Valve Confirms They are Working on a Steam Box | Hacker News Reader

Valve Confirms They are Working on a Steam Box

maximumpc.com

126 pointsjustinbkerr64 comments

I built a steambox a few days ago. Dropped $500 for a pretty performant dedicated gaming box. 8gb ram, 120gb ssd, and a $120 video card.

The Steam big-picture mode is pretty slick, but not all of the games work seamlessly with an xbox controller so I've found that you generally need to keep the mouse and keyboard around.

Instead of keeping it plugged into my TV, I now plugged in an old monitor and the girlfriend has been enjoying the sims 3.

Steam absolutely knows what they're doing and they have a real shot of widespread adoption if they build their own linux based Steam Box. The big issue is going to be game compatibility with whatever hardware / controller configuration they go with.

The crazy thing is that hardware compatibility might sort of solve itself. Developers already have to deal with all the different hardware permutations; making sure that a single specific one, with a known software configuration to boot, should be pretty easy.

They'll still have to convince people to develop a Linux version in the first place, though...

Wouldn't they only need to convince people to develop a Wine compatible version?

No. The hassle of getting that to work is probably way harder than just getting things to work on Linux in the first place.

I think that Valve will eventually put out a libvalve which can be used to target a number of linux specific integration points for typical windows programs.

Wine already runs many windows binaries, without modification, on linux. Often times when wine does not work on a given binary, the issue can be resolved by patching wine, again without touching the binary. It seems like it should be relatively easy for someone who can modify the binary source code to resolve any bugs that wine runs into (probably exposes subtle flaws in the game code in the prosses). The other issue I can think of is performance, but my sense is that the win32 API pipe is not a bottleneck in almost any program, so that is likely not an issue.

Nothing is preventing them from doing both. Dealing with nonworking wine games is incredibly frustrating (and often fruitless).

But I can see it working. In addition to being able to fix issues in the software itself, they are also working with a known hardware configuration and they can sandbox each wine instance.

PlayOnLinux already helps doing the latter, to the point where it lets you use separate wine versions for each sandbox. Much better than using synaptic to jump between different package versions.

I hope they'll stick with native versions, though.

One problem I see with low cost custom-built gaming boxes is that the Windows licence takes up a massive share of the price. I hope that Valve’s push to Linux will lead developers there as well but I don’t see the big publishers jumping on that in a hurry.

I'm not sure criticisms around cost are as relevant as they used to be. Windows 8 Pro currently sells for $40 on Microsoft's website, and yes, that key can be used to perform a clean install. If you paid $40 to Microsoft every three years when they released a new Windows version, that would work out to $13.33/year.

That isn’t exactly expensive... $13.33/year is basically a rounding error compared to the costs of console gaming.

But you pay that 40 dollars at once, and it's on the price tag of the SteamBox you would buy (if they go for a Windows box). So, 40 dollars on a console price is actually a lot of money, since most console hardware is sold at 300-400 dollars point.

The xbox360 core launched at $300. Assuming prices of the next generation are fairly inline with last generation, then yeah that's a ton. I have no idea what the cost to Microsoft on those units where, but I remember here they were either sold at a lose or with almost no profit. 13% on the BOM is more than significant especially when there is a viable alternative.

But if you're competing with a $500 PS4, you're going to have problems. Even when you throw in price savings with scaling and a colossal subsidy, that's the retail equivalent of building a PC which competes with the next-gen consoles for $800 or so. So a marginal $40 is a lot of money in that.

I commented about this here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4886028 the other day.

Essentially, how often will Valve upgrade its Steam Box? Certainly more than every 6-7 years. For those of you thinking right now: "you can ugprade it yourself!", well, yes you could , but that defeats the whole purpose of having one standardized spec for developers to target. Throw in a new graphics card here and there, and you've suddenly splintered your user base into those with PCs, Official Steam Boxes from Valve, and Official Steam Boxes from Valve that have been upgrade by the users. And now, certain games will only work on some combination of those three.

