8 ms·

Valve And Xi3 Team For ‘Piston’ Steam Box

119 points by galaktor 14y ago

AndrewDucker 14y ago
I'd like to know more about the OS and price. At the moment it's just "There will be a small PC you can plug into your TV and play games on" and I can do that for myself. What advantage will this box have over that?
- james4k 14y ago
  I don't know, the form factor is interesting. Even aside from the modularity, the size is very small, and not sure how you could really do that for yourself. Look at the size of the ethernet port on the back compared to the whole unit. Edit: And yeah, you can build your own PC that could work for your living room just as well, but that's looking at a very small piece of the market who are comfortable with doing that. You are going to need more products like these to get Steam into more living rooms.
- Karma_Police 14y ago
  Latest rumor I read was that it was going to ship with Linux (if you google steam box linux you'll find some sources). Price, I haven't heard anything about. As for advantages, it's probably the same as any other console, which means it comes with the same disadvantages. There will probably be steam box approved games on steam, which you will be sure will work in it, and you may also see some developers targeting it specifically. But yes, if you know what you're doing, there probably wont be any advantage on choosing this over your own custom built PC. I don't see many developers restricting their games to steam box.
- InclinedPlane 14y ago
  The advantage is that it will be a streamlined experienced for non tech-savvy people.
  - jiggy2011 14y ago
    That would be effectively the same as adding Steam to startup in Windows, which the installer does anyway.
    - __alexs 14y ago
      It doesn't go direct to Big Picture mode though and you still have to click through UAC and firewall alerts when launching newly installed games quiet frequently. Having full control of the software stack lets them take out quite a friction points.
      - jiggy2011 14y ago
        Adding an option to boot directly to big picture mode would be a huge problem and the Steam Windows client automatically adds firewall exceptions etc for games that you install. Since I mainly use Linux my Windows 7 PC is basically a Steam box already.
        deltasquared 14y ago
        Likewise, my Windows 7 PC runs Steam only.
        CrazedGeek 14y ago
        For what it's worth, there actually is an option to boot directly to Big Picture mode.
    - InclinedPlane 14y ago
      No, it's not the same, just as a bus, a sedan, and an suv are not the same even though they are functionally "identical".
      - jiggy2011 14y ago
        I don't see what the difference is apart from this runs Linux so has 1% of the games.
- CJefferson 14y ago
  One big advantage I would hope for would be "The games you can see for sale will all work on your graphics card and controller, and you won't have to play around with resolution settings and 2xFSAA, or whatever, trying to find an acceptable level of prettyness you computer can cope with".
- rmk2 14y ago
  It has been claimed elsewhere[1], with reference to something said by Ben Krasnow, that the projected Steam console will run Linux. Take it with a grain of salt until you hear something official, but at least, hints can be found. [1]: http://www.golem.de/news/pc-spielekonsole-steam-box-ohne-windows-1212-96609.html http://www.golem.de/news/pc-spielekonsole-steam-box-ohne-win... [german] edit: For those who don't know golem.de (presumably most here), it is one of the two major respectable German IT-news sites (next to heise.de, translated as The H)
daredevildave 14y ago
Would it kill them to put a f-ing link to Xi3 in that article?
- AndrewDucker 14y ago
  You'd get more upvotes if you contributed something to the discussion, like so: The original article didn't have a link to xi3, so here it is: http://xi3.com/ http://xi3.com/
  - regomodo 14y ago
    Yes, it's all about the upvotes.
jofo25 14y ago
I always wondered why there was this heterogeneity between consoles and PCs. You're playing the same games, why would it be good for anyone to have to develop/buy something twice or for one exclusively. Hopefully the Steam Box destroys this distinction and makes a more consistent and flexible gaming landscape.
- unwind 14y ago
  Huh? Obviously it's good for (=more money to) the publisher if you as the player buys the same game both for a console (or two!) and for a PC, and any additional platforms that may appear?
- InclinedPlane 14y ago
  Development-wise that problem has mostly been solved. In the past cross-platform game development was done as separate projects, often handing off "porting" the game to a platform to an external team, even. Today it's more common to use engines (such as the unreal engine) which support all the major platforms (PC, 360, and PS3 typically, for first-person, high graphic-load style games), and then do the development for all versions concurrently. Typically you'd just have your regular builds set up to produce versions for each platform as a matter of routine, and you'd have a consistent testing experience for each. You'd still end up with customizations and tweaks for each individual platform but for the most part all of the hard work of targeting and optimizing for each platform is automated.
  - JulianK 14y ago
