15 ms·

Steam Machines and Steam Controller shipping to beta participants December 13th

95 points by CrazedGeek 13y ago

venomsnake 13y ago
The important bit is that we will have steamos to play with soon. They say it will be downloadable when the hardware ships.
- stonemetal 13y ago
  Yeah, I think I am more excited about the new linux distro than the hardware. Only two more days to go.
  - mladenkovacevic 13y ago
    This is what I'm excited about as well, but also can't wait until more games are announced for SteamOS early next year.
Lockyy 13y ago
>We’ve had to make the difficult decision to limit our beta to the U.S. only, because of regulatory hurdles. This was not our original plan, and it means we can’t collect beta feedback from Steam customers world-wide, which is pretty unfortunate. All things considered, we’re sure it was the right decision, because the alternative was to delay the whole beta beyond the point when we’d be able to incorporate any feedback into the 2014 products. For those outside the US who were hoping to participate.
- moloch 13y ago
  Even if you're in the US there's only a very very small chance you'll be able to participate in the beta.
  - sliverstorm 13y ago
    300 units, they said. Or literally 1 in a million for the US population :) Which makes sense, considering how much one of these units probably costs.
    - venomsnake 13y ago
      Well the average is 800$-sh if we assume even distribution of the classes. So it is 240000$ - I think this is less than Valve's "Pay people to find new reasons not to do HL3" daily budget.
  - DoggettCK 13y ago
    According to the eligibility page, I'm seeing: "You are now one out of 421,843 eligible beta candidates." It's been at that number since the registration ended, and I'm almost certain it's worldwide, since they didn't say U.S.-only until today. I like my odds.
    - NamTaf 13y ago
      That was the number it showed when it ended and that is the number of worldwide participants. Your odds will now be significantly higher at the expense of my odds plummeting to zero :(
      - DoggettCK 13y ago
        If it makes you feel better, I didn't get one, either. The random number generator must have been racist against me specifically. Yeah, that's the ticket.
- ultimatehurl 13y ago
  This seems like something they should have been able to foresee. I mean granted it is literally being told you didn't win a lotto for something other than extremely small odds not going in your favour, but they had everyone fill out forms giving over data.
- yaeger 13y ago
  Sounds about right. A delay would have hurt everybody. Of course I would have loved to get my hands on this in Europe but I'd rather they can release on time. That just means the US folks have to do all the work testing this and giving frequent feedback. It's not like there is functionality that would require worldwide test data is there? Steam is the same all over the world. It's not like the XBone where 90% of it's features only work in the US.
samspenc 13y ago
Looks nice. Just curious: does anyone know where Valve is making the hardware?
benihana 13y ago
I'm anxious to see how much Valve has learned since the launch of Steam a decade ago. Steam is great now, but it sucked pretty hard when it first came out. I remember the genuine shock I felt at having the friends functionality actually work the way I expected it to after about 4 years of pure shit. I have no doubt this will eventually be awesome, only question is how long it will take.
- winslow 13y ago
  Ahh yes I remember friends list being offline for a solid year if not more. It sure has come a long way.
- gagege 13y ago
  I remember almost not installing HL2 when it first came out, because I didn't want to install Steam. Back then, the concept of being locked in to a certain launcher felt so wrong. I didn't do anything with Steam (besides having to use it to install the Orange Box) again until that first massive sale they had back in 2008 or 2009 (Can't remember what year that was).
- pekk 13y ago
  You can use Steam today to see how much they have learned about how to run Steam. I don't see what this has to do with that.
  - Chestofdraw 13y ago
    Steam today shows their software nous, hardware is a very different thing.
- gcb1 13y ago
  steam for still sucks in the way requires full control of my box to games. i only run it in a vm or spare machine, limit the games i can use. if that box is any good, it will be very good for people with a minimum security concern for their main computers
  - 13y ago
watty 13y ago
I have a 100 game library of games on Steam that I would love to play on my TV but the SteamBox will only play a tiny percentage of them due to being linux based. Seems great for those new to steam though...
- gagege 13y ago
  Apparently the SteamOS can stream games, OnLive style, from your Windows computer to your TV.
- pekk 13y ago
  Then build a Windows box. What's the point of wanting SteamBox to be a Windows box?
- jcastro 13y ago
  The Steam Machine is additive, not a replacement for your current game machine, your existing windows machine will just stream games to your steam machine over the network. The Nvidia Shield does this kind of game streaming at 1080p and it looks great.
guidopallemans 13y ago
I hope this is a good place to launch this idea: Is it possible to make an android app which acts as a steam controller through usb/bluetooth? Here is an example (JSON-ish) config file: http://gearnuke.com/steam-controller-configuration-file-already-present-steam-account-least-weeks/ http://gearnuke.com/steam-controller-configuration-file-alre...
- simoncion 13y ago
  > Is it possible... Probably? It'd be best to wait until we get the hardware and software in hand before specing out the task, though. ;)
elipsey 13y ago
I'm very hopeful about the prospect for improvement of linux graphics drivers. It seems to have a been a chicken and egg sort of problem in past; I really hope contributions from valve will create some momentum, especially for the FOSS drivers. It seemed hopeless to me only a couple of years ago, but then it wasn't so long ago that you couldn't suspend your laptop without "blowing your balls off" as Con Kolivas remarked... I'm really concerned, though, about commercial vendors aligning with the one distro/graphics stack (apparently Ubuntu in this case?), such that I have to choose between putting up with Unity's "Shopping lens" and a ghetto of bad or unimplemented 3d support for distros that don't adopt the same graphics stack as Ubuntu as the distros move away from X...