I'm a fan of Valve, their games, and their culture, and want to see this succeed. I'm sure they've put much thought into scenarios like this and trust them to make the right decision.

I image the Official Steam Box from Valve (OSBfV) wouldn't actually be that upgradable. I would want something that would fit aesthetically with my TV, XBox, etc. Trying to make the OSBfV cheap enough to entice consumers, yet pack enough of a punch for "gamers" (I really dislike that stereotype, but that isn't the point) would, I imagine, require not quite interchangeable hardware, much like the XBox. But, don't discount that Steam could easily release a OSBfV1, 2, 3 etc every other year with the latest and greatest (that fits in the form factor and budget constraints).

The other possibility is that their Steam Box fits with their "games as a service" model. Imagine if they charged a monthly/yearly fee and occasionally shipped out hardware upgrades to all Steam Box owners.

We'll be doing that model in 2013 with a B2B SaaS service that benefits from an onsite edge node to reduce latency, among other things.

The hardware isn't sold, it's leased, but the effect is the same: we manage the onsite hardware, fix it when it breaks (next day replacement), and send out new hardware every few years. The hardware is literally plug and play, and works correctly behind a NAT router with DHCP.

We actually decide what hardware a customer gets (it's based on load -- standard provisioning stuff), although customers can upgrade to a system they don't actually need for a fee.

I think this approach is way better for customers, and the response so far has been extremely positive. No longer do they have to worry about provisioning and maintaining hardware, or even deciding what to buy. Of course they don't know the best way to provision hardware for our software. Why would they?

It'd be really interesting to see this approach done in the consumer space.

If they enter the hardware market I suspect they will make different Steam boxes and have them meet certain specifications. Like Steambox A to run a certain list of games, and Steambox B to run the latest games at full performance. With such clusters of performance they could have pre-defined scripts to tweak the performance so that even a older Steambox can run the latest titles decently (make at lower details/resolution) or drop compatibility altogether if a decent performance cannot be achieved. That would be an "organized" segementation of the PC gaming scene.

This being said I am not sure this is really going to be necessary because there has not been much of race for graphics in game recently on PC - I still have a GPU from 2 years ago and it still runs all games very well, even the latest ones. This may change with the introduction of new consoles, but I am not too sure about that yet.

> Throw in a new graphics card here and there, and you've suddenly splintered your user base...

Given how aggressively they've pushed to make their games work on Mac and Linux (going against the grain of the industry), and given the years of massive user configuration surveys, and the fact that they've essentially run a fractured ecosystem for years, I'd bet they have something up their sleeve here... or they have a reason why this isn't as big a problem as it's been in the past.

This isn't actually a big problem. Comparing to the current situation, Valve will just release their own hardware with a massive user base, and have that platform be the target spec for PC games. That is the stock Steam Box and Valve with developers will make sure all games run perfectly on that.

All custom specs will be handled like they are now, expect now there is a single target spec everyone agrees on.

The hardware they will launch on is probably going to be more powerful and with support for full HSA (heterogenous computing) and with DDR4 RAM, if they are going to wait until 2014 to launch it (and assuming they are going to use AMD's delayed and probably modified Kaveri APU).

Blogspam.

OP is http://kotaku.com/5966860/gabe-newell-living-room-pcs-will-c...

I'd rather support maximum pc than kotaku to be honest.

You don't use an adblocker?

I think it is better to support the sites you like and avoid those that you do not, than to leach from all sites without discretion.

(I have no idea what moistgorilla's issue with kotaku may be.)

I support sites that I like (RockPaperShotgun, 4chan) by directly giving them money, so that I am the customer, rather than the product being sold.

That, and the number of high profile incidents where attackers sneak Flash 0day exploits into ad networks, are the reasons why I block ads.

I don't deliberately block ads, but I do block Flash and Javascript for that reason. (If you want me to see your ads, make them work without Javascript, thankyou very much.)