    Just for another perspective, my experience doesn't really align with this. From my (biased) perspective, this sounds like "in theory" as opposed to "in practice" so I'm honestly curious if you've managed to get away from having to really deal with cross-platform differences. I know that in theory you use a cross platform engine that hides away all the messy details from you.In practice, I've found the PS3/360 have quite different CPU/memory architectures and you start dealing with the reality of that sooner than you'd expect. Whether that requires manually down sizing certain swaths of textures or writing code that will run on the SPU, there's quite a bit of manual work involved. Also, most game studios tend to roll their own tech which generally requires at least a small cadre of people manually targeting and optimization for each platform.
andybak 14y ago
Anyone got any idea how technically challenging it would be for Valve to get Steam Linux running on ARM? The idea of a possible future convergence between Linux and Android gaming intrigues me.
- jspthrowaway2 14y ago
  Modern 3D engines usually contain some not-insignificant amount of assembly for performance reasons. It'd require almost completely retuning, probably, undoing years of ideas since ARM is an entirely different architecture. Wouldn't hold your breath this early.
  - w0utert 14y ago
    Modern 3D engines contain almost no assembly anymore these days, and for the rare bits that are still hand-coded assembly, platform-independent alternative codepaths always exist. We've been long past the point where raw CPU performance even matters for high-end games anymore, for some time already. Porting between e.g. PPC as used in consoles and x86 is business as usual, so I don't see why porting to ARM would be much more difficult. The main problem right now is that ARM performance is simply not there yet. It might be somewhere in the future, but even that remains to be seen, it's not entirely clear how well ARM designs will keep scaling up as they start to approach midrange x86 chips. Right now, ARM is just starting to match Atom, which is dog-slow compared to Core i3/i5/i7, and basically useless for non-trivial gaming.
  - jiggy2011 14y ago
    Most of the really low level stuff is probably in the graphics shaders, I think HLSL etc are capable of producing code that will run on most GPUs?
  - glaze 14y ago
    Assembly is mostly used to optimize rarely maintained vector/matrix SIMD operations and even then it's mostly wrapped in intrinsics.
bni 14y ago
I really hope Valve succeeds in migrating the PC gaming community off of Windows and onto Linux (maybe Blizzard will help?). It will not be easy.
- vitalique 14y ago
  'And onto Linux' would be super cool, but I see nothing especially bad or wrong with having Windows as an option, too. Healthy competition is a wonderful thing.
- officemonkey 14y ago
  I look to how successful Valve was in getting games for the Mac made. That success rate is mixed: * All the valve games were ported. * A bunch of casual games get ported. * Civilization V * Um, some of the GTA catalog, IIRC. Frankly, it was kind of a desert. I can't imagine the Linux gaming will pick up unless the GabeN had "bet the farm" on Linux versus Windows 8. Which I don't see happening. He might hate Windows 8, but Steam games play nicely on it, TTVM.
  - potatolicious 14y ago
    The funny part is that the GTA ports are more playable than their Windows originals (on modern Windows boxes). There are a slew of backwards compatibility issues that now exist that make games like GTA:SA nearly unplayable. In any case, I wouldn't put Civ5 in the "victory" category either. As with most Aspyr ports the performance is awful, and it doesn't support a bunch of pretty core features like cloud saves, or the very popular built-in mod installers that exist on PC. OS X gaming is about as dead as it's always been.
  - Laremere 14y ago
    Once you've made a game engine with the ability to port, it's easier to port a second time. Steam is (was?) just a store, nothing stopped people from porting to mac before steam went to it, and little more incentive was there after, especially initially. However now Valve has effectively opened up the Linux market in addition to the mac market. Additionally indie games have historically already had high multiplatform support. Now porting to linux will have the same incentive as porting to consoles; While the game engines will have to move first (Unity recently got there), I give it 5 years before making games for all PC platforms is common practice.
galaktor 14y ago
More pics on polygon http://www.polygon.com/2013/1/7/3849284/piston-valve-steam-box-xi3 http://www.polygon.com/2013/1/7/3849284/piston-valve-steam-b...
Revisor 14y ago
It will be called Piston. The demo unit of Piston features one ethernet port, 1/8" audio in/out, SPDIF optical audio, four USB 3.0 ports, four USB 2.0 ports (with one dedicated to keyboard input), four eSATAp ports, two Mini Display Port ports and one DisplayPort/HDMI port. It will probably cost between $500 and $1000. http://www.polygon.com/2013/1/7/3849284/piston-valve-steam-box-xi3 http://www.polygon.com/2013/1/7/3849284/piston-valve-steam-b... Edit: for those who haven't heard of Xi3 before like me, this promotional video shows what it's about: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r-ox90oXq8c http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r-ox90oXq8c
- rplnt 14y ago
  > It will probably cost between $500 and $1000. So they won't be able to subsidize the console price as Sony/Microsoft does? Because the price seems a bit on the high end for a gaming console.
