Steam reveal

FoxEye said:
So the PC has already made its way to the living room for a decent chunk of (younger) people.
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I don't know of many younger people who have a PC connected to their TV apart from us nerd types or core gamers with nas drives and whatever else!

I do know a lot of young people who might hook up their laptop to the TV to watch a film, stream via a Roku/Apple TV like device or just use a PS3/360 for Netflix. None of them actually use a PC.

That is the market SteamBox will be aiming for, catering for the more advanced users at first though then scaling to a larger audience depending on how successful the OS works and how many game devs and software devs jump onboard the Linux train.
 
Shamikebab said:
Decent chunk? What are you basing that on?
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Only personal experience.

Moving forwards, the concept of connecting your devices to a single display is going to be extremely outdated anyhow. All your displays will be networked with all your devices, allowing you to seemlessly move around as you wish, without unplugging things.

Probably not for a few years yet tho ;) Personally can't wait. I always hated cabling things :p Kind of going off on a tangent now tho!
 
After reading the article on the Beeb about Valve's flat management structure I'm left with no doubt in my mind that the delay of HL3 is solely down to the fact that Valve are staffed with trolls. :D
 
randal said:
After reading the article on the Beeb about Valve's flat management structure I'm left with no doubt in my mind that the delay of HL3 is solely down to the fact that Valve are staffed with trolls. :D
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I was thinking something along those lines. Considering they are supposedly free to do whatever they like, why the heck is no-one doing anything on HL3! Instead they just rehash out Left 4 Dead 2 and DOTA2.
 
ic1male said:
I was thinking something along those lines. Considering they are supposedly free to do whatever they like, why the heck is no-one doing anything on HL3! Instead they just rehash out Left 4 Dead 2 and DOTA2.
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I bet a lot of people are working on Half Life 3, probably so much so that the base concept of the game has probably been made multiple times then scrapped. They have to create something new with HL3 so they will be waiting for Source 2 (maybe the 3rd announcement at the end of the week?) and then they need to design some tech/gameplay experiences to wow us. Last time it was physics and the openness of them maps even though the game rode a straight path in terms of story. So what do they do this time that is more than just turning up graphics, physics and such to 11?

Create an open worldish version of HL? Create a multiple choice story with decisions causing profound consequences? Full destructible environment? More than likely it will be something we have never seen before :D I still think it is at least a good year off from being shown off. I couldn't see it tying into SteamBox in anyway. L4D would be a good series to promote SteamBox features though as that is more appealing to console gamers.
 
maxilive said:
Nail on the head.

Most of the posts in this thread have been clueless and all based on selfish needs (I suppose half the gaming comments seem to be like that these days :P).

Steam OS is a great expansion for Steam which will benefit everybody but it is not aimed directly at current Steam users as 60-70% of the playerbase would be classed as "core PC gamers" and wouldn't want to play with anything else than a keyboard and mouse.

But the PC market has been shrinking is size over the past year or two, not so much in playerbase but in sales due to tablets, mobile devices and consoles expanding and desktop PC sales shrinking. SteamOS and the SteamBox is Valves way of trying to continue expanding the Steam community/playerbase and hopefully bring some of the good sides of PC game to the none core gamers and none gaming desktop PC owners.
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Given the focus is playing games in the living room why would a non core gamer buy a steambox instead of a console? How does SteamOS benefit everyone?
 
I'm also struggling to see the market for this. However, I can see how Valve have identified this as a possible future for them - desktop and laptop sales are shrinking, and therefore Valve's playerbase is going to shrink as well. They are trying to move into a different market, just as Apple has done and Microsoft are desperately trying to do. Opening up Steam to Linux, and now the SteamOS is an attempt by them to keep expanding their playerbase. I'm not convinced at the moment and am fearful that this may turn into an expensive thorn in their side.
 
ZombieFan said:
I'm also struggling to see the market for this. However, I can see how Valve have identified this as a possible future for them - desktop and laptop sales are shrinking, and therefore Valve's playerbase is going to shrink as well. They are trying to move into a different market, just as Apple has done and Microsoft are desperately trying to do. Opening up Steam to Linux, and now the SteamOS is an attempt by them to keep expanding their playerbase. I'm not convinced at the moment and am fearful that this may turn into an expensive thorn in their side.
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A drop in sales of laptops and desktops isn't the same as people using less laptops and desktops.

More people are building their own PCs for gaming now than ever, rather than buying pre-built.
 
