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Comment by Shivetya | Hacker News Reader

To be honest, if it were SteamBox exclusive I would not buy it. I don't buy exclusives. Gaming is about fun and convenience to me. Having to buy hardware always factors into my gaming, I am very content to not spend money on hardware, especially niche hardware.

I was tempted to go with a PS/3 back in the days because I could offset the cost of a dedicated gaming machine with the fact I could play Blu-Ray. So unless this Steambox is insanely cheap or provides a significant other use and does those other uses really well I will factor its cost into the game I want to play.

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I was thinking earlier they might sell livebooting usb3 sticks with SteamOS and HL3 on them, alongside the actual Steamboxes. They could bundle it with the controller. Then release it for windows/mac a month later.

If they could get it to boot in like 5 seconds, and it came with the ability to play a range of existing steam titles, it might be a winner.

I had thought of this as well, but one of the major benefits of Steam (access to all your purchased games) is lost if you can't play them due to resource constraints (not enough storage on the usb stick for persistence, long load times for large games that need to be downloaded each time you boot).

Might be a good idea for single titles, though.

Released exclusively on SteamOS != SteamBox exclusive.

SteamOS will be freely available

> I don't buy exclusives.

With all due respect, most people don't care.

The killer app probably wouldn't be a steambox exclusive but a steam exclusive. Which means that you'd be able to play it on practically anything you can throw at it. PC, Mac,Steambox, and it won't surprise me if you'd be able to pair up your steam controller to your tablet and be able to stream the feed from your PC ala nvidia shield. In terms of convenience, tying it to steam will do way more than it being exclusive to other systems.

> I don't buy exclusives.

You've never bought an exclusive game on a platform you already own? Given that some of the best games ever made have been exclusive to something or another, this seems rather self-defeating.

Did you mean to say you've never bought a console because of exclusives? This strikes me as still quite unlikely (else why did you buy it in the first place?), but much more reasonable.

for perspective, Steambox Exclusive == Runs on Linux PC's.

Not even Xbox/GFW can do that.

Do you understand that the Universe does not revolves around you. Do you?

Half Life 3, Linux only...

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