9 ms·

What Valve got right and wrong with the Steam Machine

63 points by bpierre 11y ago

zubirus 11y ago
Overall I love the Steam Machines idea. I have many games in my library and I can't wait to play them in the living room with my friends. I think that what Valve got wrong was just two topics: - There is no game compatibility information. When I buy a console game, I know that the game will be compatible with my system. There is no such guaranty with Steam games. I would like to see a simplified benchmark tailored to pre-made Steam Machines so that consumers can understand how well they'll play their AAA games. - They lost momentum with the SteamOS platform, and many developers are now skeptical of porting their games to Linux. The Steam Machines were supposed to be launched one year ago and with them their Linux platform. Some developers took a big investment to port their games to Linux and fight around subpar OpenGL drivers. When they were done there was no Steam Machines and they were met with a Linux userbase of just 1%. Now, I believe, we'll only see more Linux launches once the developers trust the Steam Machines as an established gaming platform. Edit: formatting
- StavrosK 11y ago
  Does the second point matter any more? Most of the big engines I'm aware of make portability to all three (or even five) platforms effortless, so there's really no excuse to not having a version for each platform any more...
  - pjmlp 11y ago
    Increase in continuous integration infrastructure, additional testing scenarios, new deployment configurations, new driver issues to deal with,...
    - StavrosK 11y ago
      ...whole new market...
      - pjmlp 11y ago
        It already exists, there are plenty of companies specialized in such porting action. However, the question is the ROI in supporting the platform vs sales, even if the code doesn't need any major change.
  - hacker_9 11y ago
    Many good games do not use unity/unreal, as whilst they are packed with features, they are at their core flawed. Many people build their engines tailored to their game, in order to get the best performance. In those cases it is 'effort' to port to Linux, as with any other platform. If steam machines don't flop then I expect Linux porting will become more mainstream and the process easier.
- mavhc 11y ago
  If you already have a PC why not just use Steam's built in home streaming? Low powered box in living room, desktop pc accessed remotely
  - josefresco 11y ago
    How much does the low powered box in the living room cost? The Steam Link is supposed to address this ($50) as most don't want to, or can't afford (or justify the expense) another PC for the living room.
    - mavhc 11y ago
      Well, for me, $50, reused spare parts. Didn't know about the Link. So the Steam Machine is supposed to be for people without a desktop, to compete with consoles?
      - wlesieutre 11y ago
        Or for people without a gaming desktop, but yeah, more or less. I imagine there are a lot of folks who have a computer running Windows already, but it's a 4 year old Dell with an Intel HD 3000. So they'll play a lot of the Indie games, but not the AAA graphical showpieces that advertise better. And IMO a lot of those indie games (Bastion, FTL, etc.) are better on iPads than computers/consoles anyway. Outside of the tech crowd, actual GPUs that can compare to current-gen consoles aren't very common. Steam Machines are an attempt by Valve to widen their market and include more customers who want an off-the-shelf "it plays games" experience.
      - josefresco 11y ago
        Steam Machine = console replacement Steam Link - Stream your PC games from another Steam PC on the network The former is several hundred dollars and competes directly with Xbox, Playstation - the other is only $50.
  - ascagnel_ 11y ago
    You still have to deal with trying to play games that were designed around a desk setting, with a keyboard and mouse, in a living room setting.
- KayEss 11y ago
  > a Linux userbase of just 1% My impression when it first came out was that Linux game sales quickly surpassed Mac ones. What actually is the case with Linux as gaming platform in terms of sales revenue rather than percentage of users.
  - DizzyDoo 11y ago
    For the game I have on Steam[1], a logical puzzle game, this just isn't the case. Mac sales are at about 10%, and Linux sales are at ~3%. However, the most outspoken fans of the game, and the ones from whom I get the most nice emails from, are mostly Linux users. [1] - http://store.steampowered.com/app/386900 http://store.steampowered.com/app/386900
taude 11y ago
While not the same as the Steam Machine, I got one of the Steam Link streaming boxes for $50. It's pretty amazing and can't believe how well it works. I've only played Rocket League, Pay Day 2, Monanco, and Super Meat boy on my television. For me, it's the perfect compromise for my casual gaming. I get to have a custom built PC, hidden away in my office and a tiny box on the living room. I look forward to seeing the platform evolve.
- josefresco 11y ago
  Glad to hear it works well as I'm considering it. Curious: Is either your gaming PC, and/or the Steam Link box wired?
  - mu_killnine 11y ago
