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Umm, how is me not even being able to see Half-Life 3 when I visit the Steam store on my Steambox supposed to make me feel better when friends with more powerful PC's and newer Steamboxen can enjoy it just fine?

No. And none of this tier stuff either. The point of the Steamboxen is to kill the windows dependency of games, probably why they are future proofing them so much. They'll last 3-5 years in their present iteration and at that point it will be moot.

> Umm, how is me not even being able to see Half-Life 3 when I visit the Steam store on my Steambox supposed to make me feel better when friends with more powerful PC's and newer Steamboxen can enjoy it just fine?

OK, you don't have to hide it, but there still needs to be some kind of guide about how games will play on your Steam Machine.

This is not a big deal right now, but what about in, say, 6 years? You have an original Steam Machine and a new game JUST came out. It doesn't run on your Steam Machine because yours doesn't have a Whatsit Quantum Coprocessor. Shouldn't the Steam UI, you know, let you know that before you go about buying and downloading that 30GB game??

And I don't want tiers, either, but Valve did say they'd have something to say about this; I'm simply speculating about what it could be.

"..Shouldn't the Steam UI, you know, let you know that before you go about buying and downloading that 30GB game??.." Yeah, wouldn't that be the point? It seams like Steam wants to be a platform, and the point of the steambox would be to own your living room (as well as your computer room).

I would think that the Steam environment will do a lot of your thinking for you. It'll check your hardware, suggest upgrades (since the boxes will evidently be upgradable), etc...

Don't worry, nobody's going to get to enjoy Half-Life 3.

> Perhaps they'll do a tier system like "Steam Machine Bronze / Silver / Gold / Platinum"

It would have to be some sort of rolling release I think, because this year's gold hardware will be next year's silver or bronze.

> I'm pretty sure they'll build in the equivalent of the windows performance score that can be sent to Steam's servers, and they'll simply be able to show you the games that will run best on your machine and hide games that simply won't run at all.

You'd need to know before you buy the hardware, though.

Valve have specs - and perhaps performance - data for their PC users already: http://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey.

They can do just the same for the Steambox and use it to display the performance for games on similar systems - if they want to.

What fragmentation problem? PC games have graphics that scale. Problem solved.

I'm not talking about right now, I'm talking about what happens several years from now when suddenly there are games that are all but unplayable (or completely unplayable) on first generation Steam Machines.

There has to be a plan for that.

I'm sure the plan for that is the exact same as the plan for the current situation. Steam machines have specs, the steam client can read those specs and tell you if a game is playable or not. It's not as though gaming on PCs is a new concept.

Why wouldn't the plan be "buy a new one" like it is with consoles, pc's, and every other electric device when they either break or the newer models are that much better?

I think the best thing they could possibly do is provide a wide swath of benchmarks for each machine sold. The user can quickly see if the machine will provide performance that they deem acceptable. Require it to be displayed in a standard format.

The trouble is in getting unbiased results. I doubt Valve would want to test each model themselves.

They could produce an 'experience index' style number like windows does. It's the only effective way I can think of to distil an entire PC's performance into a single value.

edit: or maybe a triplet, CPU index, GPU index, Storage index.