News - Steam continues impressive growth in face of ‘PC decline’

[HEXUS]

Also there are hints that the Linux powered Steam Box will be revealed next week.

Read more.

[spoons33]

The pc is dead....long live the pc

[Noxvayl]

The news about PC market decline is centred around pre-built systems anyway, this has little to do with the gaming community who favour self builds or custom built units for their machines. I know of a few friends that have started playing PC games now after getting bored with their console.

I am with Gabe Newell on this one, the gaming market in terms of PC hardware components and games is not influenced by retail sails of already built machines from the likes of Dell, Acer, HP, Lenovo and others. They seem to be independent of one another.

[Andi-C]

Steam's increase in sales surely due to the common retailers going bust & Disk style installs being now Downloads ?

[Tpyo]

One problem for the PC market is Moore's law - It used to be that 3 years down the line, a PC would start to struggle with the demands of new software. With much of the recent drive being towards better power efficiency (rather than more balls-to-the-wall speed), a 3 year old computer can comfortably run most of the software out today. It doesn't help matters that the software is being written in many cases to be also run on laptops etc. so the power requirements are minimized (yes that is a good thing, but not if you are trying to justify upgrading desktop PCs!). The laptop/tablet market can still sell on increased performance/increased battery life. That leaves the high-end desktop market (and therefore upgrades) reliant on certain industries that actually need the grunt, and enthusiasts. 'Normal' home users just don't need to upgrade as often as they used to.

[whitetop]

pc is not dead just people too dumb to see it.

what do you think your consoles are its a pc in a small box with a modded linux on it.

pc is that dead everyday their is over 500 people buying a pc for home use.

pc is that dead online companies are not making so much money on selling pc part?


get a grip with out a pc would would not have anything today not even your stupid phone/tablet games bloody console fanboys talking crap as always.

[ChinesePate]

if I got a penny every time I've heard that one...

[crossy]

The news about PC market decline is centred around pre-built systems anyway, this has little to do with the gaming community who favour self builds or custom built units for their machines. I know of a few friends that have started playing PC games now after getting bored with their console. I am with Gabe Newell on this one, the gaming market in terms of PC hardware components and games is not influenced by retail sails of already built machines from the likes of Dell, Acer, HP, Lenovo and others. They seem to be independent of one another.

From experience, the mainstream folks didn't really cater for the gamer - unless it was a very well heeled one, (e.g. Alienware, Voodoo, etc). And now they seem to be spending more resource on laptops, ultrabooks and AIO's - none of which are particularly good gaming platforms.

No, I know quite a few people who've bought a "basic" machine (core i5 etc) and then - when the warranty was up - opened that sucker up and slapped in a decent graphics card. Heck, I know one guy who did that and then discovered that the PSU wasn't man enough so replaced that too, and slapped in some more RAM at the same time. One good thing about the AMD APU-based gear is that while the cpu performance ain't great, the GPU is actually pretty reasonable (compared to Intel's equivalent). And you can get something okay from a major name for around the cost of a new XBone - but of course the PC's much, much more flexible.

Steam and Gabe deserve to do well with Steam Box, as they've managed to identify the weak link in using a PC for gaming - namely Windows. Basing the SB on Linux - which handles hardware upgrades a whole damn sight better than Windows does - I think means that their "console" is going to have a lot of geek appeal and flexibility. Especially if they're going to - as suggested - allow home builders to make their own SB's and put on the OS for minimal/no cost. If so, and they can get good game support for it, then I'll find that a lot more exciting/interesting than PS4 or XBone.

Actually to my shame, I've made a lot more use of Steam in the last twelve months than I did at anytime previously. Unfortunately I'm a sucker for those "sale" deals. That said I've only bought one "full price" title and that was SRIV and only then because (a) I was impatient, and (b) I figured like Sleeping Dogs, it was probably going to end up getting Steam delivered anyway.

Strangely enough I'm not making any kind of similar use of either Origin (EA) or uPlay (Ubisoft), mainly because I find those two deliver a far worse "customer experience" than Steam.

[DanceswithUnix]

This could be *really* interesting. If Steam box is based on open source, it can be taken as a minimum spec and other people can build them.

I find it hard to talk of the PC as in decline when everyone I know has at least one and often two (that is per person, not household). They just have no reason to buy another.

Charlie had a good rant about Intel failing to keep the PC platform relevant.

http://semiaccurate.com/2013/09/18/i...s-coming-back/

[Dooms]

Yey for PC.

As for the steam box the issue I see is that everything is pointing towards it being a Linux box which just isn't good enough. I mean there is only 194 currently working games on Steam Linux (http://steamdb.info/linux/) and most of them aren't exactly big titles... You won't be getting me onto a Linux box any time soon if that instantly means I won't be able to play over half of my library.

[DanceswithUnix]

If they release Half Life 3 first for Steam Box, then people will curse like hell then buy one

Otherwise yes, it would be like releasing the Wii-U without a new Mario Kart or Zelda title on it, no-one would buy it...

[crossy]

Yey for PC. As for the steam box the issue I see is that everything is pointing towards it being a Linux box which just isn't good enough. I mean there is only 194 currently working games on Steam Linux (http://steamdb.info/linux/) and most of them aren't exactly big titles... You won't be getting me onto a Linux box any time soon if that instantly means I won't be able to play over half of my library.

You're right in that there's not that much content for Steam for Linux - but then again is that any different to any other new platform? Remember the iFan's pouring scorn on Android for lack of "decent" games - and now Android has a pretty vibrant games community - arguably better than iOS given that there's dedicated Android gaming machines.

Valve HAVE to speaking be speaking to the big vendors, unless their intention is to make it up from indy games. Then again, I've had some indy games that could run rings for quality around the "mainstream" titles. My own feeling though, is that all that's needed is for one, maybe two, of the majors to go for the Steam Box and then the rest will be forced to follow. And much as it pains me I think that it'd be EA that would be most likely to dip a toe in the SB water.

Basing the SB on Linux is a great idea, as the alternatives would be either to develop their own OS (dumb!) or go cap in hand to Microsoft (monumentally stupid). A Windows-base SB would be dire imho - remember all the issues with XBoxes? On the other hand, there's OpenGL for graphics (which is cross platform anyway) and a good few solid libraries like SDL for Linux - so there's the basics there if the vendors want to grasp the nettle. And remember that they're going to be in new territory with PS4 and XBone anyway.

[ChinesePate]

depends what you mean by "not that much" it's at about 200 games at the moment

[Dooms]

I'm not saying Linux is a bad choice, I just think they would be releasing a product that at the moment is no better than an OUYA if they did it now with the library in the state its currently in.

Anyone new to the system will wonder why they can't play most of the good games in the steam library (any non-value AAA title) and anyone who already has a resonable steam library won't want to lose access to it.

[Dooms]

depends what you mean by "not that much" it's at about 200 games at the moment

As I said above, 194 confirmed working games (and not all of those are working 100%) sounds great on paper but if you actually look at the list it's not exactly a great overall lineup. Out of my library of 336 only about 50 of those games are "working" on Linux at this point in time. Yey I can play 50 games on a steam box but why would I sacrifice 280 games to do so?

[ChinesePate]

you maybe wouldn't, but someone that is about to enter the world of gaming 50 titles is still something. add to the fact you won't be spending 2000+ on a gaming rig and we have a win-win situation