  - neonshot 14y ago
    Well the PS3 launch price was $600, seems reasonable to me. They wont get me away from my $1600 gaming rig despite being a huge advocate of steam.
    - MSM 14y ago
      PS3 was $500 for the lower version, $600 was for the bigger HD. It also didn't sell well. PS3 didn't start to pick up in sales until the price started to drop, and at the time of release PS3 was incredibly powerful. I can't imagine someone dropping $500-$1000 on this, at that point just build your own computer people!
  - abrahamsen 14y ago
    Unless they lock down the hardware, they will not be able to subsidize it. People will install Windows or Ubuntu on it, and use it as a standard PC, if it is cheaper than equivalent PC hardware.
    - 14y ago
zemanel 14y ago
i tried throwing money at the page but it didn't work. Browser issues? :-)
jiggy2011 14y ago
So the Steam box will basically be a standard PC in a cool box with Steam branding on it?
- tribaal 14y ago
  Well, what did you expect?
  - jiggy2011 14y ago
    Not entirely sure, but I don't see what the big differentiation would be with say an alienware gaming system. It's no cheaper and if they plan on putting Linux on it then the alienware will run many more games.
- sgift 14y ago
  Which is exactly what a console is. I do not understand all these "but if you would pay x more you could get this and that and ..." here - yeah, you can do this, but people still buy a X-Box/PS3/whatever. The value of a console (or Steam box) is the _standardization_ i.e. all models of the Steambox are exactly the same. You test one, it works on all of them. Contrast this with the millions and millions of configurations that PCs have which are all subtle different. People can test as long as they want but can never be sure that a game will run on _your_ (or my or anyone else) PC.
  - jiggy2011 14y ago
    The biggest value of an xbox is probably the heavily subsidised price point and access to a proprietary ecosystem and console exclusive games. Unless Valve can pull out a huge amount of launch titles this will have a very weak ecosystem of it's own so will have to compete directly against other "gaming PC" companies such as Alienware.
  - kabdib 14y ago
    > Which is exactly what a console is. Not really. - The Xbox 360 doesn't have a date/time chip. It gets its time from the cloud (Xbox Live). - The security architectures of these platforms are extensive, to prevent piracy, cheating and malware. I'm guessing that the days of standardization of console hardware are over; the mobile market has proven that you can innovate and increase power, and developers are happy to comply (as long as there is money in it). You can't /reduce/ computational power or feature sets easily, but you can certainly improve them.
abrahamsen 14y ago
> could provide access to thousands of gaming titles Does this mean 1) the box will be based on Windows, 2) or there have been way more progress in getting publishers to port their games to Linux than what we have heard of yet, 3) or that "could" indicates that "thousands" is a meaningless hypothetical number?
- mariusmg 14y ago
  rumored to be running Linux so definitely 3.
- johnyzee 14y ago
  Solid web browser ;-)
cateye 14y ago
Without matching input devices like gamepads the added value is limited. One of the best things of console gaming is the normalized gaming experience.
bane 14y ago
I think we're about to be in for a whole new console wars, except this time, instead of pushing more bits, it'll be a battle between ecosystems. It won't be a console war, but an ecosystem war. By and large, with the exception of a few exclusives, the 360 and the PS3 have more or less the same set of games. Both were incredibly advanced and were a logical progression of the course that these systems were going. But they both more or less have the same software ecosystem. Most of the library available on one is available on the other. Yet the Wii outsold both of them, using far less advanced technology and offering far inferior on-line play. Many people credit the control scheme, but because of the controls (and an incredible first party development house) Nintendo offered a truly unique software ecosystem. So this current generation we've really had two software ecosystems, the 360/PS3 one and the Wii one. So today we have three new consoles about to hit the market in the upcoming months, Valve's, the Ouya, and Project Shield, right after the Wii U. Valve is going to offer the PC gaming ecosystem and probably the strong on-line offering that PC gamers enjoy, the Ouya and Shield are offering Android (plus some exclusives on either side), and the Wii U will continue to offer Nintendo's ecosystem. This leaves Microsoft and Sony to respond, probably with announcements this year and releases before Christmas of next, with their next offering. Back in the 16-bit days, the market showed that there can really only be two console players. Third place was a very distant third (PC Engine). But it's worth it to keep in mind that the Megadrive/Genesis and Super Famicom/SNES had wildly different software ecosystems as well. In the generation following we had a plethora of platforms as well, and it rapidly shook down to 2 (with 3rd place so bad that Sega made one more go of it with the Dreamcast then exited the business entirely). Nobody remembers the CD-I, 3D0, Jaguar, CD32 from this generation. Following that we had the PS2, XBOX, Gamecube and Dreamcast. It shook down to an unusual 3 this time, but the XBOX was artificial in this environment with Microsoft willing to lose tons of cash on the investment and if you look at the numbers they really just split 2nd place with the Gamecube. Today instead of two major consoles, we have two major ecosystems. 360/PS3 and Nintendo (in transition to the WiiU)...and we're about to add 2 more to it. I don't think it'll work. Somebody's going to exit the market. It just can't sustain 4 (5 if you count iOS which is kind of stretch). The Console business is hard and the public is fickle.
