SteamMachines
store.steampowered.com
store.steampowered.com
Also, only 300 boxes for beta? That seems a little small.
EDIT: actually the latest answer in the FAQ is interesting:
"Am I going to be using a mouse and a keyboard in the living-room?"
"If you want. But Steam and SteamOS work well with gamepads, too. Stay tuned, though - we have some more to say very soon on the topic of input."
Something new on the input device front? Oculus Rift?
Valve sure is good at hyping things.
You really need to understand how painful this is for HL fans. It would be like if AMC decided not to produce & air the final season of Breaking Bad... or delay the final season for 6+ years.
I see what you mean, now.
However, not only has Valve been doing many other things in the interim, there was also about six years between the original HL and HL2. It might be a little longer to wait.
However, I would also not be surprised if Valve were to wait for the SteamOS release, and then announce HL3 as a "flagship" SteamOS game. They already have dozens of such games that work, but not as many that will make people put down their COD, GTA V, etc and play with a SteamBox in their living room.
But in any case, leaving the story with a loose end is not the same as announcing or hyping a game. I don't see anywhere Gabe has even indicated they are working on HL3.
This is a big problem with this long dev cycles. There are a few games where I was a big fan of the previous games but when the sequels eventually came, I had lost interest because I couldn't remember the precious game's story and did not want to replay it. Of course nowadays I'd just get the rundown online or watch the ending on youtube, but unless you're a big fan, it IMHO still dampens the excitement somewhat. At least for me.
That being said it could be a combo, like Rift + a wiimote-style thing?
Mouse + keyboard break Rift immersion, pads are better but still far from perfect.
My assumption is Rift will be supported, but primary controller will be something extremely 360-like. If not made by Valve than by someone that already makes 3rd party 360 controllers.
In any case, I don't think it is what Valve is hinting at, though it is something they have made some moves to support already in the form of TF2 and limited HL2 support.
Also, I'm not sure how this sort of 3D can't work for someone unless you're either blind in one eye or have some sort of issue with stereoscopic vision in general. Sounds like a configuration issue.
I just searched for such a controller and this study from the University I went to came up: http://www.yorku.ca/mack/FuturePlay2.html
Apparently gaming performance increased between 5 and 10 percent going from a traditional controller to a prototype trackball controller.
In addition to that gaming performance increase, I wonder if a trackball could be put to better use in other more traditional UI situations that SteamOS has to implement (big-picture mode clover-leaf keyboard, scrolling, item selection...)
It does, but like any other prototype the beta boxes are probably a couple more times more expensive than the finished product, and they'll probably be giving them to people for free (??) which represents half a million dollars out of their pocket.
I'd really like to know more. Currently I don't see why this is better than building a mini-ITX gaming rig in a nice case and putting Ubuntu + Steam Big Picture mode on it.
Consider:
- You can use your XBox360, PS3 controller, or WiiMote, but that's not obvious. You'll need to do some research to figure out that you CAN do it as well as HOW to do it. Again, the steps aren't particularly complicated (especially for the XBox wired controller), but remember who we're targeting, here. If you don't know much about this stuff, you might be worried you'll break something or won't be able to hook your controller back to your console.
- If this doesn't occur to you or you'd rather not use your console controllers, you might be tempted to buy one of those gaming controllers you see at Radio Shack, Best Buy, or somewhere online. Chances are high that the controller you bought will be quite shitty in comparison to your console controllers. You'll notice everything from drifting inputs to cheap buttons to just plain uncomfortable hand feel. You'll convince yourself that you just picked wrongly, so you do some more research. You eventually come upon something pretty good, but it's expensive and it's STILL not your XBox 360 controller.
- If you get past all this (whether that's finding a good 3rd party controller or reusing your console controller), you're still not QUITE sure how each new PC game will react with a controller. Sure, maybe the mappings make sense, but you worry that you'll come upon something that requires an action the developers forgot to map to a controller button. Or maybe it'll just feel wrong because the controls for your particular game were clearly designed to work best for the physical characteristics of a mouse and keyboard. You know with enough tweaking this won't be a problem, but it still bothers you that you have to tweak anything in the first place.
Nothing I've outlined above is a problem for advanced gamers, but if something like a Steam Machine is ever going to take over the living room, it has to be a natural plug n' play experience with respect to input devices. And I mean natural for your mom or uncle, not for you.
Luckily it sounds like Valve will be addressing this head-on; I am more excited about what they have to say about this than about what the specs of any particular Steam Machine might be or what the beta might look like.
