Valve's SteamBox Gets a Name and an Early Demo at CES 328
xynopsis writes "Looks like the final version of the Linux based Steam Gaming Console has been made public at CES. The result of combined efforts of small-form-factor maker Xi3 and Valve, the gaming box named 'Piston' is a potential game changer in transforming the Linux desktop and gaming market. The pretty device looks like a shrunk Tezro from Silicon Graphics when SGI used to be cool." Looks like Gabe Newell wasn't kidding.
Nope, ain't happening (Score:5, Insightful)
offer modular component updates, including the option to upgrade the PC's CPU and RAM.
I will *not* get back into that chase again, thank you very much. The whole reason I left PC gaming years ago was because I got tired of the specs chase. Consoles meant never having to look on the box and see if I needed yet another upgrade to play a game. I've even still got the stack of old video cards and MB's to remind me of how much money I wasted back then.
Not going back to that. And if I was, I would just build my own PC and connect it to my TV (why bother with Valve's box?). After all, if I'm going back to the chase, may as well get the freedom of a PC too.
Re:Nope, ain't happening (Score:4, Informative)
Since I know someone will ask....
i5-2400 8GB 1333 CL7 RAM 1TB 524AS-ending Seagate drive ASUS DVD-RW GTS450 MSI P67-based board Digital TV Tuner Card
Tada, I'm good for a couple more years.
Re:Nope, ain't happening (Score:5, Interesting)
Yea, my last computer lasted some 4 years without needing an upgrade.
Granted I usually try to max it out, when I buy it initially.
Re:Nope, ain't happening (Score:4, Insightful)
If you play games on PC with graphics quality that matches that of Xbox, it'll last you 5 years as well.
If you want to play at 1920x1200 with 4x AA, perfect shadows and water reflections, and insane viewing distances, then, yeah, it's less than that. There's no free lunch.
Re:Nope, ain't happening (Score:4, Informative)
So, 5 years of xbox 360:
1. Launch console, $400
2. New HDD, $100
3. Replacement console after RROD, $300
4. 5+ years of xbox live, $250+
Total: $1050+
Suddenly, that $800+ on a PC doesn't look so bad.
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Why so much RAM and still a spinning disk?
I bet my machine with 4GB of RAM and an SSD is faster to use.
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Ok, so buy them both.
I thought maybe the $20 would have got him $20 closer to a bigger performance boost.
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measured by what benchmark? My non-SSD system will bury yours in the benchmarks I care about due to its 32GB RAM (still not enough, though) and fast CPU. Hint, your SSD isn't fast enough to keep system performance up when buried in swap. While 4GB is sufficient for some users, many it is not. A windows gamer friend of mine finally had to bite the bullet and go 64-bit to be able to use 8GB RAM so it isn't just non-gamer uses that benefit from RAM.
In short, it all depends on what your use case is. If yours in
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1) 8GB isn't much RAM. My laptop is packing 12GB and a slot to spare, and I know of several gamers who rock 64GB so they can put games on a ramdisk for instant loading.
2) Games are too big to install to any reasonably-priced SSD, and are often optimized for sequential access due to consoles still running off optical disks. So installing games to a spinning rust disk makes more sense than installing them to an oversized thumb drive. Thus it follows that your options are either a somewhat-tricky, more-expensi
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Games are applications. They do lots of IO to read in the massive levels. Unless you like waiting for loading. Spinning disk is for cheap storage, so either you are ripping blu-rays or poor or out of date.
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Spinning disk is for cheap storage, so either you are ripping blu-rays or poor or out of date.
Or you just have more applications installed than will fit on, say, a 128 GB SSD.
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SSD are good for random IO of lots of tiny files because of the low latency, but spinning rust is about equivalent for bulk IO. If the bulk transfer speed of the media approaches the speed of the SATA bus, there isn't any real difference.
If you're a half decent game developer, you write your levels as large files that can be read sequentially and not randomly. SSDs should only improve loading times for badly written games.
Spinning rust is cheap, and game textures are large.
