SteamOS, Steam Machines, & Steam Controller

It actually does say a few things of interest:

- Triple A developers are planning to release games directly targeting it. (Most likely Ubisoft)

- OEMs can build their own boxes (Most likely ASUS and maybe Dell, but probably TV manufacturers as well - 'cept for Sony who'll stick with Gaikai and the PS Network).

- OEMs have to sign licensing agreements.

- Us geeky people can build our own boxes.

- The OS will be open to others modifying the source of the various components (hard for them not to, they're probably using GPL components somewhere in their distro).

- You can use your Windows or Mac machines, with Steam installed, to cast/stream your non-linux games to the SteamOS devices.

- It's internet enabled, with web browsing, so you can play casual games without them cluttering your Steam library.

Speculation:

Since OEMs have to sign licensing agreements, Valve (if they are smart) might have minimum required specs and suggested configurations of hardware, which might help developers know what to target (and Valve will also have uber-detailed hardware data for their hardware surveys).

Announcement #2 of 3 (Wednesday at noon) will probably be the Valve-branded Steam Box and info on the new controllers Valve has been working on with built-in biometric data.

Announcement #3 of 3 (Friday at noon) will probably be Halflife 3 !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Or not.

Valve isn't Google, their lascidacial release schedule has become legendary in the industry, any OEM building a "steam box" is risking alot. Valve will have to prove they can deliver OS updates on time and be responsive to the market conditions as well as lead by example .. ie build a cost effective steam box of their own to compete with the next gen console platforms. All of which I think is beyond Valve and Steam OS will fade into obscurity within a year due to lack of support, imo.

I've recently had a chance to try Steam again on PC, i'm surprised how sluggish it is. For a custom purpose application it doesn't feel as responsive as say Chrome or Firefox, not sure why. Content takes an annoyingly long time to load and moving between pages is slow and cumbersome.. They got a long way to go..

They're waiting for you, Gordon...in the test chamber.

And by "They" I mean "I", and by "Gordon" I mean "SteamOS", and by "test chamber" I mean "northern California".

Okay then. :D

Announcement #3 of 3 (Friday at noon) will probably be Halflife 3 !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Or not.

The devil inside me is secretly hoping they'll just build up everyone's hopes for a Half-Life 3, and then announce something really lame. But maybe it'll just be HL2 Episode 3 and not a full-blown HL3.

As for Steam OS... if it helps Linux get better drivers, and driver and kernel improvements make it up stream, then I'm all for it.

I'm a mite uneasy about this.

It's a logical culmination of the direction Valve have been going in since Gabe's initial outbursts about Windows 8, and I'm wondering if it's another move towards Valve trying to sieze control of distribution (which is what I read as the real reason behind Gabe's unhappiness). Are we going to see HL3 being SteamOS only, for example? Will those with standalone installations of Steam start becoming second-class citizens? What's going to happen to the games you've already paid for and installed on those standalone installations if so?

Re: Linux, it seems possible to mix GPL and non-GPL components in a distro (I don't claim to be an expert so this could be wrong) and if so, exactly how much of this will be "free" anyway? I sure can't see Valve releasing a fully open-sourced Steam platform that anyone can grab the code for and implement the necessary functionality on other platforms for (e.g an XBox One/PS4 Steam "loader"). The whole thing smells a little off.

There are a lot of questions the while thing opens up, and some kind of FAQ clarifying the position should exist.

Are we going to see HL3 being SteamOS only, for example? Will those with standalone installations of Steam start becoming second-class citizens?

No (IMO )

It's been the year that the Linux will finally thrive every second year for the past forever. Not even Valve can push Linux to be a mainstream gamer OS.

They're not even trying to replace your desktop OS -- they're trying to replace your media centre / PC in the living room.

The steam demographic for now will still be dominated by desktop PC clients, not media-centre clients. We'll see though, if this is an amazing product, then maybe Steam will get another eleventy million new customers from these living-room boxes, until the Windows/desktop clients are a minority. I'll believe that when I see it though.

Steam can brag about their content. I think they have far more games than Xbox and PSN, and they try to unify the "experience" by having them playable on one system.

Without further research, it seems that SteamOS attempts to unify the diversity of the OSes we have today. As more and more games are developed for Windows, Mac, iOS, Android, it seems that SteamOS attempts to emulate (eventually) every one of these OSes, so you only need to have one platform/box to play Steam games. Game developers can still port their games to any of the platforms they want, but SteamOS will pick that up and run that through their emulator.

It doesn't look like it's going to be a full-blown desktop OS (with windowing toolkit, etc), just a very specialized one for running multi-platform games.

They constantly brand this product as a "living-room" product. So maybe it will come with a dedicated hardware too -- a small box that's sitting right underneath your TV with a small blue and green LED light. A yet another gaming platform next to your PS4 and Xbox One.

Article alludes to some devs having been working with it so far, anyone from the community able to comment?

No. ;)

I normally leap over valve like a rabid fanboy but this has me scratching my head. While it has some awesome features, like streaming, cloud storage, sharing, workshops/community/etc i kind of feel its... Not the best idea.

if it really is limited to games and allows for hot swapping hardware, its sounding like a more feature-restricted console with inconsistent and unknow specs for devs to aim for. So little of the benefits of consoles with all the hassles of pc development, oh yay...

