More talk of Steam "box" Dec. 8

[Martimus]

Why would valve support games they did not create? If this hardware had their name on it they would support it.

They don't support Steam practically at all. Anyone who has ever had any problems with the service can tell you that their customer service is almost non-existant.

 

[blastingcap]

http://www.joystiq.com/2012/12/08/valves-gabe-newell-talks-turnkey-living-room-hardware/

This could present some issues for Microsoft and Sony if you ask me. Valve already has the digital distribution ability, and they can afford to sell their hardware at a loss and make money on software.

I could see them also having a faster release cycle than Microsoft and Sony. Releasing hardware every couple of years or less, and still have backwards compatibility for their older boxes at lower settings is also a major advantage over the console makers. If this model gets adopted we could see a major increase in the speeds developers adopt features and IQ improvements.

I could see them releasing a $600-800 box that sits under the TV that can do double duty as a gaming PC and HTPC. Making money off content could allow them to sell the hardware at a slight loss, and give people a pretty impressive build for the money. Using mid range GPU's and a decent quad core they could easily sell a build that cost around $1000 total to build and still turn a huge profit on software. They could work out distibution deals for TV and movies as well making their system even more attractive to consumers.

This could be awesome.

I would under virtually no circumstances pay $600-800 for something I could cobble together for a small fraction of that amount to serve as a file server, HTPC, and gaming box, unless Valve included some pretty insane software and/or hardware like specialized input devices, and I am not talking about a gamepad either, but something really cool.

 

[Zodiark1593]

The other problem with HTPCs is you pretty much need Windows or OS X to play any sort of commercial downloadable or streaming video. Linux doesn't support DRM for those formats. Yes, I own one, but it's mostly for music and playing back rips of movies I own on DVD.

Valve also isn't the first company to attempt to simplify PC gaming. The infamous Phantom comes to mind. If Valve is trying to make a console that can play existing games, I think it's a mistake. The market is already overcrowded. Three consoles is the maximum it's willing to support. It's always been like that.

Valve is better off selling their own line of pre-built gaming PCs like Alienware does. If they can offer affordable ones, people will buy them. Just don't expect them to fly off the shelves. PC gaming has always been a niche market. As dagamer34 said, most gamers are quite content with a system that just works. They don't care about hardware or modding. They don't want to fiddle with drivers. They just want something reasonably cheap that's going to last them five years.

I agree sadly, being a PC gamer often means being both a games enthusiast, and a PC enthusiast.

I would like to see a gaming laptop done right though. Decent IPS display would be nice for starters.

 

[VulgarDisplay]

I would under virtually no circumstances pay $600-800 for something I could cobble together for a small fraction of that amount to serve as a file server, HTPC, and gaming box, unless Valve included some pretty insane software and/or hardware like specialized input devices, and I am not talking about a gamepad either, but something really cool.

I guess I'm envisioning this in my head as something totally different than anyone else. I'm not thinking about some jumped up HTPC. I'm think of an actual mid/high end gaming rig that they sell for a loss for $600-800 bucks. Think i7 quad core and $200-300$ GPU. They need to make the specs for the price very enticing so they can get people to buy into the steam ecosystem and spend loads of money on content.

I do believe it will have specialized input devices of some sort. I remember seeing some news about them hiring a peripheral designer recently.

Either way, I'm interested to see how it all turns out in the long run. Of any game developer trying to break into the hardware scene I see Valve as one of the few capable of pulling it off.

 

[dagamer34]

I guess I'm envisioning this in my head as something totally different than anyone else. I'm not thinking about some jumped up HTPC. I'm think of an actual mid/high end gaming rig that they sell for a loss for $600-800 bucks. Think i7 quad core and $200-300$ GPU. They need to make the specs for the price very enticing so they can get people to buy into the steam ecosystem and spend loads of money on content.

I do believe it will have specialized input devices of some sort. I remember seeing some news about them hiring a peripheral designer recently.

Either way, I'm interested to see how it all turns out in the long run. Of any game developer trying to break into the hardware scene I see Valve as one of the few capable of pulling it off.

You've just suggested Valve make the Phantom but purposefully lose money. And no system with a Core i7 and $200 GPU is going to cost $600-800. It will be at least $1000. You aren't going to change the industry with a $1000 piece of hardware. An enthusiast might as well go out and built it themselves.

