Valve certainly won't win it, but they're bringing the heat where it wasn't before.
SteamOS is the important part here - if it is proven to be a good console experience (which the deck has basically proven already) then licensing of the OS to other manufacturers will put a lot of pressure on integrated h/w s/w manufacturers.
Unlike the handheld format, the tvbox console is fairly easy to manufacture and is tolerant of a lot of spec and price variety. Any slip up by Sony and Microsoft in specs and price will result in steam machine variants carving away market share, which could force more frequent console releases.
The steam machine will almost certainly come in at a higher price point than the PS5, but with no 'online' subscription charge and reasonably priced storage upgrades we may see these revenue streams disappear from the next console generation in order to compete.
SteamOS isn't perfect, and the variety inherent in the platform that is a strength is also a weakness. The core markets for Nintendo and for Sony aren't going anywhere.
My main game console right now is one of those little gaming boxes you can buy on Amazon for about $400, where I have installed NixOS + Jovian to get the "SteamOS" interface.
I really like it. It really does feel like a "game console"; usually when I've made my own console using Linux, it always feels kind of janky. For example, RetroPie on the Raspberry Pi is pretty cool, but it doesn't feel like a proper commercial product, it feels like a developer made a GUI to launch games.
I have like 750 games on Steam that I have hoarded over the years, in addition to the Epic Games Store and GOG, which can be installed with Heroic, and the fact that I can play them on a "console" instead of a computer makes it much easier to play in my living room or bedroom. It even works fine with the Xbox One controllers; I use the official Microsoft USB dongle to minimize latency, it works great.
I think there actually is a chance that Valve could really be a real competitor, if not a winner.
The one I ordered had 32 gigs of memory; this was more than a year ago so I'm sure there are better ones now, but I have to say that I feel like this thing "punches above its weight" in that it does seem to run a lot more stuff than I thought it would at a decent framerate.
Steam on Linux works really well now. I sort of built my own steam machine a few months back with a framework desktop that now sits in my TV rack. Gaming on it is a really good experience. Had to buy a PS5 controller though because I could not get the XBOX controller to work over bluetooth which was a bit of a bummer. For me the new controller is most interesting as most games have XBOX controller support (with xbox button captions) and the steam controller adopts the button naming.
I just built one of these as well. For your Xbox controller, see if this works: find any Windows PC and download the Xbox Accessories app. Connect the controller (via USB) and update its firmware. Once I did this, I was able to pair it with the framework desktop via bluetooth (under linux) reliably, and it's been rock solid ever since. Apparently some of the models shipped with buggy firmware that linux really doesn't like for whatever reason.
Good example of being confidently wrong. You are thinking of the little Basic interpreter that was on the pack-in consumer demo disc. Not the Linux Kit which was a very real initiative and had universities involved. We were using them in a big dedicated lab.
Current OS split of Steam users - 94.84% windows, 2.11% mac, 3.05% Linux.
Valve has fought tooth and nail for a decade to make that 3.05% a reality. Linux means they control their own destiny, instead of being at the mercy of Microsoft. Valve has their eyes on this prize and they’re willing to play the long game.
Everyone’s going to talk about “winning” the console generation, but winning could mean an increase of Linux’s share to 5-6%. That would be a massive win, and would be a vindication of Valve’s strategy. Valve could achieve their goals even if Sony and Nintendo sells millions of consoles more.
Probably not. Kernel level anti cheat is the problem. I know BF6 isn't proton safe. Fortnite is the same.
GTA VI will probably run single player on proton fine, GTA V does. Multiplayer will probably not.
The multiplayer with kernel level anti cheat will keep Sony safe through at least another generation; Microsoft is less safe as they're so vulnerable this generation anyway.
These are not winner games these days. Gaming trends are so fast that indie games like the one where you play a duck with a gun is what's driving the gaming community these days.
That's a misconception. Majority of players are with the big Franchises, and they stay with them. The variety-gamers who are playing multiple different games are a minority, though they are a big crowd, loud and have for obvious reasons more attention, leading to this misconception. For example, Escape from Duckov, which you are speaking about, had at it's peak "just" roughly as many players as Battlefield 6 has on average every day. And Battlefield is the smaller one of the big games.
I would say that‘s a bit overly simplified, as much as the indie or indie like game scene is thriving, so is the online multiplayer scene. Gaming is huge and just because one thing is big doesn’t mean another is not. Not a zero sum game here.
Sure but not being able to play 4 games is not an indication of success either way. It's not 2012 when you had to have Call of Duty - you can not have battlefield, cod or fort nite and still never run out of incredible, popular games to play.
If you have a bunch of friends that have battlefield/cod/fortnite and want to play them, they will still do so without you, or at least heavily pressure you into getting them.
I'm not sure what could that even mean from consumer pov - I'm not going to buy a platform because some of my friends might want me to play a specific game with me?
The pressure to get more games on your platform has never been as low as it is today and has never been this low on Steam itself. You could spend a lifetime with the current Steam library and never feel bored.
From product pov Valve feels very comfortable and I bet they have the data to back up this move with basically unlimited war chest. If anything I feel like Valve is pressuring game developers of these major games here - not the other way around.
That’s exactly the thought process of every teenager ever, and also most people who want to connect with their friends through gaming beyond their teenage years.
> I'm not sure what could that even mean from consumer pov - I'm not going to buy a platform because some of my friends might want me to play a specific game with me?
That's exactly how console sales worked in the past. I bought an Xbox because all my friends were playing Halo, and I wanted to join in...
The recent phenomenon of games supporting cross-play out of the gate is probably eating into this, but exclusives were a hell of a moat back in the day.
> I'm not sure what could that even mean from consumer pov - I'm not going to buy a platform because some of my friends might want me to play a specific game with me?
Yeah exactly. Depending how much you care about playing with friends compared to playing at all you might make that choice.
Sure, but those AAA games still exist, and people still want to play them.
As a gamer, why would you want to spend a few hundred bucks on a gaming box, when it isn't able to play the biggest hits? Who would want to deliberately limit their ecosystem to indie games?
There's a nonzero chance that BF6/GTA6/etc becomes a thing that everyone wants to play. If all your friends are raging about how much fun it is and are all playing together, aren't you going to regret buying a Steam Machine?
Sure, you can still play Super Meat Boy, but that doesn't matter - they regret what they can't do.
At least to start. Microsoft strongly encourages all Xbox games to also come out on PC, though they sometimes release later. I cannot find any game developed originally for Xbox Series X|S where this hasn't happened eventually (and the developers definitively aren't still working on the PC version).
I can see developers work on SteamOS anticheat soon, once it gains more traction (chicken / egg problem though). Those games are available on mobile phones and consoles as well, so "windows" is not a requirement.
5 years ago, if someone told you about a commercial Linux gaming console. You were right to laugh.
Now, with IA cheating being the norm now, I think Valve has a real chance to add a microchip to "certify" its console and so playing Fornite (or over 3A) on it.
Will be a added value over a gaming PC, I don't think they will miss this opportunity for too long.
If you can’t play Fortnite on it it sounds like a great time to line up a lawsuit against Epic Games for refusing to allow you to play Fortnite on the Steam box.
No, and I understand if that's a deal-breaker for you, but for me I refuse avoid kernel level anticheat wherever possible, so I'm none too fussed about it. If a game wants to run malware, it can do it on a console where it's nice and segmented off from my general-purpose computing.
I think that the idea is that if you get enough users on Linux, it seems foolish from the game studio's perspective not to add Linux support to their anticheat.
This depends heavily on how customised the linux is. Back in the day Amazon had to fork Android to add kernel-level support for DRM, otherwise the studios weren't going to permit streaming video on Fire tablets. One could imagine Valve adding an optional kernel DRM module to solve the same problem.
You still lose because the dev team has to split their attention.
And anyway I (and many other people!) have valid keys for basically all widevine streams extracted from supposedly secure android devices. That DRM approach ended up failing miserably and torrent sites are full of WEB-DLs.
Battlefield 6 might never run on the average Linux desktop, but I could see a future where it would run on Steam hardware in an end-to-end Secure Boot environment.
I dont give the slightest of shits about CS but have you seen the figures? It's doing absurdly well. In addition the separate economy for skins peaked at 6 billion recently.
Also consistently the most played game on Steam by a fair margin. That doesn't necessarily make it the most played PC game since some big titles like League and Fortnite aren't on Steam, but it's at least close.
Jesus, since when Fortnite and BF6 became gaming benchmark nowadays?
In order to 'win' a console generation there needs to be support for the games people want to play. Capitalism is a literal popularity contest, and any console that doesn't have Fortnite, COD, FIFA, etc won't win, regardless of what you or I might think of the games.
The reason why Steam can't win a console generation is simply because Microsoft, Sony, and Nintendo have enough sway over publishers (especially ones they own) than they stop popular games being available on a rival platform. They market it as 'exclusives' but really it's just anti-consumer.
Why would you not need to license it? Steam isn't open source and Steam, the trademark, is owned by Valve. If we were talking about a standard distro like Fedora, no, I guess they wouldn't have to license it, but we aren't.
"what, i cant play COD online? Or Battlefield? or fifa? or Rocket League?... but thats all I play, and it costs more than a ps5?
...whats the point?"
These games have gigantic followings that ship hardware year after year. People on hackernews are substantially broader-minded than your average console gamer.
On the above basis alone, most of the regular gamers I know will not buy one of these.
It doesn't need IP, it is already THE marketplace for PC gaming. People will get a box like this to play the library they already own, or get great deals on new games.
Yeah, but console gamers don't necessarily know or care about that. If you want to cut into the console market, you kind of have to meet console gamers halfway
Not if you are playing the long game. You get console gamers by buying consoles. Steam now has the concept of parental controls and kid accounts. That's the story of why my kid has never played a console. And I have grabbed a lot of her friends as well. In 5 or 6 years when these kids are teens, they will stay with steam and play whatever works on that platform over picking up whatever Nintendo, Sony or Microsoft drop.
PC gaming had been dying because it was losing kids with the rise of tablets and phones. This is a decent solution even if it will not pay off immediately.
I bought a bunch of games for console over the years that I can't play any more.
I have about a dozen games on the switch. In another console generation, nintendo will make all my existing switch games unplayable again. I feel like you don't really buy console games. You rent them for one console generation.
I mean, I can't tell whats worse - that Nintendo has the gall to try and sell me the same game for switch that I already bought retail on the Wii several years ago. Or that I can't play a lot of my old Wii games at all any more.
But every year I end up picking up more and more games on steam. So many games. I have hundreds, and so do most of my friends. And all of those games keep running on every PC I own.
That's the value proposition of a steam box. It ships with hundreds of games that I already own and already enjoy. Fancy playing bioshock again? Sure. Factorio? Yeah hit me. Dota? Cyberpunk? Terraria? Stardew Valley? Lets go.
I hardly understand the headline. Steam machine is just a computer, and since it can be used for other stuff than playing games, then it can't have the cheap pricing of a console. Most consoles are sold at a loss, and the benefits are made when selling console-exclusive games. If you sell something at a loss, but users aren't forced to buy your games, then you're not gonna make any money. Hence, the Steam Machine (AKA GabeCube) is gonna be as expensive as a laptop (or slightly less expensive because of the bigger form factor and lack of portability).
On top of that, the base OS can't run a ton of games that run on console, because it runs in the way of kernel anti cheats (think: battlefield, call of duty, valorant, league of legends... the biggest games basically), while consoles are guaranteed to run most AAA games.
So with all that in mind - while I appreciate what Valve is doing a lot - I don't think it'll win the "console generation". I hardly see how it can even be called a console. It's just a PC, and that's how they call it themselves.
You're thinking of 'back in the day.' The original XBox's video card was worth more than they sold the entire system for, and the PS3 was a complete beast of computation (even if not entirely inappropriate for games...)! But in modern times (PS4 gen onward) consoles have become relatively vanilla midrange computers designed with the intent of turning profit on the hardware as quickly as possible.
The hardware cost of the PS4 was less than it's retail price from day 0 [1], and they began making a profit per unit shortly thereafter. Similarly the PS5 also reached profit per unit in less than a year. [2] XBox models from the PS4 gen onward are conspicuously similar as well.
> I hardly understand the headline. Steam machine is just a computer, and since it can be used for other stuff than playing games, then it can't have the cheap pricing of a console.
I don't understand this train of thought. It absolutely can have the cheap pricing of a console, as long as Steam is the default store, and the majority of users will use the console as-is and buy games on Steam.
Let me give a quick analogy: Google paid Apple 20B USD just to be the default search engine in Safari, even though users can easily change it. Defaults matter. The vast majority of people are not highly technical users who customize everything in-depth and seek out alternatives. The vast majority of people just use whatever is the default.
The main problem I see is that if this is any cheaper than it's hardware, people will buy 100s of them and stack them in server racks for CI runners or whatever. Generating only losses for Valve and making the hardware unavailable to gamers.
It needs to either be at market rate or locked down to only be useful for gaming.
I don't think they could possibly make it cheap enough for that - especially once you consider all the money being wasted on RGB/Bluetooth/a GPU you won't use.
Messing around with weird consumer hardware in a datacenter context isn't exactly attractive. If all you need is some x86 cores, an off-the-shelf blade server approach gets you far more compute in the same space with far less hassle. Even if the purchase cost is attractive, TCO won't be.
Does it have IPMI? Does it have ECC ram? Racking Mac Minis is a painful enough, this form factor is less rackable than that. If you need to physically adjust the form factor per device, whatever you could've saved will be immediately lost in labor.
I think the limitation on server gear these days is electricity price vs compute, with the hardware price being an up front investment but not dominating the lifetime cost. At least at this end of the price range - it's a consumer GPU, not an A100 or anything.
The PS3 was uniquely powerful, compared to its x86 peers. It wasn't just cheap - it provided the compute of 30 desktop computers in the space, power, and price envelope of one.
Iiuc, unlike Sony’s PS3 (which were bought and used like this), Steam is the unique distributor so it would be easy for them to not allow (or make really difficult to) buying thousands of machines.
(Or they could sell it everywhere for higher price but the Machine would come with a non transferable Steam gift card.)
It’s like android. You sell pixel at relatively high price but create a wave of other with cheaper alternatives, so you end up make money from being default store.
> It absolutely can have the cheap pricing of a console
Valve hasn't committed to a price yet, but they told Gamers Nexus that it'll be priced less like a console and more like an entry level computer (i.e. more expensive than a console).
