Valve certainly won't win it, but they're bringing the heat where it wasn't before.
SteamOS is the important part here - if it is proven to be a good console experience (which the deck has basically proven already) then licensing of the OS to other manufacturers will put a lot of pressure on integrated h/w s/w manufacturers.
Unlike the handheld format, the tvbox console is fairly easy to manufacture and is tolerant of a lot of spec and price variety. Any slip up by Sony and Microsoft in specs and price will result in steam machine variants carving away market share, which could force more frequent console releases.
The steam machine will almost certainly come in at a higher price point than the PS5, but with no 'online' subscription charge and reasonably priced storage upgrades we may see these revenue streams disappear from the next console generation in order to compete.
SteamOS isn't perfect, and the variety inherent in the platform that is a strength is also a weakness. The core markets for Nintendo and for Sony aren't going anywhere.
My main game console right now is one of those little gaming boxes you can buy on Amazon for about $400, where I have installed NixOS + Jovian to get the "SteamOS" interface.
I really like it. It really does feel like a "game console"; usually when I've made my own console using Linux, it always feels kind of janky. For example, RetroPie on the Raspberry Pi is pretty cool, but it doesn't feel like a proper commercial product, it feels like a developer made a GUI to launch games.
I have like 750 games on Steam that I have hoarded over the years, in addition to the Epic Games Store and GOG, which can be installed with Heroic, and the fact that I can play them on a "console" instead of a computer makes it much easier to play in my living room or bedroom. It even works fine with the Xbox One controllers; I use the official Microsoft USB dongle to minimize latency, it works great.
I think there actually is a chance that Valve could really be a real competitor, if not a winner.
Set top box [1], like an Nvidia Shield TV [2], to play (digital) TV and other programs. My point being, would you be able to have this machine function as such (not so much portable, rather standalone with a remote control). Because that way, you take the hardware STB out of the equation, saving you (on the Nvidia Shield TV Pro) a good 200 EUR.
I tried making it my main media center, but I couldn't figure out a way to get good quality streaming from the main services, since they limit the quality and bitrate pretty heavily for the browsers. I thought I could just live with it, but it was bad enough to really bother me. After a lot of effort to try and get things working with different emulators and user agent settings, I was unsuccessful getting the quality tolerable.
I haven't fully given up on that dream, but right now I'm just using an Nvidia Shield TV that I already had.
I meant they have set up the Nix directory so you can write to it without having to mess around with bind mounts, overlayfs, etc. because the system is normally read-only.
IIRC, the nix package manager can run entirely user-level on any distro. It doesn't ship on the Deck, but it's the same process there as anywhere else.
Which box is that? I personally have a Nvidia Shield with Steam Link to stream games from my gaming computer to my TV. I connected an Xbox controller and it works pretty well. I also use an old iPad for streaming games for games that don't lend themselves well to a controller.
It's obviously not a direct replacement since it still relies on my gaming machine, which not everyone has, but it gets a pretty good console experience, and it's portable.
The one I ordered had 32 gigs of memory; this was more than a year ago so I'm sure there are better ones now, but I have to say that I feel like this thing "punches above its weight" in that it does seem to run a lot more stuff than I thought it would at a decent framerate.
I have one of the higher-end beelinks. Super small, quiet, doesn't get hot and I can play modern AAA titles on it, driving my huge screen TV in my living room.
Can you quantify this? Which Beelink? Are you powering a 4K TV? When you talk about playing modern AAA games, which ones, and what settings do you run at?
Thanks for this! I'm playing Cyberpunk 2077 on a 4K TV with my ROG Ally X right now, but I added an eGPU to get nicer 4K graphics. Very cool to hear that a mini is capable of playing it too!
Very very cool! Every time I look at building a hot gaming PC I think to myself that I'm just going to play SNES games and Elden Ring, so what's the point? Something like this would be great.
Current OS split of Steam users - 94.84% windows, 2.11% mac, 3.05% Linux.