 

[Grooveriding]

I don't think this would be about supporting Valve games ? 😵 It would be about supporting Steam and Valve, which with Big Picture, looks to be clearly heading towards a consolized interface appropriate for HDTVs.

They release a box built with a custom OS based around the Steam platform. Direct downloads of the enormous game library of Steam. Almost every game on console releases ported to PC currently, apart from the exclusive to one platform games - which isn't much of a draw at that point with all the PC exclusive titles Steam has dwarfing the sparse console exclusives.. It ships with native controller functionality, some version of a 'kinect/psmove' type system and also likely supports mouse/keyboard.

You get a console that can play more games than Xbox, Wii or Playstation, likely has superior hardware and includes Steam which offers all the features and then some of Xboxlive or PSN.

Valve could easily take a large piece of the market here. I would watch this very closely, it has an excellent chance of changing the entire console landscape. Too much focus on what we as PC Gamers consider a decent machine. You can slap together a PC for $500 that can play any game out there with better visuals/settings than a console can. This is at consumer retail pricing, not even taking into account what costing would be on a mass produced machine at the manufacturer level.

 

[power_hour]

Sounds like he is trying to build another Xbox720. I like this 'Gabe' guy. Not sure MS does haha. I wish him all the best. He is going to to need it.

 

[TehMac]

Btw guys, Gabe is one of the "Microsoft Mafia." iirc, he made about 18 million because he was one of the first guys on the team, bounced out and then founded Valve.

This guy has a mission, and it isn't to just make a fuckton more money, because he had that back in the 90s.

 

[arkcom]

Could be streaming based until more games start to support linux.

 

[PhatoseAlpha]

As it stands, it will be a failure. There's no target market, and no killer app. Publishers aren't going to jump on Linux gaming unless Valve can somehow create the market.

PC gamers aren't going to just jump, no matter how bad Win 8 sucks. They'll stick with XP/Vista/7. Switching to this just makes the entire PC back catalog go away in a flash of incompatibility and control pads. And for what? To play TF2? Portal 2? Yeah, great motivation there.

The console players will look at it, look at it's lack of library, and walk away.

That leaves the die-hard Linuxers who actually care about gaming. And they'll just to have keep dual-booting.

Dead in the water. Maybe they'll do something crazy like make HL3 exclusive, but that seems unlikely at best. They're combining the weak points of PC gaming with the weak points of console gaming. Can't see any way that will end well.

 

[dagamer34]

Someone still needs to tell me why making a Linux port of a game is a good business decision for a developer when most of them don't even bother to make a Mac port until months or years later, if at all?

Also, while there will probably be an expectation of Steam customers to get both the Windows and Linux version for the same price, how does that benefit a developer? They get no more money from a sale but still need to spend money on a port, which is not free. People will then get angry when developers essentially sell just the Linux or "Steambox" only version of a game, which few people will buy, and the experiment will have failed.

 

[blastingcap]

Btw guys, Gabe is one of the "Microsoft Mafia." iirc, he made about 18 million because he was one of the first guys on the team, bounced out and then founded Valve.

This guy has a mission, and it isn't to just make a fuckton more money, because he had that back in the 90s.

Even if he doesn't have a mission, and just wants to have fun, his estimated net worth is over $1,500 million ($1.5 billion in U.S. terminology), which is why he can continue to reject EA's attempts to buy out Valve.

I guess I'm envisioning this in my head as something totally different than anyone else. I'm not thinking about some jumped up HTPC. I'm think of an actual mid/high end gaming rig that they sell for a loss for $600-800 bucks. Think i7 quad core and $200-300$ GPU. They need to make the specs for the price very enticing so they can get people to buy into the steam ecosystem and spend loads of money on content.

I do believe it will have specialized input devices of some sort. I remember seeing some news about them hiring a peripheral designer recently.

Either way, I'm interested to see how it all turns out in the long run. Of any game developer trying to break into the hardware scene I see Valve as one of the few capable of pulling it off.

How big of a market is there for such things? I don't think the market for $600-800 Linux-based PCs is that big, especially during a deep worldwide recession.

Imho, a Core i7 is overkill, especially in a not-so-multithreaded gaming world, and so are $200-300 GPUs... you can get a HD7950 overclocked to ~7970 levels for less than $300, perhaps with a few games thrown in for good measure. That's overkill for TVs. What are most people on, 720p and 1080p TVs? Even 720p looks pretty good on many big screen TVs at typical viewing distances, btw.