Weird statement, because I can search for PS5 pro & see $750 price points, and entry level computers have been far far cheaper. Cheaper than Xbox series X at $650. Getting pretty solid laptops for a bit under $500 has been possible for many years now.
But "entry level computer" has a very broad interpretation available. Could be higher for sure.
Do those computers play games competently? I doubt they play them as well as the PS5 or Series X. We aren't in the days where integrated graphics instantly meant sub 20 FPS on any game no matter how simple, but I still wouldn't throw any recent triple A game at even new-ish computers with integrated graphics and expect them to perform all that well. They'll play Rocket League, Stardew Valley and Minecraft just fine, and maybe that's all they need to do, but a Steam Machine that can't play tomorrow's title roughly on par with current gen consoles seems like a losing bet unless the price is equivalently lower.
Yes. There's a peer thread below this one with more examples, but in general the biggest (and most relevant) cost you're looking at with a new computer is the video card. And a PS5 level video card is the RX 6700 XT which is like $200-$300. If you're willing to purchase second hand you can go substantially lower.
I suspect most of us are of a vaguely similar age, and when "we" were growing up, PC gaming was ridiculously expensive. A new gaming PC was thousands of dollars and then obsolete within a couple of years, leaving you constantly checking new release 'minimum system requirements.' It was quite painful and a big reason I (and I suspect others) migrated to console gaming. But now a days? I have a relatively old PC and never even bother looking at spec requirements - it'll run it, just fine.
The Steam Machine uses a dedicated graphics chip, similar to a discrete AMD RX 7060M. Laptop chip sure, but a stone's throw from integrated graphics. These Machines will be able to keep up.
That build uses a 13 year old CPU from AliExpress, there's no accounting for taste but I think most entry level builds are aiming a little higher than that. Some newer games won't even try to run on a CPU of that vintage since it doesn't have AVX2 support.
It was released in 2016 and does support AVX2. In general what matters when building a decent rig is aiming to balance performance to optimize against bottle necks. He demonstrated the system in various modern games, for instance running Delta Force at 4k/120FPS. And the CPU was scarcely getting touched - running at around 20%.
You can spend a ton of money on a bleeding edge CPU and see 0 performance gain in almost all cases, because basically no modern games are CPU limited, or even remotely close to it, so you're sitting there with your overpriced CPU basically idling.
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I think many people are out of the loop on PC costs and performance. The days where you needed some $1000+ bleeding edge rig to even begin to play the latest stuff are long gone. Since this thread is on consoles - an approximate PS5 equivalent video card is the RX 6700 XT which is like $200-$300, and that is, by far, the biggest expense.
Laptops have lots of components that the Steam Machine doesn't have. The screen, keyboard, touchpad, cameras, microphones, speakers, battery, et cetera are all fairly small costs, but they add up. Plus using a Linux-based OS instead of Windows automatically knocks around $50 off the price because the price doesn't include the cost of an OEM Windows license.
I don't think the Steam Machine will be priced lower than a PS5 or Xbox (unless Valve is willing to burn money in exchange for market share), but I think that it'll be priced significantly lower than an equivalent-spec laptop (which would be in the $600-800 range based on the fact that the Steam Machine has an "AMD RDNA3 28CUs" GPU, which according to Google is roughly equivalent to an Nvidia RTX 4050, laptops containing which are priced around $600-800).
> Laptops have lots of components that the Steam Machine doesn't have. The screen, keyboard, touchpad, cameras, microphones, speakers, battery, et cetera are all fairly small costs, but they add up. Plus using a Linux-based OS instead of Windows automatically knocks around $50 off the price because the price doesn't include the cost of an OEM Windows license.
Yet's all the mini PCs I've come across are more expensive than their laptop equivalent
Because it's also about the demand, and how much you can mass produce them to reduce the cost
The 'AMD RDNA3 28CUs' is likely to be the 7600M, as all the major specs are the same (power draw and clocks is lower, but given that the Steam Machine is not a laptop, it probably will have more headroom for that).
I mean, Valve built this with the profits, at least, in no small part with the profits from selling games, DLC, and gacha skins on their storefront which has many many competitors too bozo-brained to run their stores as well as Valve does.
If any company has a business case for “we’ll sell the form factor at a loss with our store preinstalled” now it’s Valve, especially if they want to make the hardware only to prove the viability of the form factor, and especially since they already have been selling on platforms they don’t own.
Very few consoles were sold at a loss. Some certainly were, like the fat PS3. But that was the exception, not the rule.
More relevantly, none of the current generation (ps5, xbox series, switch 2) are sold at a loss. They don't have large margins, but they are sold above cost.
The Taiwanese computer manufacturers won't be phased by thin margins; that's their modus operandi.
A console is really just a PC with the word “console” tagged on the side of it. It's more of a branding exercise than a proper distinction. The only real difference is you boot up the console and it takes you straight to a game library.
As for the range of games available, it's got a lot more indie titles than console does. One rather hopes it will inspire game developers to develop more Linux-compatible anti-cheat solutions, or just host Linux versions of the game on separate servers, but I won't hold my breath. I've honestly never got the point of anti-cheat myself, it doesn't seem to work in most games. I've long thought there exist much better solutions to cheating than software ones. The simplest would be to permit cheats in the game's base servers and allow players to scan their ID (á la Online Safety Act) to access servers with a higher degree of moderation. A permanent identity-based ban would sort out the problem much more swiftly than endlessly chasing hackers.
Is money still made from console exclusives? I feel like I see less of them these days. The biggest games are cross platform monsters, and the smallest are indie games.
Crazy to think that the Horizon Zero Dawns of the world would be propping up all of console gaming??
But maybe that’s why Xbox is looking to get out. And trying new monetization strategies (gamepass is on Roku or something)
In principle the consoles themselves and the exclusives are both loss leaders. Or, sold at cost, anyway. The actual money is made from the 30% cut on any third party game sales, and the online subscriptions required to play online.
Consoles are expensive. Once a consumer has bought one, they're likely to stick with it for the generation. This is why we have flame wars about them. Only a small minority has several high-end gaming devices.
> I hardly see how it can even be called a console.
Rather than focus too much on the technology classification, think of it in terms of extending the Steam platform to new markets. How many new people in the market for games-on-their-tv will at least consider a Steam machine. Even with the trade-offs you mention, my guess is quite a lot. And Valve doesn't care about making money on the hardware, they are already basically printing money.
For me, the big killer feature would be if this device is approved for modern media DRM. As much as I'm tired of streaming and its level of control over how I watch TV, it's still a decent part of my media consumption, but any Linux mini-PC I connect to the TV can only do low-resolution streaming from most providers. If the steam machine is approved for high-resolution streaming, it could totally replace the smart TV stack in most homes.
> The big thing I want to see in practice is their implementation of foveated rendering. This beautiful hack abuses the fact that human eyes have the most sharpness and fidelity at the exact centre of your field of vision, whereas your peripheral vision is abysmal at it. This means that on average you only have to render about 10% of the frame at maximum quality for it to feel like it's running at full resolution all over the screen.
> This should make the fact that the Frame is using a "weaker" CPU/GPU irrelevant. Games should look fine as long as they render the slice that needs to be in full quality fast enough.
It's not foveated rendering, it's foveated streaming. The CPU/GPU should easily be able to handle decoding video, whether foveated or not.
Maybe this is less of an issue now we’re in the digital era of console games but one of the biggest aspects for me is that if I buy one of these new machines, my existing library is just there. No starting from scratch or worrying about backwards compatibility. It’s a PC that has everything I need from the get go.
The story was the same with the Deck. Granted it took a little while for many games to be fully supported but the transparency from Valve on the store pages about compatibility was great and is in a far better state now.
> The only possible flaw I can see is that the strap it ships with doesn't go over the top of your head. If this ends up being an issue in practice, somebody is going to make a third party strap that just fixes this problem
> There's an optional ergonomic accessories kit for the Steam Frame that adds an extra strap for your head and a pair of straps, one for each controller. These added controller straps are reminiscent of those found on the Index and seem like a reasonable investment, if the price is right.
If it can play all games on Steam _today_ at 4k60fps (even with FSR) it means I have about 570 games on my Steam library it can play in perpetuity.
Even if I play 2 hours of each game, it's still a bargain =)
And because this is Valve and I've had a stellar experience with my Steam Deck, I'm pretty confident that future games will run on it too. Most likely gamedevs will add special "Steam Machine" performance profiles like they've done with the deck. And there will be a "Steam Machine certified" checkmark on Steam.
I don't play games much anymore, so maybe I'm not the right person to respond.
Why would anyone ever buy a console again? This thing has the ultimate library and works on all platforms.
Steam seems to have played the best game of chess in the industry. Sony and Microsoft were battling over exclusives and acquisitions and ways to screw over customers. This came out of left field and looks a million times better than Xbox or PS5. It has people's entire libraries on it, and the games are cheap and portable. There's no lock down. No funny business.
I almost want one. I'm excited about it and I don't even think I'd play it.
In the era of mobile games, hardware really isn't a thing anymore. Even AAA titles are niche IMO given the cost to play them at full settings. All that matters now are the exclusive titles. You refer to this derisively but really that's what made the nintendo switch, clearly the weakest compared to the PS5 and even the steam deck in the last generation the clear winner.
And do you think PC has less exclusives compared to PS5 / other consoles? How many games on Steam has never been released on consoles vs the other way round?
By that logic I'd expect this one to completely dominate.
So, we should define terms. To "dominate" should mean to sell more than or make more money than the competition, which may include taking market share from the competition. I don't doubt valve will continue to make money in an absolute sense, it already does and this likely doesn't change that.
Steam already has a monopoly in the PC space and has the "exclusives" you talk about, essentially games that never were ported to the PS5 or the switch. Thus, in order for the steam machine to take market share from the other consoles, you a) have to take console share from those players, likely by pressuring those developers to port from the consoles to PC. That could be something, but no doubt that pressure already exists, as steam already exists. I don't see how the steam machine changes that. In fact, the opposite situation exists which is why steam makes so much money, as you said. To actually dominate, it can only happen after situation c) below.
New customers or dollars cannot come from people who have a PC and can now forgo using their pc for gaming (by neglecting to upgrade their pc to keep up to date to play new AAAs), as the assumption here is they are selling the consoles at a loss (which may not be true, we'll have to find out). That if anything, is essentially a soft form of b) cannibalisation. So that isn't really "gaining market share" more so than it's changing the means of consumption of the same thing. Moreover, if they choose to sell at a loss, then I only can imagine this leading to actual cannibalisation from their existing PC customers as there isn't really any actual profit being made here.
So finally, the only route they have to expanding their player base in my mind is c) new gamers, that is casual phone players or other non-enthusiast gamers who don't really play games but will be willing to buy a console. This is how the Wii excelled in its generation and how the switch won the last one. Here, it all comes down to price and thus how much Valve is willing to sell at a loss or otherwise subsidise the steam machine using steam proper. So, this to feels like their only real route to "dominating."
As I alluded to above, a) can only happen if c) happens, as Steam already has the mindshare it does and thus it already has the same allure to developers as is the case today, and those developers are still pursuing exclusives with the PS5 and the switch. Thus, if certain developers or games are stuck on the switch or the PS5 with current conditions, they won't move enmass to the steam machine unless c) happens first and thus their calculus changes. And of course, selling at a loss means that they also run the risk of only b) occurring if they don't gain enough new players fast enough to offset the loss from selling consoles.
That leaves them not selling the hardware at a loss, then I don't really know. It's just the steam machine will likely be north of 700 usd if you're not subsidising it, and like the steam deck it will be a novelty item they may or may not make a profit off of. That I wouldn't call "domination", although they may make money overall so I don't doubt they will end up happy.
To win this console generation and outsell the PS5, Valve would have to sell 85 million Steam Machines (as of today, and likely need to sell 120 million by the end of the generation). About a 0% chance of that happening.
As the article says, "The only way that they could mess this up is with the pricing. ... I'd expect the pricing to be super aggressive." The price to beat is the $400-$500 price point of PS5 and XBox. I'm guessing Valve is going to have a very hard time matching that. We'll know soon enough.
All they have to do is market the fact you don't have to pay for online.
PS5 + 3 years of PS Plus = $740
Steam Machine = $700
Add/remove more years of PS Plus if the SM turns out to be more/less expensive.
If you add the fact that games on PC are usually cheaper and have sales more often then it's a no brainer, but that won't convince the FIFA and COD players.
> This system won't run FIFA, GTA Online, Battlefield, Valorant or CoD, it's a nonstarter for many.
That's largely known now but still a bummer.
I wonder if anything will ever change in this area and if Valve will be able to pressure game editors or create an anti-cheat so good and for any platform to be able to change something.
They don't even necessarily have to beat the PS5/Xbox. I already own the former but sometimes lament not being able to play the many, many PC exclusives out there (or at least nothing released in the past 10+ years since my daily driver laptop has poor specs). Just recently I was wondering whether one of those all-in-one Lenovo desktop boxes would have decent enough specs to play current-gen PC games at halfway decent settings, and my guess is that they don't, but I don't want to go through the hassle of building a PC and definitely don't want a tower with a huge footprint.
Turns out the Steam Machine is exactly what I'm looking for.
Exactly. I have both PS5 and Xbox One X, but I still connect my Steam Deck to TV to play Hades II because the game hasn't come out on those two consoles yet.
I think that realistically, Valve probably only need to be on par with the top of Sony’s offering hardware wise. The ability to have Steam integration on the machine (including the large amount of subpar but very cheap games) will prompt at least some movement. I’d say $800 is probably the high-end of reasonable for price point. I can certain say I’d rather just buy my kids a StreamBox than have to deal with them want full capability PCs.
I agree. Steam's prices on sales are still mostly unmatched by consoles.
Even if it is a "pricier" PS5-like machine, I'd still buy it and I bet I'd make up the difference in less than a year with just the sales games (including older games I can't play on either console).
I think most of the critiques for this are from people expecting this to be aimed at PC gamers.
I don't think it is. I think it's aimed at people that actually DON'T want to bother with building, buying, upgrading PCs, but still want to play cheap games, older games.
To this day, I can't make my PC turn on with a controller (and I've tried). Making a PC wake up as fast as a Steam Deck from sleep? Impossible.
Those little things will all add up to make this a very nice option for the non-hardcode PC game crowd.
