Valve And Xi3 Team For ‘Piston’ Steam Box

Could the lawsuit be a defensive legal maneuver?

So that's why that metal box seemed familiar to me. They used a similar design before. It's quite nice, I'd say.

I look to how successful Valve was in getting games for the Mac made. That success rate is mixed:

* All the valve games were ported. * A bunch of casual games get ported. * Civilization V * Um, some of the GTA catalog, IIRC.

Frankly, it was kind of a desert. I can't imagine the Linux gaming will pick up unless the GabeN had "bet the farm" on Linux versus Windows 8. Which I don't see happening. He might hate Windows 8, but Steam games play nicely on it, TTVM.

'And onto Linux' would be super cool, but I see nothing especially bad or wrong with having Windows as an option, too. Healthy competition is a wonderful thing.

Don't ask for Blizzards help man. Look what they did to diablo.

I'm the exact person Valve are targeting. I've some cash to spend on games, I have a Wii and Xbox360, I'm techie enough to build a gaming rig, but too lazy to bother. I prefer keyboard + mouse to the Xbox controller. $1,000 == £1,000 by the time it hits rip off UK. This is so far out of my price range for a gaming consol it is crazy. Like I could get 3 or 4 playstations for that. Or an Apple Air. Or 3 PC laptops. I hope it's more like £250 then maybe I'd pick one up, but the way things are looking I'm now thinking of hanging onto the xbox360 and picking up an Ouya. Most interesting Indy games will probably make it onto it anyway.

The price point is very interesting. It's way above console prices and will probably slow down adoption. That said, it might not matter to Valve. The console manufacturers _have_ to get a certain scale quickly to be able to establish an ecosystem, so they discount the cost of the hardware. Valve doesn't have to do that, the ecosystem exists i.e. Steam, so they could afford to go a little slower which means that their supply chain will be easier to manage and they'll make money on the hardware.

> It will probably cost between $500 and $1000.

So they won't be able to subsidize the console price as Sony/Microsoft does? Because the price seems a bit on the high end for a gaming console.

8x USB and 4x eSATA? That's pretty over the top. And why would one USB port be dedicated to keyboard input; I thought we'd left that stuff behind.

So, 2-5 times the price of a console. I'm not sure that's going to sell to the mass market.

rumored to be running Linux so definitely 3.

Solid web browser ;-)

Agreed. Hopefully, Valve will respond with something official soon.

Disagree a bit with the ecosystem comments.

You're underselling the exclusives on PS3 and X360. For all of the Zelda, Mario, and other first party Nintendo games, you have a bunch of Uncharted, God of War, Killzone, Gran Turismo, Halo, Gears of War, Forza, Viva Pinata, etc. between PS3 and X360. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_video_games_exclusives_... - there are a lot of exclusives between the two.

I would just say Nintendo was left out of all of the cross-platform games, which is a shame. Much of the Wii's "unique" ecosystem is garbage.

We may be going through a new "shakeout" period, similar to the 3DO and Jaguar days. As for mainstream adoption, I don't see any of the newcomers (OUYA, Project Shield, Piston) taking off, but it'll be fun to see what happens.

I'm still very disappointed Google isn't trying to make Android more of a "console platform", and then let a thousand OUYA-like devices bloom under it. Android may not have as many games as the others right now, but if Google was serious about getting game devs for console games, and was willing to spend a bit for that, and then if they made it easier for a lot of device makers to get that game store from them, I think they would end up having some good games in the end, and a pretty competitive console ecosystem.

I mean clearly others, like Nvidia and OUYA, are starting to move towards that anyway - whether Google helps them or not. If Google actually helped them, and allowed many others to do this, it would accelerate the process.

I know Google cares a lot more about the "TV" part of Google TV, because they want the advertising money from TV's, but they should use Microsoft's (probably mostly unintentional) Xbox strategy, where they first got the xbox in 70 million homes, and then started activating TV features. I think it's a lot easier than trying to convince people that they need a "smart TV". It would be better if they thought of it as a bonus to the console.

It would also benefit the Android ecosystem as a whole. Many people still are unwilling to switch from iOS to Android, because are afraid of losing some games. Plus, one of the major reasons people haven't switched to Macs or even Linux over time was that Windows had all the games, and a lot of people wanted Windows for being able to play all the games. So I think this strategy should be a top priority for Google, and not necessarily just something nice to do.

We had Megadrive, SNES and Master System. That's three.

I'm not sure I agree that the market can't support a variety of ecosystems. We already have PS3/Xbox/Wii, millions of people still playing PS2, iOS, Android (yes, they count, and outnumber the console platforms), and PC gaming. That's seven different platforms all doing pretty well.

the wii's attach rate was really low, so in the end developers opted not to develop for it. Talking about the software ecosystem is talking about the handful of first-party games.

> By and large, with the exception of a few exclusives, the 360 and the PS3 have more or less the same set of games. Both were incredibly advanced and were a logical progression of the course that these systems were going. But they both more or less have the same software ecosystem. Most of the library available on one is available on the other.

You know, this part still blows my mind--and that's really my age showing, because this is one of those "new normal" states that anyone born recently won't even question: Sony spent untold amounts of R&D money making an 1+8 core system at a time when that amount of power was unheard of. Microsoft put commodity PC hardware in a plastic shell. And yet you don't see any games that are exclusive to one or the other because porting is technologically unfeasible. (On the contrary, the only "exclusives" are that way because of licencing agreements.) Does this mean that people still aren't taking advantage of the systems' respective unique hardware, after all these years?

