Valve Reveals First Gen Steam Machines
store.steampowered.com
store.steampowered.com
I recently purchased a game from them that has been out for over a year, they ran out of CD Keys so Steam gave me the "could not connect to key server" message. After going back and forth with Steam support they refused to issue me a refund or even give me an ETA for when I would be able to play the game that I've already payed for. Horrible customer support and I doubt I'm the first customer they've done this to.
Several weeks later, no game, no refund, no cd key, and no update from their support staff (which is accessible via email only, no chat, no phone). Screw you Valve and Steam, I'll stick to my PC.
I know that you can stream your Windows games through the Steam Box but come on. If I wanted to do that, I could already run an hdmi cable from my PC directly to my TV and don't need an extra box in between.
It could potentially be a huge business to sell the best steam machines on the market.
And now with most of the Steam games available for Linux, and many more running nicely under Wine, Linux has almost caught up with Mac. I switched to OSX (with a Windows dual-boot option) on my new PC, because it runs most of the games I played, because it offers all the Unix stuff I need for work, and still runs the consumer software (MS Office) I occasionally need. Now that a critical amount of games are running on Linux, I'm thinking about ditching OSX and going Linux(+Windows for the occasional odd app) on all of my devices.
It has been getting harder and harder to get a good gaming PC. One reason is that since I'm grown up I can no longer read gaming magazines all day long to become a hardware expert ;-). The other is that there are less and less good off-the-shelf gaming PCs. Either they are too expensive, or too loud, or they are very unbalanced (GPU too weak, too little RAM when RAM is expensive, far more RAM then neccessary when RAM is cheap, ...).
At the same time, the whole PC market seems to be shrinking (I don't have any numbers, that's just what you read everywhere). Dell and the likes will always have enough enterprise customers, but the consumer-targeted manufacturers are probably in trouble. It makes a lot of sense for the remaining small vendors to join forces under a common label.
It's also great for the customers, since they don't have to go through the trouble of building their own PC (including choosing parts). But they still get the benefits of a custom PC: Well-balanced hardware at a reasonable price, that they know will be able to play the games they want it for. I believe that by creating a new category "steam PC" we'll be seeing a lot of positive competition and transparency in that area.
Slots are all different, the variety of RAM types is astonishing and there are more form factors, cooling solutions, hard drive types and motherboard types than you can shake a stick at.
Turns out the internet is a very good resource these days for benchmarks, price comparisons, compatibility reports etc. It really only took me 3 or 4 evenings to get back up to speed with the state of the art (ASUS had a great series of videos on NewEgg about their latest motherboard line), put together some rough sketches of systems and started to price them out. A couple iterations later and I settled on a configuration and placed my order.
A few days later everything arrived, and even though I had never touched an SSD before, had everything assembled in 2 very lazy evenings. Instructions are provided these days with most of the parts and aren't too bad. I probably did a couple things not-quite-right, but everything seems to work fine so.
I expect this system to give me 5-7 years of service and it ran well under $2k. Has an SSD for the main drive and 4TB of secondary storage, 32GB of RAM, not "quite" top of the line video (but pretty beastly), 4 cores on the latest intel architecture. It chews up games and emulation with ease and I actually do my day-to-day work inside of a couple of VMs that you barely notice are running.
So yeah, it took a few more days of my time for research, but now I know the hardware scene a lot better and the time from order to fully usable system wasn't terribly longer than ordering a complete box.
For fun, I tried to spec out an Alienware and came up with a system not quite as fast, with less storage for about a $1k more.
Otherwise there are plenty of small companies that supply gaming PCs, as well as Asus (Republic of Gamers) and Dell (through its purchase of Alienware).
Sounds like a good place to look if you want a normal desktop Linux PC which is almost guaranteed to be compatible.
- PS4/Xbox1 are very similar to PC Architecture (Steam Machine)
- even first gen Steam Machines are more powerful than consoles, a few years down the line they will be orders of magnitude faster
- Steam Machines are backwards compatible and can be replaced with faster ones when the need arises. With the 4K age dawning, this could be a huge deal as the new consoles often don't even run 1080p natively. Especially if you consider that the last gen lasted almost 8 years.
- Developing/Publishing is still a lot easier on Steam than it is on the new consoles, big deal for small devs
- it could actually be a console that PC gamers love
- Valve has the right mindset and resources to pull this off
As with everything there are also risks of course (non unified design/performance, Games, Linux) but all the contenders have their pros and cons, biggest one of the consoles is their userbase obviously.