PS3 controllers are a pity though, you need those shady ad-ridden closed source third party drivers.
"Wait, you mean I have to buy an XBox 360 controller to use my Steam Machine?"
Well, no, but it's better that way.
"What do you mean, isn't there a Steam Controller."
Not exactly, you see any Steam Machine is compatible with any number of controllers.
"So why can't I buy this other controller I saw at Best Buy?"
You can, but I can't guarantee you it'll work very well. I only use my 360 wired controller with it.
"Oh, ok. Well maybe I'll just get an XBox, then."
That's the kind of thing the Steam Alliance (or whatever they'll call it) will have to overcome.
I like the idea of a touch pad for configurable interface elements. That's what I first thought of when the Valve modularity patent was mentioned. Has anyone played a game on Ouya that made good use of that touchpad?
Or am I mistaking and it's not both a touch screen and touch pad, just more of a trackpad-like input device?
"Nah, its compatible with a lot of controllers. In my experience the Xbox 360 one works pretty well so I'd just go with that. You can check the other ones out if you want, too."
"Ok, cool."
The same thing happens when you recommend Linux to the average user, get a Microsoft Keyboard and Mouse to use with Linux. Well why aren't there Linux mice and keyboards? Can't I run Windows apps on Linux? No, well sort of, you have to install WINE and then if it is on the compatibility list, er ah look Linux has their own apps most are free and do the same thing as Windows apps but have a different user interface. Steam works on Linux, but only has 100+ Linux games, but if you run the Steam Windows Client under WINE some of not most of the games might work if you add in some exceptions to the built in libraries, etc. Then they just buy a Windows 8.1 PC instead of installing Linux over their old one that runs XP.
I really hope that SteamOS and SteamMachines catch on and port most of the Steam games to Linux, so I don't have to deal with this nonsense to my non-technical friends and family members. I hope the Steamtroller or whatever is as good as if not better than the XBox one.
Oh yeah I had friends and family members who bought a Macbook, and then ask me how to install Windows apps on it. Run Bootcamp, repartition the hard drive, reboot, stick in your Windows CD/DVD or USB stick and install, you now can dual boot Mac OSX and Windows. Then they don't know how to select it and forget what key to hold down, sell it and buy a Windows 8.1 tablet instead.
Basically if you are expecting an XBox, buy an XBox, if you want a Windows PC/Tablet buy a Windows PC/Tablet. If you want something else that is different and new, and might have a lower footprint OS that runs your games faster, and you don't care that it isn't an XBox or Windows PC/Tablet then try the SteamMachine and SteamOS. But please don't try putting XBox and Windows game disks into the SteamMachine!
Remember the average person that goes to Best Buy is a 'sheeple' controlled by FUD by the news media and other megacorproations to just part with their money on whatever new geegaw gadget they come up with as long as it is a 'trusted brand name' they are familiar with. They go to Best Buy because they hold their hand and tell them what they need to buy. If Valve was smart, they'd make a deal with Geeksquad to partition part of their area into a Steam Store that they can assist people with SteamMachine issues.
Why wouldn't Valve include a controller with their Steam Machines?
Your argument makes no sense.
I have never faced any issue using the controller to play steam games on my mac.
Or you could try to debug the source if you're up for that. I would try but don't have the expertise to help without seeing it and tinkering with it.
Restart your machine, Terminate Android File Transfer and try plugging the controller again.
When Mountain Lion came out I had to update the driver, which had undergone some 32bit -> 64bit change but also added in some other garbage about Xbox chat pads that was breaking when I tried to use it with my Logitech game pad. I don't remember if it kernel panicked or just didn't work. Certainly I caused a kernel panic or two while tinkering with the driver. But I got it working again, mostly by commenting out stuff I didn't want.
http://www.microsoft.com/hardware/en-us/p/xbox-360-controlle...
Windows isn't; your parent is explaining that clearly, given the 360 controller works great with Windows, using a controller with your PC is no longer quite the black art to the public that it used to be.
I totally agree that it's non-obvious to most of the gaming market, though.
http://www.amazon.com/Xbox-360-Wireless-Gaming-Receiver-Wind...
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0096PLB9O/ref=oh_details_o...
To get it working, you need to install the Microsoft Wireless XBox 360 Controller drivers manually, then go to the hardware manager and manually specify the official Microsoft driver as the driver for this device. Easy enough if you know your way around driver updates, but not plug-and-play. It works great, though.
Linux, plug and play. Lovely.
However, most people probably wouldn't want to jump through those kind of hoops (downloading a third party app + mapping the keys to the right keyboard keys) so I'd love if Steam had some sort of unified controller support, but I also feel like that's asking for a lot.
