
Valve Confirms They are Working on a Steam Box - justinbkerr
http://www.maximumpc.com/article/news/valve_confirms_they_are_working_steam_box123
======
sudonim
I built a steambox a few days ago. Dropped $500 for a pretty performant
dedicated gaming box. 8gb ram, 120gb ssd, and a $120 video card.

The Steam big-picture mode is pretty slick, but not all of the games work
seamlessly with an xbox controller so I've found that you generally need to
keep the mouse and keyboard around.

Instead of keeping it plugged into my TV, I now plugged in an old monitor and
the girlfriend has been enjoying the sims 3.

Steam absolutely knows what they're doing and they have a real shot of
widespread adoption if they build their own linux based Steam Box. The big
issue is going to be game compatibility with whatever hardware / controller
configuration they go with.

~~~
bitsoda
I commented about this here: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4886028> the
other day.

Essentially, how often will Valve upgrade its Steam Box? Certainly more than
every 6-7 years. For those of you thinking right now: "you can ugprade it
yourself!", well, yes you could , but that defeats the whole purpose of having
one standardized spec for developers to target. Throw in a new graphics card
here and there, and you've suddenly splintered your user base into those with
PCs, Official Steam Boxes from Valve, and Official Steam Boxes from Valve that
have been upgrade by the users. And now, certain games will only work on some
combination of those three.

I'm a fan of Valve, their games, and their culture, and want to see this
succeed. I'm sure they've put much thought into scenarios like this and trust
them to make the right decision.

~~~
varikin
I image the Official Steam Box from Valve (OSBfV) wouldn't actually be that
upgradable. I would want something that would fit aesthetically with my TV,
XBox, etc. Trying to make the OSBfV cheap enough to entice consumers, yet pack
enough of a punch for "gamers" (I really dislike that stereotype, but that
isn't the point) would, I imagine, require not quite interchangeable hardware,
much like the XBox. But, don't discount that Steam could easily release a
OSBfV1, 2, 3 etc every other year with the latest and greatest (that fits in
the form factor and budget constraints).

~~~
bloaf
The other possibility is that their Steam Box fits with their "games as a
service" model. Imagine if they charged a monthly/yearly fee and occasionally
shipped out hardware upgrades to all Steam Box owners.

~~~
erichocean
We'll be doing that model in 2013 with a B2B SaaS service that benefits from
an onsite edge node to reduce latency, among other things.

The hardware isn't sold, it's leased, but the effect is the same: we manage
the onsite hardware, fix it when it breaks (next day replacement), and send
out new hardware every few years. The hardware is literally plug and play, and
works correctly behind a NAT router with DHCP.

We actually decide what hardware a customer gets (it's based on load --
standard provisioning stuff), although customers can upgrade to a system they
don't actually need for a fee.

I think this approach is _way_ better for customers, and the response so far
has been extremely positive. No longer do they have to worry about
provisioning and maintaining hardware, or even deciding what to buy. _Of
course_ they don't know the best way to provision hardware for our software.
Why would they?

It'd be really interesting to see this approach done in the consumer space.

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sbierwagen
Blogspam.

OP is [http://kotaku.com/5966860/gabe-newell-living-room-pcs-
will-c...](http://kotaku.com/5966860/gabe-newell-living-room-pcs-will-compete-
with-next+gen-consoles)

~~~
jrajav
As nice as it is to link to the actual interview, the blog post does so as
well, and adds its own content to the mix. I don't see what's pasted or spammy
about this.

~~~
sbierwagen
"Blogspam" is slang used to refer to a specific rule on HN, rather than a
literal description of content.

<http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html>

    
    
      Please submit the original source. If a blog post 
      reports on something they found on another site, submit 
      the latter.

~~~
stdbrouw
So if a post "adds its own content to the mix" then it can't be blogspam,
innit?

~~~
darylteo
It's to mitigate people linking to the same story 10 times.

However, if the additional content is noteworthy, then you could link to it on
HN, but make the title accordingly specifying that it is the opinion of the
writer, and not the original source, that is what the reader should be
considering.

~~~
stdbrouw
Fair point.

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anonymous
I'll be interested to see if Valve will release a Linux-only or a
Linux/Windows hybrid box. It is possible today to have a system where you keep
two VMs suspended - a linux vm and a windows vm and thaw one to run the
program you need, with pci pass-through to give it full control of the video
card. This is quite feasible if they go with ATI hardware that has open
documentation.

Save system state, boot windows vm, launch game (somehow passing the
information to the steam instance in the windows vm, but that's the least of
your worries), once game finishes, freeze vm, restore system state and show
regular steam-on-linux interface.

I've had before the idea of building a system built on a hypervisor that lets
you dynamically switch vms, but the high cost of hardware with an iommu and
the pretty astronomical cost of this for a hobby project (i.e. my lazyness)
have kept me from doing it.