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So, your rebuttal is you recently bought some mid range, almost high end (for the CPU) hardware. Your point of view amounts to being right if you spend money and being wrong if you don't spend it.
Meanwhile, my PC is about 3 year old and never could run Crysis 1 well, because I could not spend a few hundreds to boost it enough. I even bought a recent midrange card (gt240 gddr5), which was incredibly more powerful than what I had before but it was still too slow. Other specs : Athlon II X2 245, 2GB ddr2, nf
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You must not have known what you were doing or something.
(I am not the GP)
I used to know what I was doing, with regard to PC building, from around the 486 era until when AGP started replacing PCI. Then I realised that it didn't interest me one jot, and dropped out of the race. From then on I used consoles for gaming, and off-the-shelf PCs for general computing.
If someone offers me a cheap box that behaves like a console, but is more indie-friendly than an Xbox, I'm interested.
Re:Nope, ain't happening (Score:5, Insightful)
Two years in the gaming world is nothing. I remember about 12 years back when you really did have to upgrade every year to 2 years to keep playing games with decent performance.
Things in the hardware space weren't always as stagnant as they are now.
Re:Nope, ain't happening (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Nope, ain't happening (Score:4, Informative)
PC's got good enough about 5-10 years ago that this specs chase is a distant memory. If you spend $500 every 5 or so years you will be a head of the game.
Valve might prefer you do that, it is why steam has a big picture mode after all.
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I'm sure Mod
Re:Nope, ain't happening (Score:4, Interesting)
Personally, I never have been a "gamer" from that sort of perspective, and yet since the days of DOS I was playing top titles within a year or so of their release. Hell, I played Quake on a min-spec Pentium with a Voodoo card within days of release and that was the first ever game to actually MAKE people into "gamers" to buy an upgrade card that serves no further purpose than to play games faster (back then, it was necessary, though unless you wanted flickbook framerates).
The problem with PC gaming is not the hardware, but the mentality. "I have to have 120fps on everything, in HD, with all the options turned on and all the latest kit to show off" - there isn't a console in the world that actually does the equivalent, and if there was it would cost a fortune or slow to a crawl and gamers would hardly notice the difference otherwise.
I have a laptop now - technically nowhere close to a gamer's laptop but it has nVidia Optimus graphics. It cost not much more than just about any of the current consoles has ever cost on release day. I can't find a game on my Steam list that it doesn't play. And from the current AAA-titles? Well, in a year's time when they are sensible prices I will buy them and try them and most of them will work just fine (if 9 years of Steam gaming is anything to go by, and years more of Counterstrike play before that) but I might have to turn down an option or two.
PC gaming isn't about upgrading every two seconds. Being a "gamer" is. I can name every upgrade I've ever done to every PC I've ever personally owned, and most of the time that was a one-time, never-to-be-repeated upgrade that doubled the performance for much much less than the price of an equivalent replacement (if you upgrade a machine, it's likely that it's to hit some bottleneck which costs more than the machine is worth to upgrade further). I have never upgraded a motherboard, or a CPU, in my own machines in all the time I've owned a PC precisely because the upgrades, and their associated prerequisite upgrades, were never worth it.
And I've probably personally owned about 3 desktops and 4-5 laptops in all my time playing, so I certainly get some use out of them (and, to be honest, the laptops die by physical breakage on the hinges more than obsolescence and I still have an IBM Thinkpad with a 90MHz processor that's going strong). And I do think of myself as a gamer, in terms of the amount of time I spend playing and the amount of money I spend each year on games, but not a "gamer" in terms of spending money on constant upgrades for my computers.
I actually have, upstairs, an MSI gaming laptop that was bought as my last work laptop three years ago (my employer buys whatever I specify, and I specified nVidia graphics for various reasons and ended up with a gaming laptop that was vastly overpowered and half-the-cost of an equivalent business model). The screen hinge is shattered and it's being used as separate LCD / keyboard parts (blue-takked to the wall and the worktop appropriately). And it *still* laughs at 99% of the games on my Steam account after all that time. And that's a laptop, which can't really be upgraded at all (about the only thing I could do to it is increase the RAM but it's on a 32-bit OS and already at 4Gb, or change the HDD, but that's really not a bottleneck in anything I do on it).
