

Valve Reveals First Gen Steam Machines - Audiophilip
http://store.steampowered.com/news/12175/

======
dm2
After dealing with Steam support I have lost any enthusiasm for Valve and
Steam.

I recently purchased a game from them that has been out for over a year, they
ran out of CD Keys so Steam gave me the "could not connect to key server"
message. After going back and forth with Steam support they refused to issue
me a refund or even give me an ETA for when I would be able to play the game
that I've already payed for. Horrible customer support and I doubt I'm the
first customer they've done this to.

Several weeks later, no game, no refund, no cd key, and no update from their
support staff (which is accessible via email only, no chat, no phone). Screw
you Valve and Steam, I'll stick to my PC.

~~~
scholia
Terrible support from a company that uses Digital Rights Management? Think
I've heard this story before....

------
yaeger
Okay, what I don't get, how could Valve get that many partners to offer Steam
Machines? Seeing as how little games for Linux there currently are? Did Valve
tell them something we don't know? Like, every major Engine Developer is about
to offer an OpenGL option that would allow devs to continue to work just as
they do now but the resulting binary could be created with OpenGL instead of
DX?

I know that you can stream your Windows games through the Steam Box but come
on. If I wanted to do that, I could already run an hdmi cable from my PC
directly to my TV and don't need an extra box in between.

~~~
kayoone
Basically these are just PC manufacturers and the Steam Machines are just PCs.
So for them its more or less business as usual, and many of them (like
Alienware) already had quite similar systems on sale. With the possibility of
the Steam Machine brand resulting in more sales for products they would be
selling in a similar form anyway, it was an easy sell i guess.

It could potentially be a huge business to sell the best steam machines on the
market.

------
captainmuon
Nice to see that they gathered some of the "big" names I fondly remember from
my gaming days (Alienware, Alternate, GigaByte, Zotac). It looks like they're
not targeting the console demographic, but the classical "PC gamers".

It has been getting harder and harder to get a good gaming PC. One reason is
that since I'm grown up I can no longer read gaming magazines all day long to
become a hardware expert ;-). The other is that there are less and less good
off-the-shelf gaming PCs. Either they are too expensive, or too loud, or they
are very unbalanced (GPU too weak, too little RAM when RAM is expensive, far
more RAM then neccessary when RAM is cheap, ...).

At the same time, the whole PC market seems to be shrinking (I don't have any
numbers, that's just what you read everywhere). Dell and the likes will always
have enough enterprise customers, but the consumer-targeted manufacturers are
probably in trouble. It makes a lot of sense for the remaining small vendors
to join forces under a common label.

It's also great for the customers, since they don't have to go through the
trouble of building their own PC (including choosing parts). But they still
get the benefits of a custom PC: Well-balanced hardware at a reasonable price,
that they know will be able to play the games they want it for. I believe that
by creating a new category "steam PC" we'll be seeing a lot of positive
competition and transparency in that area.

~~~
bane
I actually just went and built a new machine...and it wasn't _too_ bad. To put
some things in perspective, back in the mid-90s I worked at a computer
hardware store, building and repairing machines day-in and day-out, but I
haven't been in that kind of business since then. There was almost nothing
similar to those days except the basic names of some of the parts "video
card", "case" etc. I also build my last machine some 7 years ago and even from
then the industry has moved fast enough that almost nothing is recognizable.

Slots are all different, the variety of RAM types is astonishing and there are
more form factors, cooling solutions, hard drive types and motherboard types
than you can shake a stick at.

Turns out the internet is a _very_ good resource these days for benchmarks,
price comparisons, compatibility reports etc. It really only took me 3 or 4
evenings to get back up to speed with the state of the art (ASUS had a great
series of videos on NewEgg about their latest motherboard line), put together
some rough sketches of systems and started to price them out. A couple
iterations later and I settled on a configuration and placed my order.

A few days later everything arrived, and even though I had never touched an
SSD before, had everything assembled in 2 very lazy evenings. Instructions are
provided these days with most of the parts and aren't too bad. I probably did
a couple things not-quite-right, but everything seems to work fine so.

I expect this system to give me 5-7 years of service and it ran well under
$2k. Has an SSD for the main drive and 4TB of secondary storage, 32GB of RAM,
not "quite" top of the line video (but pretty beastly), 4 cores on the latest
intel architecture. It chews up games and emulation with ease and I actually
do my day-to-day work inside of a couple of VMs that you barely notice are
running.

So yeah, it took a few more days of my time for research, but now I know the
hardware scene a lot better and the time from order to fully usable system
wasn't terribly longer than ordering a complete box.

For fun, I tried to spec out an Alienware and came up with a system not quite
as fast, with less storage for about a $1k more.