- chucknelson 14y ago
  Disagree a bit with the ecosystem comments. You're underselling the exclusives on PS3 and X360. For all of the Zelda, Mario, and other first party Nintendo games, you have a bunch of Uncharted, God of War, Killzone, Gran Turismo, Halo, Gears of War, Forza, Viva Pinata, etc. between PS3 and X360. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_video_games_exclusives_(seventh_generation) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_video_games_exclusives_... - there are a lot of exclusives between the two. I would just say Nintendo was left out of all of the cross-platform games, which is a shame. Much of the Wii's "unique" ecosystem is garbage. We may be going through a new "shakeout" period, similar to the 3DO and Jaguar days. As for mainstream adoption, I don't see any of the newcomers (OUYA, Project Shield, Piston) taking off, but it'll be fun to see what happens.
leoc 14y ago
Content warning on dismembered human being in background image, kthx.
- freehunter 14y ago
  I'm not seeing a dismembered human. I'm seeing some poorly drawn cartoon characters in what looks to be a prison fight, and the picture includes what could possibly be poorly drawn blood on the ground. Are you seeing something else?
  - leoc 14y ago
    > Are you seeing something else? I was. The ad being served was Hotline: Miami not Prison Architect when I made my comment.
antimatter15 14y ago
This might not necessarily have bearing on their ability to create decent hardware for running Steam, but if I'm not mistaken ISYS Technologies (the company behind the Xi3 brand/architecture/model) started selling computers running beta versions of the Google's open source Chromium OS under the name "Chromium PC" and then sued Google for trademark infringement when Google launched the Chromebook. I feel like that kind of behavior is probably worse than being a patent troll. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chromebook#Trademark_dispute http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chromebook#Trademark_dispute http://www.isys-tech.com/xi3-architecture.php http://www.isys-tech.com/xi3-architecture.php
- mtgx 14y ago
  So that's why that metal box seemed familiar to me. They used a similar design before. It's quite nice, I'd say.
- zachrose 14y ago
  Could the lawsuit be a defensive legal maneuver?
primitur 14y ago
The days of walled-developer-gardens are over! The barrier to entry into the lucrative console markets are lower and lower with every day that passes .. as a developer who could never afford a PS3 or XBox dev license, I've been participating as much as I can in the open hardware arena (GP32, GP2X, Wiz, Caanoo, Open Pandora) as much as possible .. and now the dream is finally coming true! I can't wait until the day these things start shipping - I for one welcome the opportunity to have as much diversity in this market as possible ..
- muyuu 14y ago
  Not sure about that. Valve might want to have their own walled garden rather than ending with walled gardens. It's a tested and very profitable model.
  - primitur 14y ago
    The point is, between "totally tyrannically rulled wall garden", and "nicely maintained arena of culture", is a big difference! I'm perfectly fine with Linux as a dev platform. Steam on Linux is an admission that in fact, you can use Linux to make great games. Maybe I have to sign my binaries before Valve gives them to 20 million users, but okay; I'm still going to be, locally, 100% developing on Linux, nevertheless.
nixarn 14y ago
Is this the final design? Am I the only one who thinks this looks extremely ugly? Hope it's not the final design, I'd love for it to succeed.
- FredFredrickson 14y ago
  No, you're not the only one. It's awful.
  - regomodo 14y ago
    Needs some gloss, monotone finish and its shaped changed into a rectangle with beveled edges.
    - FredFredrickson 14y ago
      Haha, well I'm no industrial designer, so who knows what it ought to look like... but if it looks like this image, you can be sure I won't ever have one sitting next to my TV. I'm not really interested at this point anyway, but an ugly hardware design virtually seals the deal.
gebe 14y ago
I very much doubt that this is Valve's "official" steam box offering. This article is a bit more sensational than others' that have been posted on the subject today.
- deelowe 14y ago
  Agreed. Hopefully, Valve will respond with something official soon.
programminggeek 14y ago
FYI, a $500 PC that attaches to your TV is not going to sell well. It might be profitable and a good idea, but it's not going to stop console gaming from "winning". The magic price point is $199. Something like the OUYA is more likely to hit the mainstream. $99 is a great price point. What people are discounting is that something like OUYA could get updated every 1-2 years unlike the 7ish year console lifecycle we are currently in. ARM keeps getting faster, it will certainly be "fast enough" soon...