Valve is going to steal a lot of users from console, mostly Xbox. Not PC Gaming enthusiast.
$699 (maybe 799 for a more premium model) seems to be a good compromise given what it would take to build a sufficiently similar PC while being close enough to the PS5/Switch. Xbox is practically dead.
I don’t think it needs to compete on price directly, if it can deliver the polish of a console. It can also play up the angle of being a full blown computer.
With the specs these devices have I don't think it's far-fetched to assume that pricing will be competitive. Maybe they will charge a bit extra if they tout all the extra stuff you can install on the Machine vs Xbox as a selling point, which they are kind of doing, to justify a slightly higher price point.
As much as I love hacking with various things, there are reasons why I buy "closed products" for myself and for my family. I like to do hacking when I want it (with ESP32, rpi etc). I don't want to be forced to serve as a free IT support guy anytime someone presses a wrong button.
When it comes to gaming consoles, I want them to serve reliably to my family. The game console must be fun, optimized for best experience and should not break. Will that be possible with an open platform where anyone can install anything?
> The game console must be fun, optimized for best experience and should not break. Will that be possible with an open platform where anyone can install anything?
Yes, SteamOS is just that. A system that is easy to rollback if you mess things up. And you have to go deep under the covers to mess things up (switch to desktop mode, disable readonly system partition, modify wrong files).
Valve should really focus on improving the polish of the steam store, as that abomination of a (react ?) frontend breaks often in very surprising ways.
SteamOS as a console system is close to a 9/10. As far as polish of steam app/store and the ux, a fair 7/10.
Unfortunately buying closed systems hasn’t stopped me from being IT support:
- “why can’t I play online with EA Sports?”
- “I can’t log into Roblox!”
- “why can’t I see my sisters world in Minecraft?”
- “I’ve lost my Fortnight skins!”
- “why does Roblox keep disconnecting me on my phone [when Roblox servers go down]?”
- “Why can’t I play this game [without updating it]?”
- “this game update takes too long to download!”
If there’s one constant in life: it’s that doctors get nagged by friends for free diagnosis, mechanics, electricians, carpenters for free repairs, and software engineers for free IT support.
That would be great - but the last gaming console that I've experienced that with has been the switch.
I recently turned on my old xbox one - literally impossible to play any game without a massive patch, debugging os software issues etc. If the steam machine just works out of the box, it'll already be miles ahead of most of the current state of consoles.
Agree. By "best experience" I also mean "don't force me to wait". But my console doesn't do that. Some online games may require patches before playing for better (anticheat) or worse reasons but thats a fault of the game supplier - not the console supplier.
So, Steam is planning to sell these at a loss, but isn’t planning to lock out third party OS?
What’s to stop people buying them to use for completely unrelated use cases?
I guess it depends on how big the loss is… if it is small, it might not be really worth it for most people; but any larger, I wonder how sustainable this will be.
What non-gaming use cases do you imagine people might use these for?
For normal computer use (reading email, watching videos, doing spreadsheets), there are much cheaper and better options available. If somebody wanted a Steam Machine specifically, it'd be for the GPU.
If you needed a lot of GPU compute (for AI or blockchain or whatever), it'd be cheaper to buy or rent a dedicated server with Nvidia H100s rather than buying dozens of Steam Machines.
So the only potential use cases are those that have a significant but not too significant GPU requirement. The only ones I can think of are gaming (which is the intended use case), video editing, and 3D rendering.
Video editing is less of a concern because neither Adobe Premier nor Final Cut Pro will run on Linux (to my knowledge), so you might as well buy a Mac that runs both of those very efficiently and has decent hardware.
So we're left with 3D rendering. If people want to use Steam Machines to render things in Blender, I say "let them", and I assume that Valve does too.
You can run media from a potato. This will be at least 5x the cost of a cheap mini-PC. And you can't forget power draw. The Steam Machine has a 30W CPU, and I'd guess about 60W RAM which would add up to something like $120+ annually where a mini PC would cost closer to $7. 5 years later and the Steam Machine has eaten it's cost in power. Assuming it costs $500 like most consoles, you are looking at a total 5-year cost of $1100 where a mini-PC would be $100–200.
I think the mini PCs they're talking about are more likely to be N100 systems or similar that are sub 100 dollars new. Significantly less anemic, and their hardware media decode (which is well supported by software) is more than sufficient for realtime 4k playback.
> What’s to stop people buying them to use for completely unrelated use cases?
Nothing. But it doesn't mean that Valve doesn't benefit from it. Valve wants the whole gaming scheme to shift toward SteamOS. Like Google wants the whole web browsing to shift to Chrome, even you can use Chrome for stuff unrelated to Google.
If that's what happens, then I'm buying one of these right away for sure. I mean, I use steam a lot, but I certainly won't be locked in their "SteamOS". Maybe they are betting that most users will be too lazy to change the defaults and stick to SteamOS (which might very well be the case, and they have a hint of this thanks to the data they have on the Steam Deck)
I don't think they have, but it's the business model of most consoles, to be able to be very affordable. So since the headline is implying it'll do better than consoles, it's implying it'll be sold at a loss too. But honestly, I find that article BS.
I generally like the OP's posts, but I really don't buy their argument. If anything, the nintendo switch winning the last generation is a great example of how hardware isn't always that important, the game library essentially is what makes a console win, and in as much as the hardware enables the breadth of the library, that's all that matters.
Like the steam deck, I don't know who other than power users who will buy it. I love the openness they will bring to the market, but that doesn't mean they will win.
One other semi-unrecognized advantage Valve has over consoles is their generous return policy. I’ve bought many games on a whim knowing if I don’t jive with it I can safely get a full refund. Contrast that with my Ps5 where my 2 year old managed to smash buttons while I was tied up on a work call and bought COD for $69 bucks… no way to refund it and I’m not a fan of shooters. Basically Fd on that one.
My experience is otherwise. I returned one game and got banned from buying other games for a month - during a sale, so I missed that sale and was out of sync with friends for a bit.
I don't give a shit for the money, but fucking my social gaming time was unforgiveable. I still use Steam, but don't fucking trust Valves return policy.
Is there anything more to this? I’ve returned dozens of games that I didn’t end up liking and the only consequence I’ve faced is that games with trading cards don’t start dropping them until 2 hours of play time, which I think is completely fair.
If they want to capture the console audience its better be priced like one too and not prevent me from playing multiplayer games due to Linux and anti cheat software not playing nice
Anything above $600 is DOA and that's with accepting the fact that the most popular games will be not available on the platform
It's even worse for their competitors than this acknowledges.
SteamOS on Arm (using FEX) is going to spawn a generation of £100 devices that can play lower end Windows games, stream from PC, and emulate every console from the PS2 back. It's huge.
Attached my old gaming rig to the TV to run Steam on it and it is a better experience than any consoles I have (being a gaming nerd I have everything from my old Atari 2600 and most mainstreams systems since then up to PS5).
This is good news to hear Valve going in strong for the console market.
I’m not a gamer and not into consoles, but I’m watching Valve and SteamOS from the sidelines with a lot of goodwill. It’s great to see more people buying hardware that runs on Arch — that alone is a good thing. Still, something about this feels a bit too good to be true.
This is really cool. I still play my series X on occasion but tend to prefer the experience I get from my Saturn and Dreamcast when I load a game and it plays without needing to update. Every time I turn on my Xbox or PC with steam/GOG I have to wait for an update of some kind.
Unless it's reasonably priced who is the market for this box? If it's at 499 - 599 then it's probably selling well but at 799-899 I'm not sure who would buy it. If it's your first computer you still need more gear like screen, keyboard and mouse etc.
People who want to play video games would buy it. While us enlightened Computer Intellectuals may appreciate that there is no difference between a console and a PC, the majority of naïve computer peasants will much prefer something with the word “console” tagged on that boots straight to a game library. As for the keyboard and mouse thing, there's this other announcement they've made called the “Steam Controller” which addresses that issue.
It'd be a good plan. Make HL3 a VR game since you built VR experience by making Alyx, take it to the next level by launching your own VR headset, everything is perfectly made together and HL3 launch would be as big if not bigger than GTA, and you optimize it for your own hardware.
HL3 is most likely not a VR game as Valve said they aren't working on a first party VR title (plus data mining seems to confirm). Plus they already have Alyx as the masterpiece, and it was already made with their own VR headset in mind: the Valve Index.
Maybe HLX will have some kind of VR interaction possible, as they want to push technology further with each Half life game.
"steam games", doesn't really mean anything. Most games are on steam nowadays. It mostly depends on the OS on which the games run. Games with kernel anti cheat: low cheaters population, runs on Windows but not Linux. Games without kernel anti cheat: low to high (think counter strike official servers) cheaters population.
Whats the media experience like on SteamOS these days? Does it have built in support for media playback? I used to have Kodi running on PhantomOS but it was janky.
They have enough first party games which only release on their hardware that people are willing to buy a Switch for nintendo games, and another gaming device for everything else.
Sad part is that I would be willing to pay a substantial mark up to be able to play some of those first party titles on my PC, but since my kids have a Switch I just settle for using it. So even if I don’t think I’d buy a console just for their games, I’m gonna end up buying it anyway and Nintendo still wins.
I love great graphics but , Nintendo carved a nice big niche out for themselves by recognizing the constant drive for best graphics is a bit of rat race.
Nintendo has Mario, Zelda, Kirby, Donkey Kong, Starfox, Pokémon, and a few other less super famous and internationally known IP franchises. The core games and their spinoffs make more games than most children can reasonably expected to play through childhood and early adolescence. That the machine then collects dust doesn’t hurt Nintendo because they already sold it.
Yes Steam has huge library (my ‘want to play’ list is over 100 titles at this point) full of games of all genres, qualities, and niches. But Nintendo has more than enough to do what they have done for years, i.e. sit tight on their beloved IP and dole it out at varying levels of quality on strictly low end hardware and watch their earning go up.
Though, to be fair, my kids steal my Steam Deck from me more often than I try to get the Switch from them. The family share features of the Switch leave a lot to be desired.
I'm on a Switch and will not move because of the "Game Key Card" bullshit where you have a card but still don't get the files you need to play them game.
However, Pokemon guarantees a certain amount of Switch 2 sales--Pokemon ZA sold about 6 million units.
However, the single digital service that hasn't killed my digital library at some point is Steam. Games that I bought many years ago are still fine. Sony, Microsoft, and Nintendo all killed digital games that I bought.
That having been said: I've transferred a lot of my purchasing to GoG. Steam doesn't get the benefit of the doubt anymore.
Does anyone know if the foveated rendering feature of the Steam Frame depends on eye-tracking? Is it tracking the iris to determine the center of foveation, or is there some other trick to doing this?
By making it immutable out of the box, VAC enforcement because vastly easier and third-party multiplayer anti-cheating kernel rootkits are replaced by “attest that you are unmodified”, which Steam Linux and macOS/tvOS/iOS/iPadOS can do — but not Windows 10/11, because sealed boot functionality is behind Microsoft’s enterprise annual subscription fee paywall. This positions Steam Linux as the monopoly provider of console-gaming Linux, since no one else is doing sealed attestation Linux at scale, and opens the door for multiplayer AAA games to target Steam Linux for their day-one releases as a competitive equal to Xbox/PS5/Switch and as a better defended console platform than Windows PCs. The modifications described by OP are still possible, but won’t be compatible with multiplayer anti-cheating enforcement, which is perfectly fine; boot to sealed for competitive gaming, boot to custom for single player, everyone wins except Microsoft’s Windows division. (If Microsoft hadn’t shot off their foot with Windows 10, they could have simply enabled sealed booting for all 10/11 installations and remained competitive as a gaming platform, but I think they’re done with that business.) Nice to see my predictions pan out and I look forward to buying one :)
Immutability doesn't provide this on it's own. You can load any custom immutable image you want. What game devs want is full boot chain attestation where every part of the OS is measured and verified untampered with, and then to load their own spyware at the highest level.
The only way immutability helps here is you could have two OS images, the users own customisable one, and a clean one. Then when you try to load an anti cheat game, the console could in theory reboot in to the clean one, and pass all the verification checks to load the game.
I am, indeed, assuming that their immutable image can generate attestations chained appropriately. If not, it’s a catastrophic business error on their part to put in all that work, and I don’t consider that degree of failure likely. Definitely curious to see if they can enable the chain on existing Steamdecks or not.
Immutable images provide many benefits that are unrelated to DRM. The main one being that the entire fleet of Steam Decks/Machines are all in a known state. Updates are a matter of pushing a new OS image, you don't have to worry about migrating files, conflicting configurations, strange user changes. And if an update fails, the bootloader shows a screen where you can boot a previous OS image that worked.
It's like docker images for the whole OS. As far as I can tell, the Steam Deck does not have secure boot or any kind of attestation enabled. They have been very forward in marketing it as an open and free system you can do anything on. The hardware does have a TPM that is seemingly unused currently, not sure if it supports some form of secure boot.
> They have been very forward in marketing it as an open and free system you can do anything on.
Attested sealed images and Open and Free systems have no conflict with each other. Mod it all you want; sure, it’ll generate a different attestation than the shipping sealed image, or if your customizations turn off attestations and/or secure boot, none at all. You do you! Source code releases will never include the private key used to sign them, just as with all open source today, so either the OS’s attestation will be signed by Valve or by you or by someone else. It takes me about sixty seconds to add my own signing key to my PC BIOS today and it would not surprise me to find Valve’s BIOS implements the same, as I’m pretty certain this is basic off-the-shelf functionality on Zen4/Zen5. But, regardless, Free/Open Source is wholly unconcerned by whose release signing key is used; otherwise it wouldn’t be Free/Open! The decision to care about whose release signature is live right now is the gaming server’s decision, not Steam Linux’s, and that decision is not restricted by any OSS-approved license that I’m aware of.
Secure boot attestations plus sealed images do enable “unmodified Valve Linux release” checks to be performed by multiplayer game servers, without needing the user to be locked out of making changes at all. This is already demonstrated in macOS today with e.g. Wallet’s Apple Pay support; you can disable and mod the OS as much as you wish, and certain server features whose attestation requirements require an Apple release signature on the booted OS will suspend themselves when the attestation doesn’t match. When you’re ready to use those servers, you secure boot to an OEM sealed environment and they resume working immediately. This is live, today, on every Apple Silicon (and T2 chipped Intel) device worldwide, and has been available for developers to use for years.
