That is frankly the Achilles' heel of the Steam machine, much as I hate to say it: There's no compelling reason from the consumer perspective why the thing should be running SteamOS rather than Windows, and significant reasons in the other direction. That could change, I hope it will change, but it remains something of a chicken-egg problem so far, although already not nearly as bad as it was just a year or two ago.

On the other hand, assuming they do get pulled from the Steam Machine page on Steam, good luck making up for that with whatever other sales channels you got, Origin guys.

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Quoting: PeciskCan we stop being so insecure about Steam Machines? Seriously. No new AAA games? I personally rather have well working current ones, not rushed out of the gate ports with broken things. We all knew it will be low key, slowly moving, gathering pace effort.

I don't think we knew that at all. While it sure seems to be low key, and while Valve may be able to get away with that, and while there is some potential for a slow build on this, that doesn't mean we should have been expecting a low key launch or that that's the best idea.

Valve is a big company with a lot of muscle. There are reasons why big companies with a lot of muscle tend to use it when they're releasing a new product. The iphone would not have succeeded without the hype--it was just a smartphone, with really good fit & finish but a very high price; from a certain perspective it brought nothing really new to the table, and some of the glitz of the iphone actually comes with practical problems (eg it's slippery, easy to drop). It took big hype from a big company to turn it into <b>the phone</b>, the yardstick by which all other phones would be measured. They built a mystique, almost an ideology for the dang things, so now any feature they have must be good and any feature they don't have must have been part of Great Jobs' Plan.
There are tons of products which sell big even though they're mediocre, or even crap, because the hype worked. There are tons of products that are good but never sold because they had no hype. People will evaluate things more positively if they seem to be popular. People will buy the things other people are buying. Relentless hype makes it seem like other people are buying it. And in the case of Steam Machines, a fast hard launch with big resources would have the potential to juice the numbers, and the projected numbers, enough to solve the games problem once and for all--if Steam Machines looked like the next competition for PS 4, suddenly all the AAA companies would be releasing their games for Steam OS. Then the one serious knock on the Steam Machine with Steam OS would be gone, and it would likely be the beginning of the end for Windows domination of computer gaming. So a big splashy launch, a big push at the beginning putting everything behind it, has a very big potential upside.

Of course there is a downside. If Steam pushed the opening hard and it <b>didn't</b> do so well it would be seen as a huge flop, a disastrous mistake, and a long game would be far less workable. They may be thinking that, given the lacklustre pre-reviews by people who maybe in their opinion don't understand what the point or the intended audience are, a big push might be torpedoed by resistance from the typical hype-machine channels, and so they're better off taking their time, letting the things establish themselves and get accepted by the kind of people they think will actually like them, and then they'll be in a better position to push them forward once their niche is a bit better understood. Or something.

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On the whole lack-of-AAA-games issue, I'm on a weird side. I do find that Linux is still lacking a lot of games I'd like to be playing. But, none of them are AAA games. What I'm annoyed by is lack of things like Galactic Civilizations III.

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One thing I've been thinking in terms of the Steam Machine: What is success? What is failure? Especially from our Linux point of view.
It's been pointed out that there are 125 million users on Steam. Out of those, apparently 1%ish are Linux users. We can't trust that figure but we don't have anything better. So anyway, around 1.25 million Linux users on steam. There are doubtless a few Linux users who play--and buy--games but don't use Steam . . . not a ton though.
Meanwhile, on the console side, according to an article I just googled Sony has sold around 25 million PS4, MS has sold around 15 million Xbox One, and Nintendo has sold around 10 million of the latest Wii.
Let's imagine that Steam Machines end up selling a quarter as many as the weakest of those contenders. That would be a failure, right? Not even in the big leagues. But that would be 2.5 million units! For our purposes, it would triple the current number of Linux users on Steam, moving us to 3% and positioning us for more AAA games, better drivers and so on, which in turn would make future Linux gaming, and general desktop, pushes more viable. So for us, even a failure, if it's not a complete blowout, would be a success.

Steam Machines are also in a better position for gradual success than normal console platforms, because they get to piggy-back off of PC games. They won't stop having new games work on them even if success is gradual for the same reason they have such a huge library at launch relative to normal consoles. So an incremental success, representing a flop next to even Nintendo but still big enough to increase that Linux percentage noticeably, would still leave them in position for new, cheaper or more powerful, models to make a big push at Christmas next year and build further.

