Valve Reveals First Gen Steam Machines

"Steam, now on Origin" will be a great slogan.

Curious what it is about this pdf that makes Chrome's pdf reader hit 100% cpu and not make it past the second page:

http://media.steampowered.com/store/steammachines/SteamMachi...

Works fine, readable in preview.

It would be surprising if it was the other way around.

Companies like Microsoft, Nintendo and Sony make the really big bucks from the publishing fees of the games, the hardware is sold basically at cost (or at loss if we consider production, design and software costs).

Third party Steam Machines sellers can save on software, but they need to have some margin on the hardware itself, unless Valve cuts them a percentage on the actual sales.

I don´t think price will ever be the selling point of Steam Machines.

I was watching a gaming podcast the other day and someone made a good point, if valve were to go aggressively after console users with the steambox right now at the start of a new console round they'd be setting themselves up for a world of hurt. Microsoft/Sony could deliberately pay off developers to hold up the PC version of games for 6+ months after console releases. If you can't play the latest and greatest that would significantly drop the value of a steambox.

So instead, release a steambox version which is only going to be popular with "enthusiasts", bug/beta test the hell out of them and then more aggressively market steamboxes in 2-5 years time when the current console generation is starting to look old.

Valve are playing a long game here I think, the value proposition of a steambox isn't going to make sense until we're about half way through the current console cycle.

I think they're not so much building "the steam machines", but they are developing a spec.

> 'm just curious on how Valve (or the HW vendors) are gonna market it. With consoles you have the idea that with that unit you can play everything. With a steam machine is different. I'd like a "with version A you can play X, with version B you can play X+Y, with version C you can play X+Y and have 3D"...

This is nowadays already not much of a problem. If you build a mid-high end PC now, you can expect it to play every game at least at reasonable settings for the next couple of years. How long it's going to hold is always a bit of speculation, but you can get hardware reccomendations from certain magazines or websites.

The same is true for the games' side. If I buy a new game, gaming magazines/websites will tell you how much CPU, GPU, RAM you need to play it on minimal, medium, and maximal settings (the hardware requirements on the boxes are usually rubbish, unfortunately). They usually also say something like "works fine if you've built your PC in the last 3 years". You don't need to match the specs exactly, because games have gotten pretty good at automatically adjusting settings.

So it works now, but it's only going to get easier with Steam machines. You'll probably see games advertized as "Works great with 2015 steam boxes. Best effects with a 2016 steam box, or AMD Radeon OMG9000. Minimal requirements: 2014 steam box or equivalent (Intel Core i5 xxxx, 8 GB RAM, ...)."

If I were them, I'd either have yearly revisions, or hardware levels. So in 2014, a low-end will be HW level 5, a mid-end will be level 6, and a high-end will be level 7. One year later, a new high-end will maybe be level 9. Games would then just say you need a level 7 PC to run (very much like the windows hardware index, except PC's will be built to reach a certain number).