Attestations are, similarly, already available on all AMD devices with a TPM today, so long as the BIOS to OS chain implements Secure Boot — not requires, but implements, as there’s no reason to deny users unsigned OS booting once you’re checking attestation signatures server-side. As you note, it remains to be seen if the Steam Box will make use of it. If they do, it coexists just fine with full reputposability and modifiable, because you can do whatever you like with the device — and, correspondingly, each game may choose to require an unmodified environment to ensure a level playing field without kernel or OS modifications.
It would be a lost opportunity for them if they were not the first fully open OS with a fully secure multiplayer environment that prohibits both third-party cheating mods and third-party DRM rootkits. VAC becomes as simple as a sysctl, and patches are still welcome. Open source for the win, and one step further towards the Linux desktop finally overtaking residential Windows, and thr ability to play console-grade multiplayer without the proliferation of on-device software-only hacks? Yes, please.
(Note that manufacturers who use Secure Boot to lock out device modifications are not in-scope here; that choice has no effect on attestations. Secure Boot is “the OS booted had this checksum and signature” with HSM backing, so that the software can’t lie. It is extremely unlikely that Valve would demand that the OS booted be signed by Valve. That would be no different than Xbox/PS5/Switch, and they’d be leaving a massive competitive advantage over tvOS on the table: device repurposeability.)
Yes, but that works just as readily on consoles as it does PCs, so it doesn’t affect immutable Steam any more or less than any other gaming steam. Sealed protections are still valuable regardless!
It affects console too, but watch game publishers disable linux support, blaming cheaters while producing graphs that don't support their arguments. While console packs and cheats are rampant, and their game servers even being hacked during competition.
"At par with PS5.." comparing hardware specs with a console loved by millions and into year 6 of it's lifecycle. I'd rather play my PS5 titles on a PS5 or a portal than on the steam machine. Steam deck is dated, went with the portal and love it.
I think the hardest battle is going to be with anti cheat. The anti cheat that developers want basically requires dystopian levels of restrictions which are against everything valve has done on SteamOS so far.
Personally I'd love if we all just went back to playing on personal servers with your real life friends or people you otherwise trust. But I don't think this is would go over well with the average online gamer.
Hard agreement from me, but my 16 year old bricked his PC on Sunday trying to enable Valorant’s BS anti-cheat, secure boot required crap. He even knew ahead of time that he couldn’t enable it, but the pull of online gaming turned off his brain. I don’t think we’re gonna win this battle and the war is probably done as well.
We know, and the game devs know too. But Kernel anti cheat is not a solution but simply a marketing feature to make their users think they try.
Just seeing all the gamers requesting a kernel AC for CS2, saying VAC does not work; but now they have banned a lot of cheaters and seem to have less cheaters than the new Battlefield which has kernel AC.
> I think the hardest battle is going to be with anti cheat. The anti cheat that developers want basically requires dystopian levels of restrictions which are against everything valve has done on SteamOS so far.
If anyone is capable of moving things along in this space, Valve should be it.
> Personally I'd love if we all just went back to playing on personal servers with your real life friends or people you otherwise trust. But I don't think this is would go over well with the average online gamer.
It's not the gamers that don't want this - although, yes, I do also want the option of matchmaking - it's the companies that don't allow dedicated servers, or shut down the servers after releasing that year's full-price version of the same game.
> Really, the only thing that can go wrong with any of this hardware is the price.
The chances of any of the Steam Machines taking the market share of any of the current generation consoles is so vanishingly miniscule, that I don't think it can even compete against any of them.
It more or less competes against the Linux ecosystem of System76 machines or the Framework computers.
But against consoles? No dent at all in their market share.
The main problem was the missing second stick. It was well built, but for game where a controller is nice touch pads sort of suck compared to a stick and for games where a mouse is nice touch pads sort of suck compared to a mouse. So the only real advantage a touch pad brings is in an environment where you can't bring a mouse. I really liked the extra back buttons. with two sticks that is where all the face buttons should be, on the back.
Somewhat related, but I enjoy the topic. Is how freakishly good the mouse is for FPS type games. If you asked anyone to design a purpose built controller for a first person game they would not come up with a mouse. But somehow despite all odds that thing designed for moving a cursor around the screen is the best controller yet for looking around. Probably something about the huge throw distance compared to any other controller.
It's the only controller I use (bar the Steam Deck's built in controller) despite owning plenty of other conventional controllers. Once you get used to it and make use of Steam Input's per-game customisation and mapping it works really well, especially if you treat it as a mouse-like input rather than conventional gamepad.
The only place it suffers for me is games that aren't coded to support simultaneous gamepad and mouse input, which you can work around by mapping the joystick as a keyboard input. Otherwise it's great.
Its an odd one; the v1 controller feels cheap and definitely isn't as high fidelity as a modern PS5 controller. It struggled to match the quality of contemporary controllers at the same price point. But the touchpads worked. They shouldn't work, they should be abysmal, but with a little practice they're fantastic.
I still use mine for any driving or flying in games, the stick it does have is super accurate. And for watching movies its a great remote when you arent at the keyboard. If you turn the right pad to simulate a weighted track ball it is what I consider the best Dark Souls controller.
We heard this literally with the previous steam machine lol
There’s no doubt they’re tee’d up to radically alter the landscape. But man they better have a truly plug and play, turnkey system if they want to compete with consoles. The steamdeck even after this many years is absolutely trash at going from handheld to docked (better the other direction at least) and is incredibly hit or miss when it’s plugged into a TV in general. I had to buy a special DP->HDMI cable that forces 1080p @60 to get it to consistently appear on screen docked (LG C1 for reference).
I am excited for the steam machine. But yeah, telling me it’s a more powerful steamdeck is super exciting in some ways and eyebrow raising in others unless they got some big SteamOS overhaul coming.
Most of the deck/dock screen issues are related to dock firmware and USBC display negotiation. The steam machine has built in HDMI and Display port which are presumably relatively bog standard.
The official steam deck dock seems to be fairly buggy, it's widely complained about. I've been using an Apple USB-C to HDMI adapter and it's worked perfect on every TV I've tried it on. Since the steam machines don't use USB-C video out this wouldn't be an issue.
That may be the case but “official valve hardware is buggy even after almost 4 years” is a troubling yet true statement when their entire pitch today was literally “check out our new hardware.”
I love my deck. But a smooth experience it is not. Up until idk a year ago…? Flipping from gaming mode to desktop mode or vice versa had a solid 50-50 shot of inducing a fail state requiring a hard reset.
Not a chance. As much as I respect all the work Valve has done for gaming...this doesn't understand the market.
PC gamers will play on their PC. Couch gamers will have a PS5 or an XBox. So who is this for, couch gamers that don't have one of those? Or PC players tired of playing on a monitor?
Don't get me wrong, it's cool, and I'm definitely the target market but feel like that's pretty tiny.
Most couch gamers want their GTA or Call of Duty, which, if I read correctly, this will not run.
I am very much a PC gamer turned couch gamer. I have a capable PC sitting next to my Xbox Series X. The user experience is worse, as everytime I turn it on soemthing needs updating, I cannot control all of Windows through my gamepad. This ticks a lot of boxes for me. Might start witht the Controller first.
I don't think it'll outsell any current console. Not even the anemic and dying Xbox Series X.
I think that appropriately priced and supported, it will put Valve in a strategic position to actually compete in subsequent console generations as a real player. It's a little behind in terms of specs, but with as slow as uptake of this generation has been, I expect that developers will continue to target base PS5 specs for another six years at least (PS6 supposedly landing in 2027). Then they can drop their Steam Machine 2 in 2029 or 2030, hitting base PS6 specs at an affordable price. It's been a winning approach for Nintendo.
Valve certainly won't win it, but they're bringing the heat where it wasn't before.
SteamOS is the important part here - if it is proven to be a good console experience (which the deck has basically proven already) then licensing of the OS to other manufacturers will put a lot of pressure on integrated h/w s/w manufacturers.
Unlike the handheld format, the tvbox console is fairly easy to manufacture and is tolerant of a lot of spec and price variety. Any slip up by Sony and Microsoft in specs and price will result in steam machine variants carving away market share, which could force more frequent console releases.
The steam machine will almost certainly come in at a higher price point than the PS5, but with no 'online' subscription charge and reasonably priced storage upgrades we may see these revenue streams disappear from the next console generation in order to compete.
SteamOS isn't perfect, and the variety inherent in the platform that is a strength is also a weakness. The core markets for Nintendo and for Sony aren't going anywhere.
My main game console right now is one of those little gaming boxes you can buy on Amazon for about $400, where I have installed NixOS + Jovian to get the "SteamOS" interface.
I really like it. It really does feel like a "game console"; usually when I've made my own console using Linux, it always feels kind of janky. For example, RetroPie on the Raspberry Pi is pretty cool, but it doesn't feel like a proper commercial product, it feels like a developer made a GUI to launch games.
I have like 750 games on Steam that I have hoarded over the years, in addition to the Epic Games Store and GOG, which can be installed with Heroic, and the fact that I can play them on a "console" instead of a computer makes it much easier to play in my living room or bedroom. It even works fine with the Xbox One controllers; I use the official Microsoft USB dongle to minimize latency, it works great.
I think there actually is a chance that Valve could really be a real competitor, if not a winner.
I installed NixOS + Jovian on my Steamdeck and it works great as well.
Do you have link to the little gaming box?
Yep! https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0D733JFML?th=1
The one I ordered had 32 gigs of memory; this was more than a year ago so I'm sure there are better ones now, but I have to say that I feel like this thing "punches above its weight" in that it does seem to run a lot more stuff than I thought it would at a decent framerate.
These are the Beelink boxes.
They got very popular when they released a video of the manufacturing process. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ohwI3V207Ts
Hm, does it work well for games? I have a NUC I could use...
> then licensing of the OS to other manufacturers
They already tried that the first way around when they introduced steam machines. That didn't really work.
The fact that they now took full control is what's exiting about this steam machine.
Steam on Linux works really well now. I sort of built my own steam machine a few months back with a framework desktop that now sits in my TV rack. Gaming on it is a really good experience. Had to buy a PS5 controller though because I could not get the XBOX controller to work over bluetooth which was a bit of a bummer. For me the new controller is most interesting as most games have XBOX controller support (with xbox button captions) and the steam controller adopts the button naming.
I just built one of these as well. For your Xbox controller, see if this works: find any Windows PC and download the Xbox Accessories app. Connect the controller (via USB) and update its firmware. Once I did this, I was able to pair it with the framework desktop via bluetooth (under linux) reliably, and it's been rock solid ever since. Apparently some of the models shipped with buggy firmware that linux really doesn't like for whatever reason.
If you still have the xbox controller, I'd recommend the dedicated USB wireless adapter. It's reasonably priced and very solid.
SteamOS isn't perfect, but it's "open" to mods like a PS5 or XBOX will never be. As an avid console gamer it's time to go back to my roots.
Some PS were open (still have my PS2Linux) and XBoxes have dev mode, even if it is stuck on UWP, and there was XNA as well.
Turns out most open consoles are full of either crapware or emulators, which is the reason Sony and Microsoft eventually gave up on some openess.
Random trivia: The PS2 Linux was purely for tax evasion.
EU had a higher tax rate for "gaming computers" than "generic computers" so Sony slapped Linux on the console to get better profits.
Good example of being confidently wrong. You are thinking of the little Basic interpreter that was on the pack-in consumer demo disc. Not the Linux Kit which was a very real initiative and had universities involved. We were using them in a big dedicated lab.
> reasonably priced storage upgrades
To be fair to Sony here, the PS5 uses a normal m.2 NVME SSD for storage upgrades.
Current OS split of Steam users - 94.84% windows, 2.11% mac, 3.05% Linux.
Valve has fought tooth and nail for a decade to make that 3.05% a reality. Linux means they control their own destiny, instead of being at the mercy of Microsoft. Valve has their eyes on this prize and they’re willing to play the long game.
Everyone’s going to talk about “winning” the console generation, but winning could mean an increase of Linux’s share to 5-6%. That would be a massive win, and would be a vindication of Valve’s strategy. Valve could achieve their goals even if Sony and Nintendo sells millions of consoles more.
Yeah I mean... can I play Fortnite, BF6 or the upcoming GTA on steamOS?
Probably not. Kernel level anti cheat is the problem. I know BF6 isn't proton safe. Fortnite is the same.
GTA VI will probably run single player on proton fine, GTA V does. Multiplayer will probably not.
The multiplayer with kernel level anti cheat will keep Sony safe through at least another generation; Microsoft is less safe as they're so vulnerable this generation anyway.
GTA V multiplayer was working fine on Proton not too long ago. Haven't played in years though.
There where changes a few months ago. Multiplayer is completely non-viable since then.
These are not winner games these days. Gaming trends are so fast that indie games like the one where you play a duck with a gun is what's driving the gaming community these days.
That's a misconception. Majority of players are with the big Franchises, and they stay with them. The variety-gamers who are playing multiple different games are a minority, though they are a big crowd, loud and have for obvious reasons more attention, leading to this misconception. For example, Escape from Duckov, which you are speaking about, had at it's peak "just" roughly as many players as Battlefield 6 has on average every day. And Battlefield is the smaller one of the big games.
I would say that‘s a bit overly simplified, as much as the indie or indie like game scene is thriving, so is the online multiplayer scene. Gaming is huge and just because one thing is big doesn’t mean another is not. Not a zero sum game here.
Sure but not being able to play 4 games is not an indication of success either way. It's not 2012 when you had to have Call of Duty - you can not have battlefield, cod or fort nite and still never run out of incredible, popular games to play.
If you have a bunch of friends that have battlefield/cod/fortnite and want to play them, they will still do so without you, or at least heavily pressure you into getting them.
I'm not sure what could that even mean from consumer pov - I'm not going to buy a platform because some of my friends might want me to play a specific game with me?
The pressure to get more games on your platform has never been as low as it is today and has never been this low on Steam itself. You could spend a lifetime with the current Steam library and never feel bored.
From product pov Valve feels very comfortable and I bet they have the data to back up this move with basically unlimited war chest. If anything I feel like Valve is pressuring game developers of these major games here - not the other way around.
That’s exactly the thought process of every teenager ever, and also most people who want to connect with their friends through gaming beyond their teenage years.
Not everyone experiences gaming the same way.
> I'm not sure what could that even mean from consumer pov - I'm not going to buy a platform because some of my friends might want me to play a specific game with me?