- javanix 13y ago
  Drivers are usually kernel-tied more than anything else. I wouldn't expect too much improvement from the FOSS drivers like Nouveau (I suspect the performance required of modern games is still out of their reach), but the binary X drivers from should see some big improvements - any distributions that currently can leverage those would benefit.
  - elipsey 13y ago
    In particular, I'm hopeful that the radeon and intel FOSS drivers will improve (although I guess that nvidia said they will help with nouveau now: http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2013/09/nvidia-seeks-peace-with-linux-pledges-help-on-open-source-driver/ http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2013/09/nvidia...). I gather Valve has given significant feedback to all three vendors (http://www.pcworld.com/article/2049369/amd-nvidia-ramp-up-linux-driver-support-after-valves-steamos-announcement.html http://www.pcworld.com/article/2049369/amd-nvidia-ramp-up-li... and: http://games.slashdot.org/story/12/08/31/1551230/valve-finds-open-source-drivers-to-be-great http://games.slashdot.org/story/12/08/31/1551230/valve-finds...), and that steam games have, perhaps, stressed the sort of hitherto rarely used code paths that would only show themselves to be broken or unreasonably slow when some compositing DM feature wouldn't work, for example when KDE 4 was famously broken on fglrx for a couple of years, and no one cared enough to fix the driver bug because who plays games on linux, right? Of course that's the closed driver but the same kinds of problems have happened for all the drivers for want of heavy use, and of course they won't be heavily used if they are way broken. Please correct me if I'm wrong, but I think Wayland/Mir support must be added to any driver that will support them, and I believe it's not yet clear that that will be done. Intel has already refused a pull request for XMir support (http://slashdot.org/story/13/09/08/0431242/intel-rejects-supporting-ubuntus-xmir http://slashdot.org/story/13/09/08/0431242/intel-rejects-sup...), and I think the proprietary drivers have no support for either of the new WM's, nor will will they publicly admit to having any plans to implement it. KMS was added to the kernel five years ago this month, and the proprietary drivers still don't support it, although the intel driver does. Imagine a similar outcome for the new compositors, where the vendors don't implement support for a long time, or, worse, where there are factions comprised of certain combinations of driver/distro/WM... that would be bad.
X4 13y ago
Ew.. Friday 13th... wait til it passes. I don't believe this crap, but coincidently my own PC burnt with fire (literally), right after saying that and turning it on (a few years ago). Yeah, bad coincidence. However, I got part of the money back, because I sued the A/C Adapter company, whose part caused the fire. But I tell you, they were such big assholes, who looked up for the cheapest comparable parts on ebay for my hardware as a "base" price. Interestingly I had a $1200 worth collectors edition graphics card and they paid just $100 bucks for it, because the next cheapest and older model of the card on ebay was that much.
Pxtl 13y ago
I want to hear veteran RTS and FPS player weigh in on that controller. Bringing PC-style gaming into the living room would be a dream.
- Anonymous823 13y ago
  I'd really like to see someone fire up Quake 3 Arena and play a few rounds with a mouse, 360 controller, and Steam controller. Give them a few hours practice with each device, and let's watch some comparison videos, against the same skill bots, on the same map.
- winslow 13y ago
  Not exactly an RTS veteran, however Tommy Refenes (programmer from Team Meat) weighed in on his thoughts about it. http://tommyrefenes.tumblr.com/post/62476523677/my-time-with-the-steam-controller http://tommyrefenes.tumblr.com/post/62476523677/my-time-with...
  - Pxtl 13y ago
    Yeah, I saw that one, and it's reasssuring that this unorthodox gamepad can still be used as a gamepad (and it really excites me about how powerful the haptics can be if they can use the "clickyness" of the buttonpad make it feel d-pad-ish) it's kind of the opposite of what I was hoping to read. I want to see how it performs in the novel world of handheld pointers, not the proven territory of handhold joysticks.
- Negitivefrags 13y ago
  I gave one a go for about 20 minutes a couple of months ago. Honestly, I think they have some way to go, but I'm optimistic they can make it work. Using one of the sides to control a regular mouse in a game like Civ 5 I found that it was not even as good as a regular laptop touchpad. I suspect that a lot of the reason for that may be software though. There is a lot of subtle stuff going on with the motion of a laptop touchpad that has been built up over a decade of iteration and they just didn't have it tuned right. Using it to control an FPS was interesting, but I was unable to tell if it would be better or worse than, say, a 360 controller in the long term. You certainly can't just pick it up and expect to do well with it quickly. I'm certain that more muscle memory would develop in that area over time though. At the time I tried it, the haptics were only used to emit a clicking sound that was faster the faster you moved your finger along the surface. It vibrates the surface which makes it feel sort of like you are moving your finger across lots of small bumps rather than a flat surface.
ics 13y ago
Maybe by the time we get SteamOS they'll finally let customers change their account names. Without losing access to their games. Pretty please?
- namlem 13y ago
  You can change the name that other users see on Steam. It's been that way for years. Unless you mean something else?
richardw 13y ago
Is there a (legal/branding/whatever) reason why they didn't call it Steam Engine? Seems like such an obvious name.
- BHSPitMonkey 13y ago
  Sounds a bit too much like "Source Engine".

