations from different manufacturers, including choice of OS.

Honestly Steambox sounds to me like the worst combination of PC and console. It has all the disadvantages of both and the advantages of neither. It's baffling. Honestly to me Steambox exists only because Valve doesn't want MS to control their fates and to move in on their territory - purely for business reasons. I don't see the purpose at all from a consumer perspective.

When you work on a console you can do very specific stuff. For example the 360 GPU includes a fast 4x4 bilinear texture sample operation (IIRC) that is really good for stuff like downsampling and shadows that comparable video cards don't support. You can use that knowing it will work on every 360.

[Kageru]

You are confusing the spec and the products. There's a single specification for the Nvidia shield and there will probably be a single one for the valve-box. The spec is more about them all being able to use the same software base, without which they'd have no chance at surviving.

It would be interesting if valve could have a single box and that be the only instance. But they don't have the money, power or really want to control the market to that extent. So they're taking a more scatter-shot approach even if it's a little wasteful.

[luckton]

Or, in other words, the initial Google Android approach to cell phones.   

[Kageru]

Pretty much, and for much the same reason. Neither google or valve care too much about who owns and profits off the platform as long as it uses their services.

The price and volume of sales they can get, which is required to be able to capture exclusive content, will be fascinating. And I wouldn't be surprised if microsoft considers them vulnerable to being choked out of the market.

[DeathInABottle]

Some good analysis from Gameological: http://gameological.com/2013/02/more-more-morehow-do-you-like-it/

[Soln]

Or, in other words, the initial Google Android approach to cell phones.   

Well struck.  My thoughts exactly.   Yes it works but it's also a mess.

[Quinton]

Or, in other words, the initial Google Android approach to cell phones.   

Well struck.  My thoughts exactly.   Yes it works but it's also a mess.

The x86 PC hardware ecosystem is *massively* less diverse than the ARM SoC ecosystem though.  Only two real contendors for GPU and CPU, and pretty close performance parity.  If Valve does a decent job defining a min spec for logo compliance (or just goes with a list of approved CPUs and GPUs and minimum ram/disk), I think they could have a far easier time of it.