    Not the OP but I did have both sides wireless for a while and it couldn't keep the framerate up (playing Portal). I have an i7 920 @3.6Ghz, 680GTX, 12GB RAM on the main machine. I was streaming to my late-2013 MBP 15". I have an AC1750 802.11ac router. Once I wired my desktop in, I could play wirelessly via my MBP with 60fps constantly. I suspect if both were wired you'd have excellent performance. However, one caveat is that low-light games really seem to show a lot of artifacts (for example, Amnesia: The Dark Descent was close to unplayable because of compression artifacts, despite being on 'highest quality' stream settings). I hope this is helpful.
  - taude 11y ago
    Yes, they are both wired
- mreiland 11y ago
  Received mine yesterday and loaded up Tales of Zesteria. It works pretty much flawlessly for me and I'm super happy with it. I have no illusions that I'm going to be playing the latest Fallout 4 with it, but I have a strong tendency towards non-twitch based games, and those will work just fine. When I do play Fallout 4, et al, it will be on the PC, but being able to stream so many of my games to my television is great.
acd 11y ago
If Valve would join forces with Google merging ChromeOS & SteamOS -> AndroidPC then Microsoft will have to watch out. http://www.theverge.com/2015/10/29/9639950/google-combining-android-chromeos-report http://www.theverge.com/2015/10/29/9639950/google-combining-... Then you would have a device with world class apps+good gaming experiance combined with a good user interface.
- Gupocca 11y ago
  The media has been slightly mixed up about the whole Chrome OS claim. http://chrome.blogspot.com/2015/11/chrome-os-is-here-to-stay.html http://chrome.blogspot.com/2015/11/chrome-os-is-here-to-stay...
- aqzman 11y ago
  I doubt it would ever happen, but I really wouldn't be surprised if Google attempted to acquire Value. They've been making moves to get in to the "casual" gaming space with Google Play and the Nexus Player. If they purchased Value they would effectively own a large segment of the "hardcore" PC gaming market share. Again, I doubt it would ever happen, but it's interesting to consider what the impacts would be if they did. I don't think Value is for sale, and if it were Microsoft would be much more likely to purchase them.
  - corin_ 11y ago
    They would have to pay more for Valve than any other company they've ever acquired with the exception of Motorola, I think. And I'm still not even sure Valve would say yes, even to a $10b offer (I'd hazard a guess at a fair offer being $5b-10b).
    - dubcanada 11y ago
      I really doubt Gabe would ever sell. He's just not that type of person, and Google would get zero benefit from Steam, its not their realm at all.
      - 11y ago
n0us 11y ago
Marketing I think was the key here. The Steam Machine needs to appeal to people who are not previously exposed to PC gaming. People who already play PC games have PCs to play them and hooking up a computer to a television is trivial. Most of them probably know what the Steam Machine is, but if I asked any of my 'XBox' or 'Playstation' friends they wouldn't have the slightest clue what Steam is, let alone the Steam Machine. Why would they? I haven't seen any advertising anywhere. In combination with the general negative stereotypes about PC gaming (not the least of which comes from the name PC Master Race) I don't see any what that this could catch on.
- moron4hire 11y ago
  Who are these people who are exclusively PC or console or mobile gamers? Everyone I know, rich and poor, are all three.
  - n0us 11y ago
    Most guys I know play Xbox/PS4 and some mobile games. I know maybe a few people who play computer games on top of that, and plenty of people who just play mobile. PC games are generally seen as 1. extremely expensive since the cost of computers is high especially if you dan't build one yourself and 2. only for hardcore gamers. Most console gamers I know don't want to compete with the PC gamers, its like when I play Call of Duty and get slaughtered every single round but worse. The atmosphere is one in which you win at any expense, even that of the game being fun to play. These perceptions may be wholly inaccurate but they will remain until demonstrated otherwise.
    - saint_fiasco 11y ago
      Computers are not expensive. Many people use their work computers to play low-end games, and not too long ago, flash games were very popular and not just among hardcore gamers.
    - ionised 11y ago
      The price factor has always struck me as a case of not having enough information on PC hardware and game requirements (which is understandable if you only know console gaming). You don't need to go all-out on top-end graphics cards, processors, cases and watercooling to play PC games at a similar or higher standard (in terms of graphical quality and framerate) to consoles. A mid-range PC may or may cost a little more than a console but the fantastic savings that come from things like Steam sales mean you can for example, pick up 5-10 games over Christmas for a fraction of the price of doing the same with the XBox/Playstation versions of those games can mean it ends up being a lot cheaper in the long run. Of course, knowing about the prices of PC hardware and how to put together the best bang-for buck system is something you would have to consider. That knowledge is unnecessary with consoles.
