
What happened to Steam Machines? - faitswulff
http://www.pcgamer.com/what-happened-to-steam-machines/
======
mjevans
Didn't SteamOS mostly become a hedge against Microsoft locking away first
class access to their platform for Games from competitors like Valve and the
titles they help sell/publish for developers?

In the years since SteamOS first launched the open source hardware drivers
have also gotten much better. Valve continues to contribute towards better
OpenGL and Vulkan (note, mis-spelled as a distinct brand name) support (new
features, hitting current contemporary hardware support levels/etc).

The biggest issue that I can see is the number of development studios that
only target Windows (currently 90+% of the market share); it tends to be
better if they use a development kit that also allows for builds on other
platforms, but if the developer doesn't have basic automated testing on either
a Mac or Linux/BSD/etc system of some other kind then platform specific bugs
easily slip in.

~~~
erikb
90+% without Linux? That's not how it feels like, though. Maybe it's because
the genres I play are accidentally also the genres with the most Linux
support, but it feels like beside the odd game here and there or an older
incarnation of a game I like, everything is on Linux. And with most engines
providing the easy choice to add another OS to build for, the numbers should
be growing even more.

~~~
Jach
I also don't think it feels like 90+% these days. My own steam profile says
144/323 games support Linux, plus I've got some number more Linux capable
games from bundles that I never imported into Steam but either played on
desktop or in some cases the mobile version. (Then there's the "classic" Linux
games from the dark ages that I really liked a lot like Battle for Wesnoth,
Tremulous, and BZFlag.)

Of course of the steam ones, I've encountered several that either flat out
didn't work on my system (probably the hardest part of shipping linux binaries
is testing for many distros and setups, SteamOS/Ubuntu gets you most of the
way there though) or they worked poorly. So most of my gaming is still in
Windows 7 but I don't really use that OS for other stuff. Of those 144, I've
played maybe half of them (my backlog is huge..) but mostly not on Linux.
Either because they didn't support it when I played (Half-Life games as
probably the oldest example) or I tried and it didn't work [well] or I just
didn't even bother trying.

Even for the engines that don't support one-click Linux (or Mac) builds, it's
not an insurmountable effort to support Linux, and if the game was already
targeting multiple consoles+PC they've probably abstracted most platform
specific stuff already. So it's just an economic issue. A lot of the
technological issues have been mitigated or gone away.

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Robelius
The number of games in my steam library that have Linux/Mac support now is
over 100 versus a few years ago where it was maybe 10 games. My gaming PC died
a week ago, and I started looking into getting a new pc. But the thing is I
don’t feel forced to do a Windows machine to have a gaming PC. I don’t play
many AAA games, and am considering going with a Linux build.

I think the healthier ecosystem for non-windows games is what Value was going
for. And it hasn’t stopped shifting towards that direction.

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derekp7
The thing that happened with Steam Machines is the same thing that happened
with Linux-based netbooks.

In the netbook case, vendors needed something that would run on lower spec
hardware, and would be cheap enough to not be a major component of the
machine's price. Windows Vista was to resource heavy, and expensive. But then
Microsoft responded by re-releasing XP, for something like $10, but only for
netbooks, so a couple of the advantages of Linux had evaporated.

Steam Machines were a response to Windows 8, and the direction that Microsoft
was heading. After Steam on Linux became a reality, Microsoft responded by
making Windows 10 more palatable than Win 8.

~~~
digi_owl
You also had Intel move in with Atom, and the two of them combined basically
put down a stringent definition of what a netbook was supposed to be.

This in large part to avoid Netbooks eating into their lucrative ultra-
portable platform that corporations kept buying for their road warriors.

The fear being that corporations would switch to Netbooks with a mobile data
connection and simply access corporate computing resources using Citrix or
similar.

Note btw that this was much the same idea that Google had when they first
started pushing Chromebooks, to the point that one of their big launch demos
were the ability to run Citrix.

Never mind that this also mothballed any plans for Android beyond phones. As
seen with how even the 3.x "tablet" UI, that was perfectly adapted for
landscape use, was gradually rolled back.

------
pmarreck
Disclaimer: I can't stand the Windows hegemony, period, much less their
dominance of PC gaming (and I'm sure Gabe felt similarly).

Valve will need to dump a lot of money into driver optimization for 3D
hardware in order to make this work. Windows 3D driver optimization, like it
or not, is top-notch. I believe early demos of games on SteamOS were running
at something like half the framerate (or less) vs. exact same game running on
Windows on the same hardware.

There is also the matter of "is it a PC, or is it a console?" since the
inertia of people's brains doesn't really have a defined space to put
something in-between into.

------
erikb
What's really stopping us here? For quite some time it was graphics drivers
support:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IVpOyKCNZYw](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IVpOyKCNZYw)

Is this still the case? I hear from many people that at least on Ubuntu that's
no problem anymore. Are the graphics cards still overheating? Any experience
in that area?

And yes, Valve could've done things better, but it's not that bad, that you
couldn't do anything with at. As said, at least on Ubuntu with Steam gaming
should be fine. And if we got one thing from Steam it's that more and more
games are deployed for Linux as well.

Really, why hasn't it lifted off now? Is it really that users are so stupid
that they don't see a $0 offer is better than a $100 offer for an OS? Hard to
believe.