~~~
TazeTSchnitzel
I have a feeling they might just use wine for games that are known to work
fine under it.

~~~
SquareWheel
What would the licensing repercussions of that be, if any?

~~~
wmil
It's not clear. Many Mac ports are done with Transgaming's tools. Which are
commercial and include code from old BSD versions of Wine.

Microsoft isn't actually obligated to sue, so they may have just decided that
it wasn't worth while.

The Google/Oracle API copyright decision probably helps Wine.

So they're probably in the clear, but Microsoft could certainly make their
lives difficult.

------
Permit
I'm struggling to understand how they're going to pull this off without
pissing people off. It was my understanding that console makers typically take
losses on sales of their console and make up for it by selling games. That's
why we have such a slow release cycle for consoles.

A big gripe people seem to have with consoles is that the hardware limitations
due to slow release cycles prevent games from advancing. How is Steam going to
continue to put games out quickly?

Are they selling it as a PC that I could also use for word processing or
programming? This might help justify a higher cost. But then, I'm not putting
it in my living room and it's not really competing with consoles. Perhaps I'm
missing something here.

~~~
ANTSANTS
I think the tradition model of long hardware cycles, taking huge losses in an
attempt to beat Moore's law, and writing to the "bare metal" to squeeze the
most out of outdated tech is merely what consumers and the current console
manufacturers are used to, and not necessarily what consumers want or what is
the best business strategy.

I hate to put it this way, but I think Apple has already proven that the best
strategy for closed hardware platforms is to release incrementally improved
hardware on a regular release cycle, and mandate that software be written to
APIs and not "the metal" so that it remains forward compatible. In a world
where so many people happily replace their 100% working phones with new ones
every year or two, I don't really see why most of the current console market
would have a problem with purchasing a new Steam Box every few years.

Valve could easily stick $200-400 commodity PC hardware in a box and blow the
pants off of the vast majority of the existing console market that is
currently enjoying games running on hardware that was state of the art in
2006. Even if the PS4 and Xbox720 (or whatever they plan to call them) come
out later with superior hardware, I think most of the meaningful difference
can be made up by carefully cooperating with NVidia/AMD to optimize the
drivers for the specific models of GPUs used in a limited range of hardware,
while aggressively promoting the yearly hardware refreshes.

It's possible that Valve could end up playing the console game by its
established rules, but I think they'd be wasting what is probably the best
opportunity available to anyone in the industry to become the "Apple of the
living room" if they did -- lord knows why Apple itself isn't trying harder on
that front.

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gradys
What is Valve's plan for getting developers to actually develop for Linux? Is
the hope that the chance to be compatible with Valve's hardware will encourage
enough other developers to get on board?

~~~
mbell
I doubt its going to be pushing "develop for linux" that will be a problem,
most games aren't using many os calls and those are generally easily ported
anyway.

The challenge will be getting developers to program for opengl/sdl/openal
instead of directx, something they could already do on windows but have chosen
to go the directx route. The mobile push has opened a lot of developers up to
opengl ES and opengl in general sucks less now so this may not be as difficult
a pitch as it would have been 5 years ago.

What would be really cool, is if valve decided to throw their weight behind
building a direct 3d state machine for linux, I know there is work underway
there but I would imagine valve could seriously speed that up along with being
in a position to apply pressure to the video card manufacturers for support in
a way that the OSS community simply can't.

~~~
AshleysBrain
Heh, interesting - Google's ANGLE project supports OpenGL ES on top of D3D 9,
and if another project implemented D3D on top of OpenGL... would it ever
matter which you used?

~~~
mbell
The linux attempt at this in Gallium3D[0], which is the previous work I was
alluding to in my last post. I believe a D3D 10/11 state tracker exists for it
but the problem is that only the open source ATI and Nvidia drivers support
it. Unfortunately the 3D performance of those drivers is somewhere between
broken and terrible so it doesn't mean much today.

> if another project implemented D3D on top of OpenGL

This is exactly what wine does.

[0] <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gallium3D>

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shmerl
It was already posted:

<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4893902>

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VexXtreme
I think the market needs something like this badly. I have a pretty big Steam
library and I've always used my primary PC both for work and gaming. There are
some upcoming games that won't be available on PC (GTA V) that I want to play
but I am also not ready to fragment my gaming library by buying a console now.
Hopefully something like this will entice and motivate certain developers to
start developing for PC/X86-X64 again.

And now that Valve will release an actual console, Steam will be able to cover
a much larger population than any of the consoles. People satisfied with
performance on the par with Xbox and PS3 will be perfectly happy with this
solution, while people requiring more performance will be free to build a
dedicated gaming machine and install Steam on it.

I don't know how no other console manufacturers have thought of this. One of
the biggest reasons why I never bought a console (thought I wanted one at
times) is because Microsoft and Sony don't allow you to access your game
purchases on other platforms. I think we're finally heading toward a future
where cross platform game ownership will be a reality.