jeletonskelly 11y ago
I'm hoping someone with more knowledge about Direct3D/DirectX could clarify some things for me. Since we're seeing a lot of progress on .NET running on OSX and Linux, does this mean that at some point you'll be able to run Windows games on both OSX and Linux? If not, what are the major hurdles there?
- voltagex_ 11y ago
  I don't think there are a huge number of Steam games running on .NET, but the number might be increasing due to the rise of Unity. Many, many games are written in C++ and require reasonable porting efforts to get to Linux support. Someone like Ryan C Gordon (icculus) is much better qualified to comment on that, though. I doubt Microsoft would ever port DirectX to Linux, but then again I doubted they'd do that with .NET, and look where we are. The DirectX->Wine code works pretty well, but it's always going to be behind the state of the art.
  - kbwt 11y ago
    There is already a native Direct3D 9 implementation on Linux, called Gallium Nine. It works with any driver exposing the Gallium interface, such as the open source radeon driver.
- Bouncingsoul1 11y ago
  Direct3D and DirectX have nothing to do with .Net. The port of the CLR will only allow to run .Net(core) applications on OSX or Linux . And even there DirectX seems to be a blocking factor e.g. XAML/WPF which uses DirectX for drawing won't be ported/opensourced ,IMO for this very reason.
padobson 11y ago
I look at the console world and feel like I'm taking crazy pills. The massive reduction in cost of hardware has enabled every device to get smart. And, surprise surprise, the first things to get smart were the things with screens - phones and TVs. Video game consoles (and all set-top boxes) hearken back to an era where the average house only had one TV, and it was dumb. These days, there's a dozen screens in the home, and all of them have computing power many times greater than even the original XBox - more than enough juice to power a huge catalogue of existing games. So why do big game companies (Sony, Microsoft, Nintendo and now Valve) still feel they need to make hardware? And I'm not suggesting that these companies give up their 1st party platform advantage - just that their platform doesn't need to be hardware anymore. A cross-platform Nintendo App that runs the Nintendo VM and stores all of your games in the cloud makes a lot more sense than building a second rate piece of hardware and managing the supply chain to get it to the living room. The only area where you can argue hardware is still necessary is the controller - afterall, our hands haven't changed that much and immersive gaming experiences haven't adapted well to touch screens. But surely it'd be easier to manage a supply chain for bluetooth controllers than it would a console. If you add cloud graphics processing to the mix to overcome the horsepower issues of lesser hardware, something NVidia and Sony have both demonstrated at this point, then there's absolutely no reason to continue to push hardware other than inertia.
- xedarius 11y ago
  I recoil from this idea as it pushes further in the direction of free play homogenized games. Cloud graphics seems like a subscriptions based nightmare, or a world where the game no longer works after 5 years as the cloud services no longer exist. Maybe it will go this way, but I don't have to like it.
  - padobson 11y ago
    I recoil from this idea as it pushes further in the direction of free play homogenized games. This may be true, but we won't know for sure until we figure out how to make the AAA games as ubiquitous as Candy Crush and Game of War. Hopefully, that will shame the market into demanding better gaming experiences from every developer.
zxcvcxz 11y ago
So yeah I see some complaints about Linux, but there is no way Windows or OS X would have been a better choice for a product like this. Steam Machines are supposed to be the Android of the console world. Valve would have had to work closely with MS to create some locked down platform to keep people from screwing it up. You couldn't just slap stock Windows on there... and imagine the licensing fees. Linux was the best choice. I do believe that when Vulcan comes out and Valve or some other company throws some money at advertising, steam machines could easily come to dominate the console market, just as Android came to dominate the smart phone market.
- ksk 11y ago
  >steam machines could easily come to dominate the console market, What extra value would it provide over existing consoles?
jessaustin 11y ago
A Steam Machine is a PC running Linux. You can do whatever you want. We're not going to do anything to get in your way or lock it down. A lot of people are going to buy it and plug it in and only run Steam. That's cool. We also think, given history, there's a pretty good chance that users are going to find something new that we have not anticipated that's going to be super awesome, that's going to make a bunch of other customers really happy. To the extent that we can add value and make that more likely to happen, that's what we're going to do. I shed a tear of joy. A company that isn't run by soulless MBAs, about to curb-stomp a bunch of companies that are.