I have an older Logitech DualAction and a newer one, the older one will fail those checks but the newer will register itself as an Xbox controller. It seems like Microsoft, somewhere, standardized what it means to be a "controller" finally instead of having an arbitrary button0 through button10 that are always different and constantly requiring remapping.
A good change, but really frustrating for anyone with older hardware.
This way, all games have a standard controller to develop towards. Everyone loves the Xbox controller, not only because it's a solid device, but because it's the standard controller for PC gaming. Most games are developed with it in mind, so it's typically plug and play. For this reason, I'm going to assume Valve launches a controller that has a similar configuration to the 360 controller, so all the previous games designed for the 360 controller are ready to go. However, it'll probably have some misc tweaks, like buttons to perform certain tasks within the Steam software, and perhaps a touchpad, pull out mini-keyboard or improved motion controls.
I'm not going to worry about people going to Radio Shack or Best Buy and randomly shopping for controllers. I think Valve has this under control, and we'll have THE controller, and third party controllers, similar to any other gaming console.
>Am I going to be using a mouse and a keyboard in the living-room?
>If you want. But Steam and SteamOS work well with gamepads, too. Stay tuned, though - we have some more to say very soon on the topic of input.
The third announcement will be the controller Valve patented some time ago. This controller replaces a thumbstick with a trackball, and might let you swap out input devices for different games. Regardless, it'll be painless to set up with SteamOS.
That sounds like a special hell. What would even be the point? Making it marginally easier to control products that were never properly re-designed as living room software at the expense of compatibility with essentially every piece of contemporary living room software?
Here's to hoping that if such a thing is actually rolled out, it falls under "an option" and isn't an approach they put too much emphasis on.
A trackball, on the other hand...
And on top of that, occupy some 'third' control scheme somewhere between "kb/m" and "gamepad" that developers would have to explicitly target, at a time when so few of them even put the time into adding proper kb/m support for their console-first-PC-port-maybe-if-its-cheap-to-farm-out titles.
Not sure just how sturdy the thing will be, all this talk about separate components being stuck together by the user sounds kinda fragile. But if it is, you will be able to configure your pad just the way you want.
With mice, you can usually just buy Logitech and be guaranteed to get a great product, but with controllers, you'll probably end up relying on word of mouth.
This is why The Wirecutter is so important, but people who play videogames will go to videogame websites for advice instead - and won't be any wiser for it.
https://www.google.com/patents/US8241126
Video game controller having user swappable control components
Original Assignee: Valve Corporation
Abstract:
A game controller is provided. One or more main control input interfaces on the game controller consist of generalized sockets. A variety of modular input interfaces can be plugged into these sockets. Hardware specific to the input type of the modular input is contained within the modular input itself, and plugged in via an interface. This allows for dual analog sticks, a combination of analog and trackball, or further any combination of touchpad, directional pad, or additional components.
Thank you... same here!
I'm just very interested in the game industry (and a lot of other fields). I tend to R&R (Read and Research) a lot!
--
Edit: Valve Corporation patents, for those interested:
https://www.google.com/search?tbm=pts&hl=en&q=%22Valve+Corpo...
Like, "RTCHN - Responding To Comments on HN"
From 2012: http://kotaku.com/5890372/is-this-valves-control-pad-design/
This stuff happens all the time. Why is R this way? CEO of R Inc. comes up to tell you. Why is S not in space? It just so happen that a engineer from the space program is reading the comment and answers with a detailed insightful post.
When that happens, HN is awesome.
Player biofeedback for dynamically controlling a video game state: https://www.google.com/patents/US20110009193 - Responsive play
Dynamically providing guest passes for a video game: https://www.google.com/patents/US20080234043 - Steam Sharing?
Imagine selecting your weapons physically as well as in-game before going on a raid with some gamepad-plugins offering better control over in-game weapons or accessories than others.
Just a thought: In a few weeks every Xbox360 and PS3 will become obsolete. So, what are the chances of me installing SteamOS on there? I'd love to turn my PS3 into a SteamOS box.
Even though it's coming to the living room, I still don't feel that the first iterations of the Steam box are really targeted towards non-core gamers. Not even traditional video game consoles are a good fit for them beyond the original Wii, so I doubt even future versions of Steam machines will truly target non-core gamers. The products from Apple, Google, and Amazon are a better fit for that demographic, especially if any of them ever truly figure out TV... and ship. Unless Steam comes out with a cheap TV box, the non-core gamer isn't their target.