The launch is still pretty damn underwhelming so far. Seems like they're counting pretty heavily on the Steam channel itself rather than worrying too much about hype driving people into stores.

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The Steam Machine release is underwhelming and the jury remains out about how Steam Machines will end up selling, whether they will surprise us with their speed, whether they will be a steady thing which gradually works its way into the ecosystem, whether they will be a damp squib that fails.
But leave the controller out of that equation. I've looked at a lot of reviews of the Steam controller and I think it's actually quite a triumph. It's managed to get mixed-but-generally-positive reviews from the kind of people least able to like it. That is, the kind of people who review game controllers are generally long term, hardcore twitch gamers, with lots of built-in muscle memory reflexes, habits and familiarities and comfort zones ingrained deep. Throw a very different controller at them and with the best will in the world, they cannot rapidly bring themselves up to the speed with this new interface that they had with the old, and with the best will in the world they cannot make themselves feel intuitively comfortable with it. And yet despite all that, these people have overall had to admit that it's pretty impressive. And it seems to be very successful at the basic task it's meant for: Allowing people to play mouse-and-keyboard games in the living room which could never be played there before. Just that is something of a revolution.
The problem is that many reviews have concluded that while the controller is great, the Steam Machine and in particular Steam OS don't add anything. I want both to succeed, but there's something to that view. On the other hand, there are whole categories of games that a Steam Machine can now play in the living room that you can't really play with normal consoles. Take strategy games of the relatively complicated variety. We don't think of that as living room fare, but they're great for that--you can stop playing, chat with the family, leaf through a magazine, check your phone messages, all while playing some Civ V; it's turn-based not real-time, so it doesn't care.

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Quoting: tuxisagamer

Quoting: KelsAh, I'd entered without noticing the restriction (prior to seeing this article). Pity they probably wouldn't consider Canada an honourary UK member.

Isn't Canada more of the US's weird step-brother?

No. And if we were it would be rude to say so. Most of us cling grimly to our delusions of not being much like the US.

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I'm going to be really happy after Christmas to see some sales figures, if only so people will be able to argue endlessly about the significance of them instead of about whether there can be any. The whole question of whether Steam Machines will sell is starting to really feel sterile to me; we've thrashed it to death pretty thoroughly and I'm getting to where I just wish it would go away.
The other thing I've been wondering about is, what about the other machines? When I look up steam machines on Steam, I get a long list from various different manufacturers. Most of them are bloody expensive high-end things, but there are a few affordable ones. Any reviews of them, or comparisons between them and the Alienware? Not so far that I'm aware of.

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Quoting: LXeyrc1Hmm, disappointed about the performance issues, it's still early access though so I suppose it's to be expected somewhat.

Yeah, I think a lot of programmers optimize fairly late. They start with basic solid routines that will get the job done and are easy to put in and understand. Then when they're finished putting in and ripping out most of the stuff, they look and see where in the code the execution ends up spending most of its time and make that stuff faster. So no surprise if something is slow in the early going.

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Quoting: Farmboy0Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity. [External Link]

I don't think anyone had suggested malice in this case. What would that mean--they deliberately announced and withheld Linux just because they hate Linux users and wanted to yank our collective chains? Yeah, that makes no sense. I buy Tuubi's "indifference" more, although it does seem like there's a certain lack of competence (and I don't mean, lack of experience--I've never developed anything and even I would have seen when planning the development that I should, you know, look at what it is that I've promised to do and, like, investigate how I would need to approach things in order to do what I promised. And there's enough helpful stuff out there; I could google variations on "Cross-platform development" for half an hour and come up with a better approach than they seem to have used. So, incompetence).

In general, though, I think this saying is invoked far too often. There is, in fact, quite a lot of malice in the world--and even more aggressive action designed to do harm that's "Nuttin' personal, just business". Relying on that slogan leaves you blind to, and potentially defenceless against, a lot of stuff that's going on.

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Shouldn't this have, like, a crossover with Prison Architect? Multiplayer with one player architecting the hell out of the prison and other players trying to escape it.

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