The beta didn't work on my SteamOS installation (vanilla brewmaster), the screen flashes once and I'm back at the game page in the BPM. I will check today again.

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A nice side effect of the whole story: Steam on Linux and Steam Universe/SteamOS forums on Steam are alive again. I have not seen so many posts there for quite a few months now. The removal of the Steam Machines link, reporting of it and the resulting announcement from Valve rekindled interest in SteamOS, Steam Machines and Valve involvement in Linux.

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Quoting: GuestApple's walled garden, no, but what about Valve's? Many games do rely on Steam itself, which of course locks users into using Steam, and ultimately gives Valve control of gaming.
I don't mind Valve making it easy to use their system of control, and ultimately this is less about Valve, more about developers not locking themselves in.
My own view is that a game (at least a single player game) should not rely on Steam, even if it's one of the best for end user game management. I personally hope that Valve steer towards helping developers allowing games to be run without Steam, but more features are there if you do.

Many games distributed on Steam do not depend on Steam, i.e. you can shutdown Steam, navigate to a folder and run the executable directly. Sure, if you want to use Steam DRM, achievements, workshop or in-game social functions, then it creates a dependency on Steam. Sure, it's nice if a game simply disables these functions if Steam is unavailable (apart from DRM obviously), but is still usable.

You proposed that single player games should not depend on Steam and Valve is doing something completely different, yet similar: opensourcing their networking sockets library and removing Steam dependency (https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Valve-Network-Sockets-Lib [External Link], so you can use it without lock-in.

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Quoting: GuestWell, flamewars aside, Valve _do_ have some influence on GNU/Linux graphics, if for no other reason than financial support. So how that effects an open system is not entirely off topic. So long as it's kept civil.

And they do, by paying people to work on Mesa. But discussions about ethics of CUDA or Apple's walled garden are definitely off-topic in the context of "Valve's continued support for Linux gaming".

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Back on my wishlist.

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And yet another discussion hijacked into a GNU/Linux, Free Software, purists vs pragmatists, DRM, GOG vs Steam flamewar...

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Quoting: ArdjeBecause non of the partners were actually selling them, with the exception for alienware and zotac. In that respect: the zotac >> alienware in specs, so I now have a zotac for 1.5 years. No new steam branded machines have been "designed" since.
I think valve should make the branding more like "steamos compatible" instead of steam machine.

I really like my ZOTAC NEN. At €900 it was hardly a "PC console", but I got what I wanted: a capable machine in a teeny-tiny box.

ZOTAC seems to be the only maker of small form factor gaming PCs that is actually doing fine. Perhaps instead of "steamos compatible", Valve could actually work directly with ZOTAC like they work with HTC on Vive? And changing the vision of Steam Machines from "$400 box that plays last year indies" to "a powerful, unobtrusive PC in your living room"? Perhaps even today ZOTAC could re-brand some of their Magnus line mini PCs as Steam Machines, pre-install SteamOS, throw in a Steam Controller? The challenge is that few of Magnuses are below $1100 these days...

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My wallet is ready.

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I love my ZOTAC NEN. Sure, it was quite expensive, but for that price I got a capable, tiny, quiet system with Linux and Steam preinstalled and configured, a form factor I would never be able to build myself. Two years later it's doing just fine for 1080p gaming.

Pity to see Steam Machines go, but perhaps another year, we will see a follow up, successful this time.

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Quoting: GuestGame companies must think Linux users only like strategy games or something. It's a good thing though.

And action-adventure games (Mad Max, both Tomb Raider games, Shadow of Mordor...), and car sims (Dirt, Grid, F1, ETS & ATS...), and point&click (too many to list) and platformers (too many to list) :)

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