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venomsnake
I think the only interesting thing here is Gabe's definition of "very
controlled". If it means fixed hardware is acceptable. If it means walled
garden with no root or unsigned code - no thanks.

~~~
jugglinmike
Based on the full quote (below), it seems that he was referring to Valve's
offering only:

"Well certainly our hardware will be a very controlled environment," he said.
"If you want more flexibility, you can always buy a more general purpose PC.
[...]"

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shmerl
Reposting a comment, since this threads seems to have picked up over the old
one:

\---

One reason why consoles from MS and Sony are bad is their obsessive DRM and
the notion of turning a general purpose computer into a locked up appliance.

But there is another architectural reason which is generic - consolized games
degrade the quality of gaming interfaces by making them overly minimalistic
(since consoles don't use keyboards), and even developers who release
crossplatform games for PC and consoles often save time by not distinguishing
these interfaces, and when you run the game on PC it feels crippled interface
wise. So I'd say for gaming in general, consoles are a big disservice.

We'll have to see how this will develop.

~~~
TillE
Consoles drive and constrain game design in several important ways. UI is a
big one (how many management sims are playable with a gamepad?), but RAM is
probably even more important.

The demand for ever-fancier graphics on aging, static hardware means that
every other aspect of a game suffers. Smaller levels, fewer options, simpler
AI, etc. This is why the next generation of consoles is going to be such a big
deal for anyone who plays major cross-platform games.

For games that require a more complex interface, there's still a thriving PC-
only games industry. And now Kickstarter is helping to power it.

------
bowyakka
This one was obvious at least 1 year ago if not more

Its a literary of little things that kept adding up for valve to make a move
in this direction.

The big ones for me have been the fact that valve has been hiring hardware,
dsp, fpga, linux developers, kernel hackers, control chain specialists and
such forth for the last 2-3 years.

I remember saying a long time back that valve are either going to push onto
some android hybrid thing, or that there were making a console.

I think the Linux thing was valve reacting to windows 8 that forced them to
show their hand a little.

~~~
sjwright
> Its a literary of little things

The word you're looking for is litany (an understandable literary mistake)

~~~
bowyakka
ha thanks, gotta to love autocomplete huh ?

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ZeroGravitas
He seems to be suggesting some kind of open market for these things, that is
instead of trying to claim all the profit via using industry standard
commodity components and then intentionally breaking compatibility in some key
manner, they're going to grow the market by allowing 3rd parties to compete
with 'clones' (to use an old Mac phrase) of different shapes and sizes, and
presumably make their money on selling the games.

Or to put it another way, it's an Android strategy, not iOS. Could be a very
big deal.

------
gordaco
If this is done properly, it may change a little how the gaming PCs market
works. If every "Steam Box" game is 100% compatible with PC's Steam (and so
far we have no reason to think otherwise) we will start to see PCs labeled as
"Steam Box compliant" and such, to identify machines that are supposedly
guaranteed to run smoothly any "Steam Box" game.

Other PCs, with inferior hardware, will maybe lower their price.

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JackpotDen
I imagine it will be a set of components that valve will sell pre-completed,
or the user will be able to create their own.

It could come in minimum, recommended, and max, and the developers would have
these basic devices to aim for. The user can upgrade, but it will lead to a
small risk on their behalf. If it screws up, they can just put the original
components back.

------
jeffool
I'm still genuinely surprised Valve hasn't launched a game streaming service.
Then suggest developers offer Win, Linux, Mac, AND streaming, so they can
stream to every platform (like this Steam Box) they can.

"Steam Cloud Stream?"

~~~
smacktoward
I'm not; if the experience of the last big entrant to try streaming games,
OnLive, is any indication, that kind of service is an absolute furnace for
cash. The Verge reported that at its height, OnLive was burning through $5
million per month to support a measly 1,600 concurrent users
(<http://www.theverge.com/2012/8/28/3274739/onlive-report>).

It's possible that smarter architecture could bring that figure down; OnLive
needed to have a physical machine for every concurrent player (!). And OnLive
made plenty of other mistakes that a smart business like Valve might avoid.
But even if you did everything right it still sounds like running a streaming
games service at a profit with today's tech would be a serious challenge.

~~~
josephlord
I agree that the business model probably doesn't make sense generally but
Onlive isn't a useful example. Over $3000/user/month (5M/1600) sounds
absolutely ridiculous. You could buy a new machine for each user every month,
host it, license the software on it and still afford to pay the bandwidth.

It seems highly likely that the support costs for the 1,600 users were noise
amongst the staff, marketing, licensing and other costs (including potentially
wasteful overprovisioning based on expected sales).

Having said that if it cost even $10/month (and it may be more or less) to
support a user the whole business model may break down.

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mtgx
I hope he asks OEM's to only use Linux on their boxes, although if only some
use it, the others will be pressured to use it too to keep prices competitive.

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sergiotapia
Make it cheap (200$) and make it run all my Steam games and I'll buy one.

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malloreon
perfect, now there's no need to buy a gaming PC.