I would say no. Instead, it seems more that an increasing trend to make one's SDK something that runs on commodity PC hardware--instead of an expensive, dedicated, serial-connected tester unit, as in previous generations--has fostered all the disadvantages of commodity PC hardware on the developer. It's hard to developer for 8+1 cores if you don't see the speedup on your own machine. So game software is now, by and large, PC software--software for a CPU with some small number of cores, some large amount of RAM, and a pretty massive GPU for everything else--not software targeted at special tile-drawing and sprite-drawing and audio-synthesis chips.

What this means, I think, for the next generation of consoles: ignoring UX differentiators like the Wii (and it seems like they're still the only ones differentiating on UX), the rest of the systems will probably all have roughly the same set of games. Portability is now easy, because every console is basically a PC. We don't include special hardware any more, because nobody's gonna program for it. For consumers, this means console choice will come down to something like price-point + brand-recognition, rather than any question of "what games will run on this."

The obvious exception is the one I mentioned above--platforms with enough leverage to make exclusive licensing deals. But this is, at least currently, a declining relic of a bygone age: I can see first-party (Nintendo, Valve) and fully-owned subsidiaries (Bungie) as continuing to create exclusives, but even the most heavily one-platform-at-a-time companies (Square-Enix) are now branching out all over the place, because that amount of power over the consumer is decreasingly relevant, and it captures more of the market to have some games on every platform, than to target one console's market and get "guaranteed" consumption because you're the biggest fish in the smaller pond.

In other words, in a way, console software is being "globalized" between markets, just like movies and music are being globalized between the US, Europe and Asia. You can't just release on one and then perhaps re-release on the others at some later date; you'll be missing out if you aren't everywhere.

Development-wise that problem has mostly been solved. In the past cross-platform game development was done as separate projects, often handing off "porting" the game to a platform to an external team, even. Today it's more common to use engines (such as the unreal engine) which support all the major platforms (PC, 360, and PS3 typically, for first-person, high graphic-load style games), and then do the development for all versions concurrently. Typically you'd just have your regular builds set up to produce versions for each platform as a matter of routine, and you'd have a consistent testing experience for each. You'd still end up with customizations and tweaks for each individual platform but for the most part all of the hard work of targeting and optimizing for each platform is automated.

Huh? Obviously it's good for (=more money to) the publisher if you as the player buys the same game both for a console (or two!) and for a PC, and any additional platforms that may appear?

Not sure about that.

Valve might want to have their own walled garden rather than ending with walled gardens. It's a tested and very profitable model.

No, you're not the only one. It's awful.

The advantage is that it will be a streamlined experienced for non tech-savvy people.

One big advantage I would hope for would be "The games you can see for sale will all work on your graphics card and controller, and you won't have to play around with resolution settings and 2xFSAA, or whatever, trying to find an acceptable level of prettyness you computer can cope with".

Latest rumor I read was that it was going to ship with Linux (if you google steam box linux you'll find some sources). Price, I haven't heard anything about.

As for advantages, it's probably the same as any other console, which means it comes with the same disadvantages. There will probably be steam box approved games on steam, which you will be sure will work in it, and you may also see some developers targeting it specifically.

But yes, if you know what you're doing, there probably wont be any advantage on choosing this over your own custom built PC. I don't see many developers restricting their games to steam box.

It has been claimed elsewhere[1], with reference to something said by Ben Krasnow, that the projected Steam console will run Linux. Take it with a grain of salt until you hear something official, but at least, hints can be found.

[1]: http://www.golem.de/news/pc-spielekonsole-steam-box-ohne-win... [german]

edit: For those who don't know golem.de (presumably most here), it is one of the two major respectable German IT-news sites (next to heise.de, translated as The H)

I don't know, the form factor is interesting. Even aside from the modularity, the size is very small, and not sure how you could really do that for yourself. Look at the size of the ethernet port on the back compared to the whole unit.

Edit: And yeah, you can build your own PC that could work for your living room just as well, but that's looking at a very small piece of the market who are comfortable with doing that. You are going to need more products like these to get Steam into more living rooms.

Modern 3D engines usually contain some not-insignificant amount of assembly for performance reasons. It'd require almost completely retuning, probably, undoing years of ideas since ARM is an entirely different architecture.

Wouldn't hold your breath this early.

You'd get more upvotes if you contributed something to the discussion, like so:

The original article didn't have a link to xi3, so here it is: http://xi3.com/

Which is exactly what a console is. I do not understand all these "but if you would pay x more you could get this and that and ..." here - yeah, you can do this, but people still buy a X-Box/PS3/whatever. The value of a console (or Steam box) is the _standardization_ i.e. all models of the Steambox are exactly the same. You test one, it works on all of them. Contrast this with the millions and millions of configurations that PCs have which are all subtle different. People can test as long as they want but can never be sure that a game will run on _your_ (or my or anyone else) PC.

Well, what did you expect?

I'm not seeing a dismembered human. I'm seeing some poorly drawn cartoon characters in what looks to be a prison fight, and the picture includes what could possibly be poorly drawn blood on the ground. Are you seeing something else?