I'd buy a console tomorrow if they allowed mouse/keyboard - sick of all the cheaters in PC gaming, and having games get _better_ as the hardware ages would be a welcome change from having to constantly upgrade my video card to play new releases at a decent frame rate!
[1] http://xim3.com/
The way FPSs interpret mouse movement is by mapping units of mouse movement onto units of rotational movement. If you move the mouse x units to the left, your view will rotate f(x) units (an absolute relation). When mapping joystick movement, the location of the joystick determines the speed at which your view rotates. If the joystick is x units off center, you will move at f(x) units per second until the joystick moves again (a relative relation).
For this reason, it's pretty simple to convert relative joystick movement into mouse movement, since you simply need to map the joystick position onto an absolute mouse velocity. However, it's extremely difficult to turn the absolute mouse movement into a relative joystick position. From what I can tell, it takes the velocity of the mouse movement and returns it as a joystick position, so if you're moving the mouse at x units per second, it will return a joystick position of g(x), which the game will then turn into f(g(x)) units of rotation per second.
What you end up with is jerky and unresponsive. Mouse movement just can't be translated into joystick position in a transparent way. I used the thing for a couple days, and ultimately gave up on it. Even as a hard core Mouse/Keyboard gamer, I preferred the controller over the XIM.
It works pretty well, for what it's worth.
Even my steering wheel, while not practical to use with that application, is recognized.
Is this actually true? I've been looking for a decent PC gamepad for a long time. The default recommendation seems to be the Xbox 360 controller, but with the caveat that the d-pad sucks. I play a lot of games that use the d-pad.
What's a good PC gamepad with a good d-pad?
The wireless controllers for the 360 work just fine with the PC. I personally swap mine between them all the time.
Though mine was in white.
From the page. "Xbox 360 Controller for Windows works with most Windows XP-based PCs and Xbox 360, delivering a consistent and universal gaming experience."
It comes with a wireless dongle thing you plug in to your PC. Both the controllers that come with your 360 and this controller can be swapped between your PC and your 360 on demand by pushing the resync button on the controller and on the device simultaneously.
I've never heard of a 360 controller that didn't work both with the PC dongle and the 360 itself.
However, the one which does not specify "...for Windows" will not work with the PC, which is the distinction I am attempting to express when recommending it as an option for PC gaming.
On (US) Amazon the two separate listings are http://www.amazon.com/Microsoft-Xbox-Wireless-Controller-Win... and http://www.amazon.com/Xbox-360-Wireless-Controller-Glossy-Bl...
The PS3 controllers may work differently, but I do not find them as comfortable to use as the 360 controllers personally.
I regularly use both the controller that came with my 360, and another 360 controller that I brought separately (with no "for windows" marking) in addition the controller that came with the wireless receiver.
I assure you that all 3 are identical.
I have a wireless receiver that came with a 'for Windows' controller, and it works perfectly with the controller that came with my Xbox.
Naively, I had expected beforehand that the controller to use 802.11(a|b|g|n|ac) or bluetooth and therefore not need another receiver provided that those protocols were already available on the PC, but in the case of the wireless Xbox 360 controller another component is necessary for better or worse.
Luckily, I researched the situation before purchasing another controller with its usage on the PC in mind, so I did not encounter a potential headache until the solution dawned upon me.
Hopefully the next generation PS4 or Xbox One wireless controllers work without taking up a port on the PC with a wireless receiver again.
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Logitech-gamepad.JPG
Although I've started seeing compatibility problems recently: the Xbox 360 controller has become such a standard that some newer indie games support ONLY them and not native PC gamepads.
Buy Logitech F710 wireless controller.
Plug Logitech controller in.
Notice modern Windows games auto-detect Logitech controller as XBox controller.
Play games.
It's not rocket science. And frankly, most PC gamers are pretty familiar with jumping through far more hoops than that.
Key binding continuity issues are still a problem for most games.
Driving games, platformers, RPGs, and more.
Simply use the Logitech Wireless Gamepad F710 for all Steam boxes, problem solved.
It's to me, better than all controllers you mention. It supports BOTH DirectInput and XInput APIs.
>Can I download the OS to try it out?
>>You will be able to download it (including the source code,[...]) but not yet.
and
>Am I going to be using a mouse and a keyboard in the living-room?
>>If you want. [...] Stay tuned, though - we have some more to say very soon on the topic of input.
People have been doing that on PCs for ages. So far Valve seems to be doing well with "well, then, we'll just outcompete" as a solution to that issue.