63 points by bpierre 11y ago

Overall I love the Steam Machines idea. I have many games in my library and I can't wait to play them in the living room with my friends. I think that what Valve got wrong was just two topics: - There is no game compatibility information. When I buy a console game, I know that the game will be compatible with my system. There is no such guaranty with Steam games. I would like to see a simplified benchmark tailored to pre-made Steam Machines so that consumers can understand how well they'll play their AAA games. - They lost momentum with the SteamOS platform, and many developers are now skeptical of porting their games to Linux. The Steam Machines were supposed to be launched one year ago and with them their Linux platform. Some developers took a big investment to port their games to Linux and fight around subpar OpenGL drivers. When they were done there was no Steam Machines and they were met with a Linux userbase of just 1%. Now, I believe, we'll only see more Linux launches once the developers trust the Steam Machines as an established gaming platform. Edit: formatting

StavrosK 11y ago
Does the second point matter any more? Most of the big engines I'm aware of make portability to all three (or even five) platforms effortless, so there's really no excuse to not having a version for each platform any more...
- pjmlp 11y ago
  Increase in continuous integration infrastructure, additional testing scenarios, new deployment configurations, new driver issues to deal with,...
  - StavrosK 11y ago
    ...whole new market...
    - pjmlp 11y ago
      It already exists, there are plenty of companies specialized in such porting action. However, the question is the ROI in supporting the platform vs sales, even if the code doesn't need any major change.
- hacker_9 11y ago
  Many good games do not use unity/unreal, as whilst they are packed with features, they are at their core flawed. Many people build their engines tailored to their game, in order to get the best performance. In those cases it is 'effort' to port to Linux, as with any other platform. If steam machines don't flop then I expect Linux porting will become more mainstream and the process easier.
mavhc 11y ago
If you already have a PC why not just use Steam's built in home streaming? Low powered box in living room, desktop pc accessed remotely
- josefresco 11y ago
  How much does the low powered box in the living room cost? The Steam Link is supposed to address this ($50) as most don't want to, or can't afford (or justify the expense) another PC for the living room.
  - mavhc 11y ago
    Well, for me, $50, reused spare parts. Didn't know about the Link. So the Steam Machine is supposed to be for people without a desktop, to compete with consoles?
    - wlesieutre 11y ago
      Or for people without a gaming desktop, but yeah, more or less. I imagine there are a lot of folks who have a computer running Windows already, but it's a 4 year old Dell with an Intel HD 3000. So they'll play a lot of the Indie games, but not the AAA graphical showpieces that advertise better. And IMO a lot of those indie games (Bastion, FTL, etc.) are better on iPads than computers/consoles anyway. Outside of the tech crowd, actual GPUs that can compare to current-gen consoles aren't very common. Steam Machines are an attempt by Valve to widen their market and include more customers who want an off-the-shelf "it plays games" experience.
    - josefresco 11y ago
      Steam Machine = console replacement Steam Link - Stream your PC games from another Steam PC on the network The former is several hundred dollars and competes directly with Xbox, Playstation - the other is only $50.
- ascagnel_ 11y ago
  You still have to deal with trying to play games that were designed around a desk setting, with a keyboard and mouse, in a living room setting.
KayEss 11y ago
> a Linux userbase of just 1% My impression when it first came out was that Linux game sales quickly surpassed Mac ones. What actually is the case with Linux as gaming platform in terms of sales revenue rather than percentage of users.
- DizzyDoo 11y ago
  For the game I have on Steam[1], a logical puzzle game, this just isn't the case. Mac sales are at about 10%, and Linux sales are at ~3%. However, the most outspoken fans of the game, and the ones from whom I get the most nice emails from, are mostly Linux users. [1] - http://store.steampowered.com/app/386900 http://store.steampowered.com/app/386900

taude 11y ago

While not the same as the Steam Machine, I got one of the Steam Link streaming boxes for $50. It's pretty amazing and can't believe how well it works. I've only played Rocket League, Pay Day 2, Monanco, and Super Meat boy on my television. For me, it's the perfect compromise for my casual gaming. I get to have a custom built PC, hidden away in my office and a tiny box on the living room. I look forward to seeing the platform evolve.