~~~
scholia
There's a website that helps you pick and order the parts, you can get advice
on builds, or use someone else's build

[http://pcpartpicker.com/](http://pcpartpicker.com/)

Otherwise there are plenty of small companies that supply gaming PCs, as well
as Asus (Republic of Gamers) and Dell (through its purchase of Alienware).

~~~
bane
Man, that would have been super useful this last go around!

------
rurounijones
I thought the steam machine would be more console-like in its uniformity but
it seems to be more a case of "Limited compatible component guaranteed to work
with Steam" sets of PCs.

Sounds like a good place to look if you want a normal desktop Linux PC which
is almost guaranteed to be compatible.

~~~
kayoone
Yep, and Steam Machines should make very good Windows-PCs as well. After all
they are well designed, reasonably small, have a proper cooling solution and
run standard hardware.

------
kayoone
I can actually see Steam Machines find their place next to PS4/Xbox1 in this
generation for several reasons:

\- PS4/Xbox1 are very similar to PC Architecture (Steam Machine)

\- even first gen Steam Machines are more powerful than consoles, a few years
down the line they will be orders of magnitude faster

\- Steam Machines are backwards compatible and can be replaced with faster
ones when the need arises. With the 4K age dawning, this could be a huge deal
as the new consoles often don't even run 1080p natively. Especially if you
consider that the last gen lasted almost 8 years.

\- Developing/Publishing is still a lot easier on Steam than it is on the new
consoles, big deal for small devs

\- it could actually be a console that PC gamers love

\- Valve has the right mindset and resources to pull this off

As with everything there are also risks of course (non unified
design/performance, Games, Linux) but all the contenders have their pros and
cons, biggest one of the consoles is their userbase obviously.

~~~
gizzlon
_\- it could actually be a console that PC gamers love_

As an old-school PC gamer, this is the first "console" I've been interested in
since the first Playstation. Don't know how big he marked of people like me is
though..

------
Al-Khwarizmi
Am I the only one to think they are too expensive? The cheapest ones are more
expensive than the most expensive competing console...

~~~
dageshi
I was watching a gaming podcast the other day and someone made a good point,
if valve were to go aggressively after console users with the steambox right
now at the start of a new console round they'd be setting themselves up for a
world of hurt. Microsoft/Sony could deliberately pay off developers to hold up
the PC version of games for 6+ months after console releases. If you can't
play the latest and greatest that would significantly drop the value of a
steambox.

So instead, release a steambox version which is only going to be popular with
"enthusiasts", bug/beta test the hell out of them and then more aggressively
market steamboxes in 2-5 years time when the current console generation is
starting to look old.

Valve are playing a long game here I think, the value proposition of a
steambox isn't going to make sense until we're about half way through the
current console cycle.

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Vaskivo
I wasn't expecting so many different machines. I was thinking of a cheap steam
machine (300/400 $) to play indie games and game about 4 years old, a medium
spec'd machine for about 700 $ that can play everything in the market, and a
1500 $ machine with high specs.

Still, one of the great points in PCs is the variety of hardware.

I'm just curious on how Valve (or the HW vendors) are gonna market it. With
consoles you have the idea that with that unit you can play everything. With a
steam machine is different. I'd like a "with version A you can play X, with
version B you can play X+Y, with version C you can play X+Y and have 3D"...

