Why Valve's SteamOS Could Be Revolutionary | Hacker News Reader

Why Valve's SteamOS Could Be Revolutionary

informationweek.com

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PC gaming has been getting sloppy seconds from the console market for a while now. Graphics have been held back by cross-platform development with consoles, which additionally has slowed the PC obsolescence rate to a snail's pace and killed PC sales. There have been many poor console ports with sloppy interfaces and poor utilization of PC hardware. However, there are a few titles (e.g. Skyrim) that are best played on a PC, and the vast difference in image quality, interface, and community mods is astounding. When developers trouble themselves to put some effort into the PC version, it shines.

In most previous console generations consoles began with clearly superior graphics quality to PC's of the time. The Xbox360 and PS3 changed this trend by being barely ahead at all, and the latest generation of consoles is apparently behind right out of the gate [1]! Consoles offer inferior graphics performance and inferior input (you can always hook a gamepad up to a PC!), but they're relatively cheap and have pretty effective DRM.

This situation presents a big opportunity for Steam. Make steamboxes as cheap and simple to use as a console and you effectively have a console! If you do this while providing superior image quality and supporting better forms of user input, you have a contender. Unfortunately, Valve isn't going to get much help from game producers right away. They'll prioritize whatever market generates the most profit. Steam is going to have to make steamboxes popular before game studios will prioritize the Steam experience vs. that on other consoles.

[1] http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/digitalfoundry-battlefield...

To make steamboxes cheap and with good enough quality graphics to compete with the PS4 or a high end PC they're going to need to sell the boxes at cost (or maybe subsidize) and cut great deals with hardware manufacturers.

I don't know if this can square with their plan of having third parties sell Steam boxes unless they are going to give these companies a cut of game sales or something like that.

If you're wondering when PC hardware can "catch up" to console hardware, history shows it's simply a matter of waiting a year or two. Rather than the traditional new console generation land grab, Valve is playing a long game; they can afford to let Moore's law catch up a bit.

That doesn't necessarily change the economics so much. As time goes on a console manufacturer can drop the price of it's console and make up the difference using it's massive economies of scale and by selling more games (since it gets a cut of every title sold).

OTOH a hypothetical steambox manufacturer must still make a profit on every box sold. Since roughly the same pile of hardware can be sold as either a "steambox" or a "PC" (which can have steam installed) the margins on the two will have to be roughly the same.

Bare in mind that margins on most PCs are already pretty slim.

Bear in mind this is additional demand. People were never going to buy the equivalent "cheap pc gaming rig" because it didn't look and act like a console. Whereas steambox will, so effectively existing PC manufacturers will suddenly get access to a potentially huge new market which was off limits to them previously.

Given that the new console generation lifecycle will be about a decade, in 3-5 years SteamBox will be a no brainer in terms of price/performance.

I actually think what comes next is a "battle of the stores", where Steam will come installed on every Steambox but manufacturers will probably get paid to install other stores as well.

However, a "steambox builder" has more leverage for changing parts suppliers in order to cut costs; a console is absolutely stuck with the choices it made at the outset.

You can build, for the price of a ps4, a more powerful x86 computer than a ps4, today.

It isn't about two years, it is now. This console generation isn't selling at a loss, so all that is really happening is that MS and Sony have developed two entirely proprietary OSes with proprietary APIs and locked down distribution and usage, when under the hood they are just normal x86 based systems.

I think it really shows the absurdity of modern consoles in general. The industry made sense from the 70s to 90s when you needed heavily specialized hardware with finely tuned pipelines and exact design specs to be able to do real time video in 2 and eventually 3 dimensions, but today any computer can do that for fairly cheap, and console technologies are not entirely novel hardware concepts, but just cpus and gpus bundled on a board just like every other modern computer system.

If you want an argument for SteamOS, it is that coupling physical parts with a proprietary gaming platform is unnecessary and ridiculous today. So SteamOS doesn't do that. It is a console OS for any computer, in the same way the PS4 and Xbone operate, except you can just build your own rather than being shackled to hardware.

So you are still shackled to a proprietary software platform (Steam) but can console said platform anywhere it supports without being bound to silicon and copper.

Although not a gaming platform (a detail not to be dismissed), isn't coupling physical parts with a proprietary software platform Apple's recipe for success - and the direction Microsoft is headed, beyond the XBox business unit?

Microsoft initially took the decoupled route with desktops (sell software, primarily to OEMs), which obviously brought them great success; but the tides in this market are clearly changing. Could we be on the brink of a transition within the console market as well, albeit in the opposite direction (from closely coupled to decoupled).