Valve has fought tooth and nail for a decade to make that 3.05% a reality. Linux means they control their own destiny, instead of being at the mercy of Microsoft. Valve has their eyes on this prize and they’re willing to play the long game.
Everyone’s going to talk about “winning” the console generation, but winning could mean an increase of Linux’s share to 5-6%. That would be a massive win, and would be a vindication of Valve’s strategy. Valve could achieve their goals even if Sony and Nintendo sells millions of consoles more.
Valve’s strategy being that Microsoft will continue down this user-hostile and privacy-hostile experience.
Being computer-savvy means I’m still a relative outlier, but given the renewed shift away from Windows and Office; Windows unfortunately may become niche.
Honestly, as much as I prefer Linux for most things Linux staying pat and macOS stealing market share from Windows is almost as good as Linux taking those users. I think we’re currently seeing a trend starting of people leaving Windows for each of them, and some users for both of them.
I’d bet that most PC Windows gamers care a lot more about Steam than they do about Windows. If Microsoft did anything drastic - like blocking Steam like Apple do on iOS - it would hurt Windows severely.
Steam on Linux works really well now. I sort of built my own steam machine a few months back with a framework desktop that now sits in my TV rack. Gaming on it is a really good experience. Had to buy a PS5 controller though because I could not get the XBOX controller to work over bluetooth which was a bit of a bummer. For me the new controller is most interesting as most games have XBOX controller support (with xbox button captions) and the steam controller adopts the button naming.
I just built one of these as well. For your Xbox controller, see if this works: find any Windows PC and download the Xbox Accessories app. Connect the controller (via USB) and update its firmware. Once I did this, I was able to pair it with the framework desktop via bluetooth (under linux) reliably, and it's been rock solid ever since. Apparently some of the models shipped with buggy firmware that linux really doesn't like for whatever reason.
I tried several solutions, including an old PS3, Xbox One controller (with the official dongle) and I ended up buying an 8bitDo xbox controller. They are well manufactured (better than the xbox controller), has a built in batter (unlike the xbox controller) and has a usb dock for charging.
This is only possible due to how the console space has changed over the last 10 years. The killer app for console over PC used to be simplicity - you pop in the disc/cartridge and you just go. This is rarely true anymore. Even Switch 2 games often require waiting to download a bunch of stuff before you can play. Meanwhile the PC experience has generally gotten simpler and most games "just work", in part thanks to Steam itself.
Thank you for calling this out. As a long time console gamer, I hadn't noticed this creeping bloat until I started playing games with my young children. My son begged for a new Madden game after playing it at his friend's house.
When we got the game, it probably took us an hour of fucking around with downloads and accounts. Off the top of my head, I had to set up a parents EA account and kids account, set permissions, had to make my 7 year old an email address, had to set up two factor authentication, accept crazy terms of use, verify emails, etc.) And then once we got all that done we're dodging ads for in game points, coins, cards, card packs, cosmetics, pre-order bonuses, etc. to get to the actual game. It's so SO bad and just not fun.
It completely killed his enthusiasm for the game. My son wandered off multiple times during this process. When I joked with my wife that we could have built a PC in the time it took us to do this bullshit it was an exaggeration, but only a little.
I had this experience playing couch co-op call of duty a few years ago. I had to make a fucking account. It's not even my console.
Nintendo has wavered a tad, but they're the closet to the original experience. You pop in a thingy, hook up another controller, or two, or three, and you're off. It just works, maybe you can input a name for your guy, maybe not, maybe you just always play Waluigi so everyone knows who you are.
Nintendo is also becoming worse. Some Switch 2 games are so big you need to juggle with the internal storage and expansion SD express cards above 256Gb are simply unobtainable or priced outrageously.
While you can obviously delete and redownload titles that takes a while and it's a shame the console storage can be completely filled with 4 AAA titles.
That in combination with 'key carts' that are just a download key and still require internal storage has put a big brake on my game collection ambitions for the time being.