Gone are the days where you have to have the latest bus that nobody else has got, with a massively overpowered card that churns through power, whirrs like mad, and sets the motherboard on fire, and some huge CPU and memory that's unheard of in anything else but video-editing, and some stupidly over-powered PSU to run it all, just to play a 3D game. Hell, a half-decent laptop laughs at anything for at least 3-4 years so long as you're not hoping for 120fps in stereo 3D at the highest resolution supported on the HDMI out, on full detail while encoding Blu-Ray's in the background.
And, to be honest, in all my time, I've never had a laptop that didn't break BEFORE it became obsolete (usu
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Hell, I played Quake on a min-spec Pentium with a Voodoo card within days of release and that was the first ever game to actually MAKE people into "gamers" to buy an upgrade card that serves no further purpose than to play games faster (back then, it was necessary, though unless you wanted flickbook framerates).
I played Quake on a Cyrix DX4-100 (overclocked to 120Mhz) with a standard SVGA card.
Sure the resolution as lowand the frame-rates wern't spectacular, but isn't that your whole point? You don't need to buy top end hardware to play games. You can get away without upgrading every few months if you are happy with not having the best graphics.
Nintendo 64 Expansion Pak (Score:3)
Consoles meant never having to look on the box and see if I needed yet another upgrade to play a game.
"Never" is a strong word. Several games for Sega Saturn and Nintendo 64 required a RAM expansion cartridge.
And if I was, I would just build my own PC and connect it to my TV (why bother with Valve's box?).
Valve is targeting the mass market, which has shown itself unwilling to connect a device marketed as a "computer" to a display marketed as a "television". To the mass market, computers are for desks and consoles are for living rooms. See previous comments [slashdot.org].
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Several games for Sega Saturn and Nintendo 64 required a RAM expansion cartridge.
Several is an exaggeration, in the N64's case it is "THREE". DK64, Perfect Dark and Majora's Mask. in other words, games requiring expansions are niche cases which is why the meme is: console hardware expansions fail in the market"
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> Why should PC game companies keep pushing the spec envelope when their cash cow of xbox games can't play those games?
exactly... The SW is simply not demanding cutting edge HW, because it's written for stuff released years ago. In terms of pushing the envelope, consoles are holding back PC gaming for anything cross platform.
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Support for this varies by studio and even by game; but sometimes the PC side can at least enjoy the benefits of having minimum specs that are basically dictated by the console ports; but at least having the option to shove the sliders all the way toward 'overkill' or install a bunch of mods that each use more RAM than a PS3 or Xbox360 has available for its entire system...
The existence of consoles generally means that even your crap best-buy special is an $80 video card away from being able to play the gam
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Made a 1.3k PC two years ago... Kept the old Case/Keyboard/Mouse/Monitor/HDDs from my previous box... Still performs very well... Though a vid card update is tempting.
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2k(while it definitely allows for some sweet toys) is really overkill for adequate gaming. Particularly this late in the console cycle, almost any CPU that isn't total budget crap, along with an $80-$100 video card will run almost anything if you don't crank the pretty all the way up, and will generally support somewhat better looking play than the available consoles. Consoles are still a bit cheaper on hardware(though games can really make up the difference if you buy too many); but this isn't the bad old
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I have to agree with the other commenters: you've just been silly and short-sighted, and didn't really know what the heck you were doing in the first place. A 5-6 years old PC can perfectly well play games at similar settings as a PS3 or Xbox360, so if you feel their image quality is fine why would you need to chase after newer and newer specs? Or is it just the "since it's POSSIBLE I feel it's my responsibility to continue upgrading!" - mentality?
Which makes me wonder, why make the Steambox upgradeable?
Nail the spec down, factor the design onto a single board with as few chips as possible, and churn them out cheap in their millions. Don't even think of upping the spec for 5 years or so.