That would means ads would be blocking page load, with javascript loaded ads, you can have the ad load asynchronously to the page.

As nice as it is to link to the actual interview, the blog post does so as well, and adds its own content to the mix. I don't see what's pasted or spammy about this.

"Blogspam" is slang used to refer to a specific rule on HN, rather than a literal description of content.

http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

  Please submit the original source. If a blog post 
  reports on something they found on another site, submit 
  the latter.

So if a post "adds its own content to the mix" then it can't be blogspam, innit?

It's to mitigate people linking to the same story 10 times.

However, if the additional content is noteworthy, then you could link to it on HN, but make the title accordingly specifying that it is the opinion of the writer, and not the original source, that is what the reader should be considering.

Fair point.

I'll be interested to see if Valve will release a Linux-only or a Linux/Windows hybrid box. It is possible today to have a system where you keep two VMs suspended - a linux vm and a windows vm and thaw one to run the program you need, with pci pass-through to give it full control of the video card. This is quite feasible if they go with ATI hardware that has open documentation.

Save system state, boot windows vm, launch game (somehow passing the information to the steam instance in the windows vm, but that's the least of your worries), once game finishes, freeze vm, restore system state and show regular steam-on-linux interface.

I've had before the idea of building a system built on a hypervisor that lets you dynamically switch vms, but the high cost of hardware with an iommu and the pretty astronomical cost of this for a hobby project (i.e. my lazyness) have kept me from doing it.

It is a Linux box. Gabe said it.

I have a feeling they might just use wine for games that are known to work fine under it.

What would the licensing repercussions of that be, if any?

It's not clear. Many Mac ports are done with Transgaming's tools. Which are commercial and include code from old BSD versions of Wine.

Microsoft isn't actually obligated to sue, so they may have just decided that it wasn't worth while.

The Google/Oracle API copyright decision probably helps Wine.

So they're probably in the clear, but Microsoft could certainly make their lives difficult.

I'm struggling to understand how they're going to pull this off without pissing people off. It was my understanding that console makers typically take losses on sales of their console and make up for it by selling games. That's why we have such a slow release cycle for consoles.

A big gripe people seem to have with consoles is that the hardware limitations due to slow release cycles prevent games from advancing. How is Steam going to continue to put games out quickly?

Are they selling it as a PC that I could also use for word processing or programming? This might help justify a higher cost. But then, I'm not putting it in my living room and it's not really competing with consoles. Perhaps I'm missing something here.

I think the tradition model of long hardware cycles, taking huge losses in an attempt to beat Moore's law, and writing to the "bare metal" to squeeze the most out of outdated tech is merely what consumers and the current console manufacturers are used to, and not necessarily what consumers want or what is the best business strategy.

I hate to put it this way, but I think Apple has already proven that the best strategy for closed hardware platforms is to release incrementally improved hardware on a regular release cycle, and mandate that software be written to APIs and not "the metal" so that it remains forward compatible. In a world where so many people happily replace their 100% working phones with new ones every year or two, I don't really see why most of the current console market would have a problem with purchasing a new Steam Box every few years.

Valve could easily stick $200-400 commodity PC hardware in a box and blow the pants off of the vast majority of the existing console market that is currently enjoying games running on hardware that was state of the art in 2006. Even if the PS4 and Xbox720 (or whatever they plan to call them) come out later with superior hardware, I think most of the meaningful difference can be made up by carefully cooperating with NVidia/AMD to optimize the drivers for the specific models of GPUs used in a limited range of hardware, while aggressively promoting the yearly hardware refreshes.

It's possible that Valve could end up playing the console game by its established rules, but I think they'd be wasting what is probably the best opportunity available to anyone in the industry to become the "Apple of the living room" if they did -- lord knows why Apple itself isn't trying harder on that front.

What is Valve's plan for getting developers to actually develop for Linux? Is the hope that the chance to be compatible with Valve's hardware will encourage enough other developers to get on board?