If that is the case and given the fact that the mobile market is essentially closely coupled as well; any bets on a similar shift in 20 years there?

> isn't coupling physical parts with a proprietary software platform Apple's recipe for success

It is also Google's recipe for success with Android, since their Nexus products are always stellar. But by having Android the OS be independent of Nexus the Google hardware, they also have a magnitude more device sales per quarter running their platform than Apples.

And trying to directly compare Apple and Google revenue isn't really accurate since Google isn't trying to use Nexus or Android as a revenue generator.

Microsoft I feel is heading in the Apple direction out a lack of direction and lack of confidence in their own ability to innovate at all. But I don't think that is necessarily saying a wholly proprietary vertical stack in house is the absolute truth - it is like how the dark side is the easy way, but the light side wins in the end. It is easy for an industry to walk the single stack single company monopoly platform because then you can dodge the support across devices / OSes / etc angle, but in the long run having multiple devices / OSes / software stacks means competition, full market coverage, organic growth, and much more innovation, at least to me.

Actually, a $4-500 PC can outperform/match these "next gen" consoles today. With parts bought from a store, so assuming Valve can get the parts cheaper, they can assemble a better performing machine for less than $400.

Here's a good thread about this on Reddit: http://www.reddit.com/r/buildapc/comments/1qmr84/challenge_b...

the thing is, you wont be able to provide superior image quality if you want to match the price of consoles. As all of them are x86 now they are all pretty equal in terms of capabilities with price being the limiting factor.

Graphics are held back: well as-long as the games are fun and ported well, this is not a big deal to me. Crappy ported games Linux or PC are far worse !

Make sure to support Star Citizen if you're interested in PC-only gaming.

FYI: "Left 4 dead 2" running on Linux has 315 fps vs 270 fps on a windows PC. Other bloggers have put the game on max settings and tested on the same hardware and gotten almost double the frames per second out of Ubuntu linux vs Windows 8.

It's obvious Valve is in this for the long run. They've talked about it for years: "Big things have small beginnings", "We hate windows", "Windows 8 sucks". And they're right. Windows is holding gamers hostage. And the gaming community's backwards compatibility is unstable because of it. (some titles made just a few years ago don't work on Windows 7 and can't run under compatability mode) The PC gaming community has had no choice but to stick with Windows.

This move is Valve's way of detaching the gaming community from the endlessly, re-re-redesigned, bloated, sluggish, "that'll be $200 for the new version" operating system and onto one that's free, specifically designed to cater to gamers, and maintained by a company that isn't so hostile towards it's users.

I can't wait. It'll take a good 10 years but a Windows free gaming future is on it's way.

I'm saving up to upgrade my PC (AMD HSA on Kaveri + DDR4) because of SteamOS (amongst other things) instead of getting a next-gen console. And I know a few other people doing that as well.

This is what I'm doing. I'm actually looking forward to having a real machine connected to my TV (for lots of reasons besides Steam)...

I have a PC in my living room, a wireless keyboard+mouse, high DPI, and no regrets.

I have my TV as second monitor to my PC in the living room. It's great.

AMD needs to move to 14/16nm FinFET in 2015 as soon as possible (like Nvidia is doing). Everything is great on the GPU side, especially with all the added parallelism features, but they really need to close up that gap as much as possible with Intel on the CPU side. They can't do that by being 2 process nodes behind Intel, no matter how much they will innovate on the CPU side in the next few years, too.

If they try to be on the most cutting edge process node as early as possible (that's available to them), that could make them quite competitive and appealing, especially as all-in-one solution for gamers. I'd certainly consider them myself, too, but not until 2015, and until they jump to 14/16nm FinFET.

I am doing the same, once the OS gets released and I can buy controllers I will be hooking it up as the main system. The thing steam gets right is that everyone in the house who uses games has a great experience, from 10 - 35 years old it is extremely friendly and useful.

I have been using Steam on Linux and once they get a few more titles final (like CS: GO, they already have DOTA) it removes any need for Windows (home life isn't very Office centric).

I've also been doing this. I have a pretty beefy windows machine that I have configured to launch into big picture mode on boot with an Xbox 360 controller and the experience is about 85% there. It is kind of a pain in the ass having a controller, a keyboard, and a trackball in my living room in addition to the TV remote stuff.

