Vivi22 said:
summation = steam machines are not consoles, and should not ever be compared to consoles
sorry but even though you have spent the better part of 1 and half pages of text trying to say that steam machines are not consoles, and that anyone who thinks they might be consoles is wrong I don't buy your line of reasoning to which the best you've given is "they are PCs, so therefore not consoles" which doesn't hold water for one simple resounding truth 'consoles are specialized PCs' they have unified specs, they have unified naming (when the thought of possible band confusion with yourself is taken into account eg: Nintendo). I buy a game for and XBox360 whether I have a low tier Gen1 360. or a top tier Gen5 360 the game will still run. but even as a person who has done the spreadsheets worth of work to determine if my system will run a given PC game I can tell you first hand that this is a detriment of the PC gaming community.
let me walk you through the real world of PC gaming with a direct case example of Assassin's Creed (pick any of them) within an hour of the game being announced there are at least 5 threads on the steam forums, and the Ubisoft forums each asking the same question "will my system run this", and then countless replies of "maybe", "yes", "no", "what if I have this instead". as a person who has worked in game development I can also tell you that minimum system requirements in 80% of cases is bullshit at the least they are what the developers were using, and at the worst they are just guesses, and then most of the time they are not feasibly testable because testing against a backlog of 5000+ different hardware configs is a joke.
even Gabe has said that "I would want to remove some of the barriers to PC gaming" and you know what has a lower barrier for entry then a PC a console. yes I will give you that they are not being called consoles, but at the same time the only reason that I can say they fall
short (literal, and figurative intent) of being consoles is that their pricing is still prohibitive, their specs are non-uniform, and they will still create situations of the questions "will my system run this?"
the worst part about these steam machines (And I would be willing to bet real money on this to my real life friends, but none of them would take it cause they are all smarter then that), and what will drive a real nail in their motherboards is they will try to keep up with tech "innovations" (either Intel, AMD, ATI, or Nvidia yelling "we have something new and shiny buy it"), and then release a new version every year making them even more prohibitive a product then a console (at least if I throw down on one of those I know I would have to relatively get a new one for about 4-5 years). the PC market is hard to get into as a customer for very specific reasons: figuring what hardware you need to benchmark at, finding a retailer/seller that will offer that hardware at a reasonable price, assembling/building/setting-up the hardware, and then potentially having to upgrade that hardware. these system don't answer any of these issues, and therefore they will not receive needed penetration, and at the most I see these as a thing that will stick around for maybe 3 years then fade away
my point is just because no one at Valve said the word "console" mainly because that would either aggravate the PC playing base that believes in that "PC master race" BS, or caused even more confusion over what "console" is in the general populous. by calling them steam machine on all of these, and saying that they will run games on steam (they never said all games, or even if they will continue to run games in the future) they are effectively calling them consoles without using the specific words. just because the super market doesn't say apples, and oranges are fruit when stocking them doesn't mean they are not fruit.
Roboshi said:
Vivi22 said:
Now of course I may be missing a huge element to this, but I don't really see the draw. One of the things that currently pushes steam to provide a better deal in it's sales is the competition online; GoG, origin (for what it is), direct company downloads etc all prevent a monopoly existing in the pc market and a dedicated Steam machine would destroy that.
Plus, I feel people are forgetting, This is no longer the valve that made Half life 2 episode 2 and TF2, this is the Valve that won't provide quality control on their greenlight service or give a proper refunding service if your game won't work.
I really don't see this creating a monopoly mainly considering that they would have to follow a few steps that would cause mass exoduses with each step: require any developer that wanted to post a new game on steam also post it in SteamOS compatible (depending on creation tool this is not conducive), and offer different prices for different versions of the game (effectively making the SteamOS version less expensive). for the most part there are still sites that sell even steam-keys to games at competitive prices (HumbleBundle Store, Green Man Gaming), so I don't see them trying to lock down their system.
the only thing that would cause their system to become a monopoly is if Microsoft (similar to Win8. though I am pretty sure most people just stuck with Win7), or Apple (I don't actually know why people stick with these draconian butt-heads) do something to drive so many people away that they gain what they feel to be market saturation, but those would be seen as bad business moves on the parts of Microsoft, and Apple, and not aggressive practices by Valve. then at the end of the day in a Linux environment it is still possible to sandbox in Windows.
