Steam reveal

ic1male said:
That's probably the only one that has enough buzz about it. I know there are things like Total War, Company of Heroes, SimCity, etc. but they're all mouse-driven and aren't arguably system sellers.

But by putting HL3 on to SteamOS exclusively, they risk some kind of uproar from Windows Steam users.
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If it is a free OS then anyone can install it so why would it cause an uproar? They launched steam with HL2 after all.
 
JBod said:
If it is a free OS then anyone can install it so why would it cause an uproar? They launched steam with HL2 after all.
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Because it's teh Internetz and people rage at the slightest thing? :p I remember HL2 launching on Steam and people were going mad with this new mandatory form of DRM.
 
ic1male said:
Because it's teh Internetz and people rage at the slightest thing? :p I remember HL2 launching on Steam and people were going mad with this new mandatory form of DRM.
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running the steam app is slightly different to running a new OS. ok it's free but for those with only one pc, you'd have to setup a dual boot so restarting your machine just to play a game is something that is going to cause a bit of nerd rage. :p
 
marc2003 said:
got any sauce? this is from the steamOS homepage....



also, steam has had a native linux client for quite sometime and you can filter linux only games on the store.

http://store.steampowered.com/search/?sort_by=Metascore&sort_order=DESC&category1=998&os=linux
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Read it on Phoronix a while back about them working with wine and devoting dev time to it. Will try to find you a link.

Also yes I am fully aware that Steam has a Linux client, having been a beta tester and running it on arch and xubuntu. I no longer own a Windows PC and yeah I went from like 360 games to 80 but I dont care because Linux > Windows and everything I do at home Linux does better than Windows anyway. Any wrapper that brings more games to linux that eventually gets devs to write natively for linux is a good thing. That is irrefutable and if you disagree then you go pay MS for a locked down, less verbose system. My arch install uses less than 200MB of RAM when idle. Try getting Win7 or 8 to do that. Less overheads means more resources for games = better.
 
I'm in mixed minds about this, overall I think it could work, but how many people are like me??

I game on a PC because i have idiot hands, I really struggle with a controller.

I also play flight sims, so need a joystick/compatability

I use dual screen as I watch TV as well as gaming, but they are both 24 in, but I would love having a big shiny screen!

Not adverse to Linux at all, but will all my current games work?? I'm assuming so as this would be bad for Steam otherwise.

All in all I would love to support SteamOS and SteamBox, but I don't use consoles for a reason, because I can't!
 
gropingmantis said:
Any wrapper that brings more games to linux that eventually gets devs to write natively for linux is a good thing.
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i really don't believe they will use any kind of wrapper like wine. you must know yourself if you've used WINE on linux, you don't get very far without winetricks. it's easy enough for you to ignore any license agreements when installing all those MS update packages for windows but it's not something a company like valve can promote when you don't have a windows license.

also i'd wager performance would be lacking behind games coded natively. again this is the other major feature that valve are pushing. their blurb:

In SteamOS, we have achieved significant performance increases in graphics processing, and we’re now targeting audio performance and reductions in input latency at the operating system level. Game developers are already taking advantage of these gains as they target SteamOS for their new releases.
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i just don't buy into this wine thing at all.
 
Might suit some people but others might think it wiser to hold back spending on a separate device and invest that in keeping the main pc up to a good spec or buying a bigger monitor or multi monitor setup.
 
Anyone having trouble getting the Big Picture badge?

Edit: Needed to update the client.
 
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Boycey0211 said:
All in all I would love to support SteamOS and SteamBox, but I don't use consoles for a reason, because I can't!
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haha. I'm the same :)

I wonder if this is just the start of a much bigger picture :) and this is more about Linux than it is about the Living Room. The Living room avenue is just to offer the alternative without changing anything on your gaming PC. Take it or leave it. I can't see any exclusives coming for it. Incentives probably at most. Offer a new hat and thousands of TF2 players will go for it :p

Depending on numbers it could perk larger developers interest and wham, 5 years on and Linux is your main OS.

It's difficult to see how things will turn out, but I'm certainly excited to see where it leads PC Gaming. Looking forward to the first user reviews and experiences.

Origin box to shortly follow.
 
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marc2003 said:
i really don't believe they will use any kind of wrapper like wine. you must know yourself if you've used WINE on linux, you don't get very far without winetricks. it's easy enough for you to ignore any license agreements when installing all those MS update packages for windows but it's not something a company like valve can promote when you don't have a windows license.

also i'd wager performance would be lacking behind games coded natively. again this is the other major feature that valve are pushing. their blurb:



i just don't buy into this wine thing at all.
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I'm not suggesting they will be using standard wine but its entirely possible that there will be some sort of wrapper/fork of wine/vm to bring existing titles to linux. How else will they do it? Magic? Yeah you'll take a performance hit but have you tried wine recently? I run EVE through wine and I have seen no performance drop (yeah its a bad example but all other examples would be third hand accounts).

The graphical improvements they are talking about will be from the work they have done with Nvidia to improve OpenGL/CL performance on the proprietary Nvidia driver. I frankly dont care about taking a performance hit on older games (chances are my PC can cope with that without me noticing) provided it means future games are native...which with Steam and Valve behind it I think it would.
 
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if this takes off well I just hope game developers don't decide to ditch windows base games. I don't think i'll be able to use a Linux OS to well.
 
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