It's also annoying to have a full desktop PC in the living room. When game streaming lands in Steam I'll be able to move that entire box into my office and then just have a simple front end Steam Machine handling driving the TV. People keep posting pics of the streaming UI but they haven't turned it on yet.

For my "front end" machines I am using 2 Ubuntu laptops with background auto updating turned on, steam in big picture mode on boot, and either an Xbox controller or a Logitech 710. I am thinking those will hold me over until Valve starts publishing the case CAD files and I'll be able to build my own proper machine.

With the mediocrity of "next-gen" consoles from Sony & MS, I pray to the gods that Valve is successful in this endeavor.

Console stagnation harms all gaming.

Exactly. I think its quite worrisome that some of the launch titles dont run 1080p natively for performance reasons. If thats the basis for game development in the next 5-7 years it will be limited right off the bat considering 4K displays might be quite wide spread amongst enthusiasts until then. I also believe the consoles wont be able to go another 7 years without someone really disrupting their market, its long overdue.

I sort of disagree. One of the benefits of the stagnant last-generation consoles is that us PC gamers didn't have to upgrade our hardware nearly as often. (And STILL, many games simply wouldn't run acceptably on hardware many times more powerful than Xbox/PS3, even at low settings.) I wish developers focused more on performance over flashiness. As far as I'm concerned, Super Mario Galaxy is still one of the best looking games ever made, and it was essentially running on Gamecube hardware.

I'm extremely interested in how Valve will grow into a hardware company, especially given it's frequently-vaunted history of utterly flat management structure. Personally, I have a hard time seeing it work well; hardware is a whole different ballgame from software, and I can envision their internal organization (from what little I know of it) not being very conducive to HW development.

That being said, I DEARLY HOPE I'm wrong.

I work at a company that has a "flat" management structure. You probably use a product that has one of our products several times a day and not even know it. While we are not a hardware design company, we do design and manufacture plenty of products you make use of every day. Mostly known for GORE-TEX.

I don't believe the management structure would cause any major issues. Generally a team is created to handle a project, and people not in that team really have no major say in what is going on.

Plus, flat management structure doesn't mean flat team structure - when a group of people work on a task at shadowcat, there's generally one person who acts as effective lead for that project, whether we get around to writing it down anywhere or not.

yep!

There are "semi-equivalents" to a traditional structure. Teams have one or more Leaders that make or help make decisions for the rest of the team.

Once you get larger you do run into the case where a team is created that can force decisions upon another team to a certain degree. Such as if IT decides that your password should start containing two numbers instead of one, that decision affects everyone who uses those services. Don't like it? You need to get funding and support to setup your own IT for your team which most likely will not get support.

Other than the controller it sounds like they're not getting into the hardware business:

- http://games.on.net/2013/11/steam-controllers-will-only-be-m...

This seems smart to me, control the quality of the controller (as that seems to be the central point of the experience anyway), and since the box itself is just a PC let the existing boutique builders build the boxes.

I didn't realize the controller was the only component they'd be making. I agree, that seems smart - especially with how slick they look. I got the impression their foray into hardware was into a more console-like machine.

I kinda think that ridiculous upgrade treadmills harm gaming more. Remember the mid-90s, when a bleeding-edge box was obsolete in a year?

I don't think it's fair to blame consoles entirely for the slowing rate of hardware progression--we've just reached a point of diminishing returns, where it takes more and more hardware improvement for less and less visible benefit. Compare the difference between, say, Quake and Half-Life 2 versus Half-Life 2 and Crysis 3--about the same amount of time between each.

But whatever it is, I do think reduced hardware development is good for the vast majority of gamers. The tiny group that is "hardcore", demands bleeding-edge graphics, and has thousands of dollars to burn every year might whine, but for the rest of us, the playing field is getting more level. I like pretty graphics as much as the next guy, but it's gameplay, not shaders, that make gaming fun.

In the most meaningful way, it could be Android for consoles. It's "freely licensable" for hardware manufacturers, so companies will be able to build new consoles without building their own OS -- the same innovation that led HTC and Samsung to become two of the world's leading phone manufacturers.

Show me the game list. IMO the make or break for SteamOS.

I have a steam account on a mac which has a pretty close parity with linux as to the game list. If that is all, not that interested. New games only for the steamOS will take some time to build a catalog. Similar to the new generation of consoles, from what I have seen it's going to be next fall before there are enough interesting titles to tempt me to get one. If Valve can bring a decent chunk of the last few years of windows games to SteamOS, I would be quite interested in a unit.