Well (Score:2)
if this means more games for linux on the desktop then yeah it could be big.
Otherwise - it's just another locked down console and I'm not sure what benefit it will have for linux on the desktop.
Re:Well (Score:5, Informative)
if this means more games for linux on the desktop then yeah it could be big.
Otherwise - it's just another locked down console and I'm not sure what benefit it will have for linux on the desktop.
Unless Valve has been lying through their teeth this whole time(certainly possible; but not obvious why doing so would be an advantage for them), their desire is to compete in the console space by offering one or more 'easy, just-works, fits in your living room, appliance' style PCs that will be churned out to spec by cooperating OEMs and running Steam-on-linux by default; but that they have no problem with people running Steam-on-linux on whatever oddball homebuilds they like, subject to the caveat that Valve has minimal interest in dealing with the rough edges of motherboard Z's shitty ACPI implementation or binary compatibility problems introduced by your Gentoo install's creative compiler flags.
Steam is, among other things, a DRM system; but not one that has ever depended on some crypto-lockdown-trusted-firmware(and, indeed, they seem quite worried that Microsoft, despite Games for Windows Live sucking pretty brutally, is well placed to be the ones offering such a system instead, same with Apple and its app store on the OSX side) in its Windows or Mac iterations. It would be odd if they were to go that route for Linux.
Obviously, they aren't porting stuff to linux just because they love penguins and freedom and whatnot(since the closed source Steam binary will still mostly dish out closed source game binaries); but the threat posed by both Microsoft and Apple having digital stores attached to their platforms, along with a desire not to add the cost of a Windows license to every 'console' they ship, gives them a pretty good reason to support compatibility of games with at least the most common Linux desktop systems.
Locked down != locked down (Score:2)
Otherwise - it's just another locked down console
There's a difference between "locked down" in the sense of Apple iTrinkets and "locked down" in the sense of Sony and Nintendo products. Apple encourages startups to develop for its iTrinkets; Sony and Nintendo seek only established studios with "financial stability" and "relevant video game industry experience". Is Steam Greenlight closer to Apple's model or to Sony's and Nintendo's?
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Sony and Nintendo seek only established studios with "financial stability" and "relevant video game industry experience".
True, because, bluntly put, they don't want a bunch of wannabe game developers making a ton of shovelware tetris/bejeweled/sokoban clones.
So that's why you "pay your dues" if you want to do a console game. If you're not willing or capable of doing so...you'll have to live with the reality of how things are.
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It seems that way - but I've gotten too jaded to just count on it.
2013 (Score:4, Insightful)
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PS3 runs Linux.
Until Sony's change of heart, after which system updates deleted Other OS.
Pretty sure Wii does too.
Nintendo never authorized this, and system updates deleted the Homebrew Channel several times.
Perhaps 2013 might be the year of the console with a wholehearted commitment to Linux.
I hate the case (Score:2, Insightful)
Wake me up when people start making consoles that stack again
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They make too much heat for that.
If they let you stack it, it would have to be bigger and actually have adequate ventilation. That would cut into their margins and not look cool.
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Besides, having steam come out the top is probably a marketing feature.
Re: I hate the case (Score:2)
Like what? When was there ever a console that would stack? I've never seen one...maybe you could claim the original X-box, but that's all I can think of and even that wouldn't work all that well. Most of the others I know of, for CDs or cartridges, were all top-loading....
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There was a slot-loading SegaCD, too. It was a POS but that was Sega's fault, not an inherent problem. And the 360 stacks, believe it or not, just don't cover the holes.
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The Wii also stacks. The PS2 stacked, but the PS3 doesn't.
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When was there ever a console that would stack?
Well, obviously the PS2 stacks. The slim version is top-loading though.
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PS2, NES, Colecovision if you took the controllers out, and most top loading CD systems if you were willing to unstack them to change games.
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I can think of 3 consoles that stack:
NES front-loading model
PS2 (up until the PSTwo)
Wii
The Xbox 360 to a certain extent.