95 points by CrazedGeek 13y ago

The important bit is that we will have steamos to play with soon. They say it will be downloadable when the hardware ships.

stonemetal 13y ago
Yeah, I think I am more excited about the new linux distro than the hardware. Only two more days to go.
- mladenkovacevic 13y ago
  This is what I'm excited about as well, but also can't wait until more games are announced for SteamOS early next year.

Lockyy 13y ago

>We’ve had to make the difficult decision to limit our beta to the U.S. only, because of regulatory hurdles. This was not our original plan, and it means we can’t collect beta feedback from Steam customers world-wide, which is pretty unfortunate. All things considered, we’re sure it was the right decision, because the alternative was to delay the whole beta beyond the point when we’d be able to incorporate any feedback into the 2014 products. For those outside the US who were hoping to participate.

moloch 13y ago
Even if you're in the US there's only a very very small chance you'll be able to participate in the beta.
- sliverstorm 13y ago
  300 units, they said. Or literally 1 in a million for the US population :) Which makes sense, considering how much one of these units probably costs.
  - venomsnake 13y ago
    Well the average is 800$-sh if we assume even distribution of the classes. So it is 240000$ - I think this is less than Valve's "Pay people to find new reasons not to do HL3" daily budget.
- DoggettCK 13y ago
  According to the eligibility page, I'm seeing: "You are now one out of 421,843 eligible beta candidates." It's been at that number since the registration ended, and I'm almost certain it's worldwide, since they didn't say U.S.-only until today. I like my odds.
  - NamTaf 13y ago
    That was the number it showed when it ended and that is the number of worldwide participants. Your odds will now be significantly higher at the expense of my odds plummeting to zero :(
    - DoggettCK 13y ago
      If it makes you feel better, I didn't get one, either. The random number generator must have been racist against me specifically. Yeah, that's the ticket.
ultimatehurl 13y ago
This seems like something they should have been able to foresee. I mean granted it is literally being told you didn't win a lotto for something other than extremely small odds not going in your favour, but they had everyone fill out forms giving over data.
yaeger 13y ago
Sounds about right. A delay would have hurt everybody. Of course I would have loved to get my hands on this in Europe but I'd rather they can release on time. That just means the US folks have to do all the work testing this and giving frequent feedback. It's not like there is functionality that would require worldwide test data is there? Steam is the same all over the world. It's not like the XBone where 90% of it's features only work in the US.