119 points by galaktor 14y ago

I'd like to know more about the OS and price. At the moment it's just "There will be a small PC you can plug into your TV and play games on" and I can do that for myself. What advantage will this box have over that?

james4k 14y ago
I don't know, the form factor is interesting. Even aside from the modularity, the size is very small, and not sure how you could really do that for yourself. Look at the size of the ethernet port on the back compared to the whole unit. Edit: And yeah, you can build your own PC that could work for your living room just as well, but that's looking at a very small piece of the market who are comfortable with doing that. You are going to need more products like these to get Steam into more living rooms.
Karma_Police 14y ago
Latest rumor I read was that it was going to ship with Linux (if you google steam box linux you'll find some sources). Price, I haven't heard anything about. As for advantages, it's probably the same as any other console, which means it comes with the same disadvantages. There will probably be steam box approved games on steam, which you will be sure will work in it, and you may also see some developers targeting it specifically. But yes, if you know what you're doing, there probably wont be any advantage on choosing this over your own custom built PC. I don't see many developers restricting their games to steam box.
InclinedPlane 14y ago
The advantage is that it will be a streamlined experienced for non tech-savvy people.
- jiggy2011 14y ago
  That would be effectively the same as adding Steam to startup in Windows, which the installer does anyway.
  - __alexs 14y ago
    It doesn't go direct to Big Picture mode though and you still have to click through UAC and firewall alerts when launching newly installed games quiet frequently. Having full control of the software stack lets them take out quite a friction points.
    - jiggy2011 14y ago
      Adding an option to boot directly to big picture mode would be a huge problem and the Steam Windows client automatically adds firewall exceptions etc for games that you install. Since I mainly use Linux my Windows 7 PC is basically a Steam box already.
      - deltasquared 14y ago
        Likewise, my Windows 7 PC runs Steam only.
      - CrazedGeek 14y ago
        For what it's worth, there actually is an option to boot directly to Big Picture mode.
  - InclinedPlane 14y ago
    No, it's not the same, just as a bus, a sedan, and an suv are not the same even though they are functionally "identical".
    - jiggy2011 14y ago
      I don't see what the difference is apart from this runs Linux so has 1% of the games.
CJefferson 14y ago
One big advantage I would hope for would be "The games you can see for sale will all work on your graphics card and controller, and you won't have to play around with resolution settings and 2xFSAA, or whatever, trying to find an acceptable level of prettyness you computer can cope with".
rmk2 14y ago
It has been claimed elsewhere[1], with reference to something said by Ben Krasnow, that the projected Steam console will run Linux. Take it with a grain of salt until you hear something official, but at least, hints can be found. [1]: http://www.golem.de/news/pc-spielekonsole-steam-box-ohne-windows-1212-96609.html http://www.golem.de/news/pc-spielekonsole-steam-box-ohne-win... [german] edit: For those who don't know golem.de (presumably most here), it is one of the two major respectable German IT-news sites (next to heise.de, translated as The H)

daredevildave 14y ago

Would it kill them to put a f-ing link to Xi3 in that article?

AndrewDucker 14y ago
You'd get more upvotes if you contributed something to the discussion, like so: The original article didn't have a link to xi3, so here it is: http://xi3.com/ http://xi3.com/
- regomodo 14y ago
  Yes, it's all about the upvotes.

jofo25 14y ago

I always wondered why there was this heterogeneity between consoles and PCs. You're playing the same games, why would it be good for anyone to have to develop/buy something twice or for one exclusively. Hopefully the Steam Box destroys this distinction and makes a more consistent and flexible gaming landscape.

unwind 14y ago
Huh? Obviously it's good for (=more money to) the publisher if you as the player buys the same game both for a console (or two!) and for a PC, and any additional platforms that may appear?
InclinedPlane 14y ago
Development-wise that problem has mostly been solved. In the past cross-platform game development was done as separate projects, often handing off "porting" the game to a platform to an external team, even. Today it's more common to use engines (such as the unreal engine) which support all the major platforms (PC, 360, and PS3 typically, for first-person, high graphic-load style games), and then do the development for all versions concurrently. Typically you'd just have your regular builds set up to produce versions for each platform as a matter of routine, and you'd have a consistent testing experience for each. You'd still end up with customizations and tweaks for each individual platform but for the most part all of the hard work of targeting and optimizing for each platform is automated.
- JulianK 14y ago
  Just for another perspective, my experience doesn't really align with this. From my (biased) perspective, this sounds like "in theory" as opposed to "in practice" so I'm honestly curious if you've managed to get away from having to really deal with cross-platform differences. I know that in theory you use a cross platform engine that hides away all the messy details from you.In practice, I've found the PS3/360 have quite different CPU/memory architectures and you start dealing with the reality of that sooner than you'd expect. Whether that requires manually down sizing certain swaths of textures or writing code that will run on the SPU, there's quite a bit of manual work involved. Also, most game studios tend to roll their own tech which generally requires at least a small cadre of people manually targeting and optimization for each platform.