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How could you forget the Pioneer LaserActive? That bitch was rackable. How about the 3DO??? Huh? Ppfft... and you call yourself a gamer.
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Would you like them all to have the same dimensions so that you're not building an oblong pyramid with every addition of device, too?
As much as I prefer nice perpendicular-angled boxes myself, that is more of an aversion to convex sides that make it impossible to stack anything on top of them - or them on top of anything - than it is about the actual angles. Looks like this thing's X shape will happily let it stand on a flat surface on all 4 sides, and anything else will happily lay flat on it.
Most likely,
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They show it mounted to the VESA mounting on the back of the monitor. How am I supposed to mount the TV to the wall mounting bracket?
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There's precedent for that. For example there are Raspberry Pi cases which mount on the VESA screw holes. It's a good option, but you do need alternative options, if you want to use the VESA mounting for something else.
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I hate the case
I love it! The mini-Tezro makes a nice package. A little minus comes from its grilles of shiny aluminum -- if I owned one I would soon paint them matte black, like the rest of the case.
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Wake me up when people start making consoles that stack again
I curse the process by which rack compatibility for A/V gear somehow became a "Wow, you must be crazy rich and want a $50k system installed by specialist contractors, or you are a roadie and only buying musical gear, not home theater stuff' feature.
Most of it is still roughly the right width, and light enough that a simple two-post setup built into the basic crap MDF enclosures that TVs are placed on would be able to support it; but no not even optional rack ears, and a proliferation of weird-shaped set-top
Not *the* steam-box (Score:5, Informative)
This is just *a* steam-box, just a few days ago Ben Krasnow (Valve hardware designer) said that steambox would appear at GDC.
999$ for a console? (Score:2)
X7A, on which Piston is based, costs 999$. Good luck gathering adoption at this price point.
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Make enough of them, and that price will come right down.
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I was thinking more like a quarter, or less. It's the difference between niche market, limited production runs, versus mass market and huge production runs.
These should be cheaper to churn out that $300 beige boxes.
Possible $1000 price point? (Score:2)
Linux Mint, Steam and My Laptop (Score:3)
There are lots of people claiming that the little SFF computer called the Piston does not have the power to adequately run Steam games under Linux. But I have Linux Mint KDE 14 AMD64 installed on an HP nx9420 laptop which is 5 years old. It only has a dual core 2.16GHz processor, the equivalent of an Nvidia GT 7900 GPU and 4GB of ram. I was playing Dark Descent, Team Fortress 2 and Killing Floor all weekend. It worked great. If this laptop will do this well, I'm sure that little SFF computer will be just fine also. I wonder if Valve will release them with a subscription like mobile phone companies do.
You can see where their naming convention is going (Score:2)
Re:You can see where their naming convention is go (Score:5, Funny)
Word from Redmond is that Microsoft is going to attempt to clone Steam now.
They're working on a competitor called "Shaft."
CEO Steve Ballmer even said he "can't wait to Shaft his customers, it's going to be the biggest thing since squirting on the Zune. It's going to totally fucking kill Steam and Linux off."
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Word from Redmond is that Microsoft is going to attempt to clone Steam now.
They're working on a competitor called "Shaft."
So... new version of "Games for Windows â" LIVE"?
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Damn it, Ray! Egon said not to cross the memes.
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That is an unqualified opinion. No "good" desktop for what? For games? There's isn't because linux as a game platform has been largely non-existent. But there are plenty of environments with minimalistic UIs that could be good and I think that's what Valve is building here. I'd argue that there's no good desktop environment for gaming, period. Windows just is not and never has been a good gaming environment either, it's just the defacto desktop OS.
If this moves developers to make ports of their gam
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Steam's "Big Screen" mode is actually pretty good. I won't be surprised if that's what the SteamBox winds up running.
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It could bring Linux to the desktop for the casual (web client only) user - i.e. a lot of users. But there'd be a lot more users who'd still want a dedicated Mac or PC.