josefresco 11y ago
Glad to hear it works well as I'm considering it. Curious: Is either your gaming PC, and/or the Steam Link box wired?
- mu_killnine 11y ago
  Not the OP but I did have both sides wireless for a while and it couldn't keep the framerate up (playing Portal). I have an i7 920 @3.6Ghz, 680GTX, 12GB RAM on the main machine. I was streaming to my late-2013 MBP 15". I have an AC1750 802.11ac router. Once I wired my desktop in, I could play wirelessly via my MBP with 60fps constantly. I suspect if both were wired you'd have excellent performance. However, one caveat is that low-light games really seem to show a lot of artifacts (for example, Amnesia: The Dark Descent was close to unplayable because of compression artifacts, despite being on 'highest quality' stream settings). I hope this is helpful.
- taude 11y ago
  Yes, they are both wired
mreiland 11y ago
Received mine yesterday and loaded up Tales of Zesteria. It works pretty much flawlessly for me and I'm super happy with it. I have no illusions that I'm going to be playing the latest Fallout 4 with it, but I have a strong tendency towards non-twitch based games, and those will work just fine. When I do play Fallout 4, et al, it will be on the PC, but being able to stream so many of my games to my television is great.

acd 11y ago

If Valve would join forces with Google merging ChromeOS & SteamOS -> AndroidPC then Microsoft will have to watch out. http://www.theverge.com/2015/10/29/9639950/google-combining-android-chromeos-report http://www.theverge.com/2015/10/29/9639950/google-combining-... Then you would have a device with world class apps+good gaming experiance combined with a good user interface.

Gupocca 11y ago
The media has been slightly mixed up about the whole Chrome OS claim. http://chrome.blogspot.com/2015/11/chrome-os-is-here-to-stay.html http://chrome.blogspot.com/2015/11/chrome-os-is-here-to-stay...
aqzman 11y ago
I doubt it would ever happen, but I really wouldn't be surprised if Google attempted to acquire Value. They've been making moves to get in to the "casual" gaming space with Google Play and the Nexus Player. If they purchased Value they would effectively own a large segment of the "hardcore" PC gaming market share. Again, I doubt it would ever happen, but it's interesting to consider what the impacts would be if they did. I don't think Value is for sale, and if it were Microsoft would be much more likely to purchase them.
- corin_ 11y ago
  They would have to pay more for Valve than any other company they've ever acquired with the exception of Motorola, I think. And I'm still not even sure Valve would say yes, even to a $10b offer (I'd hazard a guess at a fair offer being $5b-10b).
  - dubcanada 11y ago
    I really doubt Gabe would ever sell. He's just not that type of person, and Google would get zero benefit from Steam, its not their realm at all.
    - 11y ago

n0us 11y ago

Marketing I think was the key here. The Steam Machine needs to appeal to people who are not previously exposed to PC gaming. People who already play PC games have PCs to play them and hooking up a computer to a television is trivial. Most of them probably know what the Steam Machine is, but if I asked any of my 'XBox' or 'Playstation' friends they wouldn't have the slightest clue what Steam is, let alone the Steam Machine. Why would they? I haven't seen any advertising anywhere. In combination with the general negative stereotypes about PC gaming (not the least of which comes from the name PC Master Race) I don't see any what that this could catch on.

moron4hire 11y ago
Who are these people who are exclusively PC or console or mobile gamers? Everyone I know, rich and poor, are all three.
- n0us 11y ago
  Most guys I know play Xbox/PS4 and some mobile games. I know maybe a few people who play computer games on top of that, and plenty of people who just play mobile. PC games are generally seen as 1. extremely expensive since the cost of computers is high especially if you dan't build one yourself and 2. only for hardcore gamers. Most console gamers I know don't want to compete with the PC gamers, its like when I play Call of Duty and get slaughtered every single round but worse. The atmosphere is one in which you win at any expense, even that of the game being fun to play. These perceptions may be wholly inaccurate but they will remain until demonstrated otherwise.
  - saint_fiasco 11y ago
    Computers are not expensive. Many people use their work computers to play low-end games, and not too long ago, flash games were very popular and not just among hardcore gamers.
  - ionised 11y ago
    The price factor has always struck me as a case of not having enough information on PC hardware and game requirements (which is understandable if you only know console gaming). You don't need to go all-out on top-end graphics cards, processors, cases and watercooling to play PC games at a similar or higher standard (in terms of graphical quality and framerate) to consoles. A mid-range PC may or may cost a little more than a console but the fantastic savings that come from things like Steam sales mean you can for example, pick up 5-10 games over Christmas for a fraction of the price of doing the same with the XBox/Playstation versions of those games can mean it ends up being a lot cheaper in the long run. Of course, knowing about the prices of PC hardware and how to put together the best bang-for buck system is something you would have to consider. That knowledge is unnecessary with consoles.