That's exactly how console sales worked in the past. I bought an Xbox because all my friends were playing Halo, and I wanted to join in...
The recent phenomenon of games supporting cross-play out of the gate is probably eating into this, but exclusives were a hell of a moat back in the day.
> I'm not sure what could that even mean from consumer pov - I'm not going to buy a platform because some of my friends might want me to play a specific game with me?
Yeah exactly. Depending how much you care about playing with friends compared to playing at all you might make that choice.
Sure, but those AAA games still exist, and people still want to play them.
As a gamer, why would you want to spend a few hundred bucks on a gaming box, when it isn't able to play the biggest hits? Who would want to deliberately limit their ecosystem to indie games?
There's a nonzero chance that BF6/GTA6/etc becomes a thing that everyone wants to play. If all your friends are raging about how much fun it is and are all playing together, aren't you going to regret buying a Steam Machine?
Sure, you can still play Super Meat Boy, but that doesn't matter - they regret what they can't do.
Exactly, this competes with a second hand PS5.
thats not accurate. they have improved, but the market does not look as you described
It’s unlikely you’ll be able to play GTA 6 on any PC platform as it’s only coming out on consoles.
At least to start. Microsoft strongly encourages all Xbox games to also come out on PC, though they sometimes release later. I cannot find any game developed originally for Xbox Series X|S where this hasn't happened eventually (and the developers definitively aren't still working on the PC version).
And they might eventually steer all games into XBox store.
I am expecting the day Microsoft decides to take all their studios out of Steam, if SteamOS starts to be too much of a pain.
I can see developers work on SteamOS anticheat soon, once it gains more traction (chicken / egg problem though). Those games are available on mobile phones and consoles as well, so "windows" is not a requirement.
5 years ago, if someone told you about a commercial Linux gaming console. You were right to laugh.
Now, with IA cheating being the norm now, I think Valve has a real chance to add a microchip to "certify" its console and so playing Fornite (or over 3A) on it.
Will be a added value over a gaming PC, I don't think they will miss this opportunity for too long.
If you can’t play Fortnite on it it sounds like a great time to line up a lawsuit against Epic Games for refusing to allow you to play Fortnite on the Steam box.
No, and I understand if that's a deal-breaker for you, but for me I refuse avoid kernel level anticheat wherever possible, so I'm none too fussed about it. If a game wants to run malware, it can do it on a console where it's nice and segmented off from my general-purpose computing.
Do you also game on a separate windows/Linux user?
If any game has DRM or anti-cheat technology which BF6 does and even most AAA games, then it cannot play it at all without it.
That is going to be a no go for any SteamOS device when an highly anticipated game gets released on day 1.
I think that the idea is that if you get enough users on Linux, it seems foolish from the game studio's perspective not to add Linux support to their anticheat.
Not necessarily, the anticheat will end up much easier to defeat on Linux.
This depends heavily on how customised the linux is. Back in the day Amazon had to fork Android to add kernel-level support for DRM, otherwise the studios weren't going to permit streaming video on Fire tablets. One could imagine Valve adding an optional kernel DRM module to solve the same problem.
You still lose because the dev team has to split their attention.
And anyway I (and many other people!) have valid keys for basically all widevine streams extracted from supposedly secure android devices. That DRM approach ended up failing miserably and torrent sites are full of WEB-DLs.
ARC Raiders runs fine with anticheat on Linux. As does the Finals.
Not the case - lots of games including AAA ones have these things on the Steam Deck.
Market pressure can change game studios behavior.
Battlefield 6 might never run on the average Linux desktop, but I could see a future where it would run on Steam hardware in an end-to-end Secure Boot environment.
Gamers don't like playing with cheaters.
That you are talking about a hypothetical game not running says enough...
Fortnite came out in '17, at some point it's no longer going to be relevant.
Counter Strike came out in '99 and it's more relevant than ever. Some games just keep going and going.
I hate to break it to you, but CS is not relevant. How much money do you think it makes, compared to recent top sellers or live service/mobile games?
I dont give the slightest of shits about CS but have you seen the figures? It's doing absurdly well. In addition the separate economy for skins peaked at 6 billion recently.
thats not irrelevant
About $1B/year.
CS:GO is the highest grossing game on Steam, according to some sources, all agree its top 5.
Why is that irrelevant?
Also consistently the most played game on Steam by a fair margin. That doesn't necessarily make it the most played PC game since some big titles like League and Fortnite aren't on Steam, but it's at least close.
Raid shadow legends is also estimated to make around $1B/year, and there are many such mobile games.
Roblox made $3.6B in 2024. Fornite makes $3-5B/year for the past ~decade.
Genshin Impact is estimated to make ~$10B this year.
Not only in revenue, but all of the above have way more cultural impact/awareness too.
The pond is very big, but it's easy to miss that if you're in a bubble in that pond.
CS is consistently the top played game on Steam every year. Are you saying Steam isn't relevant? That's quite the claim to be making.
You didn't know what you were talking about and got caught in it.
That's fine! I was surprised too.
Something I've learned with age is it's better to have a laugh together than throw out more cover.
Jesus, since when Fortnite and BF6 became gaming benchmark nowadays?
There’s Dota 2, CS2, TF2 all of which are much better games that you’ve listed, and thousands games more.
And you can absolutely play GTA, thankfully without horrendous online. The only thing steam should do is to ban their shitty launcher for eternity.
Jesus, since when Fortnite and BF6 became gaming benchmark nowadays?
In order to 'win' a console generation there needs to be support for the games people want to play. Capitalism is a literal popularity contest, and any console that doesn't have Fortnite, COD, FIFA, etc won't win, regardless of what you or I might think of the games.
The reason why Steam can't win a console generation is simply because Microsoft, Sony, and Nintendo have enough sway over publishers (especially ones they own) than they stop popular games being available on a rival platform. They market it as 'exclusives' but really it's just anti-consumer.
Licensing? What do you mean, licensing? Other manufacturers are free to take it. It's all open source.
Yes, you need to license SteamOS to preinstall it on devices you sell: https://store.steampowered.com/steamos/oem
Why would you not need to license it? Steam isn't open source and Steam, the trademark, is owned by Valve. If we were talking about a standard distro like Fedora, no, I guess they wouldn't have to license it, but we aren't.
It's also about protecting their brand.
If someone starts selling completely shitty "SteamOS PCs" without licensing, it'll hurt Valve more than the no-name Chinese PC manufacturer.
Licensing -> Valve can dictate minimum specs and QA requirements -> Good for everyone.
their biggest fight is this:
"what, i cant play COD online? Or Battlefield? or fifa? or Rocket League?... but thats all I play, and it costs more than a ps5?
...whats the point?"
These games have gigantic followings that ship hardware year after year. People on hackernews are substantially broader-minded than your average console gamer.
On the above basis alone, most of the regular gamers I know will not buy one of these.
"Will it play GTA6, and play it well, whenever that eventually comes out?"
That is the bar (in my opinion) today, you have to take your box over to rockstar and spec for that or you are just selling outdated hardware.
Steam needs IP. Something as iconic as Kratos or Mario. That's how you go toe to toe with consoles.
It doesn't need IP, it is already THE marketplace for PC gaming. People will get a box like this to play the library they already own, or get great deals on new games.
> it is already THE marketplace for PC gaming
Yeah, but console gamers don't necessarily know or care about that. If you want to cut into the console market, you kind of have to meet console gamers halfway
Not if you are playing the long game. You get console gamers by buying consoles. Steam now has the concept of parental controls and kid accounts. That's the story of why my kid has never played a console. And I have grabbed a lot of her friends as well. In 5 or 6 years when these kids are teens, they will stay with steam and play whatever works on that platform over picking up whatever Nintendo, Sony or Microsoft drop.
PC gaming had been dying because it was losing kids with the rise of tablets and phones. This is a decent solution even if it will not pay off immediately.
Gordon Freeman and Glados should be able to handle that.
Steam/Valve is the IP already. It's the default goto for gamers.
I bought a bunch of games for console over the years that I can't play any more.
I have about a dozen games on the switch. In another console generation, nintendo will make all my existing switch games unplayable again. I feel like you don't really buy console games. You rent them for one console generation.
I mean, I can't tell whats worse - that Nintendo has the gall to try and sell me the same game for switch that I already bought retail on the Wii several years ago. Or that I can't play a lot of my old Wii games at all any more.
But every year I end up picking up more and more games on steam. So many games. I have hundreds, and so do most of my friends. And all of those games keep running on every PC I own.
That's the value proposition of a steam box. It ships with hundreds of games that I already own and already enjoy. Fancy playing bioshock again? Sure. Factorio? Yeah hit me. Dota? Cyberpunk? Terraria? Stardew Valley? Lets go.
How do the console makers compete with that?
Does it?
I mean, it already has a library of games vaster than all other consoles taken together.
I hardly understand the headline. Steam machine is just a computer, and since it can be used for other stuff than playing games, then it can't have the cheap pricing of a console. Most consoles are sold at a loss, and the benefits are made when selling console-exclusive games. If you sell something at a loss, but users aren't forced to buy your games, then you're not gonna make any money. Hence, the Steam Machine (AKA GabeCube) is gonna be as expensive as a laptop (or slightly less expensive because of the bigger form factor and lack of portability).
On top of that, the base OS can't run a ton of games that run on console, because it runs in the way of kernel anti cheats (think: battlefield, call of duty, valorant, league of legends... the biggest games basically), while consoles are guaranteed to run most AAA games.
So with all that in mind - while I appreciate what Valve is doing a lot - I don't think it'll win the "console generation". I hardly see how it can even be called a console. It's just a PC, and that's how they call it themselves.
> Most consoles are sold at a loss
You're thinking of 'back in the day.' The original XBox's video card was worth more than they sold the entire system for, and the PS3 was a complete beast of computation (even if not entirely inappropriate for games...)! But in modern times (PS4 gen onward) consoles have become relatively vanilla midrange computers designed with the intent of turning profit on the hardware as quickly as possible.
The hardware cost of the PS4 was less than it's retail price from day 0 [1], and they began making a profit per unit shortly thereafter. Similarly the PS5 also reached profit per unit in less than a year. [2] XBox models from the PS4 gen onward are conspicuously similar as well.
[1] - https://tech.yahoo.com/general/article/2013-11-19-ps4-costs-...
[2] - https://www.theverge.com/2021/8/4/22609150/sony-playstation-...
PS2 and PS3 were price-competitive with stand-alone DVD and Blu-Ray players (respectively) at launch.
However, Switch is another console that sold for more than component and manufacturing cost at launch.
But most of the cost that needs to be amortized is R&D.
> PS3 were price-competitive with stand-alone Blu-Ray players at launch.
We got a PS3 at home for this very reason, needless to say my brother and I were ecstatic.
> I hardly understand the headline. Steam machine is just a computer, and since it can be used for other stuff than playing games, then it can't have the cheap pricing of a console.
I don't understand this train of thought. It absolutely can have the cheap pricing of a console, as long as Steam is the default store, and the majority of users will use the console as-is and buy games on Steam.
Let me give a quick analogy: Google paid Apple 20B USD just to be the default search engine in Safari, even though users can easily change it. Defaults matter. The vast majority of people are not highly technical users who customize everything in-depth and seek out alternatives. The vast majority of people just use whatever is the default.
The main problem I see is that if this is any cheaper than it's hardware, people will buy 100s of them and stack them in server racks for CI runners or whatever. Generating only losses for Valve and making the hardware unavailable to gamers.
It needs to either be at market rate or locked down to only be useful for gaming.
I don't think they could possibly make it cheap enough for that - especially once you consider all the money being wasted on RGB/Bluetooth/a GPU you won't use.
Messing around with weird consumer hardware in a datacenter context isn't exactly attractive. If all you need is some x86 cores, an off-the-shelf blade server approach gets you far more compute in the same space with far less hassle. Even if the purchase cost is attractive, TCO won't be.
The RGB costs maybe 2€ to add, the bluetooth chip is maybe 50c.
Does it have IPMI? Does it have ECC ram? Racking Mac Minis is a painful enough, this form factor is less rackable than that. If you need to physically adjust the form factor per device, whatever you could've saved will be immediately lost in labor.
I think the limitation on server gear these days is electricity price vs compute, with the hardware price being an up front investment but not dominating the lifetime cost. At least at this end of the price range - it's a consumer GPU, not an A100 or anything.
you don't remember playstation clusters?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PlayStation_3_cluster
that said, practically buying hundreds of them should prove to be quite difficult.
The PS3 was uniquely powerful, compared to its x86 peers. It wasn't just cheap - it provided the compute of 30 desktop computers in the space, power, and price envelope of one.
Iiuc, unlike Sony’s PS3 (which were bought and used like this), Steam is the unique distributor so it would be easy for them to not allow (or make really difficult to) buying thousands of machines.
(Or they could sell it everywhere for higher price but the Machine would come with a non transferable Steam gift card.)
It’s like android. You sell pixel at relatively high price but create a wave of other with cheaper alternatives, so you end up make money from being default store.
> It absolutely can have the cheap pricing of a console
Valve hasn't committed to a price yet, but they told Gamers Nexus that it'll be priced less like a console and more like an entry level computer (i.e. more expensive than a console).
I didn't say it "will", I said it "can". And since pricing is not announced yet we have no idea what they will do in the end.
Weird statement, because I can search for PS5 pro & see $750 price points, and entry level computers have been far far cheaper. Cheaper than Xbox series X at $650. Getting pretty solid laptops for a bit under $500 has been possible for many years now.
But "entry level computer" has a very broad interpretation available. Could be higher for sure.
Do those computers play games competently? I doubt they play them as well as the PS5 or Series X. We aren't in the days where integrated graphics instantly meant sub 20 FPS on any game no matter how simple, but I still wouldn't throw any recent triple A game at even new-ish computers with integrated graphics and expect them to perform all that well. They'll play Rocket League, Stardew Valley and Minecraft just fine, and maybe that's all they need to do, but a Steam Machine that can't play tomorrow's title roughly on par with current gen consoles seems like a losing bet unless the price is equivalently lower.
Yes. There's a peer thread below this one with more examples, but in general the biggest (and most relevant) cost you're looking at with a new computer is the video card. And a PS5 level video card is the RX 6700 XT which is like $200-$300. If you're willing to purchase second hand you can go substantially lower.