andybak 14y ago

Anyone got any idea how technically challenging it would be for Valve to get Steam Linux running on ARM? The idea of a possible future convergence between Linux and Android gaming intrigues me.

jspthrowaway2 14y ago
Modern 3D engines usually contain some not-insignificant amount of assembly for performance reasons. It'd require almost completely retuning, probably, undoing years of ideas since ARM is an entirely different architecture. Wouldn't hold your breath this early.
- w0utert 14y ago
  Modern 3D engines contain almost no assembly anymore these days, and for the rare bits that are still hand-coded assembly, platform-independent alternative codepaths always exist. We've been long past the point where raw CPU performance even matters for high-end games anymore, for some time already. Porting between e.g. PPC as used in consoles and x86 is business as usual, so I don't see why porting to ARM would be much more difficult. The main problem right now is that ARM performance is simply not there yet. It might be somewhere in the future, but even that remains to be seen, it's not entirely clear how well ARM designs will keep scaling up as they start to approach midrange x86 chips. Right now, ARM is just starting to match Atom, which is dog-slow compared to Core i3/i5/i7, and basically useless for non-trivial gaming.
- jiggy2011 14y ago
  Most of the really low level stuff is probably in the graphics shaders, I think HLSL etc are capable of producing code that will run on most GPUs?
- glaze 14y ago
  Assembly is mostly used to optimize rarely maintained vector/matrix SIMD operations and even then it's mostly wrapped in intrinsics.

bni 14y ago

I really hope Valve succeeds in migrating the PC gaming community off of Windows and onto Linux (maybe Blizzard will help?). It will not be easy.

vitalique 14y ago
'And onto Linux' would be super cool, but I see nothing especially bad or wrong with having Windows as an option, too. Healthy competition is a wonderful thing.
officemonkey 14y ago
I look to how successful Valve was in getting games for the Mac made. That success rate is mixed: * All the valve games were ported. * A bunch of casual games get ported. * Civilization V * Um, some of the GTA catalog, IIRC. Frankly, it was kind of a desert. I can't imagine the Linux gaming will pick up unless the GabeN had "bet the farm" on Linux versus Windows 8. Which I don't see happening. He might hate Windows 8, but Steam games play nicely on it, TTVM.
- potatolicious 14y ago
  The funny part is that the GTA ports are more playable than their Windows originals (on modern Windows boxes). There are a slew of backwards compatibility issues that now exist that make games like GTA:SA nearly unplayable. In any case, I wouldn't put Civ5 in the "victory" category either. As with most Aspyr ports the performance is awful, and it doesn't support a bunch of pretty core features like cloud saves, or the very popular built-in mod installers that exist on PC. OS X gaming is about as dead as it's always been.
- Laremere 14y ago
  Once you've made a game engine with the ability to port, it's easier to port a second time. Steam is (was?) just a store, nothing stopped people from porting to mac before steam went to it, and little more incentive was there after, especially initially. However now Valve has effectively opened up the Linux market in addition to the mac market. Additionally indie games have historically already had high multiplatform support. Now porting to linux will have the same incentive as porting to consoles; While the game engines will have to move first (Unity recently got there), I give it 5 years before making games for all PC platforms is common practice.

galaktor 14y ago

More pics on polygon http://www.polygon.com/2013/1/7/3849284/piston-valve-steam-box-xi3 http://www.polygon.com/2013/1/7/3849284/piston-valve-steam-b...

Revisor 14y ago

It will be called Piston. The demo unit of Piston features one ethernet port, 1/8" audio in/out, SPDIF optical audio, four USB 3.0 ports, four USB 2.0 ports (with one dedicated to keyboard input), four eSATAp ports, two Mini Display Port ports and one DisplayPort/HDMI port. It will probably cost between $500 and $1000. http://www.polygon.com/2013/1/7/3849284/piston-valve-steam-box-xi3 http://www.polygon.com/2013/1/7/3849284/piston-valve-steam-b... Edit: for those who haven't heard of Xi3 before like me, this promotional video shows what it's about: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r-ox90oXq8c http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r-ox90oXq8c

