Steam Machine question

[Alfred The Grey]

Ok, I have perhaps a stupid question. I confess to ignoring the steam machine up until now. I understand that the pc is basically running a flavor of Linux. I also understand that valve has been pushing linux development for games.

My question is, what is the "draw/demand" for a steam machine if it only runs linux compatible games?

If I want to play witcher 3, must I stream the game from my main PC through this glorified proxy (steam machine)?

 

[Deleted member 83233]

It's a PC. You can run SteamOS, any other Linux distribution, or Windows on it. You could dual boot, wipe SteamOS completely, or just use it as is.

There are quite a few things you can do with it. One would be to stream to it for games that aren't supported in SteamOS yet. Not ideal when you could just buy the Steam Link thing though for less money.

Have you sorted by OS lately on Steam? I was quite surprised to see the Linux/Mac support has probably tripled/quadrupled in the last few months. A lot of AAA games have gotten ported recently. I see this trend continuing.

If one is into Indie games, he/she could buy one of the low end Steam boxes for very little money, and be quite happy I think too. I don't think these are for everyone, and definitely not for the type of person that hangs out on a site like this for the most part, but I think they have a lot bigger place than our demographic might think.

If I didn't already have a pretty nice PC in the living-room I'd be tempted to pick up a mid-high end one of these just because of the simplicity of it. I just don't need one though with upwards of ten PCs in the house. I have a few friends that got them because they've yet to make the jump to living-room computing. In their cases, these make quite a bit of sense. If anything, it just widens the PC audience (which is pretty broad in what it offers,) which is good for everyone I think.