Gabe Newell: Valve's Steam Machines Outperform Consoles At Same Price Point

can't wait to see the sales, or lack thereof, data on these machines. Epitome of niche.
 
crusty_juggler said:
Is the hardware faster on paper? Sure. But in reality, 3D performance under Linux is abysmal. And two years after Valve's big push to Linux, it hasn't gotten any better.

There is zero reason (beyond irrational hatred of MS) to buy a Steam Machine. And let's not forget, that irrational hatred of MS is what started Valve on this crusade in the first place. If "MS is evil" was a valid selling point that resonated with the masses, then Linux would have more than 1% market share.

Consumers want a large selection of games and high performance hardware. Steam Machines offer none of those. The only benefit Steam Machines offer is a sense of self-worth. The feeling that you're sticking it to Microsoft by buying one. Try convincing a garden variety consumer that he should sacrifice performance and a large game library in order to bring down the evil MS behemoth and you'll get nothing but blank stares.
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Its a shame that Valve hasn't nailed this yet. Choices are GOOD, but right now Steam Machines aren't a viable on. I have a Steam Link and I will be returning it.

I hope this shakes out in the years to come. Steam itself was terrible for a solid five years before it came into its own.
 
jwcalla said:
In terms of Steam Machines I never understood why people were so focused on the Linux aspect. That part is nice for people like me who use Linux, but what I thought would be more interesting for PCMR types is that somebody is finally stepping up to try and change the dynamics of gaming from "consoles first, second, third, fourth and, if there's enough time, maybe we'll make a shitty PC port for you scrubs" to putting the PC as the primary target platform for developers.

There are a gazillion reasons why PC gamers should have been getting behind the effort for the benefit of the entire PC platform. But they didn't. "Because Linux."

It seems like the PCMR has no problem being second-fiddle to PS4 and XB1 and getting the sloppy seconds.

Valve and nvidia are about the only companies out there that still care about PC gaming, even if their efforts are imperfect.
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I saw the entire steambox thing as Gabe's fight against the software stores from apple and then Microsoft. It really seemed like a half ass'd response to the push for the software store in windows 8.

People were focused on the linux part because it means the game support tanks. In many big games the pc is already considered a second class system behind the consoles. Valve is then asking developers to do more work which in this case almost seems like the steam os is going to be a third class system. Valve's answer to this was streaming from a windows machine to the steam box. If you have a cheap set top box this isn't a bad feature(which was nvidia's approach). In the steam machines case you really need two gaming systems to pull this off, the gaming computer and the steam machine.

Personally I think they should have gone about this in one of two ways. First would have been to run a windows embedded or full blown copy on it. Comparability would have been a lot higher and the cost would have been under 50 bucks more a unit.

The second would be a steam os free and a more feature packed one for oems that includes windows. Use pci-e passthrough with OVMF with Qemu and KVM to run games on windows that don't run on linux. It would take some tweaking but that way the steam machine could run pretty much everything. Over time if they could get the linux side to take off you could always go away from the windows side.

I guess I don't see steam os being a primary platform for developers. One can say that it helps development for games on linux in general but the linux community has been pretty bad with paid software at the consumer level in the past. You've had companies that focused on porting games and things like the Ubuntu software store that failed badly. Bryan Lunduke talked about it in one of his linux sucks videos where he had a program in like the top 10 paid and it was making next to nothing. Many distributions are very anti closed source programs as well. While linux does a lot of things amazing the vibe around it that paid software and closed source is bad pushes developers away trying to sell software.

DukenukemX said:
Really no OSX support? That's a dick move by Blizzard. Though to be honest I'm not playing their games at the moment. Though it's not like non of their games don't run fine in Wine, but still dick move.
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I wonder what percent of apple computers sold have intel graphics only? Sure the higher in macbook pro 15 inch and the bigger imac have better as does the mac pro. Most of the models just are not setup for gaming. With no expansion on many of the models I can see why they just don't care.
 
funkydmunky said:
Yumm cool-aid. Not much has changed at all as far as XB1 programing. DX12 is being used as a nice marketing bullet vs. PS4. Many programmers have stated that not much has changed and not to expect any level of performance increase.
All of the consoles being GCN have had their own low level API from the get go. Suspiciously AMD also at a parallel time released Mantel API for PC GCN, and now XB1 get DX12 yet nothing of any gravity (except marketing) has changed.
GO....FIGURE.... ;)
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And I'm saying the argument about console optimization vs PC is now BS. This changes nothing about that.
 
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