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.
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.
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.
It's the android model. Valve make the reference hardware and OS, the PC manufacturers build the boxes. The PC manufacturers are betting that Steambox will let them tap into the console market which is both huge and currently unavailable too them.
The gaming PC market is shrinking. Basically nobody buys pre-built gaming PCs anymore. It makes a lot of sense for manufacturers to join forces under a common label.
And now with most of the Steam games available for Linux, and many more running nicely under Wine, Linux has almost caught up with Mac. I switched to OSX (with a Windows dual-boot option) on my new PC, because it runs most of the games I played, because it offers all the Unix stuff I need for work, and still runs the consumer software (MS Office) I occasionally need. Now that a critical amount of games are running on Linux, I'm thinking about ditching OSX and going Linux(+Windows for the occasional odd app) on all of my devices.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
It would be surprising if it was the other way around.
Companies like Microsoft, Nintendo and Sony make the really big bucks from the publishing fees of the games, the hardware is sold basically at cost (or at loss if we consider production, design and software costs).
Third party Steam Machines sellers can save on software, but they need to have some margin on the hardware itself, unless Valve cuts them a percentage on the actual sales.
I don´t think price will ever be the selling point of Steam Machines.
I think the prices are typical for gaming PCs. They are not really building a new console, they are reviving the "Branded PC".
Unless you are buying a PC for a company, buyers fall into two categories today. Those that buy a $300 "Office PC" from the shelf, and those that build their own. High-end preassembled PCs are basically gone (save for "all-in-ones").
Since the PC market is generally shrinking (or stagnating), it makes a lot of sense to join forces and collect the big gaming PC assemblers under a united label. It's a little bit like people don't want a Sony or an Acer or an Asus anymore, they want an "Ultrabook".
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.
- 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..
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.
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).
> 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.
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).
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.
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 =(
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).
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).
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.
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.
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.