However, by grabbing the dedicated web-client-only users, it would make an expansion market for a lot of software vendors. It could be the in-road Linux needs to get the desktop... Now that the desktop/notebook is being supplanted by the tablet.
My question is... Will I be able to run FreeBSD on it? It could make a nice little server, dependin
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Article says you can buy an Xi3 now if you want to put FreeBSD on it. Looks like they start at about $500.
Interview with Gabe Newell linked in summary discusses how theirs is meant to be a locked-down console, not a general purpose PC.
Re:Linux + DRM (Score:5, Informative)
Parent: Missing the point of Steam entirely.
Steam itself is not DRM. My library contains lots of DRM free games. On the other hand it also contains certain games which come with the same DRM as the boxed version. If you want to make a point buy the DRM free indie games on Steam and and don't buy the DRM ridden ones.
Don't dismiss something just because it can do more than what you need. Nobody forces you to pirate with bittorrent or murder your wife with a kitchen knife either.
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When "more than I need" includes randomly blocking access to things I paid for, I damn well will dismiss it!
I am one of the unfortunate people who learned to hate DRM through experience. Are you aware that Steam locks you out if you play in "offline mode" for too long?
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I think he means if you don't use that feature you will be safe.
You do not need offline mode if you only buy indie DRM free games on steam.
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Good point, it would be nice to have something like steam though.
My preference would be to get the games into a repository and just pay for a CD key or something. The typical brain dead each application has its own updater is one of the most annoying things about windows/osx.
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That's a worthy intent, but requires the indie developer to run some sort of store, do all the marketing, etc. which they quite likely have little interest in doing. A decent publisher actually earns their piece of the pie. Things like Steam or the various App stores allow developers to focus on developing, and let someone else do all the annoying sales work. Okay, they probably need to do at least a little marketing too just to reach critical mass for the automated recommendation system to come into pla
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If I only buy indie DRM free games, I don't need Steam. I'd rather cut out the middleman
The middleman controls access to the living room. Without a console like the forthcoming Piston, and without building a PC to put next to your TV which almost nobody seems to want to do [slashdot.org], how are you going to play these "indie DRM-free games" with real life friends on a television-sized monitor?
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Saying this, I am going to go home now and close Steam, then try and browse to Braid in the file structure of my Steam installation. If I can run it without logging in to Steam, I will take all I've said about it back. I don't think that will be the case, though.
Quite a few games check by location whether they're supposed to run Steam or not, so try copying it to a different directory if it does try to start Steam.
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So do not use offline mode.
To play the DRM free indie games you don't need to launch steam at all. You can launch them right from their exes.
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And the sign-in fails, and you have to contact tech support, and wait days for a response. Twice now. "Lockout" is the word I use to describe that.
Re:Linux + DRM (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Linux + DRM (Score:4, Informative)
Except he's right. Steam is not DRM. Steamworks is the DRM, and it's not mandatory.
You're missing the point: it's not Steam or Valve's fault if the games you buy use DRM. It's the publisher's decision. If the game wasn't on Steam, it'd have another form of (likely much more annoying/shitty) DRM. What Steam provides is fairly mild DRM (yes, I say mild, because honestly I prefer having an account that adds a lot of value to my games versus limited activation, phone home schemes, or plain and simply unreliable bullshit ala StarForce).
But Steam doesn't force anyone to use the DRM in their games.
Re:Linux + DRM (Score:5, Insightful)
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That's strictly true, but Linux only lets you use your computer the way you want to because of the belief system that underlies it.
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Unless Valve somehow gets Linus to infect the kernel with their DRM and close up the source, that is not going to change. I put the odds of the esteemed Mr.Torvalds doing that at about 1 in infinity.
Re:Linux + DRM (Score:5, Funny)
Linux is an operating system, not a belief system.
Heretic! Heathen! Infidel!
If you repent and say three Hail Stallmans we'll let you off this time...