I do imagine thats a huge part of it. Combine that with the fact that if you target Valve's hardware, you're also targeting a pretty decent sized cross section of Linux PC's as well, and you've got yourself a recipe for better than what the competition has (from a developers perspective)

I doubt its going to be pushing "develop for linux" that will be a problem, most games aren't using many os calls and those are generally easily ported anyway.

The challenge will be getting developers to program for opengl/sdl/openal instead of directx, something they could already do on windows but have chosen to go the directx route. The mobile push has opened a lot of developers up to opengl ES and opengl in general sucks less now so this may not be as difficult a pitch as it would have been 5 years ago.

What would be really cool, is if valve decided to throw their weight behind building a direct 3d state machine for linux, I know there is work underway there but I would imagine valve could seriously speed that up along with being in a position to apply pressure to the video card manufacturers for support in a way that the OSS community simply can't.

Heh, interesting - Google's ANGLE project supports OpenGL ES on top of D3D 9, and if another project implemented D3D on top of OpenGL... would it ever matter which you used?

The linux attempt at this in Gallium3D[0], which is the previous work I was alluding to in my last post. I believe a D3D 10/11 state tracker exists for it but the problem is that only the open source ATI and Nvidia drivers support it. Unfortunately the 3D performance of those drivers is somewhere between broken and terrible so it doesn't mean much today.

> if another project implemented D3D on top of OpenGL

This is exactly what wine does.

[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gallium3D

This is where Valve blows the doors off the world, and announces they've ported the DirectX API to Linux

Developing for SteamBox is a lot less scary than developing for "Linux".

Linux has even more hardware diversity than Windows, and the added complexity of multiple distributions and competing drivers (e.g. open source vs closed). And fans that will bite your head of if you don't support their favorite choices.

If Valve does it right, the SteamBox will define the baseline for gaming on Linux. Distributions targeted to home users will be sure to include the ABI's used by the SteamBox, and Linux gamers will buy hardware that is "similar, but better" than the SteamBox hardware to maximize the chance their Steam library will work on their PC.

It was already posted:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4893902

I think the market needs something like this badly. I have a pretty big Steam library and I've always used my primary PC both for work and gaming. There are some upcoming games that won't be available on PC (GTA V) that I want to play but I am also not ready to fragment my gaming library by buying a console now. Hopefully something like this will entice and motivate certain developers to start developing for PC/X86-X64 again.

And now that Valve will release an actual console, Steam will be able to cover a much larger population than any of the consoles. People satisfied with performance on the par with Xbox and PS3 will be perfectly happy with this solution, while people requiring more performance will be free to build a dedicated gaming machine and install Steam on it.

I don't know how no other console manufacturers have thought of this. One of the biggest reasons why I never bought a console (thought I wanted one at times) is because Microsoft and Sony don't allow you to access your game purchases on other platforms. I think we're finally heading toward a future where cross platform game ownership will be a reality.

I think the only interesting thing here is Gabe's definition of "very controlled". If it means fixed hardware is acceptable. If it means walled garden with no root or unsigned code - no thanks.

Based on the full quote (below), it seems that he was referring to Valve's offering only:

"Well certainly our hardware will be a very controlled environment," he said. "If you want more flexibility, you can always buy a more general purpose PC. [...]"

Reposting a comment, since this threads seems to have picked up over the old one:

---

One reason why consoles from MS and Sony are bad is their obsessive DRM and the notion of turning a general purpose computer into a locked up appliance.

But there is another architectural reason which is generic - consolized games degrade the quality of gaming interfaces by making them overly minimalistic (since consoles don't use keyboards), and even developers who release crossplatform games for PC and consoles often save time by not distinguishing these interfaces, and when you run the game on PC it feels crippled interface wise. So I'd say for gaming in general, consoles are a big disservice.

We'll have to see how this will develop.