Had to do the same with halo infinite at my friends house, tried to use some burner emails and it kept banning our 2nd player within a few minutes. Gotta love the digital future.
This is so very sad and so very ripe for disruption.
So many of the top players in our modern late stage capitalism economy fit this mold of having a terrible user experience with a large unsatisfied user base. Usually it's not even a monopoly, but all the top players are roughly equally awful to their users.
I'm tempted to start some companies to just do the thing in a way that doesn't suck for the actual paying customers. I think just doing a good/competent/user-needs-centric job at the same basic product would be enough to disrupt the market in many cases.
Good example of being confidently wrong. You are thinking of the little Basic interpreter that was on the pack-in consumer demo disc. Not the Linux Kit which was a very real initiative and had universities involved. We were using them in a big dedicated lab.
Not at all, you're mixing up with YA BASIC, that came with PS 2 demo disc.
People that weren't there keep mixing channels on this one.
To acquire PS2 Linux, you had to pay additionally 300 euros for the Linux distribution, the PS2 hard disk, and cables that would only work in monitors using sync on green signal.
Initially the price was much higher, and got reduced to around 300 in 2004.
I don't know -- per Microsoft's recent announcement.. the Xbox will basically be a Windows PC in a tiny package. So, no more Xbox Live needed to play online and you can install other marketplaces on there (such as Epic and GOG).
Microsoft hasn't announced the next Xbox yet. They've been promoting the Xbox-branded ROG Ally this cycle, which is just a Windows PC in a tiny package, but that's not the next console, just a current generation SteamDeck competitor.
They've been implying there will be a greater convergence in which Windows devices feel (play) like an Xbox, but they've been saying the same things since initiatives like Xbox Play Anywhere originally launched in 2016 (almost a decade ago!), which didn't result in the Xbox Series X being a PC in 2020 (despite similar speculation that it might be at the time).
It will be interesting to see where Xbox is planning to go, but so far most of the speculation is just reading (decade old) tea leaves.
100% agree with everything you said, and also Valve is a huge value prop in the cross-platform Steam store. I already prefer Steam because I have both Windows and Mac machines and generally travel with a MacBook.
Microsoft has limited Xbox to Windows buy-once, Sony has… nothing. Valve is building an ecosystem that goes from handheld deck to Windows/Mac/Linux to console to VR.
It’s been a slow burn but that is a very nice strategy.
The x86 running Windows isn’t perfect. The x86 rack system running Linux isn’t perfect. Android isn’t perfect. The Ford F150 isn’t the perfect pickup. Budweiser is far from the perfect beer.
The phrase “worse is better” has a lot of historical significance in computing. Long before that, though, Adolphus Busch started his brewing empire. If you take a brewery tour at an Anheuser-Busch brewery, they’ll tell you that the company’s flagship product, the aforementioned Budweiser, was never intended to be anyone’s favorite beer.
That’s right. One of the top selling beers in the world was never intended to be a personal favorite of a single buyer or beer drinker. What it was designed to be was unobjectionable, approachable, and good enough to serve your guests when their preferred beer runs out. There are so many varieties of beer that are so different, and they are often loved by some and despised by others. So an intentionally unremarkable but quality beverage was marketed to be a very popular second or third choice.
If most households have a Playstation and a Deck or Frame, or have a Switch and a Frame, or have a PC and a Deck then in total numbers the Steam machines just might be the top seller even if it’s not a universal favorite.
It doesn't have to dethrone anyone. If SteamOS-powered boxes start eating into the "enthusiast console" nich that alone could force Microsoft and Sony to rethink their current lock-in-heavy strategies
They tried it without a flagship and without a large library of compatible games.
They now have a flagship first party Steam Machine and Proton to run games. They are also working with partners to create 3rd party Steam OS handhelds.
If steam machines sell well, we will likely see supported 3rd party offerings.
Yes. It’s the Pixel / Surface / strategy: show there is a market for premium, flagship reference devices and let those guide the second tier manufacturers.
You don’t even have to be the #1 vendor, the reference implementation does a lot of good for the ecosystem.