rplnt 14y ago
> It will probably cost between $500 and $1000. So they won't be able to subsidize the console price as Sony/Microsoft does? Because the price seems a bit on the high end for a gaming console.
- neonshot 14y ago
  Well the PS3 launch price was $600, seems reasonable to me. They wont get me away from my $1600 gaming rig despite being a huge advocate of steam.
  - MSM 14y ago
    PS3 was $500 for the lower version, $600 was for the bigger HD. It also didn't sell well. PS3 didn't start to pick up in sales until the price started to drop, and at the time of release PS3 was incredibly powerful. I can't imagine someone dropping $500-$1000 on this, at that point just build your own computer people!
- abrahamsen 14y ago
  Unless they lock down the hardware, they will not be able to subsidize it. People will install Windows or Ubuntu on it, and use it as a standard PC, if it is cheaper than equivalent PC hardware.
  - 14y ago

zemanel 14y ago

i tried throwing money at the page but it didn't work. Browser issues? :-)

jiggy2011 14y ago

So the Steam box will basically be a standard PC in a cool box with Steam branding on it?

tribaal 14y ago
Well, what did you expect?
- jiggy2011 14y ago
  Not entirely sure, but I don't see what the big differentiation would be with say an alienware gaming system. It's no cheaper and if they plan on putting Linux on it then the alienware will run many more games.
sgift 14y ago
Which is exactly what a console is. I do not understand all these "but if you would pay x more you could get this and that and ..." here - yeah, you can do this, but people still buy a X-Box/PS3/whatever. The value of a console (or Steam box) is the _standardization_ i.e. all models of the Steambox are exactly the same. You test one, it works on all of them. Contrast this with the millions and millions of configurations that PCs have which are all subtle different. People can test as long as they want but can never be sure that a game will run on _your_ (or my or anyone else) PC.
- jiggy2011 14y ago
  The biggest value of an xbox is probably the heavily subsidised price point and access to a proprietary ecosystem and console exclusive games. Unless Valve can pull out a huge amount of launch titles this will have a very weak ecosystem of it's own so will have to compete directly against other "gaming PC" companies such as Alienware.
- kabdib 14y ago
  > Which is exactly what a console is. Not really. - The Xbox 360 doesn't have a date/time chip. It gets its time from the cloud (Xbox Live). - The security architectures of these platforms are extensive, to prevent piracy, cheating and malware. I'm guessing that the days of standardization of console hardware are over; the mobile market has proven that you can innovate and increase power, and developers are happy to comply (as long as there is money in it). You can't /reduce/ computational power or feature sets easily, but you can certainly improve them.

abrahamsen 14y ago

> could provide access to thousands of gaming titles Does this mean 1) the box will be based on Windows, 2) or there have been way more progress in getting publishers to port their games to Linux than what we have heard of yet, 3) or that "could" indicates that "thousands" is a meaningless hypothetical number?

mariusmg 14y ago
rumored to be running Linux so definitely 3.
johnyzee 14y ago
Solid web browser ;-)

cateye 14y ago

Without matching input devices like gamepads the added value is limited. One of the best things of console gaming is the normalized gaming experience.

bane 14y ago

I think we're about to be in for a whole new console wars, except this time, instead of pushing more bits, it'll be a battle between ecosystems. It won't be a console war, but an ecosystem war. By and large, with the exception of a few exclusives, the 360 and the PS3 have more or less the same set of games. Both were incredibly advanced and were a logical progression of the course that these systems were going. But they both more or less have the same software ecosystem. Most of the library available on one is available on the other. Yet the Wii outsold both of them, using far less advanced technology and offering far inferior on-line play. Many people credit the control scheme, but because of the controls (and an incredible first party development house) Nintendo offered a truly unique software ecosystem. So this current generation we've really had two software ecosystems, the 360/PS3 one and the Wii one. So today we have three new consoles about to hit the market in the upcoming months, Valve's, the Ouya, and Project Shield, right after the Wii U. Valve is going to offer the PC gaming ecosystem and probably the strong on-line offering that PC gamers enjoy, the Ouya and Shield are offering Android (plus some exclusives on either side), and the Wii U will continue to offer Nintendo's ecosystem. This leaves Microsoft and Sony to respond, probably with announcements this year and releases before Christmas of next, with their next offering. Back in the 16-bit days, the market showed that there can really only be two console players. Third place was a very distant third (PC Engine). But it's worth it to keep in mind that the Megadrive/Genesis and Super Famicom/SNES had wildly different software ecosystems as well. In the generation following we had a plethora of platforms as well, and it rapidly shook down to 2 (with 3rd place so bad that Sega made one more go of it with the Dreamcast then exited the business entirely). Nobody remembers the CD-I, 3D0, Jaguar, CD32 from this generation. Following that we had the PS2, XBOX, Gamecube and Dreamcast. It shook down to an unusual 3 this time, but the XBOX was artificial in this environment with Microsoft willing to lose tons of cash on the investment and if you look at the numbers they really just split 2nd place with the Gamecube. Today instead of two major consoles, we have two major ecosystems. 360/PS3 and Nintendo (in transition to the WiiU)...and we're about to add 2 more to it. I don't think it'll work. Somebody's going to exit the market. It just can't sustain 4 (5 if you count iOS which is kind of stretch). The Console business is hard and the public is fickle.