I don't care too much for graphics, so hardware specs don't speak too much for
me. Tell me how these specs translate in certain game. I just need enough
resolution and enought effects to feel imersed to be happy with the graphics.

~~~
captainmuon
I think they're not so much building "the steam machines", but they are
developing a spec.

> 'm just curious on how Valve (or the HW vendors) are gonna market it. With
> consoles you have the idea that with that unit you can play everything. With
> a steam machine is different. I'd like a "with version A you can play X,
> with version B you can play X+Y, with version C you can play X+Y and have
> 3D"...

This is nowadays already not much of a problem. If you build a mid-high end PC
now, you can expect it to play every game at least at reasonable settings for
the next couple of years. How long it's going to hold is always a bit of
speculation, but you can get hardware reccomendations from certain magazines
or websites.

The same is true for the games' side. If I buy a new game, gaming
magazines/websites will tell you how much CPU, GPU, RAM you need to play it on
minimal, medium, and maximal settings (the hardware requirements on the boxes
are usually rubbish, unfortunately). They usually also say something like
"works fine if you've built your PC in the last 3 years". You don't need to
match the specs exactly, because games have gotten pretty good at
automatically adjusting settings.

So it works now, but it's only going to get easier with Steam machines. You'll
probably see games advertized as "Works great with 2015 steam boxes. Best
effects with a 2016 steam box, or AMD Radeon OMG9000. Minimal requirements:
2014 steam box or equivalent (Intel Core i5 xxxx, 8 GB RAM, ...)."

If I were them, I'd either have yearly revisions, or hardware levels. So in
2014, a low-end will be HW level 5, a mid-end will be level 6, and a high-end
will be level 7. One year later, a new high-end will maybe be level 9. Games
would then just say you need a level 7 PC to run (very much like the windows
hardware index, except PC's will be built to reach a certain number).

~~~
justin66
> If I were them, I'd either have yearly revisions, or hardware levels.

They'll probably end up using something like the Windows Experience Index.
People shouldn't have to worry about the specifics of their CPU, etc. unless
they want to.

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scanr
Interesting price points. According to Engadget they are from $500 all the way
to $6000, although not all of them have been announced.

[http://www.engadget.com/2014/01/06/valve-steam-machines-
spec...](http://www.engadget.com/2014/01/06/valve-steam-machines-specs/)

------
venomsnake
I find the exact hardware much less exciting than the controller and OS.

If valve wants this to succeed they better pour a lot of money into the making
current steam libraries work on linux properly. I want linux as my daily
driver.

------
jiggy2011
Interesting to see alienware on the list, since they already sell gaming PCs
intended for living room use. How will this fit into their existing lineup?

The only concrete differences I can see would be the OS , which would seem
inferior to just shipping windows+steam out of the box at this point; and the
controller. But I always assumed the controller would be compatible with
regular Windows PCs anyway (and I assume they will be available separately).

------
justin66
Curious what it is about this pdf that makes Chrome's pdf reader hit 100% cpu
and not make it past the second page:

[http://media.steampowered.com/store/steammachines/SteamMachi...](http://media.steampowered.com/store/steammachines/SteamMachinesBroc_WEB.PDF)

Works fine, readable in preview.

~~~
adricnet
That is one tough PDF. It's loading in Firefox (UX) here but is balky.

~~~
scholia
The PDF is quite small and loads in a second from Scribd

[http://www.scribd.com/doc/196758024/Steam-Machines-CES-
broch...](http://www.scribd.com/doc/196758024/Steam-Machines-CES-brochure)

Since it has taken more than 30 minutes to load just two pages in Firefox from
[http://media.steampowered.com](http://media.steampowered.com) then it must be
a different problem....

------
ChikkaChiChi
Since Steam Machines == Linux Machines, I'm going to celebrate this as a list
of companies that are now fully supporting Linux OOB. I expect similarly
configured boxes showing up in their retail channels sans a Microsoft OS.

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socialist_coder
As someone who already has a gaming computer as an HTPC, I really just want to
buy the steam controller. It looks like it isnt for sale yet, however =(

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rplnt
"Steam, now on Origin" will be a great slogan.

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painisRelative
Is this the end or the start of the beginning?

~~~
nobodyshere
This is a new way of marketing gaming pc's of mid-range price group. You no
longer will have to know what gtx780 is and how to build a decent machine. It
will also be convenient for media playback. Some kind of a revised htpc that
you don't have to worry about, but still allows you to replace almost anything
inside (try doing that with a ps4 or xbox one).

~~~
scholia
Except people will still need to figure those things out to decide which of
the many different Steam Boxes to buy....

Oth3erwise, the PC and gaming industry strategies are completely different.
With consoles, the hardware is more or less fixed, but later developments (eg
die shrinks) are used to reduce the price. With PCs, the price is maintained
fairly constant over the short term but later developments are used to
increase the performance or whatever is fashionable (eg maintain or reduce the
performance but make it thinner).

------
programminggeek
The only problem with Steam Machines TODAY is just that so many of the games
right now are Windows only. That is changing FAST, but there is a whole
backlog of Windows games that is not moving to Linux soon.

~~~
sc00ty
Valve is working on game streaming, which will hopefully solve this problem.
While not the best solution, though, it will certainly help.

See:
[https://steamcommunity.com/groups/homestream](https://steamcommunity.com/groups/homestream)

