Read more.Firm seeks to unify living room and PC gaming with Linux powered set-top box.
Read more.Firm seeks to unify living room and PC gaming with Linux powered set-top box.
I'm not sure what Valve means by "tightly controlled" but as long as we have the ability to install XBMC on it, I'll be happy.
I hope it will mean that there aren't 10000 different versions of each hardware component and each software package, so that it will be easier to write drivers that work, for example. I certainly hope he is not talking about controlled environments like we see in the consoles: we've all seen how much those have held back progress in gaming.
I must be one of the few people not looking forward to a Valv PC. At least my Xbox allows me to play my games without plugging into the net.
I would hazard a guess the "controlled environment" will be something like a steam box has a minimum certain intel quad core + 4GB ram + 1/2GB GeForce graphics card + 1TB HDD + Ubuntu or Windows and possibly a DVD rom.
Then they'll gear to making their games run 60fps @ 1080p on a known set of hardware. Unless they use custom Ubuntu with steam big picture overlay dunno how they'll account for the amount of ****e people install onto their PC (mostly windows).
+1 to that, I am getting really pissed off that games companies are making games for consoles and porting them to PC and by doing so reduce the awesomeness that can be achieved if you just focus on the PC market - Battlefield 3 looks and plays amazingly on the PC because it was designed for it!
Well from any other developer - I'd say the project was doomed. VALVe, however, can probably pull it off.
So, here's my predictions.
The "tightly controlled" system will be an exact-spec x86-64 PC running a specially tailored Ubuntu-based OS which presents only Big Picture Mode to users. No optical media support out of the box - just a big hard disk and a network connection (remember the Phantom?). Obviously they won't have remotely enough games available if it's "just" Steam for Linux, so they'll need to go to each of their publishing partners and say "we are releasing a SteamBox, your game won't run on it, fix it now plz" - publishers know that more than 90% of their online purchases come via steam, and will do as they're told. SteamBox ports will run on regular desktop Linux Steam, although not necessarily be tested to work on anything other than the SteamBox's GPU choice. The SteamBox will be hackable (i.e. you can get into it & go nuts as if it were a regular Linux desktop) by design, but by design users won't need to think about the underlying OS. It'll just be Xbox 360 and PS3 and SteamBox and WiiU. There is a less than zero chance of this being Windows-based, and publishers will not accept Valve going behind their backs to push a Wine-based solution to existing game libraries - games will need to be ported (and more importantly, tested) as working well on the SteamBox, even if that means a specially bundled and certified Wine that the user never sees. Both AMD and NVIDIA will be interested in the contract to do the GPU, possibly even Intel will present an offering based on HD4000, citing their superior driver support (i.e. "buy our special CPU with an HD4000 on crack, it'll be better for your end users than shoddy ATI drivers")
Totally disagree here - a SteamBox ("The Boiler"?) looks to be a "no brainer" replacement for a normal console. So if you've got a suitable PC, then you (I guess) install "SteamOS" and away you go. As long as your hardware specs meet, or exceed, that of the SteamBox then you're good to go.
Also remember that this is a single purpose device - it plays games and nothing else. In which case it's going to be dead easy to limit the specs to something reasonable. E.g. in graphics you'll have Radeon and Geforce and possibly Intel HD4000 - one driver for each. Sound cards - limit that to HD Audio. Mouse driver and then one joystick and one gamepad driver. The rest is low level stuff and even here there's not a lot of choice - one for AMD chipsets, one for Intel. Windows "safe" mode does a pretty good job of a minimal system, and most Linux's seem to be pretty adaptable.
In my experience the problems come when you start introducing fancy drivers - but the call for them on a single use system is going to be very arguable.
I also remain to be convinced that console's "controlled environment" has held back gaming - consoles are designed to be minimal fuss, minimal intervention ways of doing video gaming. Not everyone wants to spend 45 minutes+ tweaking this setting and that setting to get a few extra fps - nor figure on spending £200+ on a new video card every 24 months. That the publishers have decided to go for the easy route of doing console games and then enhancing them with a few PC-specific goodies, rather than do the decent thing and do the "high end" PC version first and "dumb it down" for the consoles, isn't the fault of the consoles themselves.
Agreed, but not Windows - nothing against it, but it's already been stated that Valve want to go Linux. Licensing has got to be one issue, but also if you go Windows then you're handing your future to Microsoft to do with as they will.
The argument against the "sh** shovellers" (you know - the one's who just MUST have that fancy toolbar on their browsers, etc) is easy. You can go under the hood, but if you do so then you're on your own - same deal as with rooting/jailbreaking phones. And if there's a Linux engine under there then, to use the cliche, "if you build it then they will come", the "they" in that case being the hackers and tweakers - look at Kushan's post (#2) for an example.
they may want to go linux, but lets think about the percentage of games on steam that are windows only. they have no real choice but to use windows.
The kind of user they are targeting is the person who has a computer upstairs, probably already has a steam account, but like playing games on his TV and cannot lug his computer back and forth, even doing that with a laptop is a lot of hassle.
For that person, are you really going to say "hey, buy this steambox, you can use your current steam account with hundreds of games. but you cant play any of them because it runs linux!"
so yeah, they are stuck with windows.
Pre-existing title count is largely irrelevant. Windows steam users are already fairly game saturated. Valve is looking at this as a long term investment. But on that count, there's actually a fair number of titles on Linux that are already on Steam. If Valve churns out a SteamBox then it'll be a heavy driver to encourage publishers to port to SteamBox as well as PS3, and the technologies they use aren't be so dissimilar that making a port for their engines would be problematic. And if it works on SteamBox, then it works on Steam for Linux.
Im hoping that it means relatively locked down hardware configs and drivers but with a relatively enhanceable Linux os (im not to bothered if its not super modable so long as its easy for people to make stuff for it so we can add office and software features etc). Big picute isn't quite ready yet without media playback and a lack of game support but it works well with games which have properly integrated it and a steambox with good support and a £300-400 price tag would be an insta buy for me.
As opposed to staking your future on a niche OS which lacks the backing of a huge multinational software giant and support from the predominant graphics API (Direct X). Windows or Ubuntu - both present a risk. Best reason not to use Windows is cost of licensing, assuming that eclipses the cost of pushing a non-Windows ecosystem into the PC-based gaming arena.
If only there were some sort of graphics API everyone could use... that runs on many operating systems... something that all the major GPU vendors supported... that wasn't controlled by any particular company's agenda... lets call it Open Graphics Library... oh wait a min.
aidanjt (11-12-2012)
I think you might be missing the point of Steam slightly. You don't NEED a mega powerful PC to play Steam games on. I'm using a small netbook to play indie games on when I'm on the move. I expect they'll have different tiered editions of the PC's to cater to specific needs, and price ranges.
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