chucknelson 14y ago
Disagree a bit with the ecosystem comments. You're underselling the exclusives on PS3 and X360. For all of the Zelda, Mario, and other first party Nintendo games, you have a bunch of Uncharted, God of War, Killzone, Gran Turismo, Halo, Gears of War, Forza, Viva Pinata, etc. between PS3 and X360. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_video_games_exclusives_(seventh_generation) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_video_games_exclusives_... - there are a lot of exclusives between the two. I would just say Nintendo was left out of all of the cross-platform games, which is a shame. Much of the Wii's "unique" ecosystem is garbage. We may be going through a new "shakeout" period, similar to the 3DO and Jaguar days. As for mainstream adoption, I don't see any of the newcomers (OUYA, Project Shield, Piston) taking off, but it'll be fun to see what happens.

leoc 14y ago

Content warning on dismembered human being in background image, kthx.

freehunter 14y ago
I'm not seeing a dismembered human. I'm seeing some poorly drawn cartoon characters in what looks to be a prison fight, and the picture includes what could possibly be poorly drawn blood on the ground. Are you seeing something else?
- leoc 14y ago
  > Are you seeing something else? I was. The ad being served was Hotline: Miami not Prison Architect when I made my comment.

antimatter15 14y ago

This might not necessarily have bearing on their ability to create decent hardware for running Steam, but if I'm not mistaken ISYS Technologies (the company behind the Xi3 brand/architecture/model) started selling computers running beta versions of the Google's open source Chromium OS under the name "Chromium PC" and then sued Google for trademark infringement when Google launched the Chromebook. I feel like that kind of behavior is probably worse than being a patent troll. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chromebook#Trademark_dispute http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chromebook#Trademark_dispute http://www.isys-tech.com/xi3-architecture.php http://www.isys-tech.com/xi3-architecture.php

mtgx 14y ago
So that's why that metal box seemed familiar to me. They used a similar design before. It's quite nice, I'd say.
zachrose 14y ago
Could the lawsuit be a defensive legal maneuver?

primitur 14y ago

The days of walled-developer-gardens are over! The barrier to entry into the lucrative console markets are lower and lower with every day that passes .. as a developer who could never afford a PS3 or XBox dev license, I've been participating as much as I can in the open hardware arena (GP32, GP2X, Wiz, Caanoo, Open Pandora) as much as possible .. and now the dream is finally coming true! I can't wait until the day these things start shipping - I for one welcome the opportunity to have as much diversity in this market as possible ..

muyuu 14y ago
Not sure about that. Valve might want to have their own walled garden rather than ending with walled gardens. It's a tested and very profitable model.
- primitur 14y ago
  The point is, between "totally tyrannically rulled wall garden", and "nicely maintained arena of culture", is a big difference! I'm perfectly fine with Linux as a dev platform. Steam on Linux is an admission that in fact, you can use Linux to make great games. Maybe I have to sign my binaries before Valve gives them to 20 million users, but okay; I'm still going to be, locally, 100% developing on Linux, nevertheless.

nixarn 14y ago

Is this the final design? Am I the only one who thinks this looks extremely ugly? Hope it's not the final design, I'd love for it to succeed.

FredFredrickson 14y ago
No, you're not the only one. It's awful.
- regomodo 14y ago
  Needs some gloss, monotone finish and its shaped changed into a rectangle with beveled edges.
  - FredFredrickson 14y ago
    Haha, well I'm no industrial designer, so who knows what it ought to look like... but if it looks like this image, you can be sure I won't ever have one sitting next to my TV. I'm not really interested at this point anyway, but an ugly hardware design virtually seals the deal.

gebe 14y ago

I very much doubt that this is Valve's "official" steam box offering. This article is a bit more sensational than others' that have been posted on the subject today.

deelowe 14y ago
Agreed. Hopefully, Valve will respond with something official soon.

programminggeek 14y ago

FYI, a $500 PC that attaches to your TV is not going to sell well. It might be profitable and a good idea, but it's not going to stop console gaming from "winning". The magic price point is $199. Something like the OUYA is more likely to hit the mainstream. $99 is a great price point. What people are discounting is that something like OUYA could get updated every 1-2 years unlike the 7ish year console lifecycle we are currently in. ARM keeps getting faster, it will certainly be "fast enough" soon...