Sony/Xbox lost money on hardware for years before making money off software license fees, but they had the scale to do that. Would a Steam box have such scale? Even with 30% cut off distro, I don't think PC gaming on a Linux box would be lucrative enough for Valve to break even for a very long time, and maybe never.

Btw the higher-wattage the rig, the more fans and cooling and bigger the space and more that people will complain about ruining the aesthetics of the living room. I personally don't care but I know my gf wouldn't be thrilled to have a hulking, whirring thing next to the TV.

Yes I've heard the same rumors about input devices which is why I mentioned it... we'll have to see what they come up with.

 

[showb1z]

When I bought an Xbox 360 back at release and put Halo 4 in that console. I am not having to run at lower graphics settings than someone who bought one a year later or just last week. When I buy an Xbox360 game it works, same for my PS3. If my friend has the same game it works, plays, and looks exactly the same. There is no "oh well, you have this video card so you need to turn shadows down to low". None of that, put in disk...press start...play. This cannot be avoided with PC unless you want your HD 7970 X-Fire and GTX 670 SLI to be worthless because everyone has to conform to the specs of Valve's piece of crap from 2 years ago.

No, you don't have to run at lower graphics settings. You've been stuck at those (lower than) low settings for the past 5 years.
Consoles may not have graphics settings, but compared to pc's their graphics keep getting worse and worse. So really what's the difference. At least the steambox would leave room for upgrading if you want to. And if not you can still play at the same graphical fidelity of a couple years ago, just like consoles.
Also, obviously steam would auto-detect the optimal settings for your hardware configuration. That's the whole point of this thing, make pc-gaming more accessible to the masses.

Anyway, we don't really know anything concrete about all this yet, this whole thread is just speculation.

 

[VulgarDisplay]

No, you don't have to run at lower graphics settings. You've been stuck at those (lower than) low settings for the past 5 years.
Consoles may not have graphics settings, but compared to pc's their graphics keep getting worse and worse. So really what's the difference. At least the steambox would leave room for upgrading if you want to. And if not you can still play at the same graphical fidelity of a couple years ago, just like consoles.
Also, obviously steam would auto-detect the optimal settings for your hardware configuration. That's the whole point of this thing, make pc-gaming more accessible to the masses.

Anyway, we don't really know anything concrete about all this yet, this whole thread is just speculation.

Speculating is fun though lol. I can see this being awesome for gamers.


I know that gabe talked abou this hatred for windows 8, but honestly it's new UI is actually suited pretty well to TV's with a controller for input. I know they have looked a lot into Linux as an OS, but I still can't rule out that their hardware may run some version of windows. Who knows, I'm sure they have the know how to make their own OS from the ground up. I wonder if they can License DX from Microsoft seperate from a windows install?

 

[zebrax2]

One of the main problem i see here is how are they gonna convince the masses to use keyboard and mouse in their living rooms. Sure you can play with a gamepad but that will eleminate a huge amount of games in the steam library that you can play and at the same time most of the games that support gamepads are ports from other consoles.

 

[Nintendesert]

Speculating is fun though lol. I can see this being awesome for gamers.


I know that gabe talked abou this hatred for windows 8, but honestly it's new UI is actually suited pretty well to TV's with a controller for input. I know they have looked a lot into Linux as an OS, but I still can't rule out that their hardware may run some version of windows. Who knows, I'm sure they have the know how to make their own OS from the ground up. I wonder if they can License DX from Microsoft seperate from a windows install?

He doesn't hate Windows8 for the UI, he hates it for the Microsoft store included. He doesn't like the competition.


As for this, I'm not sure Valve even has the resources to go up against Sony/Microsoft/Nintendo in that market, and the people that are familiar with Steam and Valve already have their preferred box to play on.

I'm not sure what the ultimate goal is here, but I'm sure it's a way to tie more people to their platform and maintain their marketshare. With all the other players entering the digital distribution game and Valve not actually having killer apps themselves to keep people on Steam, they need to find ways to keep people on their platform.

Once Origin is more established and Activision has their own there's a foreseeable future that has both big publishers not releasing anything to Steam and driving them out of the market. Gabe fears competition because the competition offers something Valve doesn't, products.