Re:Linux + DRM (Score:5, Insightful)
If you think linux's only purpose is to create DRM free games, or anything else for that matter, you're kinda missing the point. The purpose of linux afaik is to create freedom....to do whatever you want with the OS. If I want to play DRM games on my linux install, then its doing its job because its what I want to do with the OS.
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I think that the reason I can't switch to a Linux-only setup is the vocal minority who believe that, since Linux is FOSS, everything that runs on Linux should be FOSS.
This provides the benefit that for everything you need, there is a free version.
However, there are things I want, and these tend to be harder to find on Linux. That is, unless you're fine with suffering through a potentially unstable or severely handicapped version on Wine.
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When Linus made Linux he did not say "it is going to be DRM free", he even said that DRM is ok with Linux not too long ago.
How is "Linux + DRM" a point? What is the point of Linux then?
You are able to run DRM software on Linux right now anyway. Even if Steam is going to be big, it doesn't require DRM for the games which are distributed on it.
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Miracast is too laggy for these kinds of video games. No one wants to play an FPS and deal with compression artifacts and latency from miracast.
Bluetooth would be simple enough to add with a usb adaptor. Real gamers will probably want a wired connection anyway. No fun in losing a match when the wireless gets fritzy.
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Well it is too laggy for anything but casual games, is that all you buy on steam? Would you like to see them after they are compressed poorly to minimize that latency?
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Is there a correlation between "casual" and "latency-sensitive"?
I imagine Civ V would work fine. As we learned when all that fuss about OnLive was going on, Xbox GTA4 has more latency than a typical OnLive game running on a server on a WAN.
Turn-based (Score:2)
Is there a correlation between "casual" and "latency-sensitive"?
Yes. True, there are some turn-based hardcore games, such as the Civilization series that you mentioned. But I imagine that casual games are statistically more likely to be turn-based. Consider Words With Friends, Angry Birds, and the like.
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Ugly? This thing ataches to the back of the TV, you won't ever see it.
Those ports look like very good news, a keyboard will make the box PC-like (wireless keyboards still need a USB port), those SATA ports mean you'll be able to use it as a nice media center, and a network port means you'll be able to use a reliable high speed wired connection. Also, more ports won't hurt, less ports will.
But yeah, you are rignht in a point. If it requires those wires, it will be bad. It's great to make the ports available,
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Not all wireless keyboards need a USB port, bluetooth units for example.
I think requiring HDMI is fine, nothing beyond that. Miracast nor any other solution like it is truly suited to playing anything but casual games.
Re:Author quote (Score:5, Informative)
Captain, I'm sensing a bitter old man. I suggest caution.
It's not bitter old man, but it is a little sad. SGI used to be the epitome of cool in the computer world. Cast your mind back to 1994. You had most people running DOS and Windows 3.11. A few people were running UNIX (tm) workstations with CDE.
Many of those systems were slow, clunky, had at most 8 bits per pixel of palletted horibleness, weak graphics ugly user interfaces and so on.
Then you had SGI.
1280x1024 trucolour displays with accelerated texture mapped graphics. Holy crap that 3D asteroid blaster game looked sweet. Oh and a really cool UI with scalable vector icons, webcams, TV out, video chat and excellent sound built in. In 1994.
Oh and you could get portable systems with a TFT screen back when they more or less did not exist for all practical purposes. And certainly not at that kind of resolution.
Seriously, SGIs were something out of the future.
How long did it take for PCs to get webcams built in?
Re: (Score:2)
An Indigo station ran about, what, $12 grand in 1994? I think the cheapest Indy was about $5000, but I may be way off here.
Re: (Score:2)
I have one of those sitting around with a gigantic 21" CRT... I wonder if it's worth anything as a collector's item...
Re:Author quote (Score:5, Insightful)
Isn't SGI one of those companies that has achieved eternal coolness by (like any self-respecting rock star) dying horribly before it could really ruin its reputation with a string of pathetic comeback attempts at 3rd string clubs?
My sense is that SGI's last gasp of genuine relevance was over a decade ago; but that they are forever enshrined in the datacenters of Valhalla(and every system today that uses OpenGL gives them praise)