As an old-school PC gamer, this is the first "console" I've been interested in since the first Playstation. Don't know how big he marked of people like me is though..
Companies like Microsoft, Nintendo and Sony make the really big bucks from the publishing fees of the games, the hardware is sold basically at cost (or at loss if we consider production, design and software costs).
Third party Steam Machines sellers can save on software, but they need to have some margin on the hardware itself, unless Valve cuts them a percentage on the actual sales.
I don´t think price will ever be the selling point of Steam Machines.
So instead, release a steambox version which is only going to be popular with "enthusiasts", bug/beta test the hell out of them and then more aggressively market steamboxes in 2-5 years time when the current console generation is starting to look old.
Valve are playing a long game here I think, the value proposition of a steambox isn't going to make sense until we're about half way through the current console cycle.
Unless you are buying a PC for a company, buyers fall into two categories today. Those that buy a $300 "Office PC" from the shelf, and those that build their own. High-end preassembled PCs are basically gone (save for "all-in-ones").
Since the PC market is generally shrinking (or stagnating), it makes a lot of sense to join forces and collect the big gaming PC assemblers under a united label. It's a little bit like people don't want a Sony or an Acer or an Asus anymore, they want an "Ultrabook".
Still, one of the great points in PCs is the variety of hardware.
I'm just curious on how Valve (or the HW vendors) are gonna market it. With consoles you have the idea that with that unit you can play everything. With a steam machine is different. I'd like a "with version A you can play X, with version B you can play X+Y, with version C you can play X+Y and have 3D"...
I don't care too much for graphics, so hardware specs don't speak too much for me. Tell me how these specs translate in certain game. I just need enough resolution and enought effects to feel imersed to be happy with the graphics.
> 'm just curious on how Valve (or the HW vendors) are gonna market it. With consoles you have the idea that with that unit you can play everything. With a steam machine is different. I'd like a "with version A you can play X, with version B you can play X+Y, with version C you can play X+Y and have 3D"...
This is nowadays already not much of a problem. If you build a mid-high end PC now, you can expect it to play every game at least at reasonable settings for the next couple of years. How long it's going to hold is always a bit of speculation, but you can get hardware reccomendations from certain magazines or websites.
The same is true for the games' side. If I buy a new game, gaming magazines/websites will tell you how much CPU, GPU, RAM you need to play it on minimal, medium, and maximal settings (the hardware requirements on the boxes are usually rubbish, unfortunately). They usually also say something like "works fine if you've built your PC in the last 3 years". You don't need to match the specs exactly, because games have gotten pretty good at automatically adjusting settings.
So it works now, but it's only going to get easier with Steam machines. You'll probably see games advertized as "Works great with 2015 steam boxes. Best effects with a 2016 steam box, or AMD Radeon OMG9000. Minimal requirements: 2014 steam box or equivalent (Intel Core i5 xxxx, 8 GB RAM, ...)."
If I were them, I'd either have yearly revisions, or hardware levels. So in 2014, a low-end will be HW level 5, a mid-end will be level 6, and a high-end will be level 7. One year later, a new high-end will maybe be level 9. Games would then just say you need a level 7 PC to run (very much like the windows hardware index, except PC's will be built to reach a certain number).
They'll probably end up using something like the Windows Experience Index. People shouldn't have to worry about the specifics of their CPU, etc. unless they want to.
http://www.engadget.com/2014/01/06/valve-steam-machines-spec...
If valve wants this to succeed they better pour a lot of money into the making current steam libraries work on linux properly. I want linux as my daily driver.
The only concrete differences I can see would be the OS , which would seem inferior to just shipping windows+steam out of the box at this point; and the controller. But I always assumed the controller would be compatible with regular Windows PCs anyway (and I assume they will be available separately).
http://media.steampowered.com/store/steammachines/SteamMachi...
Works fine, readable in preview.
http://www.scribd.com/doc/196758024/Steam-Machines-CES-broch...
Since it has taken more than 30 minutes to load just two pages in Firefox from http://media.steampowered.com then it must be a different problem....
Oth3erwise, the PC and gaming industry strategies are completely different. With consoles, the hardware is more or less fixed, but later developments (eg die shrinks) are used to reduce the price. With PCs, the price is maintained fairly constant over the short term but later developments are used to increase the performance or whatever is fashionable (eg maintain or reduce the performance but make it thinner).