I suspect most of us are of a vaguely similar age, and when "we" were growing up, PC gaming was ridiculously expensive. A new gaming PC was thousands of dollars and then obsolete within a couple of years, leaving you constantly checking new release 'minimum system requirements.' It was quite painful and a big reason I (and I suspect others) migrated to console gaming. But now a days? I have a relatively old PC and never even bother looking at spec requirements - it'll run it, just fine.
The Steam Machine uses a dedicated graphics chip, similar to a discrete AMD RX 7060M. Laptop chip sure, but a stone's throw from integrated graphics. These Machines will be able to keep up.
I assumed they meant an entry level gaming computer, not something with potato-grade integrated graphics, but I agree it's vague.
You can build an entry level gaming computer for under $400 easily. Here [1] is one example (parts list/link in the description).
[1] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vecR26Nz_YA
That build uses a 13 year old CPU from AliExpress, there's no accounting for taste but I think most entry level builds are aiming a little higher than that. Some newer games won't even try to run on a CPU of that vintage since it doesn't have AVX2 support.
It was released in 2016 and does support AVX2. In general what matters when building a decent rig is aiming to balance performance to optimize against bottle necks. He demonstrated the system in various modern games, for instance running Delta Force at 4k/120FPS. And the CPU was scarcely getting touched - running at around 20%.
You can spend a ton of money on a bleeding edge CPU and see 0 performance gain in almost all cases, because basically no modern games are CPU limited, or even remotely close to it, so you're sitting there with your overpriced CPU basically idling.
-----
I think many people are out of the loop on PC costs and performance. The days where you needed some $1000+ bleeding edge rig to even begin to play the latest stuff are long gone. Since this thread is on consoles - an approximate PS5 equivalent video card is the RX 6700 XT which is like $200-$300, and that is, by far, the biggest expense.
> It was released in 2016 and does support AVX2
My mistake, I missed off the important "v4" when looking up the model. Embarrassing.
Steam machine is barely at base ps5 level in performance
Laptops have lots of components that the Steam Machine doesn't have. The screen, keyboard, touchpad, cameras, microphones, speakers, battery, et cetera are all fairly small costs, but they add up. Plus using a Linux-based OS instead of Windows automatically knocks around $50 off the price because the price doesn't include the cost of an OEM Windows license.
I don't think the Steam Machine will be priced lower than a PS5 or Xbox (unless Valve is willing to burn money in exchange for market share), but I think that it'll be priced significantly lower than an equivalent-spec laptop (which would be in the $600-800 range based on the fact that the Steam Machine has an "AMD RDNA3 28CUs" GPU, which according to Google is roughly equivalent to an Nvidia RTX 4050, laptops containing which are priced around $600-800).
> Laptops have lots of components that the Steam Machine doesn't have. The screen, keyboard, touchpad, cameras, microphones, speakers, battery, et cetera are all fairly small costs, but they add up. Plus using a Linux-based OS instead of Windows automatically knocks around $50 off the price because the price doesn't include the cost of an OEM Windows license.
Yet's all the mini PCs I've come across are more expensive than their laptop equivalent
Because it's also about the demand, and how much you can mass produce them to reduce the cost
The 'AMD RDNA3 28CUs' is likely to be the 7600M, as all the major specs are the same (power draw and clocks is lower, but given that the Steam Machine is not a laptop, it probably will have more headroom for that).
I mean, Valve built this with the profits, at least, in no small part with the profits from selling games, DLC, and gacha skins on their storefront which has many many competitors too bozo-brained to run their stores as well as Valve does.
If any company has a business case for “we’ll sell the form factor at a loss with our store preinstalled” now it’s Valve, especially if they want to make the hardware only to prove the viability of the form factor, and especially since they already have been selling on platforms they don’t own.
Very few consoles were sold at a loss. Some certainly were, like the fat PS3. But that was the exception, not the rule.
More relevantly, none of the current generation (ps5, xbox series, switch 2) are sold at a loss. They don't have large margins, but they are sold above cost.
The Taiwanese computer manufacturers won't be phased by thin margins; that's their modus operandi.
Microsoft testified under oath in court that they lost money on every Xbox sold prior to the current generation.
Sega lost money on every console prior to exiting the market.
Nintendo sold various consoles at a loss (Wii U).
The PlayStation 1 through 4 sold either at a loss or break even.
GabeCube gave me a good chuckle, thank you.
A console is really just a PC with the word “console” tagged on the side of it. It's more of a branding exercise than a proper distinction. The only real difference is you boot up the console and it takes you straight to a game library.
As for the range of games available, it's got a lot more indie titles than console does. One rather hopes it will inspire game developers to develop more Linux-compatible anti-cheat solutions, or just host Linux versions of the game on separate servers, but I won't hold my breath. I've honestly never got the point of anti-cheat myself, it doesn't seem to work in most games. I've long thought there exist much better solutions to cheating than software ones. The simplest would be to permit cheats in the game's base servers and allow players to scan their ID (á la Online Safety Act) to access servers with a higher degree of moderation. A permanent identity-based ban would sort out the problem much more swiftly than endlessly chasing hackers.
Is money still made from console exclusives? I feel like I see less of them these days. The biggest games are cross platform monsters, and the smallest are indie games.
Crazy to think that the Horizon Zero Dawns of the world would be propping up all of console gaming??
But maybe that’s why Xbox is looking to get out. And trying new monetization strategies (gamepass is on Roku or something)
In principle the consoles themselves and the exclusives are both loss leaders. Or, sold at cost, anyway. The actual money is made from the 30% cut on any third party game sales, and the online subscriptions required to play online.
Consoles are expensive. Once a consumer has bought one, they're likely to stick with it for the generation. This is why we have flame wars about them. Only a small minority has several high-end gaming devices.
Exclusives sold consoles which determined future revenues. MS messed up horrendously with both a worse console and meh exclusives.
An exclusive will sell fewer copies, so the console manufacturer will strike a beneficial deal to make up for it.
> I hardly see how it can even be called a console.
Rather than focus too much on the technology classification, think of it in terms of extending the Steam platform to new markets. How many new people in the market for games-on-their-tv will at least consider a Steam machine. Even with the trade-offs you mention, my guess is quite a lot. And Valve doesn't care about making money on the hardware, they are already basically printing money.
For me, the big killer feature would be if this device is approved for modern media DRM. As much as I'm tired of streaming and its level of control over how I watch TV, it's still a decent part of my media consumption, but any Linux mini-PC I connect to the TV can only do low-resolution streaming from most providers. If the steam machine is approved for high-resolution streaming, it could totally replace the smart TV stack in most homes.
> The big thing I want to see in practice is their implementation of foveated rendering. This beautiful hack abuses the fact that human eyes have the most sharpness and fidelity at the exact centre of your field of vision, whereas your peripheral vision is abysmal at it. This means that on average you only have to render about 10% of the frame at maximum quality for it to feel like it's running at full resolution all over the screen.
> This should make the fact that the Frame is using a "weaker" CPU/GPU irrelevant. Games should look fine as long as they render the slice that needs to be in full quality fast enough.
It's not foveated rendering, it's foveated streaming. The CPU/GPU should easily be able to handle decoding video, whether foveated or not.
Maybe this is less of an issue now we’re in the digital era of console games but one of the biggest aspects for me is that if I buy one of these new machines, my existing library is just there. No starting from scratch or worrying about backwards compatibility. It’s a PC that has everything I need from the get go.
The story was the same with the Deck. Granted it took a little while for many games to be fully supported but the transparency from Valve on the store pages about compatibility was great and is in a far better state now.
> The only possible flaw I can see is that the strap it ships with doesn't go over the top of your head. If this ends up being an issue in practice, somebody is going to make a third party strap that just fixes this problem
Not even a third party: https://youtu.be/b7q2CS8HDHU?t=380
> the option of an ergonomic strap that you can hook onto the top, hook onto the back, to take more weight off the front of your head.
https://www.pcgamer.com/hardware/vr-hardware/steam-frame-spe...
> There's an optional ergonomic accessories kit for the Steam Frame that adds an extra strap for your head and a pair of straps, one for each controller. These added controller straps are reminiscent of those found on the Index and seem like a reasonable investment, if the price is right.
I don't really understand the early enthusiasm about the Steam Machine, and I happily own a Steam Deck.
"It's on par with a PS5!" You mean the thing that was launched over 5 years ago (exactly!) ?
We don't know its price yet, which is the most crucial detail.
If it can play all games on Steam _today_ at 4k60fps (even with FSR) it means I have about 570 games on my Steam library it can play in perpetuity.
Even if I play 2 hours of each game, it's still a bargain =)
And because this is Valve and I've had a stellar experience with my Steam Deck, I'm pretty confident that future games will run on it too. Most likely gamedevs will add special "Steam Machine" performance profiles like they've done with the deck. And there will be a "Steam Machine certified" checkmark on Steam.
I don't play games much anymore, so maybe I'm not the right person to respond.
Why would anyone ever buy a console again? This thing has the ultimate library and works on all platforms.
Steam seems to have played the best game of chess in the industry. Sony and Microsoft were battling over exclusives and acquisitions and ways to screw over customers. This came out of left field and looks a million times better than Xbox or PS5. It has people's entire libraries on it, and the games are cheap and portable. There's no lock down. No funny business.
I almost want one. I'm excited about it and I don't even think I'd play it.
In the era of mobile games, hardware really isn't a thing anymore. Even AAA titles are niche IMO given the cost to play them at full settings. All that matters now are the exclusive titles. You refer to this derisively but really that's what made the nintendo switch, clearly the weakest compared to the PS5 and even the steam deck in the last generation the clear winner.
And do you think PC has less exclusives compared to PS5 / other consoles? How many games on Steam has never been released on consoles vs the other way round?
By that logic I'd expect this one to completely dominate.
So, we should define terms. To "dominate" should mean to sell more than or make more money than the competition, which may include taking market share from the competition. I don't doubt valve will continue to make money in an absolute sense, it already does and this likely doesn't change that.
Steam already has a monopoly in the PC space and has the "exclusives" you talk about, essentially games that never were ported to the PS5 or the switch. Thus, in order for the steam machine to take market share from the other consoles, you a) have to take console share from those players, likely by pressuring those developers to port from the consoles to PC. That could be something, but no doubt that pressure already exists, as steam already exists. I don't see how the steam machine changes that. In fact, the opposite situation exists which is why steam makes so much money, as you said. To actually dominate, it can only happen after situation c) below.
New customers or dollars cannot come from people who have a PC and can now forgo using their pc for gaming (by neglecting to upgrade their pc to keep up to date to play new AAAs), as the assumption here is they are selling the consoles at a loss (which may not be true, we'll have to find out). That if anything, is essentially a soft form of b) cannibalisation. So that isn't really "gaining market share" more so than it's changing the means of consumption of the same thing. Moreover, if they choose to sell at a loss, then I only can imagine this leading to actual cannibalisation from their existing PC customers as there isn't really any actual profit being made here.
So finally, the only route they have to expanding their player base in my mind is c) new gamers, that is casual phone players or other non-enthusiast gamers who don't really play games but will be willing to buy a console. This is how the Wii excelled in its generation and how the switch won the last one. Here, it all comes down to price and thus how much Valve is willing to sell at a loss or otherwise subsidise the steam machine using steam proper. So, this to feels like their only real route to "dominating."
As I alluded to above, a) can only happen if c) happens, as Steam already has the mindshare it does and thus it already has the same allure to developers as is the case today, and those developers are still pursuing exclusives with the PS5 and the switch. Thus, if certain developers or games are stuck on the switch or the PS5 with current conditions, they won't move enmass to the steam machine unless c) happens first and thus their calculus changes. And of course, selling at a loss means that they also run the risk of only b) occurring if they don't gain enough new players fast enough to offset the loss from selling consoles.
That leaves them not selling the hardware at a loss, then I don't really know. It's just the steam machine will likely be north of 700 usd if you're not subsidising it, and like the steam deck it will be a novelty item they may or may not make a profit off of. That I wouldn't call "domination", although they may make money overall so I don't doubt they will end up happy.
To win this console generation and outsell the PS5, Valve would have to sell 85 million Steam Machines (as of today, and likely need to sell 120 million by the end of the generation). About a 0% chance of that happening.
Looks cool, though
Surely the Steam Machine is in a newer generation than the PS5?
I'm implying they'd win via a cultural victory TBH
I am up for a lego pyramid made of Steam machines.
As the article says, "The only way that they could mess this up is with the pricing. ... I'd expect the pricing to be super aggressive." The price to beat is the $400-$500 price point of PS5 and XBox. I'm guessing Valve is going to have a very hard time matching that. We'll know soon enough.
All they have to do is market the fact you don't have to pay for online.
PS5 + 3 years of PS Plus = $740
Steam Machine = $700
Add/remove more years of PS Plus if the SM turns out to be more/less expensive.
If you add the fact that games on PC are usually cheaper and have sales more often then it's a no brainer, but that won't convince the FIFA and COD players.
This system won't run FIFA, GTA Online, Battlefield, Valorant or CoD, it's a nonstarter for many.
Sure you don't need to subscribe to PS+, but that's somewhat easier to swallow since PS+ gives you games with the subscription.
I'm still interested in this for playing older games but I have a Steam Deck and it still isn't remotely as seamless as my Switch or PS5.
> This system won't run FIFA, GTA Online, Battlefield, Valorant or CoD, it's a nonstarter for many.
That's largely known now but still a bummer. I wonder if anything will ever change in this area and if Valve will be able to pressure game editors or create an anti-cheat so good and for any platform to be able to change something.
Valve can't even do it for cs2 on windows.
Why not? You can just install windows on it.
"Just", YMMV.
It has a custom motherboard for example, which may or may not be supported by Microsoft.
>All they have to do is market the fact you don't have to pay for online.
All Sony and MS have to do it market that it can't play GTA6 at launch.
Plus a game catalog that stretches back some 30 years?
And +X years, because you could write your own games for it and install them without begging for permission from Valve.
They don't even necessarily have to beat the PS5/Xbox. I already own the former but sometimes lament not being able to play the many, many PC exclusives out there (or at least nothing released in the past 10+ years since my daily driver laptop has poor specs). Just recently I was wondering whether one of those all-in-one Lenovo desktop boxes would have decent enough specs to play current-gen PC games at halfway decent settings, and my guess is that they don't, but I don't want to go through the hassle of building a PC and definitely don't want a tower with a huge footprint.
Turns out the Steam Machine is exactly what I'm looking for.