Probably not. Kernel level anti cheat is the problem. I know BF6 isn't proton safe. Fortnite is the same.
GTA VI will probably run single player on proton fine, GTA V does. Multiplayer will probably not.
The multiplayer with kernel level anti cheat will keep Sony safe through at least another generation; Microsoft is less safe as they're so vulnerable this generation anyway.
There's a circular opportunity though - if the SteamOS market share gets anywhere, then it might become worth it for these developers to support anti-cheat on the that platform. Some systems (notably BattleEye) actually have Linux support, they just need to enable it, but there's no incentive for them to do so.
> Some systems (notably BattleEye) actually have Linux support, they just need to enable it, but there's no incentive for them to do so.
This isn't really true. As GP said, there isn't a kernel level anti cheat for linux. You can switch a flick on BattleEye to run on linux but it wont be a kernel level as it is on windows. So there is an incentive for them to not turn it on because it simply is the worse version than the windows one. As far as I know even on windows you get cheats even if it is kernel level. Meaning, allowing linux you'd probably be flooded with cheaters if you already get them on windows.
> Meaning, allowing linux you'd probably be flooded with cheaters if you already get them on windows.
There's an easy way to not get cheaters, or at least to slow down their impact: stop making your games "free to play". When cheaters have to buy 60€ games everytime they get b&, eventually they'll run out of money.
If anything the Tarkov ban treadmill is a way to drive sales. Even if some of them get disputed as fraudulent due to stolen card numbers, BSG may still come out ahead.
Battleeye games get flooded with cheaters no matter what. On most anti cheats is the same anyways. Just see tarkov for a battleeye game with rampant cheaters
These are not winner games these days. Gaming trends are so fast that indie games like the one where you play a duck with a gun is what's driving the gaming community these days.
That's a misconception. Majority of players are with the big Franchises, and they stay with them. The variety-gamers who are playing multiple different games are a minority, though they are a big crowd, loud and have for obvious reasons more attention, leading to this misconception. For example, Escape from Duckov, which you are speaking about, had at it's peak "just" roughly as many players as Battlefield 6 has on average every day. And Battlefield is the smaller one of the big games.
I don't think it's entirely the case. They are on franchises, but not the ones you think of - they're playing live service games that have been around for years. Games like League of Legends, Counterstrike, Fortnite, Dota, WoW, PUBG etc. Games like Battlefield are up there, but I don't think they're the games people mainly play over the years. (Although Fifa and GTA definitely are.)
For example, the top 10 games in Korean PC bangs last week were:
1. League of Legends
2. PUBG (I think)
3. Fifa
4. Valorant
5. Overwatch 2
6. Sudden Attack (a KR FPS game)
7. Maple Story
8. Lost Ark
9. Dungeon Fighter Online
10. StarCraft (Brood War, I believe)
The next 15: Diablo 2 Resurrection, World of Warcraft, Diablo 4, Lineage, Eternal Return, Path of Exile, Warcraft 3, Black Desert, Cyphers, Aion, Path of Exile 2, Diablo 3, StarCraft 2, Tales Runner, Final Fantasy 14.
Lineage and Brood War weren't even made in this millennium!
> I don't think it's entirely the case. They are on franchises, but not the ones you think of
I didn't name any franchise. I only mentioned Battlefield to compare it with the mentioned Duck-Game, as they are both on Steam where everyone can see the numbers. I mean if we are talking about the real big numbers, then we would be with Minecraft, Roblox, Fortnite, LoL, which are all not on Steam; making number-checking a tad harder.
> Games like Battlefield are up there, but I don't think they're the games people mainly play over the years.
As a Franchise it seems moving Fifa, very popular, but also seasonal peaks. Each new version shoves in players for a while, until they are satisfied again. Though, I don't really play them, so it's just external observation.
To be fair Brood War was like a national pastime in Korea for many many years and there are still pro tournaments held multiple times a year that draw a decent audience. That game will never die in Korea.