 

[gladiatorua]

Well, game support is/will be not that bad. Unreal is compatible with Llinux, Crytech too, Unity and Source officially support Linux... Four major engines.

 

[cmdrdredd]

Crytek engine is used in how many games? I count 2 major titles in the last maybe 5 years? Source is old and outdated. Not bad but it does have shortcomings. Not exactly something to build your rep on especially when the only genres those engines are used for is fps isn't it?

 

[cmdrdredd]

No, you don't have to run at lower graphics settings. You've been stuck at those (lower than) low settings for the past 5 years.
Consoles may not have graphics settings, but compared to pc's their graphics keep getting worse and worse. So really what's the difference. At least the steambox would leave room for upgrading if you want to. And if not you can still play at the same graphical fidelity of a couple years ago, just like consoles.
Also, obviously steam would auto-detect the optimal settings for your hardware configuration. That's the whole point of this thing, make pc-gaming more accessible to the masses.

Anyway, we don't really know anything concrete about all this yet, this whole thread is just speculation.

Your way off the point. I am saying with this box having changing specs year to year you would be stuck buying a new one every year to keep up. That would kill the market for it immediately. Dead. If you don't upgrade to the new box then your games run slower and look worse than the new one. Who wants that?? Again this is why consoles sell so well. The hardware is set and every game for the life of the console works the same each time on each system. No worry about lower fps or anything.

That is why this has no market. PC games demand upgrades periodically and you have to adjust settings to accommodate new tech in the games if you don't have a newer system. So if they wanna break into console market they need a set hardware standard which means they will have to stagnate PC gaming or they make it like a PC and have upgrades and in that case just build your own and it'll be faster anyway.


Also to whoever says steam has more exclusives than consoles and the number of titles dwarfs consoles forgetts that a good number of console exclusives sell millions of copies in a week. No PC exclusive does that consistently. Plus mist of the games that you would list off as steam exclusive or whatever are not the same quality as some of the console exclusives. The budget of an indie title is way way too small.

 

[EDUSAN]

i could see valve making a new steam console with upgraded hardware every year... and giving a big discount to people already owning the console

it would be almost as what happens in pc... you buy hardware, when you want to upgrade, you sell the part and buy the new part.

But as valve probably wouldnt get any money from part upgrades, they would sell you the console again and "buy" the old console back. Then they would just open it, take out the outdated part, insert the new one and sell it again 😛

seems like a cheap and easy way to upgrade your hardware all the time instead of limiting the games to your hardware that wont be upgraded for a long long time

 

[Nintendesert]

i could see valve making a new steam console with upgraded hardware every year... and giving a big discount to people already owning the console

it would be almost as what happens in pc... you buy hardware, when you want to upgrade, you sell the part and buy the new part.

But as valve probably wouldnt get any money from part upgrades, they would sell you the console again and "buy" the old console back. Then they would just open it, take out the outdated part, insert the new one and sell it again 😛

seems like a cheap and easy way to upgrade your hardware all the time instead of limiting the games to your hardware that wont be upgraded for a long long time

Where do they get all this money at?

 

[cmdrdredd]

If you have to buy upgrades every year even discounted ones...its a failure.

That is the same as a PC and they are supposed to simplify it. That isn't simplifying it.

 

[EDUSAN]

it is if you only need to send your console to the store and return with a new one

it simplifies what pc gamers do today... look for the best price/best performance part in different stores, buy it, receive it and change the part yourself or send the pc (which is bigger than a console) to get it installed, download the correct driver

and if you use notebook, well... its even harder

====

btw...im not saying YOU NEED to do it. But if you want to keep playing the games at THE HIGHEST quality, you must upgrade.
I could imagine steam store showing a chart in any game store page at what quality you can play it in each version of the console

Like... XXXXX game
Steambox v1 = Low quality
Steambox v2 = Mid quality
Steambox v3 = High Quality

you can buy the game anyway, just be sure that you WILL have to play it in low quality if you have the oldest version

 

[Lonyo]

And if you buy the low quality one, you get to have to replace it in 2 or 3 years when it's too slow for newer games. Rather than 6 years with a "regular" console.

 

[EDUSAN]

which seems fairly good to me

specially when you think that this method will let the games continue growing instead of making the console hardware the limit.

and more specially if you are a pc user that need to bear with ugly textures because as the consoles couldnt handle better ones they lowered the game quality