I bought a steam deck to play Age of Wonders 4. Briefly got sucked into playing a Skyrim again.
Exactly. I have both PS5 and Xbox One X, but I still connect my Steam Deck to TV to play Hades II because the game hasn't come out on those two consoles yet.
I think that realistically, Valve probably only need to be on par with the top of Sony’s offering hardware wise. The ability to have Steam integration on the machine (including the large amount of subpar but very cheap games) will prompt at least some movement. I’d say $800 is probably the high-end of reasonable for price point. I can certain say I’d rather just buy my kids a StreamBox than have to deal with them want full capability PCs.
I agree. Steam's prices on sales are still mostly unmatched by consoles.
Even if it is a "pricier" PS5-like machine, I'd still buy it and I bet I'd make up the difference in less than a year with just the sales games (including older games I can't play on either console).
I think most of the critiques for this are from people expecting this to be aimed at PC gamers.
I don't think it is. I think it's aimed at people that actually DON'T want to bother with building, buying, upgrading PCs, but still want to play cheap games, older games.
To this day, I can't make my PC turn on with a controller (and I've tried). Making a PC wake up as fast as a Steam Deck from sleep? Impossible.
Those little things will all add up to make this a very nice option for the non-hardcode PC game crowd.
Valve is going to steal a lot of users from console, mostly Xbox. Not PC Gaming enthusiast.
Totally. SteamOS is everything here.
They told press that it wouldn’t be console pricing and would match entry level PC. I think it’s going to be $800
Is that the price point of those anymore? I see 550 ish for the base ps5 with a disc drive and closer to 750 for the pro.
I don't expect them to match either in volume but it seems like microsoft is already backing out of the dedicated console hardware space tho
$699 (maybe 799 for a more premium model) seems to be a good compromise given what it would take to build a sufficiently similar PC while being close enough to the PS5/Switch. Xbox is practically dead.
I don’t think it needs to compete on price directly, if it can deliver the polish of a console. It can also play up the angle of being a full blown computer.
You can tell XBox is cooked because Halo was released on the PS5.
With the specs these devices have I don't think it's far-fetched to assume that pricing will be competitive. Maybe they will charge a bit extra if they tout all the extra stuff you can install on the Machine vs Xbox as a selling point, which they are kind of doing, to justify a slightly higher price point.
> Who are we to tell you how to use your computer?
I'm buying one just for this sentiment alone.
As much as I love hacking with various things, there are reasons why I buy "closed products" for myself and for my family. I like to do hacking when I want it (with ESP32, rpi etc). I don't want to be forced to serve as a free IT support guy anytime someone presses a wrong button.
When it comes to gaming consoles, I want them to serve reliably to my family. The game console must be fun, optimized for best experience and should not break. Will that be possible with an open platform where anyone can install anything?
> The game console must be fun, optimized for best experience and should not break. Will that be possible with an open platform where anyone can install anything?
Yes, SteamOS is just that. A system that is easy to rollback if you mess things up. And you have to go deep under the covers to mess things up (switch to desktop mode, disable readonly system partition, modify wrong files).
Valve should really focus on improving the polish of the steam store, as that abomination of a (react ?) frontend breaks often in very surprising ways.
SteamOS as a console system is close to a 9/10. As far as polish of steam app/store and the ux, a fair 7/10.
Unfortunately buying closed systems hasn’t stopped me from being IT support:
- “why can’t I play online with EA Sports?”
- “I can’t log into Roblox!”
- “why can’t I see my sisters world in Minecraft?”
- “I’ve lost my Fortnight skins!”
- “why does Roblox keep disconnecting me on my phone [when Roblox servers go down]?”
- “Why can’t I play this game [without updating it]?”
- “this game update takes too long to download!”
If there’s one constant in life: it’s that doctors get nagged by friends for free diagnosis, mechanics, electricians, carpenters for free repairs, and software engineers for free IT support.
That would be great - but the last gaming console that I've experienced that with has been the switch.
I recently turned on my old xbox one - literally impossible to play any game without a massive patch, debugging os software issues etc. If the steam machine just works out of the box, it'll already be miles ahead of most of the current state of consoles.
and then you have to download a 100GB patch each time you turn the thing on anyway, by the time it ends installing my time slot is gone
Agree. By "best experience" I also mean "don't force me to wait". But my console doesn't do that. Some online games may require patches before playing for better (anticheat) or worse reasons but thats a fault of the game supplier - not the console supplier.
They announced 3 products guys. The first time Valve has counted to 3.
Half Life 3 is coming.
Maybe try Half Life Alyx :P
So, Steam is planning to sell these at a loss, but isn’t planning to lock out third party OS?
What’s to stop people buying them to use for completely unrelated use cases?
I guess it depends on how big the loss is… if it is small, it might not be really worth it for most people; but any larger, I wonder how sustainable this will be.
What non-gaming use cases do you imagine people might use these for?
For normal computer use (reading email, watching videos, doing spreadsheets), there are much cheaper and better options available. If somebody wanted a Steam Machine specifically, it'd be for the GPU.
If you needed a lot of GPU compute (for AI or blockchain or whatever), it'd be cheaper to buy or rent a dedicated server with Nvidia H100s rather than buying dozens of Steam Machines.
So the only potential use cases are those that have a significant but not too significant GPU requirement. The only ones I can think of are gaming (which is the intended use case), video editing, and 3D rendering.
Video editing is less of a concern because neither Adobe Premier nor Final Cut Pro will run on Linux (to my knowledge), so you might as well buy a Mac that runs both of those very efficiently and has decent hardware.
So we're left with 3D rendering. If people want to use Steam Machines to render things in Blender, I say "let them", and I assume that Valve does too.
> What non-gaming use cases do you imagine people might use these for?
Media box under your TV? Right now I don't have a lot of options that also don't inundate me with ads.
Sure, I can build one, but if Valve can put this out at a price that makes me go "Nah. Not worth building it myself." that's a win.
You can run media from a potato. This will be at least 5x the cost of a cheap mini-PC. And you can't forget power draw. The Steam Machine has a 30W CPU, and I'd guess about 60W RAM which would add up to something like $120+ annually where a mini PC would cost closer to $7. 5 years later and the Steam Machine has eaten it's cost in power. Assuming it costs $500 like most consoles, you are looking at a total 5-year cost of $1100 where a mini-PC would be $100–200.
You can get 100-200€ Chinese mini (or micro?) PCs with an Intel N97/N100 CPU that can do this perfectly.
No need to buy an almost 1000€ massively overpowered custom gaming machine for that.
Couldn't you use a Raspberry Pi or a mini PC for this?
Sure? But RPi's are anemic and not cheap while refurb mini PC's are $400.
So, there's quite a bit of pricing room.
I think the mini PCs they're talking about are more likely to be N100 systems or similar that are sub 100 dollars new. Significantly less anemic, and their hardware media decode (which is well supported by software) is more than sufficient for realtime 4k playback.
I think the explanation is that people love Valve beyond reason, so a vast majority will just use Steam on it.
Plus, Steam is bordering on a monopoly for PC gaming anyway, so, even if they install another OS, a user is probably going to end up on Steam.
> Steam is planning to sell these at a loss
Just a random blog's guess.
> What’s to stop people buying them to use for completely unrelated use cases?
Nothing. But it doesn't mean that Valve doesn't benefit from it. Valve wants the whole gaming scheme to shift toward SteamOS. Like Google wants the whole web browsing to shift to Chrome, even you can use Chrome for stuff unrelated to Google.
What's stopping someone from using a steam deck for running emulators, SuperTuxKart, and pirated games? This isn't their first rodeo
I doubt the steam deck is sold at a loss.
If that's what happens, then I'm buying one of these right away for sure. I mean, I use steam a lot, but I certainly won't be locked in their "SteamOS". Maybe they are betting that most users will be too lazy to change the defaults and stick to SteamOS (which might very well be the case, and they have a hint of this thanks to the data they have on the Steam Deck)
You can install Windows (or Bazzite, or whatever else) on a Steam Deck as well.
Did they say they are selling at a loss?
Valve haven't said that, but the article randomly claims it.
I don't think they have, but it's the business model of most consoles, to be able to be very affordable. So since the headline is implying it'll do better than consoles, it's implying it'll be sold at a loss too. But honestly, I find that article BS.
no modern console is sold at a loss this is silly speculation
I generally like the OP's posts, but I really don't buy their argument. If anything, the nintendo switch winning the last generation is a great example of how hardware isn't always that important, the game library essentially is what makes a console win, and in as much as the hardware enables the breadth of the library, that's all that matters.
Like the steam deck, I don't know who other than power users who will buy it. I love the openness they will bring to the market, but that doesn't mean they will win.
One other semi-unrecognized advantage Valve has over consoles is their generous return policy. I’ve bought many games on a whim knowing if I don’t jive with it I can safely get a full refund. Contrast that with my Ps5 where my 2 year old managed to smash buttons while I was tied up on a work call and bought COD for $69 bucks… no way to refund it and I’m not a fan of shooters. Basically Fd on that one.
My experience is otherwise. I returned one game and got banned from buying other games for a month - during a sale, so I missed that sale and was out of sync with friends for a bit.
I don't give a shit for the money, but fucking my social gaming time was unforgiveable. I still use Steam, but don't fucking trust Valves return policy.
Is there anything more to this? I’ve returned dozens of games that I didn’t end up liking and the only consequence I’ve faced is that games with trading cards don’t start dropping them until 2 hours of play time, which I think is completely fair.
Related ongoing threads:
Steam Controller - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45905703
Steam Machine - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45903404
Steam Frame - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45903325
If they want to capture the console audience its better be priced like one too and not prevent me from playing multiplayer games due to Linux and anti cheat software not playing nice
Anything above $600 is DOA and that's with accepting the fact that the most popular games will be not available on the platform
It's even worse for their competitors than this acknowledges.
SteamOS on Arm (using FEX) is going to spawn a generation of £100 devices that can play lower end Windows games, stream from PC, and emulate every console from the PS2 back. It's huge.
Attached my old gaming rig to the TV to run Steam on it and it is a better experience than any consoles I have (being a gaming nerd I have everything from my old Atari 2600 and most mainstreams systems since then up to PS5).
This is good news to hear Valve going in strong for the console market.
same, I just attached my old laptop with nixos + steam + jellyfin, everything running on KDE and it's been super smooth so far.
I’m not a gamer and not into consoles, but I’m watching Valve and SteamOS from the sidelines with a lot of goodwill. It’s great to see more people buying hardware that runs on Arch — that alone is a good thing. Still, something about this feels a bit too good to be true.
It won't outsell Quest 2, much less the real consoles, not in the next half decade anyway.
This is really cool. I still play my series X on occasion but tend to prefer the experience I get from my Saturn and Dreamcast when I load a game and it plays without needing to update. Every time I turn on my Xbox or PC with steam/GOG I have to wait for an update of some kind.
Unless it's reasonably priced who is the market for this box? If it's at 499 - 599 then it's probably selling well but at 799-899 I'm not sure who would buy it. If it's your first computer you still need more gear like screen, keyboard and mouse etc.
People who want to play video games would buy it. While us enlightened Computer Intellectuals may appreciate that there is no difference between a console and a PC, the majority of naïve computer peasants will much prefer something with the word “console” tagged on that boots straight to a game library. As for the keyboard and mouse thing, there's this other announcement they've made called the “Steam Controller” which addresses that issue.
So no Half Life 3? (':
Rumor has it that it’d be released with the VR set in 2026 ;)
It'd be a good plan. Make HL3 a VR game since you built VR experience by making Alyx, take it to the next level by launching your own VR headset, everything is perfectly made together and HL3 launch would be as big if not bigger than GTA, and you optimize it for your own hardware.
HL3 is most likely not a VR game as Valve said they aren't working on a first party VR title (plus data mining seems to confirm). Plus they already have Alyx as the masterpiece, and it was already made with their own VR headset in mind: the Valve Index.
Maybe HLX will have some kind of VR interaction possible, as they want to push technology further with each Half life game.
I wish... https://www.uploadvr.com/valve-isnt-currently-working-on-a-n...
:(
Wasn’t that Alyx?
Perhaps Alyx walked so HL3 could run.
They announced 3 devices. 3! HL3 confirmed :D
I don't think they're even trying to do that. But they will kill Xbox.
This feels like Valve's iPhone, while the original 2012 Steam Machines were the Newton.
What is the multiplayer cheating situation like on Steam games?
(Technology, demographics, popularity?)
"steam games", doesn't really mean anything. Most games are on steam nowadays. It mostly depends on the OS on which the games run. Games with kernel anti cheat: low cheaters population, runs on Windows but not Linux. Games without kernel anti cheat: low to high (think counter strike official servers) cheaters population.
Whats the media experience like on SteamOS these days? Does it have built in support for media playback? I used to have Kodi running on PhantomOS but it was janky.
Putting the steam machine in the same category as a console didn't make sense to me a decade ago and doesn't make much sense to me today.
>I think it's safe to say that Valve is about to win the next console generation.
For that they need to outsell the Switch 2. 10m units in 6 months.
Good luck with that.
Nintendo is in its own category in which the other competitor is also Valve. For now Nintendo is winning there.
They have enough first party games which only release on their hardware that people are willing to buy a Switch for nintendo games, and another gaming device for everything else.
Sad part is that I would be willing to pay a substantial mark up to be able to play some of those first party titles on my PC, but since my kids have a Switch I just settle for using it. So even if I don’t think I’d buy a console just for their games, I’m gonna end up buying it anyway and Nintendo still wins.
Or the many people like myself who are willing to buy a Switch for Nintendo games and that's their only console.
I love great graphics but , Nintendo carved a nice big niche out for themselves by recognizing the constant drive for best graphics is a bit of rat race.
Nintendo has a tiny library.
Steam does not.
Nintendo has Mario, Zelda, Kirby, Donkey Kong, Starfox, Pokémon, and a few other less super famous and internationally known IP franchises. The core games and their spinoffs make more games than most children can reasonably expected to play through childhood and early adolescence. That the machine then collects dust doesn’t hurt Nintendo because they already sold it.
Yes Steam has huge library (my ‘want to play’ list is over 100 titles at this point) full of games of all genres, qualities, and niches. But Nintendo has more than enough to do what they have done for years, i.e. sit tight on their beloved IP and dole it out at varying levels of quality on strictly low end hardware and watch their earning go up.
Steam Deck has a tiny install base.