That would give a huge crowd an incentive to try Steam the way Valve is hoping it'd be used in the future. So they give 300 boxes, but get thousands of people trying their console-like services.
Evil geniuses, those Valvers are.
1) Convince Nvidia and AMD to improve their Linux graphic drivers - probably by promising them additional revenue from Steambox sales - to lay the groundwork 2) Port Steam to Linux, start porting their own games 3) Build a Steam-based Linux distribution and make it available to everyone 4) Find partners that build custom hardware to run SteamOS
IMO Valve is trying to achieve two goals with this. The first goal seems to be to hedge their bets OS-wise. Gabe Newell was quite explicit in his criticism of the road MS has taken with Windows 8. Valve may very well view this as an existential threat to their business model if MS for instance takes the Apple route of promoting app store downloads over the old way of installing software. Thus, it makes sense to work towards an alternative platform that is not entirely controlled by one company. The second goal would be to introduce a new competitor in the console market by leveraging the existing Steam ecosystem and game catalogue. The beauty of this strategy is that each step adds value on its own even if the ultimate goal of establishing Steamboxes should fail
I've opened a discussion thread in the Steam Universe forum, on this very topic.
http://steamcommunity.com/groups/steamuniverse/discussions/0...
Why not just set a timer on your smartphone and when it goes off turn off the kid's console..
This is no magical fiction world, I assure you.
Respect them, have reasonable rules, discipline every single rule violation (most important), and have fun. Suddenly you'll find kids are awesome.
The timer method does work (tried and true), but it's far, FAR easier if the computer automatically locks the account.
I am a parent (11 year old girl and 7 month old son) and I restrict her (son is a little too young!) time playing games in the same way my parents did by making sure I do my chores and homework first. I don't rely on OS level parental controls and I find it kind of sad people need to. I spend a lot of time playing Animal Crossing with my daughter for example and she knows when she can and can't play it.
I guess I just find it kind of depressing that we have all these kind of digital restrictions in place for kids these days. Part of the reason I am successful in what I do [professionally] is that I didn't have such restrictions as a child and I hope my daughter in the same. At the end of the day playing Mario Kart or Viva Piñata isn't going to ruin her life.
Just like I'd love to have automated lighting in my home, or automated curtains, or a computer that will automatically turn on at certain times, sometimes it's also nice to have a things that automatically turn off after a while as well.
So, without further ado: Each person / family is different. We could probably sit down and have a conversation and find out some topic where some random solution works amazingly well for me, but - surprise! - it does not seem to be working so well for you. At which point, it would be my turn to observe how you could just man up and do it; after all, it's so easy. For me. In my particular case. Which is different from yours. People and families being different from each other.
Have I belabored the issue enough now?
I also view parental controls as contrived and harmful, and dont use them personally, but I'm certainly not going to critise someone else for doing so.
However, I honestly doubt that parental controls will have any significant impact, generally, on the viability of the steam boxes.
I was simply sharing my opinion that until a few years ago no kid grew up with these automated digital restrictions and pretty much everyone seems to be ok.
I understand that such things can be helpful however my personal opinion is that it is a little sad that there is such a need for such features. I would bet that most people on Hacker News are successful in their lives because of unrestricted access to computers as children/young adults. I know that is certainly the case for me. I would spend hours typing in BASIC from computer magazines sometimes into the early mornings. I would get told off and have my computer taken away now and then for breaking the rules my parents put in place but this was ultimately good for me I feel (both the breaking of the rules and accepting the punishment).
It will be small, put it away in a cupboard when it isn't being used like any other toy.
> If you want. But Steam and SteamOS work well with gamepads, too. Stay tuned, though - we have some more to say very soon on the topic of input.
This excites me. Valve's bread-and-butter, as a gamedev company and not a game reseller, uses a pointing device. FPS games and Dota are both genres that do far better with a mouse.
Obviously, supporting gamepads will get the vast ocean of console-like games into the living room just fine. But for games originally designed for a mouse, a gamepad is a pretty sub-par experience. Do they have some new control device planned? Please? Pretty-please?
Toupée fallacy. I'd argue that games built for a gamepad -- Halo and Gears of War come to mind -- feel much better on a gamepad than they do on a keyboard and mouse.
Once you get used to these limitations or find a game where diagonal movement isn't required (not sure about SMB), it's really quite tolerable to play a 2D platformer with WASD or arrow keys. But you're still right it doesn't quite have that magical kinesthetic quality that a d-pad does, and I'll always choose a gamepad myself.