Consoles drive and constrain game design in several important ways. UI is a big one (how many management sims are playable with a gamepad?), but RAM is probably even more important.

The demand for ever-fancier graphics on aging, static hardware means that every other aspect of a game suffers. Smaller levels, fewer options, simpler AI, etc. This is why the next generation of consoles is going to be such a big deal for anyone who plays major cross-platform games.

For games that require a more complex interface, there's still a thriving PC-only games industry. And now Kickstarter is helping to power it.

This one was obvious at least 1 year ago if not more

Its a literary of little things that kept adding up for valve to make a move in this direction.

The big ones for me have been the fact that valve has been hiring hardware, dsp, fpga, linux developers, kernel hackers, control chain specialists and such forth for the last 2-3 years.

I remember saying a long time back that valve are either going to push onto some android hybrid thing, or that there were making a console.

I think the Linux thing was valve reacting to windows 8 that forced them to show their hand a little.

> Its a literary of little things

The word you're looking for is litany (an understandable literary mistake)

ha thanks, gotta to love autocomplete huh ?

He seems to be suggesting some kind of open market for these things, that is instead of trying to claim all the profit via using industry standard commodity components and then intentionally breaking compatibility in some key manner, they're going to grow the market by allowing 3rd parties to compete with 'clones' (to use an old Mac phrase) of different shapes and sizes, and presumably make their money on selling the games.

Or to put it another way, it's an Android strategy, not iOS. Could be a very big deal.

If this is done properly, it may change a little how the gaming PCs market works. If every "Steam Box" game is 100% compatible with PC's Steam (and so far we have no reason to think otherwise) we will start to see PCs labeled as "Steam Box compliant" and such, to identify machines that are supposedly guaranteed to run smoothly any "Steam Box" game.

Other PCs, with inferior hardware, will maybe lower their price.

I imagine it will be a set of components that valve will sell pre-completed, or the user will be able to create their own.

It could come in minimum, recommended, and max, and the developers would have these basic devices to aim for. The user can upgrade, but it will lead to a small risk on their behalf. If it screws up, they can just put the original components back.

I'm still genuinely surprised Valve hasn't launched a game streaming service. Then suggest developers offer Win, Linux, Mac, AND streaming, so they can stream to every platform (like this Steam Box) they can.

"Steam Cloud Stream?"

I'm not; if the experience of the last big entrant to try streaming games, OnLive, is any indication, that kind of service is an absolute furnace for cash. The Verge reported that at its height, OnLive was burning through $5 million per month to support a measly 1,600 concurrent users (http://www.theverge.com/2012/8/28/3274739/onlive-report).

It's possible that smarter architecture could bring that figure down; OnLive needed to have a physical machine for every concurrent player (!). And OnLive made plenty of other mistakes that a smart business like Valve might avoid. But even if you did everything right it still sounds like running a streaming games service at a profit with today's tech would be a serious challenge.

There is no need for streaming like OnLive. On x86 platforms, I don't see why Steam couldn't emulate the Windows version, much like what Wine or Cedega does. This is one way that they could support cross-platform gaming on OS X, Windows, and Linux. But I guess instead, Valve is going after a common baseline to develop native code on those three OSes.

I agree that the business model probably doesn't make sense generally but Onlive isn't a useful example. Over $3000/user/month (5M/1600) sounds absolutely ridiculous. You could buy a new machine for each user every month, host it, license the software on it and still afford to pay the bandwidth.

It seems highly likely that the support costs for the 1,600 users were noise amongst the staff, marketing, licensing and other costs (including potentially wasteful overprovisioning based on expected sales).

Having said that if it cost even $10/month (and it may be more or less) to support a user the whole business model may break down.

I hope he asks OEM's to only use Linux on their boxes, although if only some use it, the others will be pressured to use it too to keep prices competitive.

Make it cheap (200$) and make it run all my Steam games and I'll buy one.

perfect, now there's no need to buy a gaming PC.

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