The other thing not talked about with SteamOS, PS4 or Xbone is cheat protection on multiplayer games. Huge problem with PC gaming. Small problem with Xbox 360 and a minor problem with PS3. What does SteamOS bring to the table to help prevent this? Or is it purely on the game studio to combat cheating?

Valve has been focusing an extreme amount on becoming the place indie studios release on. They're intent is clear: focus more on finding the next top-tier studios instead of a pointless pursuit of the current ones. There's also nothing preventing you from using Windows on one of these boxes, or streaming Windows games from another PC.

Valve has an anti-cheat system, but I don't think they license it (someone correct me if they do).

Steam does offer [1] their anti-cheat system to developers, along with features such as matchmaking, leaderboards and achievements. It's all on a platform called Steamworks, which offers devs very similar features to Sony and Microsoft's online services.

[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Valve_Anti-Cheat#Games_that_sup...

Sports games drive a huge piece of the console world. Indie releases aren't going to get the job done.

It is 1983. The Atari 800 (XBox One) and Commodore 64 (PS4) are the hottest items in home computing. The PC (Steam) that has been around for a couple of years is a growing infant that doesn't quite approach the industry leaders. The brewing revolution that is attributable to the ubiqitous penetration of the PC along with *nix, cheap networking, the internet, billion dollar apps like DBase, Lotus and WordPerfect is a decade away, but it has started. The snowball has started rolling.

SteamOS has the potential to be a juggernaut of gaming that eclipses consoles. Will Valve prove to use their talent and determination to make this THE eventual go-to gaming platform? (Note: Rhetorical headlines can usually be answered with a "no.")

Maybe. They certainly have the opportunity.

I, too, am deeply excited by the potential. I wish Valve and Canonical (if they are partnering) well. I certianly would purchase a SteamOS machine. I have a HTC One X w/ Android. I have a Dell XPS w/ Ubuntu preloaded.

I predict, however, that if successful Microsoft will be sure to try to monetize the new revenue stream via patent licensing agreements.

I feel what Valve is doing (if all that was discussed here is legit) is truly important because gaming has always been the next to last selling point for the Wintel ecosystem.

My conjecture: you have to decide if you want mass market (open app OS inc. no app store and no competing h/w division - i.e. pre-win8 desktop Microsoft Windows, pre-Nokia Microsoft WinMobile, pre-Moto Google Android) or niche market (vertically integrated OS, app store and h/w - i.e. Apple, PS4, Xbox)

Windows is the Mom&Pop desktop OS. There is plenty of room for an open gaming-oriented OS.

Linux has been such a net positive for the software industry it is not even funny at this stage. Viva la revolucion libre! :)

For me the best thing to come out of SteamOS is the potential for some really powerful game development tools on Linux.

Until we get out hands on the OS, so outside of idle speculation, we really don't have much to go on. Steams "Big Screen" is far from mainstream ready, so I doubt that we'll see a usable OS for some time.

You can start to watch what the interface at least will be by running the linux client with -steamos, it'll autostart in big picture mode with a few cosmetic differences right now (Mostly with settings).

>It's worth noting that current iPhone and Android phones now equal, if not exceed, the current generation of consoles in terms of power.

Is this true?

No, they haven't quite reached the last generation (PS3/Xbox 360) yet and they're a long way away from the PS4 and Xbox One.

No. xbox 360 gpu has ~ 240 GFLOPS http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xenos_(graphics_chip)

phones have ~ 25 Gflops - 50 Gflops http://www.anandtech.com/show/6330/the-iphone-5-review/11

That's last year's iPhone. Didn't the performance double this year?

http://www.imore.com/sites/imore.com/files/styles/large/publ...

http://www.anandtech.com/show/7335/the-iphone-5s-review/5

It looks like we might get a doubling of performance every year. With Android vs iOS vs Microsoft, consumers should be in for quite a treat.

Looks like the A7 gpu is coming in at 115.2 glops... so yeah... getting close. That's pretty awesome.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_(system_on_chip)

That's not that awesome, that's a brand new chip vs a 7 year old console chip. And not even the whole chip, just the performance of the GPU.

Which is running on in the palm of your hand, on battery power.. How is that not awesome?

The horsepower-per-pixel of a 5s is a close match to an Xbox360 game that insists on running at full 1080p. http://timothylottes.blogspot.com/2013/09/a7.html

they are just now about halfway there. When virtually everyone has a smartphone capable of that power is a different matter entirely though, for all i know many of my friends still use iphone 4/4S'

Still don't have decent ways to get gigabytes of assets onto the phone. Some PC games are getting into the 40 GB range (which is one of the design points for Xbox One).