samspenc 13y ago

Looks nice. Just curious: does anyone know where Valve is making the hardware?

benihana 13y ago

I'm anxious to see how much Valve has learned since the launch of Steam a decade ago. Steam is great now, but it sucked pretty hard when it first came out. I remember the genuine shock I felt at having the friends functionality actually work the way I expected it to after about 4 years of pure shit. I have no doubt this will eventually be awesome, only question is how long it will take.

winslow 13y ago
Ahh yes I remember friends list being offline for a solid year if not more. It sure has come a long way.
gagege 13y ago
I remember almost not installing HL2 when it first came out, because I didn't want to install Steam. Back then, the concept of being locked in to a certain launcher felt so wrong. I didn't do anything with Steam (besides having to use it to install the Orange Box) again until that first massive sale they had back in 2008 or 2009 (Can't remember what year that was).
pekk 13y ago
You can use Steam today to see how much they have learned about how to run Steam. I don't see what this has to do with that.
- Chestofdraw 13y ago
  Steam today shows their software nous, hardware is a very different thing.
gcb1 13y ago
steam for still sucks in the way requires full control of my box to games. i only run it in a vm or spare machine, limit the games i can use. if that box is any good, it will be very good for people with a minimum security concern for their main computers
- 13y ago

watty 13y ago

I have a 100 game library of games on Steam that I would love to play on my TV but the SteamBox will only play a tiny percentage of them due to being linux based. Seems great for those new to steam though...

gagege 13y ago
Apparently the SteamOS can stream games, OnLive style, from your Windows computer to your TV.
pekk 13y ago
Then build a Windows box. What's the point of wanting SteamBox to be a Windows box?
jcastro 13y ago
The Steam Machine is additive, not a replacement for your current game machine, your existing windows machine will just stream games to your steam machine over the network. The Nvidia Shield does this kind of game streaming at 1080p and it looks great.

guidopallemans 13y ago

I hope this is a good place to launch this idea: Is it possible to make an android app which acts as a steam controller through usb/bluetooth? Here is an example (JSON-ish) config file: http://gearnuke.com/steam-controller-configuration-file-already-present-steam-account-least-weeks/ http://gearnuke.com/steam-controller-configuration-file-alre...

simoncion 13y ago
> Is it possible... Probably? It'd be best to wait until we get the hardware and software in hand before specing out the task, though. ;)

elipsey 13y ago

I'm very hopeful about the prospect for improvement of linux graphics drivers. It seems to have a been a chicken and egg sort of problem in past; I really hope contributions from valve will create some momentum, especially for the FOSS drivers. It seemed hopeless to me only a couple of years ago, but then it wasn't so long ago that you couldn't suspend your laptop without "blowing your balls off" as Con Kolivas remarked... I'm really concerned, though, about commercial vendors aligning with the one distro/graphics stack (apparently Ubuntu in this case?), such that I have to choose between putting up with Unity's "Shopping lens" and a ghetto of bad or unimplemented 3d support for distros that don't adopt the same graphics stack as Ubuntu as the distros move away from X...