In any other context that would be the foulest cheating... but in the context of game-design for vastly different interfaces, it's a perfectly reasonable handicap.
Experiments in allowing gamepad and mouse players to compete directly have proven absurd to balance, since you either give the joystick players aim-bots or let them be crippled. Joysticks are meant to provide you with good control over a vector - you can comfortably select and gradually alter the velocity of something with a joystick.
Pointing devices are meant to control a position, not a vector. "facing", from a user perspective, is best expressed as a position. The player is thinking "I want to face this way" not "I want to turn this fast".
The main reason Halo and GoW feel bad on mouse+keyboard is that they feel glacially, frustratingly slow on a system where the conventions tend to be far faster-paced (because the interface allows for it) and because the games used heavy auto-aim to compensate for the difficulty in making precise movements on a gamepad.
Which is fine, I'm no snob. But at this point you've created a substantially different game with a substantially different experience.
edit: to take it further, notice the huge difference in the DOTA and RTS genres between PCs and consoles - places where auto-aim won't really fix the game. The interface has to be so fundamentally altered that they're a whole new genre.
I'd say that Genres built for a gamepad, such as platformers, feel much better on a gamepad, but shooters still feel best with a more precise and fast device. Sure you can design around it to make it suck less, but in the end you still need to add in aim assist to make it an enjoyable experience (as pretty much all console shooters do).
1. Valve Corporation ("Valve", "We", "Us" or "Our") has developed and produced prototypes of entertainment system hardware and software, including a set-top box running custom software and a game controller
A game controller...
http://www.theverge.com/2012/3/2/2840932/exclusive-valve-ste...
Or it may be something to do with Gabe Newell's interest in biometrics.
The possibilities are exciting.
They give PC makers a great new customizable way to enter the livingroom-computer market. With their gaming shop built in.
This is great for gamers. In a few years any SteamMachine for 300$ will easily outperform PS4/XBone. And have way way more games. And all AAA games (all PC releases).
Uhh, do you have any support for this claim?
Current gen consoles came out in '05-'06, by 2008 a strong having pc could easily be built to surpass them in abilities (strong gaming PC - ~1000$). By 2010 that goal was achievable on a more sane budget (let's say 600$).
Now you want to say: "hey z999! You said 300$ in a few years!, this is 600$ in five years!". Yes, but the next gen console are much less powerful compared to the market than what the current gen console were compared to the market in 2005. Remember how the PS3 cost 600$ and the Xbox was 500$ (I'm not certain on the Xbox price, it could have been 400$)? Well, next green consul mess know that there is no reason to lose money on hardware because that doesn't win the race, meaning they are probably equivalent to a 1000$ PC TODAY, so following the past trends we will easily see HSA arcade of equivalent power in the 300$-400$ bracket.
Makes me wonder when MS will complain that SteamOS is free just like how they complain Android is free.
http://www.techdirt.com/blog/wireless/articles/20130409/0212...
So it will be open source...
That being said Steam (the app) will obviously remain closed source.
Problem is, we now have 2 (maybe more?) would be replacements, and I'm sure there are more to come. Obligatory XKCD reference: http://xkcd.com/927/
Sounds like the next announcement is likely to be a controller then
This is non announcement. They didn't tell anything. Except some weird beta test on unspecified hardware.
http://ir.amd.com/phoenix.zhtml?c=74093&p=irol-eventDetails&...
Are there any HN groups on Steam? If I try to create a group named Hacker News, it's already in use. If I try to find it, no results found :-)
[1] http://steamcommunity.com/groups/steamuniverse/discussions/0...
But Valve are about to change this.
The so called Steambox announced a day or so ago is now going to be in direct competition with Apple's own devices as Valve can now offer this "complete experience" package too. If you want to know why this is so important you only need to realise that the term "Mac" for most people refers not only to the computer itself, but to the operating system also. No other company has anything that comes close to this, but soon Valve will, and the more time passes and the more people get accustomed to the range of available Steamboxes, the most ground Valve will gain, and the more Apple will lose.
Can I download the OS to try it out?
You will be able to download it (including the source code, if you're into that) but not yet.
So, when I buy a samsung steambox it's going to come with its own BallsWiz UI customization as they try to differentiate isnt it?
As long as we can install our own OS it'll be fine.
I can imagine it being like this
1) Top of the range high spec machine running SteamOS (£500-£600) 2) Medium spec machine running SteamOS (£250-£400) 3) Basic machine running SteamOS that's designed for people who just want to stream games from their Desktop PC into their living room (£60-£120)
Valve has already announced the OS and hardware, dev tools could be next.
