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Steam Machines and Steam Controller shipping to beta participants December 13th

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Re: Steam Machines and Steam Controller shipping to beta participants December 13th

#11

Post by gagege »

benihana wrote: post #7

I'm anxious to see how much Valve has learned since the launch of Steam a decade ago. Steam is great now, but it sucked pretty hard when it first came out. I remember the genuine shock I felt at having the friends functionality actually work the way I expected it to after about 4 years of pure shit. I have no doubt this will eventually be awesome, only question is how long it will take.

I remember almost not installing HL2 when it first came out, because I didn't want to install Steam. Back then, the concept of being locked in to a certain launcher felt so wrong. I didn't do anything with Steam (besides having to use it to install the Orange Box) again until that first massive sale they had back in 2008 or 2009 (Can't remember what year that was).

Re: Steam Machines and Steam Controller shipping to beta participants December 13th

#12

Post by sliverstorm »

moloch wrote: post #6
Lockyy wrote: post #3

>We’ve had to make the difficult decision to limit our beta to the U.S. only, because of regulatory hurdles. This was not our original plan, and it means we can’t collect beta feedback from Steam customers world-wide, which is pretty unfortunate. All things considered, we’re sure it was the right decision, because the alternative was to delay the whole beta beyond the point when we’d be able to incorporate any feedba…

Even if you're in the US there's only a very very small chance you'll be able to participate in the beta.

300 units, they said. Or literally 1 in a million for the US population :) Which makes sense, considering how much one of these units probably costs.

Re: Steam Machines and Steam Controller shipping to beta participants December 13th

#13

Post by ultimatehurl »

Lockyy wrote: post #3

>We’ve had to make the difficult decision to limit our beta to the U.S. only, because of regulatory hurdles. This was not our original plan, and it means we can’t collect beta feedback from Steam customers world-wide, which is pretty unfortunate. All things considered, we’re sure it was the right decision, because the alternative was to delay the whole beta beyond the point when we’d be able to incorporate any feedba…

This seems like something they should have been able to foresee. I mean granted it is literally being told you didn't win a lotto for something other than extremely small odds not going in your favour, but they had everyone fill out forms giving over data.

Re: Steam Machines and Steam Controller shipping to beta participants December 13th

#14

Post by guidopallemans »

I hope this is a good place to launch this idea:

Is it possible to make an android app which acts as a steam controller through usb/bluetooth? Here is an example (JSON-ish) config file: http://gearnuke.com/steam-controller-configuration-file-alre...

Re: Steam Machines and Steam Controller shipping to beta participants December 13th

#15

Post by elipsey »

I'm very hopeful about the prospect for improvement of linux graphics drivers. It seems to have a been a chicken and egg sort of problem in past; I really hope contributions from valve will create some momentum, especially for the FOSS drivers. It seemed hopeless to me only a couple of years ago, but then it wasn't so long ago that you couldn't suspend your laptop without "blowing your balls off" as Con Kolivas remarked...

I'm really concerned, though, about commercial vendors aligning with the one distro/graphics stack (apparently Ubuntu in this case?), such that I have to choose between putting up with Unity's "Shopping lens" and a ghetto of bad or unimplemented 3d support for distros that don't adopt the same graphics stack as Ubuntu as the distros move away from X...

Re: Steam Machines and Steam Controller shipping to beta participants December 13th

#16

Post by venomsnake »

sliverstorm wrote: post #12
moloch wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even if you're in the US there's only a very very small chance you'll be able to participate in the beta.

300 units, they said. Or literally 1 in a million for the US population :) Which makes sense, considering how much one of these units probably costs.

Well the average is 800$-sh if we assume even distribution of the classes.

So it is 240000$ - I think this is less than Valve's "Pay people to find new reasons not to do HL3" daily budget.

Re: Steam Machines and Steam Controller shipping to beta participants December 13th

#17

Post by DoggettCK »

moloch wrote: post #6
Lockyy wrote: post #3

>We’ve had to make the difficult decision to limit our beta to the U.S. only, because of regulatory hurdles. This was not our original plan, and it means we can’t collect beta feedback from Steam customers world-wide, which is pretty unfortunate. All things considered, we’re sure it was the right decision, because the alternative was to delay the whole beta beyond the point when we’d be able to incorporate any feedba…

Even if you're in the US there's only a very very small chance you'll be able to participate in the beta.

According to the eligibility page, I'm seeing:

"You are now one out of 421,843 eligible beta candidates."

It's been at that number since the registration ended, and I'm almost certain it's worldwide, since they didn't say U.S.-only until today.

I like my odds.

Re: Steam Machines and Steam Controller shipping to beta participants December 13th

#18

Post by pekk »

watty wrote: post #8

I have a 100 game library of games on Steam that I would love to play on my TV but the SteamBox will only play a tiny percentage of them due to being linux based. Seems great for those new to steam though...

Then build a Windows box. What's the point of wanting SteamBox to be a Windows box?

Re: Steam Machines and Steam Controller shipping to beta participants December 13th

#19

Post by pekk »

benihana wrote: post #7

I'm anxious to see how much Valve has learned since the launch of Steam a decade ago. Steam is great now, but it sucked pretty hard when it first came out. I remember the genuine shock I felt at having the friends functionality actually work the way I expected it to after about 4 years of pure shit. I have no doubt this will eventually be awesome, only question is how long it will take.

You can use Steam today to see how much they have learned about how to run Steam. I don't see what this has to do with that.

Re: Steam Machines and Steam Controller shipping to beta participants December 13th

#20

Post by X4 »

Ew.. Friday 13th... wait til it passes.

I don't believe this crap, but coincidently my own PC burnt with fire (literally), right after saying that and turning it on (a few years ago). Yeah, bad coincidence. However, I got part of the money back, because I sued the A/C Adapter company, whose part caused the fire. But I tell you, they were such big assholes, who looked up for the cheapest comparable parts on ebay for my hardware as a "base" price. Interestingly I had a $1200 worth collectors edition graphics card and they paid just $100 bucks for it, because the next cheapest and older model of the card on ebay was that much.

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