You could argue that many of those assets could be served via streaming, or would be a quarter the size on a phone-like screen (... until you want to show it in 1080P via an adapter or something). Or that the game industry doesn't give a damn about asset size because it hasn't had to, on PCs.

Hm, I wonder how long these 250 GB monthly bandwidth caps can last with that kind of download size becoming more common. I've already run into one or two cases where I needed multiple months of DL cap for single downloads, so I'm hoping the pressure forces a bump...

For some reason I think that Gabe et. al. are smart enough to know that partnering with ubuntu right now would not be met with enthusiasm by the community, on the other hand maybe pressure from Valve could get Mark to pull his head out of his ass and work with the community instead of continually disrupting it.

The Shuttleworth/Canonical bashing is beyond tiresome at this stage.

Given like Canonical have actual experience getting their OS onto h/w vendors machines Gabe et. al. would be stupid not to at least contemplate partnering.

Also, Ubuntu is Debian. You've no problem with Debian succeeding, right?

Canonical can do what they like within the boundary of the GPL and other licences. Free software guarantees this freedom. I figure it's his money, he gets to decide. People hate on Canonical for not contributing to the Linux kernel. Then when they innovate build their own identity (you may gather I like Unity btw) they get criticized. For what?

Give it a rest already. the article was mainly about Valve and their Linux play anyway.

edit: without -> within >.<

My main issue, one that is especially relevant to gaming, is with the shitstorm around Mir. I would be thrilled if Valve built off Debian, however I would be disappointed if their interpretation of 'open' was strictly literal (GPL etc) and did not take in to account the fact that cooperative and collaborative interactions with the larger linux community are equally (if not more) important. SteamOS is also not the only distro that valve is targeting, so going down a road that reduces support for other distros seems like a rather stupid idea to me (and yes, I am saying that Canonoical's current behavior is isolating their platform from other distros).

It's times like these that I wish Valve wasn't private.

I hope Valve SteamOS makes it, Linux gives you freedom from unknown surveillance. If gamers start using Linux there will be a mass market and easier to find good Linux hardware for desktop setups.

Lets also face it consoles are a kind of credit purchase where the manufacturer of the console gives you hardware rebate which you pay with increased game prices. You also pay with your freedom as the console maker controls which software are allowed to run on the console.

Lets see it released and what it has and how hackable it is - if we could reasonably run all the stuff on current linux distros if packaged correctly it could be my main OS.

But vaporware is always revolutionary (I treat every unreleased software as vaporware). My predictions for steam OS - really rocky start that will settle few months in when the enthusiast community would have ironed most of the kinks and then the heavy gaming hitters will appear.

He hadn't mentioned Microsoft project spark, a game creation platform , which at least according to the demo , lets people build amazing stuff with little effort or experience.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m37sVEgJrOA

If it's promise is true, maybe this is where we should look for the future of gaming, and the future of platforms.

Will it be suitable to use SteamOS not only as a gaming platform, but also as a general-purpose operating system - i.e. the new Windows for gamers? There might have been a hint in the article, but I didn't quite catch it.

they will have a "desktop-mode", and seeing it will probably be based on Ubuntu, it should be usable for at least basic tasks.

Only revolutionary or disruptive?

I'd be more hopeful if it was open sourced, and not built by a company that has pioneered DRM...

Not sure how Valve 'pioneered DRM', not to mention that DRM on Steam is purely optional, as in it's up to the game publishers to decide if they want to use DRM.

Unfortunately it seems only indie game developers are opting for DRM free releases on Steam, but again it is the choice of the publisher, not Valve.

As for SteamOS, as far as I've gathered the OS itself will be fully open sourced, the Steam service application will remain proprietary.

Steam is probably the least in your face, get in your way DRM there has been.. Compared to what other have done, and will do, I'll take Steam.

Steam is very in your face.

But it provides huge amounts of value and minimal pain. The biggest problem I have with steam now is that the app can be pretty laggy and I can't move it to my second screen for some reason. Neither of those things hurts my gaming experience. I get a friend system, integrated store, automatic updates, game distribution, achievements, in game browser overlay, steam cloud, etc...

But I still can't play my games without steam. I still can't sell them. I still can't loan them to a friend. It's just that I don't really care.

> a company that has pioneered DRM

I believe, before steam PC gamers had StarForce and alikes. Valve is not guilty of pioneering DRM, but guilty of making DRM bearable (which has both good and bad sides).

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