Switch 2 does not.
I'm mostly a PC gamer but let's be real here.
Though, to be fair, my kids steal my Steam Deck from me more often than I try to get the Switch from them. The family share features of the Switch leave a lot to be desired.
I'm on a Switch and will not move because of the "Game Key Card" bullshit where you have a card but still don't get the files you need to play them game.
However, Pokemon guarantees a certain amount of Switch 2 sales--Pokemon ZA sold about 6 million units.
That's not an argument in the Steam Machine's case as you have the same situation there (even worse because you can't resell your games).
You aren't wrong.
However, the single digital service that hasn't killed my digital library at some point is Steam. Games that I bought many years ago are still fine. Sony, Microsoft, and Nintendo all killed digital games that I bought.
That having been said: I've transferred a lot of my purchasing to GoG. Steam doesn't get the benefit of the doubt anymore.
>Sony, Microsoft, and Nintendo all killed digital games that I bought.
No? All stores are still online. Some don't allow buying new games anymore (DSi Shop, Wii Shop, PS3 store for example) but redownloading still works.
Year of linux desktop..I mean console.. . Confirmed?
Does anyone know if the foveated rendering feature of the Steam Frame depends on eye-tracking? Is it tracking the iris to determine the center of foveation, or is there some other trick to doing this?
Needs eye tracking and it's foveated streaming not rendering.
By making it immutable out of the box, VAC enforcement because vastly easier and third-party multiplayer anti-cheating kernel rootkits are replaced by “attest that you are unmodified”, which Steam Linux and macOS/tvOS/iOS/iPadOS can do — but not Windows 10/11, because sealed boot functionality is behind Microsoft’s enterprise annual subscription fee paywall. This positions Steam Linux as the monopoly provider of console-gaming Linux, since no one else is doing sealed attestation Linux at scale, and opens the door for multiplayer AAA games to target Steam Linux for their day-one releases as a competitive equal to Xbox/PS5/Switch and as a better defended console platform than Windows PCs. The modifications described by OP are still possible, but won’t be compatible with multiplayer anti-cheating enforcement, which is perfectly fine; boot to sealed for competitive gaming, boot to custom for single player, everyone wins except Microsoft’s Windows division. (If Microsoft hadn’t shot off their foot with Windows 10, they could have simply enabled sealed booting for all 10/11 installations and remained competitive as a gaming platform, but I think they’re done with that business.) Nice to see my predictions pan out and I look forward to buying one :)
Immutability doesn't provide this on it's own. You can load any custom immutable image you want. What game devs want is full boot chain attestation where every part of the OS is measured and verified untampered with, and then to load their own spyware at the highest level.
The only way immutability helps here is you could have two OS images, the users own customisable one, and a clean one. Then when you try to load an anti cheat game, the console could in theory reboot in to the clean one, and pass all the verification checks to load the game.
I am, indeed, assuming that their immutable image can generate attestations chained appropriately. If not, it’s a catastrophic business error on their part to put in all that work, and I don’t consider that degree of failure likely. Definitely curious to see if they can enable the chain on existing Steamdecks or not.
Immutable images provide many benefits that are unrelated to DRM. The main one being that the entire fleet of Steam Decks/Machines are all in a known state. Updates are a matter of pushing a new OS image, you don't have to worry about migrating files, conflicting configurations, strange user changes. And if an update fails, the bootloader shows a screen where you can boot a previous OS image that worked.
It's like docker images for the whole OS. As far as I can tell, the Steam Deck does not have secure boot or any kind of attestation enabled. They have been very forward in marketing it as an open and free system you can do anything on. The hardware does have a TPM that is seemingly unused currently, not sure if it supports some form of secure boot.
> They have been very forward in marketing it as an open and free system you can do anything on.
Attested sealed images and Open and Free systems have no conflict with each other. Mod it all you want; sure, it’ll generate a different attestation than the shipping sealed image, or if your customizations turn off attestations and/or secure boot, none at all. You do you! Source code releases will never include the private key used to sign them, just as with all open source today, so either the OS’s attestation will be signed by Valve or by you or by someone else. It takes me about sixty seconds to add my own signing key to my PC BIOS today and it would not surprise me to find Valve’s BIOS implements the same, as I’m pretty certain this is basic off-the-shelf functionality on Zen4/Zen5. But, regardless, Free/Open Source is wholly unconcerned by whose release signing key is used; otherwise it wouldn’t be Free/Open! The decision to care about whose release signature is live right now is the gaming server’s decision, not Steam Linux’s, and that decision is not restricted by any OSS-approved license that I’m aware of.
Secure boot attestations plus sealed images do enable “unmodified Valve Linux release” checks to be performed by multiplayer game servers, without needing the user to be locked out of making changes at all. This is already demonstrated in macOS today with e.g. Wallet’s Apple Pay support; you can disable and mod the OS as much as you wish, and certain server features whose attestation requirements require an Apple release signature on the booted OS will suspend themselves when the attestation doesn’t match. When you’re ready to use those servers, you secure boot to an OEM sealed environment and they resume working immediately. This is live, today, on every Apple Silicon (and T2 chipped Intel) device worldwide, and has been available for developers to use for years.
Attestations are, similarly, already available on all AMD devices with a TPM today, so long as the BIOS to OS chain implements Secure Boot — not requires, but implements, as there’s no reason to deny users unsigned OS booting once you’re checking attestation signatures server-side. As you note, it remains to be seen if the Steam Box will make use of it. If they do, it coexists just fine with full reputposability and modifiable, because you can do whatever you like with the device — and, correspondingly, each game may choose to require an unmodified environment to ensure a level playing field without kernel or OS modifications.
It would be a lost opportunity for them if they were not the first fully open OS with a fully secure multiplayer environment that prohibits both third-party cheating mods and third-party DRM rootkits. VAC becomes as simple as a sysctl, and patches are still welcome. Open source for the win, and one step further towards the Linux desktop finally overtaking residential Windows, and thr ability to play console-grade multiplayer without the proliferation of on-device software-only hacks? Yes, please.
(Note that manufacturers who use Secure Boot to lock out device modifications are not in-scope here; that choice has no effect on attestations. Secure Boot is “the OS booted had this checksum and signature” with HSM backing, so that the software can’t lie. It is extremely unlikely that Valve would demand that the OS booted be signed by Valve. That would be no different than Xbox/PS5/Switch, and they’d be leaving a massive competitive advantage over tvOS on the table: device repurposeability.)
There's hardware level (on a separate device) ability to capture video and send key/mouse now. Impossible to be detected by anticheat. https://wiki.sipeed.com/hardware/en/kvm/NanoKVM_Pro/cua.html
Yes, but that works just as readily on consoles as it does PCs, so it doesn’t affect immutable Steam any more or less than any other gaming steam. Sealed protections are still valuable regardless!
It affects console too, but watch game publishers disable linux support, blaming cheaters while producing graphs that don't support their arguments. While console packs and cheats are rampant, and their game servers even being hacked during competition.
gaming *system
"At par with PS5.." comparing hardware specs with a console loved by millions and into year 6 of it's lifecycle. I'd rather play my PS5 titles on a PS5 or a portal than on the steam machine. Steam deck is dated, went with the portal and love it.
They’re not gonna win the console generation, this marks the end of the console generation.
That and intermediary consoles like the PS5 Pro are blurring the lines and adapting to the popularity of PC gaming.
I think the hardest battle is going to be with anti cheat. The anti cheat that developers want basically requires dystopian levels of restrictions which are against everything valve has done on SteamOS so far.
Personally I'd love if we all just went back to playing on personal servers with your real life friends or people you otherwise trust. But I don't think this is would go over well with the average online gamer.
Hard agreement from me, but my 16 year old bricked his PC on Sunday trying to enable Valorant’s BS anti-cheat, secure boot required crap. He even knew ahead of time that he couldn’t enable it, but the pull of online gaming turned off his brain. I don’t think we’re gonna win this battle and the war is probably done as well.
If anti-virus software can function in user mode, anti-cheat software can too. https://www.theverge.com/news/692637/microsoft-windows-kerne...
We know, and the game devs know too. But Kernel anti cheat is not a solution but simply a marketing feature to make their users think they try.
Just seeing all the gamers requesting a kernel AC for CS2, saying VAC does not work; but now they have banned a lot of cheaters and seem to have less cheaters than the new Battlefield which has kernel AC.
What restrictions are you talking about?
It was fine like 10 years ago
> I think the hardest battle is going to be with anti cheat. The anti cheat that developers want basically requires dystopian levels of restrictions which are against everything valve has done on SteamOS so far.
If anyone is capable of moving things along in this space, Valve should be it.
> Personally I'd love if we all just went back to playing on personal servers with your real life friends or people you otherwise trust. But I don't think this is would go over well with the average online gamer.
It's not the gamers that don't want this - although, yes, I do also want the option of matchmaking - it's the companies that don't allow dedicated servers, or shut down the servers after releasing that year's full-price version of the same game.
Love the enthusiasm but expensive versions of commodity products with last gen specs are not going to win that generation or the next one.
Win the console generation in what sense? In outselling the PS5? The Switch 2? I have trouble picturing it being cheaper than either.
> Really, the only thing that can go wrong with any of this hardware is the price.
The chances of any of the Steam Machines taking the market share of any of the current generation consoles is so vanishingly miniscule, that I don't think it can even compete against any of them.
It more or less competes against the Linux ecosystem of System76 machines or the Framework computers.
But against consoles? No dent at all in their market share.
Related:
Steam Frame https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45903325
Steam Machine https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45903404
Steam Controller 1 wasn't good IMO and is now accumulating dust.
The main problem was the missing second stick. It was well built, but for game where a controller is nice touch pads sort of suck compared to a stick and for games where a mouse is nice touch pads sort of suck compared to a mouse. So the only real advantage a touch pad brings is in an environment where you can't bring a mouse. I really liked the extra back buttons. with two sticks that is where all the face buttons should be, on the back.
Somewhat related, but I enjoy the topic. Is how freakishly good the mouse is for FPS type games. If you asked anyone to design a purpose built controller for a first person game they would not come up with a mouse. But somehow despite all odds that thing designed for moving a cursor around the screen is the best controller yet for looking around. Probably something about the huge throw distance compared to any other controller.
It's the only controller I use (bar the Steam Deck's built in controller) despite owning plenty of other conventional controllers. Once you get used to it and make use of Steam Input's per-game customisation and mapping it works really well, especially if you treat it as a mouse-like input rather than conventional gamepad.
The only place it suffers for me is games that aren't coded to support simultaneous gamepad and mouse input, which you can work around by mapping the joystick as a keyboard input. Otherwise it's great.
Its an odd one; the v1 controller feels cheap and definitely isn't as high fidelity as a modern PS5 controller. It struggled to match the quality of contemporary controllers at the same price point. But the touchpads worked. They shouldn't work, they should be abysmal, but with a little practice they're fantastic.
The rumble is really weird.
I still use mine for any driving or flying in games, the stick it does have is super accurate. And for watching movies its a great remote when you arent at the keyboard. If you turn the right pad to simulate a weighted track ball it is what I consider the best Dark Souls controller.
I asked a coworker today about those and he said it's the only controller he cares to use at all, especially for FPS.
I don't know. I couldn't really get used to it, it has a weird feeling to it.
> Valve does nothing and still wins.
Who would have thought that not actively engaging in enshittification can be a secret winning recipe!
We heard this literally with the previous steam machine lol
There’s no doubt they’re tee’d up to radically alter the landscape. But man they better have a truly plug and play, turnkey system if they want to compete with consoles. The steamdeck even after this many years is absolutely trash at going from handheld to docked (better the other direction at least) and is incredibly hit or miss when it’s plugged into a TV in general. I had to buy a special DP->HDMI cable that forces 1080p @60 to get it to consistently appear on screen docked (LG C1 for reference).
I am excited for the steam machine. But yeah, telling me it’s a more powerful steamdeck is super exciting in some ways and eyebrow raising in others unless they got some big SteamOS overhaul coming.
Most of the deck/dock screen issues are related to dock firmware and USBC display negotiation. The steam machine has built in HDMI and Display port which are presumably relatively bog standard.
This is the steamdeck official dock plugged into my LGC1, which is one model in a very popular line of TV’s, via hdmi.
The official steam deck dock seems to be fairly buggy, it's widely complained about. I've been using an Apple USB-C to HDMI adapter and it's worked perfect on every TV I've tried it on. Since the steam machines don't use USB-C video out this wouldn't be an issue.
That may be the case but “official valve hardware is buggy even after almost 4 years” is a troubling yet true statement when their entire pitch today was literally “check out our new hardware.”
I love my deck. But a smooth experience it is not. Up until idk a year ago…? Flipping from gaming mode to desktop mode or vice versa had a solid 50-50 shot of inducing a fail state requiring a hard reset.
Literally every USB-C dock I've ever used with any laptop has these sorts of issues.
On the flip side, I'm pretty confident AMD will be able to output to DisplayPort
Yeah but what laptop is trying to be a gaming rig on your tv via a separate $100 dock?
Not a chance. As much as I respect all the work Valve has done for gaming...this doesn't understand the market.
PC gamers will play on their PC. Couch gamers will have a PS5 or an XBox. So who is this for, couch gamers that don't have one of those? Or PC players tired of playing on a monitor?
Don't get me wrong, it's cool, and I'm definitely the target market but feel like that's pretty tiny.
Most couch gamers want their GTA or Call of Duty, which, if I read correctly, this will not run.
I am very much a PC gamer turned couch gamer. I have a capable PC sitting next to my Xbox Series X. The user experience is worse, as everytime I turn it on soemthing needs updating, I cannot control all of Windows through my gamepad. This ticks a lot of boxes for me. Might start witht the Controller first.
Two of us! As mentioned, I'm probably part of the target market and will probably check it out.
It's not useless by any definition, but will it really outsell the PS5? Because that is, to me, what the headline is implying...
I don't think it'll outsell any current console. Not even the anemic and dying Xbox Series X.
I think that appropriately priced and supported, it will put Valve in a strategic position to actually compete in subsequent console generations as a real player. It's a little behind in terms of specs, but with as slow as uptake of this generation has been, I expect that developers will continue to target base PS5 specs for another six years at least (PS6 supposedly landing in 2027). Then they can drop their Steam Machine 2 in 2029 or 2030, hitting base PS6 specs at an affordable price. It's been a winning approach for Nintendo.