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Comment by revelation | Hacker News Reader

So they are going the Chromebook route, hardware from every other company? The reason current gen consoles lasted as long as they did is certainly not because they had lots of fragmented platforms with vastly different performance characteristics.

That model seems to appeal to nobody but tech people.

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Four of the top 10 best selling laptops on Amazon are Chromebooks. Not sure how that translates to only appealing to tech people.

http://www.amazon.com/Best-Sellers-Computers-Accessories-Lap...

The fact that #1 and #2 are Chromebooks is worth mentioning. I found that surprising.

It really does. I always think Chromebook is pretty bad in this decade given how terrible Internet speed is outside your super fast office connection.

Really? I have a lot of complaints about ChromeOS (I have a chromebook, and nuked ChromeOS off of it), but that isn't one of them. Gigabit connections may be rare in the US, but some form of broadband is typically ubiquitous. You have to get pretty far out into the country before you find people who can only get dialup. Just a few Mbps is perfectly fine for ChromeOS purposes.

I guess I am saying reliable and extremely consistent speed. I mean using that at school is a challenge for a lot of people. I can't get fios yet and I am stuck with this inconsistent, horrible connection that works excellent only after midnight at home.

In general, that's very true for a lot of places in the US. While I can find a lot of free wifi in NYC these days, they are slow and some of them aren't secured either. So while chromeOS might be secure as OS, I still don't quite trust the connection.

It's not that surprising. These are the cheapest option if you want a decent computer.

You don't get to Windows until #4. The world has changed.

If we are comparing Valve to Google, then Steam-machines/SteamOS is more akin to Android than Chromebook imho. Valve provides platform/appstore, 3rd party devs provide apps.

It would be painfully easy for Steam to integrate some hardware polling with a database ranking the parts to give a rough estimate of how well you can run any given Steam game.

I'd argue it surely beats sitting on decade old hardware an entire console cycle. That was probably one of the primary motivators for SteamOS as a consolesque platform - Sony and Microsofts inertia circa 2012 was presenting a gaping hole in the market, and Nintendo's Wii U was (and still is) underwhelming. If Valve could get an open platform with vendor competition and constant product iteration in the living room, it would cement them there as much as it did on Windows digital distribution.

That plan might not have come to complete fruition the way they were hoping, though - both of their chief competitors will have months and a holiday season ahead of them, and SteamOS hasn't announced any launch titles or exclusives to attract early adopters (of the whole living room platform and haptic controller, at least).

They already do the hardware polling, and if they're already supporting this variety of GPUs on Windows, I can't see the Linux situation being that much worse:

http://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey

It really is that much worse. Hardware companies work far harder on their Windows drivers. On Linux we are mostly dependent on third party volunteers to write or fix drivers which support our hardware, because the vendors don't care.

Then Linux takes the blame for worse driver support, impairing adoption. It's a vicious circle.

I think valve would probably say they're trying to go the PC gaming route. that's traditionally been valve's market. Steamboxes don't exist to kill playstation and xbox, they exist to take over the PC gaming market from windows and the threat of the microsoft store on windows 8, which is clearly aimed as a competitor to steam.

To me it reads like a slightly different model- they make plenty of money in their primary business on Windows, and had no quarrel with Microsoft for many years. Now as they feel threatened by Microsoft, they are attempting to grow into a new market space- somewhat of a "blue ocean" strategy- namely, people who already like consoles but have always found PCs too intimidating or too much work. I doubt they want to cannibalize Windows; growing into a new market provides them additional revenue and security in the event Microsoft starts to take over some of Valve's old market share.

It's not quite "red ocean" and not quite "blue ocean" because they are targeting the gap between the two markets, and many customers will probably own both a console and a Steambox, or a PC and a Steambox, but of course some may forgo all but the Steambox.

AMD/ATI is in all new major consoles, and with what they are trying to do with "Mantle", things may radically change, and more PC's could start getting memory unified between CPU/GPU, like in consoles.

Only on machines with SoC's though ("APU"). Discrete graphics, the most common gaming configuration, will always require bussing data across PCI.

The real ray of sunlight is that huma (heterogeneous unified memory access?) might close some of the gap.

Consoles already have discrete chips and have unified memory...

Sure, the new generation will have unified memory access, but my parent was talking about PC's. What happens in console usually has little bearing on what happens in PC.

Not something introduced in the new generation; the last generation had it as well. And the generation before that. And before that.

They are not trying to introduce a console, IMO. It's a play for the gap between consoles and PCs. Some of the console "plug-n-play", some of the PC "performance-price-spectrum".

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