jeletonskelly 11y ago

I'm hoping someone with more knowledge about Direct3D/DirectX could clarify some things for me. Since we're seeing a lot of progress on .NET running on OSX and Linux, does this mean that at some point you'll be able to run Windows games on both OSX and Linux? If not, what are the major hurdles there?

voltagex_ 11y ago
I don't think there are a huge number of Steam games running on .NET, but the number might be increasing due to the rise of Unity. Many, many games are written in C++ and require reasonable porting efforts to get to Linux support. Someone like Ryan C Gordon (icculus) is much better qualified to comment on that, though. I doubt Microsoft would ever port DirectX to Linux, but then again I doubted they'd do that with .NET, and look where we are. The DirectX->Wine code works pretty well, but it's always going to be behind the state of the art.
- kbwt 11y ago
  There is already a native Direct3D 9 implementation on Linux, called Gallium Nine. It works with any driver exposing the Gallium interface, such as the open source radeon driver.
Bouncingsoul1 11y ago
Direct3D and DirectX have nothing to do with .Net. The port of the CLR will only allow to run .Net(core) applications on OSX or Linux . And even there DirectX seems to be a blocking factor e.g. XAML/WPF which uses DirectX for drawing won't be ported/opensourced ,IMO for this very reason.

padobson 11y ago

I look at the console world and feel like I'm taking crazy pills. The massive reduction in cost of hardware has enabled every device to get smart. And, surprise surprise, the first things to get smart were the things with screens - phones and TVs. Video game consoles (and all set-top boxes) hearken back to an era where the average house only had one TV, and it was dumb. These days, there's a dozen screens in the home, and all of them have computing power many times greater than even the original XBox - more than enough juice to power a huge catalogue of existing games. So why do big game companies (Sony, Microsoft, Nintendo and now Valve) still feel they need to make hardware? And I'm not suggesting that these companies give up their 1st party platform advantage - just that their platform doesn't need to be hardware anymore. A cross-platform Nintendo App that runs the Nintendo VM and stores all of your games in the cloud makes a lot more sense than building a second rate piece of hardware and managing the supply chain to get it to the living room. The only area where you can argue hardware is still necessary is the controller - afterall, our hands haven't changed that much and immersive gaming experiences haven't adapted well to touch screens. But surely it'd be easier to manage a supply chain for bluetooth controllers than it would a console. If you add cloud graphics processing to the mix to overcome the horsepower issues of lesser hardware, something NVidia and Sony have both demonstrated at this point, then there's absolutely no reason to continue to push hardware other than inertia.

xedarius 11y ago
I recoil from this idea as it pushes further in the direction of free play homogenized games. Cloud graphics seems like a subscriptions based nightmare, or a world where the game no longer works after 5 years as the cloud services no longer exist. Maybe it will go this way, but I don't have to like it.
- padobson 11y ago
  I recoil from this idea as it pushes further in the direction of free play homogenized games. This may be true, but we won't know for sure until we figure out how to make the AAA games as ubiquitous as Candy Crush and Game of War. Hopefully, that will shame the market into demanding better gaming experiences from every developer.

zxcvcxz 11y ago

So yeah I see some complaints about Linux, but there is no way Windows or OS X would have been a better choice for a product like this. Steam Machines are supposed to be the Android of the console world. Valve would have had to work closely with MS to create some locked down platform to keep people from screwing it up. You couldn't just slap stock Windows on there... and imagine the licensing fees. Linux was the best choice. I do believe that when Vulcan comes out and Valve or some other company throws some money at advertising, steam machines could easily come to dominate the console market, just as Android came to dominate the smart phone market.

ksk 11y ago
>steam machines could easily come to dominate the console market, What extra value would it provide over existing consoles?

jessaustin 11y ago

A Steam Machine is a PC running Linux. You can do whatever you want. We're not going to do anything to get in your way or lock it down. A lot of people are going to buy it and plug it in and only run Steam. That's cool. We also think, given history, there's a pretty good chance that users are going to find something new that we have not anticipated that's going to be super awesome, that's going to make a bunch of other customers really happy. To the extent that we can add value and make that more likely to happen, that's what we're going to do. I shed a tear of joy. A company that isn't run by soulless MBAs, about to curb-stomp a bunch of companies that are.