Unless you never actually run games on it and it just functions as a streaming device for your computer with few extra perks like music/movie player or Internet browsing. Hmmmm...

Valve isn't Google, their lascidacial release schedule has become legendary in the industry, any OEM building a "steam box" is risking alot. Valve will have to prove they can deliver OS updates on time and be responsive to the market conditions as well as lead by example ..

While it's a fair point, I don't know. Steam was buggy as hell and took forever to get even basic features in... but still caught on. So who knows.

Great news, not that I intend to buy such a console in the upcoming years, but more Linux games to play.

Faaairly sure it's just a "stream your PC game to a Steam Box" thing or something. Just because otherwise it implies a big massive work with Wine or some layer in between.

We'll see.

Faaairly sure it's just a "stream your PC game to a Steam Box" thing or something. Just because otherwise it implies a big massive work with Wine or some layer in between.

We'll see.

All/Most native linux games will run natively on SteamOS, Windows/Mac games can be streamed(AFAIK Wine will not be pre-installed and it might be tricky to install software through sources other than steam on it(If valve makes it easy to install third party software they might end up getting competing digital distribution services on the platform and that would defeat its purpose). Valve will announce some native SteamOS AAA titles for 2014 shortly. (We can assume that Valve will release their own games for it atleast but unless the other big AAA developers jump on board the OS will most likely flop badly). Getting gamers to adopt the OS shouldn't be that difficult though. Ubuntu allready gives a decent performance boost for sourceengine games so a stripped down system like SteamOS should do even better and if gamers are hesitant due to a low number of games they can always give the SteamOS users free access to some of their own games for a limited time to give people a reason to try it out.

If there is some party I'd have to choose to bring gaming to Linux (or SteamOS specifically, doesn't matter) it would be Valve with Steam.

Valve is no toddler in business world and I trust they know the leap they are taking with SteamOS, they have to be prepared to put lots of bucks into development, support, advertising etc. They were pioneers in cloud-based gaming, digital distribution and electronic sales with Steam, they saw the opportunity and made it happen.

Based on that I have much confidence in them really turning the PC gaming around, perhaps even affecting Windows popularity in the long run. After all, gaming and some specific professional tools are what is nailing down consumer preferences that OEM preferences depend on. After OEM manufacturers start to ship machines without preinstalled OSs or with multiple alternatives so that consumers have to make a conscious choice about it that's when we're starting to see the monopoly break.

That might be getting ahead of things but it's hard not to be enthusiastic about how this could affect the way games will be played.

Holy moly! Thanks for the link. That's a huge thing for me, as a linux fan, I'm really looking forward to this. I really wanted

I hope linux will surpass windows in gaming one day.

One think I find interesting is that -if- done properly, slowly, but surely consoles as we know them will become irrelevant. Some of this can be seen already today in the handheld space with the popularity of the Phablets. SteamOS could slowly replace the dedicated console hardware as there is no longer a reason to have dedicated console hardware, since all you have to do is just support the OS. This of course then re-creates the vendro lock-in issue that they are trying to solve, but I could see SteamOS having some if not significant impact on consoles -if- the adoption rate is high enough.

No. ;)

Heh, well played ;) Though, it would be interesting to know how involved Canonical has been with its development and whether this is part of their convergence plan or if SteamOS will be another downstream effort like Mint, Elementry, or Kubuntu (of course that assumes that it is Ubuntu-Core based)

One think I find interesting is that -if- done properly, slowly, but surely consoles as we know them will become irrelevant. Some of this can be seen already today in the handheld space with the popularity of the Phablets. SteamOS could slowly replace the dedicated console hardware as there is no longer a reason to have dedicated console hardware, since all you have to do is just support the OS. This of course then re-creates the vendro lock-in issue that they are trying to solve, but I could see SteamOS having some if not significant impact on consoles -if- the adoption rate is high enough.

Vendor lock-in is only bad when someone else is doing it :)

Valve is basically wanting to become Amazon.com but for games.

They want to have every website game page use Steam for purchasing, to 'democratize' the video game market. Except, democratize, with 30% going to Valve for every sale of any game anywhere on the internet (and 30% of all DLC and monthly subscriptions). In exchange, consumers will get a unified library, commenting and probably ratings, indie developers will be able to just upload their own games to their own game-specific Steam-enabled webpage and get to control pricing and promotional deals, and triple-A developers will get auto-patching of content. And Valve will force all the developers to go through them or be ostracized.

This is something the Humble Indie Bundle is also wanting to do, and has already be silently unrolling to the masses bit by bit.

Looks like Valve's next announcement is for their Steam Machines

[Update]

Upon further reading, Valve hinted that the next update may revolve around "input", so the third update may likely revolve around how they plan to interface with their new OS

Valve is late to the party the next gen devices will be out then and that will greatly dampen enthusiasm for the "Steam Machine". The issue with the PC is not that it wasn't powerful, the issue was piracy was rampant so the best developers didn't bother making content for it. If the best developers skip over the Steam Machine, it wouldn't matter if it was 2x more powerful than the PS4. It's a chicken and egg deal, u won't get those developers unless you prove your platform is not only viable but successful, but who is gonna buy a 300-1000$ device without atleast some AAA titles and promises of more? Maybe the hardcore PC gamer but that probably isn't enough..