javanix 13y ago
Drivers are usually kernel-tied more than anything else. I wouldn't expect too much improvement from the FOSS drivers like Nouveau (I suspect the performance required of modern games is still out of their reach), but the binary X drivers from should see some big improvements - any distributions that currently can leverage those would benefit.
- elipsey 13y ago
  In particular, I'm hopeful that the radeon and intel FOSS drivers will improve (although I guess that nvidia said they will help with nouveau now: http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2013/09/nvidia-seeks-peace-with-linux-pledges-help-on-open-source-driver/ http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2013/09/nvidia...). I gather Valve has given significant feedback to all three vendors (http://www.pcworld.com/article/2049369/amd-nvidia-ramp-up-linux-driver-support-after-valves-steamos-announcement.html http://www.pcworld.com/article/2049369/amd-nvidia-ramp-up-li... and: http://games.slashdot.org/story/12/08/31/1551230/valve-finds-open-source-drivers-to-be-great http://games.slashdot.org/story/12/08/31/1551230/valve-finds...), and that steam games have, perhaps, stressed the sort of hitherto rarely used code paths that would only show themselves to be broken or unreasonably slow when some compositing DM feature wouldn't work, for example when KDE 4 was famously broken on fglrx for a couple of years, and no one cared enough to fix the driver bug because who plays games on linux, right? Of course that's the closed driver but the same kinds of problems have happened for all the drivers for want of heavy use, and of course they won't be heavily used if they are way broken. Please correct me if I'm wrong, but I think Wayland/Mir support must be added to any driver that will support them, and I believe it's not yet clear that that will be done. Intel has already refused a pull request for XMir support (http://slashdot.org/story/13/09/08/0431242/intel-rejects-supporting-ubuntus-xmir http://slashdot.org/story/13/09/08/0431242/intel-rejects-sup...), and I think the proprietary drivers have no support for either of the new WM's, nor will will they publicly admit to having any plans to implement it. KMS was added to the kernel five years ago this month, and the proprietary drivers still don't support it, although the intel driver does. Imagine a similar outcome for the new compositors, where the vendors don't implement support for a long time, or, worse, where there are factions comprised of certain combinations of driver/distro/WM... that would be bad.

X4 13y ago

Ew.. Friday 13th... wait til it passes. I don't believe this crap, but coincidently my own PC burnt with fire (literally), right after saying that and turning it on (a few years ago). Yeah, bad coincidence. However, I got part of the money back, because I sued the A/C Adapter company, whose part caused the fire. But I tell you, they were such big assholes, who looked up for the cheapest comparable parts on ebay for my hardware as a "base" price. Interestingly I had a $1200 worth collectors edition graphics card and they paid just $100 bucks for it, because the next cheapest and older model of the card on ebay was that much.

Pxtl 13y ago

I want to hear veteran RTS and FPS player weigh in on that controller. Bringing PC-style gaming into the living room would be a dream.

Anonymous823 13y ago
I'd really like to see someone fire up Quake 3 Arena and play a few rounds with a mouse, 360 controller, and Steam controller. Give them a few hours practice with each device, and let's watch some comparison videos, against the same skill bots, on the same map.
winslow 13y ago
Not exactly an RTS veteran, however Tommy Refenes (programmer from Team Meat) weighed in on his thoughts about it. http://tommyrefenes.tumblr.com/post/62476523677/my-time-with-the-steam-controller http://tommyrefenes.tumblr.com/post/62476523677/my-time-with...
- Pxtl 13y ago
  Yeah, I saw that one, and it's reasssuring that this unorthodox gamepad can still be used as a gamepad (and it really excites me about how powerful the haptics can be if they can use the "clickyness" of the buttonpad make it feel d-pad-ish) it's kind of the opposite of what I was hoping to read. I want to see how it performs in the novel world of handheld pointers, not the proven territory of handhold joysticks.
Negitivefrags 13y ago
I gave one a go for about 20 minutes a couple of months ago. Honestly, I think they have some way to go, but I'm optimistic they can make it work. Using one of the sides to control a regular mouse in a game like Civ 5 I found that it was not even as good as a regular laptop touchpad. I suspect that a lot of the reason for that may be software though. There is a lot of subtle stuff going on with the motion of a laptop touchpad that has been built up over a decade of iteration and they just didn't have it tuned right. Using it to control an FPS was interesting, but I was unable to tell if it would be better or worse than, say, a 360 controller in the long term. You certainly can't just pick it up and expect to do well with it quickly. I'm certain that more muscle memory would develop in that area over time though. At the time I tried it, the haptics were only used to emit a clicking sound that was faster the faster you moved your finger along the surface. It vibrates the surface which makes it feel sort of like you are moving your finger across lots of small bumps rather than a flat surface.

ics 13y ago

Maybe by the time we get SteamOS they'll finally let customers change their account names. Without losing access to their games. Pretty please?

namlem 13y ago
You can change the name that other users see on Steam. It's been that way for years. Unless you mean something else?

richardw 13y ago

Is there a (legal/branding/whatever) reason why they didn't call it Steam Engine? Seems like such an obvious name.

BHSPitMonkey 13y ago
Sounds a bit too much like "Source Engine".