The top Google hits for all of those things (depending on how Google rates what kind of consumer you are) are not Valve's products. They seem to do fine, though.
Wondering if that'd include their entire product in source code? probably not, aye?
I'm gonna say "Yes, they do know better".
A choice of one is no choice at all
>Apple's wildly successful with their iPhone business model.
Have you seen the mobile market share? Android is king.
Because no choice is as easy as no choice?
In any case, I'm pretty much guaranteed to buy the finished product. What little gaming I've done for the past 4 years or so has been almost exclusively via Steam.
I'm interested in knowing how this streaming is going to work. Is this similar to VNC?
That's a non issue. Valve would be stupid to start making Linux only games. The SteamMachine is for people who would want to play pc games in their living room but who don't have a PC anywhere close to connect it to the tv.
So now, they can get the Steam Machine. But since Linux based games on Steam are still a minority, people might say they don't want that "console" if it doesn't have much games so Valve set it up that you can stream every windows based game from your pc that can be anywhere in your home via lan to your SteamMachine.
just in case: kk it is still funny :p
If you take the time of the announcement (in seconds elapsed since midnight, March 14th 1993), divided by the amount of letters in the FAQ, and then find the square root of the resulting number, you get 3!
Seriously though, are you suggesting that HL3 will only be released (even for a short while) the SteamOS? I agree it's possible, but I think that would piss all kinds of people off due to it obviously being a marketing ploy.
I would imagine a more likely option for them are discounts for various games on the platform for a few weeks.
You mean like HL2 and the original steam release?
Gosh I miss CS1.5
[1] http://1stclass.mylargescale.com/scottychaos/steam_washingto...
Some of the biggest fiascos in gaming have come when company took its fans for granted while trying to expand into a new market (e.g. Ultima 8). The usual result is losing your existing base while not building a new one. Once Valve is sure that the PC gamers are on board, who should be their easiest sell, they'll start going after the console players.
Also SteamMachine might be more unique and thus easier to search for.
Does that mean streaming from another computer (presumably running Windows) in your house?
1) Hardware is hard.
2) Apparently deadlines are important above all else, even if you have nothing to announce/release.
Gaming appliances need to be focused at the gaming market, which Sony and MS own like the U.S. and USSR in the mid to late 20th century. Nintendo messed up with the Wii U and probably won't recover, and everything else is secondary, for now. I even think Apple's move into the TV gaming market will be mostly a bust, but I could be wrong, because the casual game market is strong.
I've personally not bought a single game from Steam. I know they are big, but I just don't have time for it. I'm not the target market though.
Seriously, I'd buy (or build) a SteamMachine in a heartbeat. It's the most sensible option for me at this time.
Nov 2013 Sony and MS start shipping new consoles.
Oct 2013 Apple likely to announce and immediately ship $129=$199 A7X based console killer.
Sep 2013 Valve announces beta opt in for SteamMachine with zero details on product.
Maybe I'm just missing something here, but I'm pretty sure an ARM-based system has exactly zero chance of displacing current gaming platforms. They could whip up a sexy Ouya competitor, sure, but Ouya isn't exactly setting the gaming world on fire. An ARM console would be a competitor to phone/tablet gaming, not to console gaming.
The GPUs in the 5S give 76 GFLOPs and are underclocked at 300 Mhz for battery reasons. A hypothetical A7X which, following the A6X, has twice as many GPUs as the A7, would put us at 150 GFLOPs.
Keep in mind the A6X is still on a mobile device. Up the clock speed to 500 Mhz and we've arrived at 250 GFLOPs. This is comparable to the PS3 (230) and 360 (260) and the assumptions seem pretty reasonable.
GFLOPs aren't the whole story but it's important to understand what class of machine Apple could ship now. It's certainly console quality. Specwise it won't hold a candle to the PS4 (1.8 TFLOPs), at least in 2013/14. But as we learned last generation the new stud consoles often trail not only underpowered upstarts (Wii) but sometimes their own previous generation consoles due to supply or price issues.
https://www.google.com/search?q=ps2+outsells+ps3&safe=active
And in terms of price Apple could ship the system we're talking about with a decent amount of RAM and a controller for $149. Of course they won't even market it primarily as a gaming device so it would probably ship without a (gaming) controller for $129+.
Any "console killer" is going to have to compete with...well, current consoles (and now, Steamboxen). Apple could certainly ship an underpowered "do your mobile gaming on your TV" device (and to be clear, I think there's room in the market to siphon off some casual gamers), but actually going head-to-head with the console market just isn't going to happen without putting some more raw power into the box and shipping an architecture that won't make ports a pain in the ass. The Xbox One, PS4, and Steambox are all going to be X86-64 architectures. Throwing an ARM platform into the mix and expecting it to kill existing consoles is silly.