~~~
grenoire
Not really. That $100 offer comes with better performance, support, and GPU
drivers; users do care enough about those.

~~~
erikb
Is that still the case? Last I checked the graphics support was there. Exactly
in this time frame since SteamOS announcement they pushed NVidia and friends
to provide better Linux support as well.

~~~
sgift
Yes, it's still the case. The Linux support is far better than it was a few
years ago, but not even remotely comparable - NVidia (and I think AMD too, but
I have a NVidia card) provide a new Windows driver with specific optimizations
for almost every AA to AAA game. For example: The last Linux driver in the
"short lived" branch came out at 09.05., the last Windows driver 29.06

~~~
erikb
I see. Sad to hear that.

~~~
Pica_soO
I always assumed the best approach would actually to have a console-hardware
emulation for gaming.

------
mixedCase
I'm pretty sure that Valve rushed it, botched it and now it's waiting to have
something substantial before giving it another go. They have been putting a
lot of work on improving Linux as a gaming platform, so I'm fairly confident
it isn't just something to keep MS at bay.

------
orionblastar
SteamOS is based on Debian last I heard. Not that many games for Linux and at
least 90 percent of video game companies target Windows. Until Linux gets more
support, SteamOS will not be viable enough for people to buy.

Anyone remember the Indrema that was Linux based? It had some of the same
problems.

~~~
erikb
> Until Linux gets more support, SteamOS will not be viable enough for people
> to buy.

I don't see why this argument is reasonable. Windows is currently costing you
about $100. Linux is currently costing you exactly $0. Linux has come so far,
I doubt there is any area where it doesn't make you at least 80% satisfied. So
the choice would save you about $80 of value, two triple A games in a Steam
sale.

And I don't know what your choice of games are, but while there may be really
90% of steam product listings without Windows support most people also
wouldn't buy/play about 90% of the products. If you look at the interesting
games the feeling is more like 80% of what we need is there as well. And the
rest will certainly follow once the user demand for Linux is there.

So, please continue to think what the real reason for not switching is. The
providers would certainly follow. Most already have a Linux deployment
pipeline ready and just wait for users to ask for it.

~~~
orionblastar
Ok a better argument would be that GPU companies put driver priority on
Windows drivers and don't do too much for Linux.

Some popular games like Civilization VI have been ported to Linux but they run
better on Windows and faster for some reason. I suspect the Windows drivers
are better optimized. I triple boot Linux Mint, Windows 7 Pro, and Windows 10
Pro. Linux Mint seems to play the Civ 6 game slower than 10 or 7.

~~~
the_af
Depending on your hardware (of course), many AAA games run fantastically well
on Linux. I'm playing Mad Max for example, and it runs beautifully on a
GTX960M, great framerate and no glitches that I can see.

------
moron4hire
Valve is a lot like a small version of Alphabet in that there are no adults
around to make sure people are dilligently finishing and polishing products.

I say this as an developer myself. After a 20 year career of working on other
people's businesses and struggling to put my own things together, the whole,
"we'll make amazing things if we just get away from management" thing is a
gigantic, unproductive trap of thinking. Few programmers have the necessary
self-awareness of their own limitations to stick to a problem all the way
through to the end.

~~~
erikb
I work in a big corp's software science department and this is really how it
feels like. Lots of awesome ideas, but everything is just 40%-60% done. And
you can't really blame budget or upper management for this, since in our
industry it's totally fine to come 10 years late to the party. In this market
segment you may still be the first.

~~~
Jach
You should have lunch with the non-science department guys and see where
they're at. I would bet it's pretty similar, not everything but lots of things
only 40-60% done, PMs and some devs have lots of awesome ideas that can't all
squeeze into the next planning horizon. The difference is things at least get
shipped in that state and worked on incrementally with lots of flags to hide
the roughest edges, ideally at some point things are worked on enough and
declared 90+% "done" and only worked on in maintenance mode but there's always
new things shipping half-baked.

------
pjmlp
GNU/Linux and BSDs aren't a platform for gaming, it is quite easy to see on
their conferences.

One goes to WWDC and BUILD, even Google IO, there are always a few tracks
related to game development, libraries and debugging tooling.

GNU/Linux and BSDs are all about file systems, kernel drivers, license
advocacy.

When graphics get talked about, it is usually about X, Wayland or how to get
vendors to release specs, hardly motivating for professional game developers.

I eventually came to realize that regarding gaming, the OS X/Windows
comunities are closer to what Amiga and Atari ST were, than GNU/Linux and BSDs
will ever be.

~~~
the_af
> _GNU /Linux and BSDs aren't a platform for gaming_

My huge library of GOG, HumbleBundle and Steam games, some of which are AAA
titles, begs to differ.