Macro said:
Given the focus is playing games in the living room why would a non core gamer buy a steambox instead of a console? How does SteamOS benefit everyone?
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Because the SteamOS features are also being adding to the Steam client, therefore the investment Valve are putting into SteamOS make it to the client as well. Family sharing, Big picture etc.

As for the non core gamers buying the device I don't think it will kick off straight away as I doubt Valve are going to be advertising it all that much and the mainstream have no idea what Steam is. Chuck a cheap £80-100 device in the gaming/media section of a shop that is capable of using Netflix, other apps and games. I'm sure some people will jump on board even if they aren't a 100% sure what they are getting into. Then overtime if Valve want to advertise it more of if it gains more mainstream press/talk in the schoolyard type of thing then it will become a bigger market.

I know a few people who are already pretty interested in a Steambox/SteamOS who aren't massively into games but are tech heads so the prospect of a free, speedy, pre- setup OS that will run apps and games is
intriguing.
 
If the Steambox is announced to run this OS, and it's priced under £200 ish, I can definitely see my replacing my WDTV Live. Will be perfect for indie games and less demanding games (that work) and I assume the media side of things will take care of streaming music and video. Can probably see netflix making an appearance.

So as a HTPC it could be awesome. I mean I know you can build a HTPC, but an all in one that plays 'some' games sounds more appealing as a direct replacement for my current media box.
 
If a performance boost from a free OS isn't enough to move 'core' gamers over to steamOS then you can sit in the dying MS gaming camp.

Steams moving in to the living room because the PC gaming community is dying, for the 5th year in a row. Consoles are growing, Valve know they arn't a hardware company so they are meeting in the gaming community in the middle. A big powerful computer tucked away and a nice little device beaming all your console style games to your TV. It's aimed at the more casual gamer, like me.
I didn't build a PC for a long while because I don't have the room in my house to put a PC desk in etc, I eventually made one and replaced windows 8 shell with big picture (I've got a yootoob vid on it) Now I happily sit in my living room playing all the dotas!

Look at it this way, you can use a multi purpose OS for gaming, or a OS designed with gaming in mind, to deliver the best performance and the best gaming platform in the world. Everything else comes second.

Valve have sent shockwaves across the gaming world, even Nvidia have changed their stance on Linux and have offered the team that deal with Nvidia Linux ported drivers assistance with documentation supply, granted most if is stuff they already know but it shows willing. They've made a debugger giving no excuse not to develop for Linux, they also fixed activision's problems when they ported source over to linux (both source and CoD engine are modded quake 3 enignes) I think we'll see a lot of AAA titles hit steamOS, it looks good on their list and if Valve are as clever as we think they are, they'll charge a little less to sell games over steam that support SteamOS.

You can turn your nose up at all the other features offered but if your a gamer and you wont go to a free operating system that gives you better performance ingame then your a stubborn brain washed fool who happily lets MS bum love you for all your hard earned pennys.
 
I seriously don't get the MS hate. You pay £30-40 for an OS. Less than Apple. You then get nigh on two decades of patches, security fixes, service packs, firewall, antivirus, etc. free of charge and you're moaning about it? You spend £500+ on a PC and then you moan about spending less than a tenth on an operating system that supports all of your hardware out of the box. If you can afford to buy all of these AAA games (which are nigh on more than the OS I might add) then you can afford to spend money on the underlying operating system. Especially with Windows 7 being far and away the best OS on any platform.

WOW - titles support Linux and Linux is free - that must make it a better OS. NVidia made a debugger that probably took about 2 minutes to code. This is all impressive stuff /sarcasm.

Regarding the performance we're hearing Gabe going it produces impressive performance increases but nothing to back this up - it's as if he's marketing moving to a Linux based OS... oh wait.. he is. He's also moving because of greed. Essentially they don't want to compete with the Windows store so they're throwing the toys out of the pram and developing this (instead of developing AAA games that you mention).

It doesn't support DirectX. You still need a Windows based PC to stream games to it. Hell if I've had to turn the PC on to play a game then what is the point in using the SteamBox?

As people have already said. Keyboard and mouse are going to be an issue, streaming latency is going to be interesting - especially at high res. What about multi-monitor and such like - yes I know it's aimed at a TV but there should be nothing stopping you adding a couple of monitors.

What about the entire backlog of PC games? Steam isn't the only one out there (GOG, Origin, etc.) and there are a massive amount of games not even on any online store.

Finally if you have Linux and are running Steam then what's the point?



M.
 
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