I'm showing the PS3 at 230 (various Google) and the X360 at 240 (wikipedia Xenos). Regardless the Ouya at 12 is not in the same ballpark. To say the hypothetical Apple system is Ouya quality and not PS3/360 console quality is simply wrong.
"console killer" is going to have to compete with...well, current consoles (and now, Steamboxen) ... actually going head-to-head with the console market just isn't going to happen without putting some more raw power"
It doesn't have to compete directly though, it just has to be good enough at gaming at the price it's selling for in addition to whatever else they're selling to undermine the console business model. Mobiles won the point and shoot and handheld gaming markets without competing directly on specs in those markets.
Regarding undermining the console business model, consoles live and die on their triple-A titles. Your GTAs, Halos, Marios, and Call of Duties are what sell consoles, not cheap hardware.
Footnote: Regarding the gigaflops numbers, I got them from here - I admittedly didn't do the math. I kind of suspect it's a combined CPU + GPU number in light of your numbers: http://www.extremetech.com/gaming/156273-xbox-720-vs-ps4-vs-...
People love to watch netflix on their PS3 but at the end of the day nobody drops $300 on a PS3 to watch netflix. Plenty of people buy Apple boxes just so they can watch netflix. That's the difference the price point makes. When there were 30 million 3DS's and 100 million ipod touches people stopped making games for the 3DS.
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"Nobody makes ARM games except mobile developers."
What developer isn't in mobile today? This is like saying no one knows how to code for ARM except for everyone.
"consoles live and die on their triple-A titles. Your GTAs, Halos, Marios, and Call of Duties are what sell consoles, not cheap hardware."
I would say that is misreading the biggest lesson of the current generation which saw the Wii dominate it's first 3-4 years based on (1) the cheap hardware and (2) Wii Sports, a new title. To some extent AAA titles will go where the users are.
The PS4 is strongly targeting indies, Microsoft already has, and Steam is more than anyone. Steam already has a ton of traction, and now they're making it possible to roll your own console, in addition to future hardware.
Why would I, as either a developer or a player, bet on Apple, when they have a reputation for being even more closed and oppressive than the others, take a bigger cut of my (developer) revenue, and charge me more for hardware (as a player)?
While mobile may be taking alot of sales from the casual gamer, I reckon there's still alot more money to be made from console/PC sales (how much is GTA 5 up to? over a billion last I checked).
You might say the same thing about mobile games and the 3DS and PSP/Vita. What was more compelling about Apple's ecosystem than Sony's or Nintendo's?
(1) there were a lot more devices shipped.
(2) they have a lot of credit card numbers on file
(3) relatively fewer restrictions.
"more closed and oppressive than the others"
Right because it's super easy to get your games on XBL, Steam, PSN. These companies are all changing their policies because Apple took all the mindshare of the industry 5 years ago with the extremely dev friendly app store (you know, the one that you're calling 'oppressive').
"take a bigger cut of my (developer) revenue"
Uninformed. Steam takes the same 30% as Apple, Google it. MS charged devs tens of thousands of dollars to patch a game on XBL. Neither MS nor Sony has released the cut they're planning to take with PS4/Xbone.
"and charge me more for hardware (as a player)?"
That doesn't even make sense. The whole premise here is that the hardware would be less powerful and much cheaper than the new consoles being released.
"there's still alot more money to be made from console/PC sales"
That's not really under debate, what's at issue is which platform(s) will we see the money being made on. Just like in the home console market, there is lots of money still being made in mobile gaming; in fact more than ever. But that money simply isn't going to Nintendo and Sony the way it did 10 years ago.
Take a company like Mojang, obviously an outlier, but they sell a popular app on PC, Xbox, and mobile. Their financials are somewhat public, and their all-time mobile sales are around 1 quarter of their yearly salves... And of course, they became a hit on PC. They also do twice the yearly revenue as Rovio.
When I was thinking closed and oppressive, I was thinking vs. PC/Linux (you can distribute your app through many channels), so you're right that Steam, XBL and PSN aren't very open, but they're becoming more open.
As a player, a decent iOS gaming device (iPad retina) costs more than a PS4 will cost at launch. Apple's not going to put out an Ouya competitor, the internals they put in the iPhone 5S would put them in the same price range as the PS4 for vastly inferior hardware.