It sounds like a sale but it isn't. It is a crap deal actually.

If you buy the bundle you get a 50% discount on the price of all titles combined. Not now, always. Because DOTT is now on sale (40% discount), the total content of the bundle drops by €6, and therefore the bundle price drops by €3, which results in 52% discount. So instead of €98 for the bundle, you pay €95.

IMO, better wait until a Steam sale. Then all titles will be on sale, combine with the 50% bundle discount and price becomes much better than this.

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Kerbal is not AAA. not even Cities are. AAA are the major releases from the big ones; Bioware, EA, Ubisoft, Rockstar, Blizzard & co with franchises like Assassins Creed, Call Of Duty, Battefront, Mass Effect, Overwatch, The Division, Fallout, GTA, The Witcher, Bioshock, Uncharted, Far Cry and so forth. The big productions.

Why do you call these big productions? Why are the games I named not big productions?

I only difference I can pinpoint is that you are naming typical console games that are ported to PC afterwards. But that would be a very bad definition of AAA. Deal with it, PC will always have a different portofolio of games.

And the problem is: It's not enough with just one or two of the absolute top tier releases. A gamer want them all.

This is exactly what I am trying to point at. Why do they want them all? Marketing. Therefore fix the marketing towards games that are on SteamOS.

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Quoting: MblackwellAn i7 is somewhat useful since it is powerful enough to cut through the translation overhead of any wrappers...

I don't think so, because multi-threaded rendering is a bottleneck of OpenGL and therefore of wrappers. The main advantage of the i7 over the i5 is hyperthreading, for which you need games with lots of threads.

In order to cut through translation layers you need high clock speeds, but the clock speeds of the i5 and also the i3 are just fine.

Looking at the future, where we will have less wrappers and more Vulkan, the case for an i7 doesn't get stronger.

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Quoting: tmtvlHowever, when AAA titles are basically not being released for SteamOS

This is also very much has to do with what people perceive. People complain about games like GTA and Skyrim not available on Linux, but apparently it is no problem that XCOM2, Kerbal Space program, or Cities: Skylines are not available on the Playstation 4. (Yes, KSP is planned, but we are playing it for years now on Linux). And these are serious, big games, that you can justify to call AAA.

Do we need more AAA games? Definately. Is the situation as bad as people make it? No, the situation is quite good actually compared to most platforms. The platform that does a better job is Windows, but you should not target Steam Machines at Windows gamers.

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Lack of games is mostly a perceived problem. In fact, for a console gamer, a Steam Machine has a wealth of games available never seen before. Therefore reducing this perception, for example by hiding Windows-only games, might be just as important as well as getting more games available. You could also think of targeted advertising pointing to games that are on SteamOS, but not (yet) on consoles.

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I agree with a lot in your story, but one thing: Remeber that in a box like the Alienware Steam Machine you are extremely thermally constrained. A GTX1060 with its 120W in a Steam Machine might be well out of scope, allthough we haven't seen the final price yet, what I did see about the price is that such a GPU will kill the economic viability of such a card too.

That both Alienware and Zotac went with the GTX960 OEM is likely no accident: It is probably the best GPU to choose in the current market.

I fully agree about CPU: An i3 fine. The i5 should be used for a top-end Steam Machine and an i7 in a Steam Machine is pure nonsense. It basically shows that Dell are a PC manufacturer and not very experienced in the game business.

Long story short: We need AMD. That don't have the fastest CPU is no concern, because they can offer a good enough CPU and GPU within the required budget.

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Quoting: XaeroVincentIMO, it makes more sense to buy an Alpha R2 then put SteamOS or another distribution on it instead of buying the Steam Machine at this point.

Definately not, because the hardware is the same. You can connect the graphics amplifier to the Steam Machine, you just need to support yourself. Because of lack of Windows license to spend money on, the Steam Controller and the game bundle, the Steam Machine is way preferable over installing SteamOS on the Alpha R2.

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Consider this a non-issue. Yes the specification is 75W and the card can consume 77W. But a mainboard manufacturer taking only 2 watts of margin into account would be very, very stupid. You can assume safely that any sane mainboard manufacturer designs their board to be capable of delivering more than 75W.

This is mainly bad press for AMD, the amount of situations where it will cause problems will be near zero.

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Quoting: devland

This does not include Android, even though it is Linux,

Android is not Linux. Linux programs don't work on Android and Android apps don't work on Linux.
Android uses a heavily modified version of the Linux kernel. That's it.

I don't agree, because you can easily install a Linux distribution in a chroot and it will run your usual Linux applications then.

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Wow, I didn't expect that considering that we were well below 2% in the last months. But many people are considering to switch to Linux at the moment, now that Microsoft is increasing pressure with Windows 10 updates. Computer magazines also had specials about switching to Linux.

If this is responsible for the rise, it is likely that some of these people will reboot to Windows again. But some will stay on Linux, so it's good.

Also the W3Schools statistics pages show Linux at the highest share ever:

http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_os.asp [External Link]

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