That's a lot of guesswork for such a strong claim as yours. You can actually see gaming distribution on open steamdb[1] stats and every year the amount of games avg player plays grows higher and higher.
A linux native game called Banana got almost a million concurrent player peak (compared to #1 CS2 having only 1.8M). This didn't exist 10 years ago - the gaming landscape is entirely different in 2025.
This call that gamers generally play 1 game only is extremely dated especially when flavor of the month games are extremely in right now. I'm sure Valve with the biggest gaming dataset in the world didn't just dive into this blind.
It's not guesswork, it's reading the statistics. Gaming Reports are regularly showing that the majority of gamers and income is with only a handful of games/franchises.
> You can actually see gaming distribution on open steamdb[1] stats and every year the amount of games avg player plays grows higher and higher.
Yes, because the market grows. But look at the numbers, the top is always with the same games, with the same numbers, which are usually in a complete different league then the rest. The Top 5 Games have usually 10-20 times as many players as every other games. And, be aware that this is only Steam. The gaming market is much, much bigger than just steam. Steam is kinda its own bubble with a skewed view.
I'm not saying steam or indie-market is small, but people looking at PC and Indie-games develop a kind of natural filter for the real behemoths of the market.
> A linux native game called Banana got almost a million concurrent player peak
We have at the moment >3 Billion Players. 1 Million gamers for a shady shortlived hype-game is not bad, but it's not even remotely winning the market, or setting a trend. At best, it's setting a trend in a specific niche. Valve wiped out billions of value in CS-Skins some week ago. That's more market-influence than a free game with shady skin-business will ever gain.
The reality of native Linux gaming must be really sad if the top example is in essence "NFT" generator with minimal if no gameplay...
It is essentially a software toy people left running to generate random items some of which ended up being speculated on generating some money for "players".
I would say that‘s a bit overly simplified, as much as the indie or indie like game scene is thriving, so is the online multiplayer scene. Gaming is huge and just because one thing is big doesn’t mean another is not. Not a zero sum game here.
Sure but not being able to play 4 games is not an indication of success either way. It's not 2012 when you had to have Call of Duty - you can not have battlefield, cod or fort nite and still never run out of incredible, popular games to play.
If you have a bunch of friends that have battlefield/cod/fortnite and want to play them, they will still do so without you, or at least heavily pressure you into getting them.
I'm not sure what could that even mean from consumer pov - I'm not going to buy a platform because some of my friends might want me to play a specific game with me?
The pressure to get more games on your platform has never been as low as it is today and has never been this low on Steam itself. You could spend a lifetime with the current Steam library and never feel bored.
From product pov Valve feels very comfortable and I bet they have the data to back up this move with basically unlimited war chest. If anything I feel like Valve is pressuring game developers of these major games here - not the other way around.
That’s exactly the thought process of every teenager ever, and also most people who want to connect with their friends through gaming beyond their teenage years.
> I'm not sure what could that even mean from consumer pov - I'm not going to buy a platform because some of my friends might want me to play a specific game with me?
Yeah exactly. Depending how much you care about playing with friends compared to playing at all you might make that choice.
> I'm not sure what could that even mean from consumer pov - I'm not going to buy a platform because some of my friends might want me to play a specific game with me?
That's exactly how console sales worked in the past. I bought an Xbox because all my friends were playing Halo, and I wanted to join in...
The recent phenomenon of games supporting cross-play out of the gate is probably eating into this, but exclusives were a hell of a moat back in the day.
Sure, but those AAA games still exist, and people still want to play them.
As a gamer, why would you want to spend a few hundred bucks on a gaming box, when it isn't able to play the biggest hits? Who would want to deliberately limit their ecosystem to indie games?
There's a nonzero chance that BF6/GTA6/etc becomes a thing that everyone wants to play. If all your friends are raging about how much fun it is and are all playing together, aren't you going to regret buying a Steam Machine?
Sure, you can still play Super Meat Boy, but that doesn't matter - they regret what they can't do.
The sale success of the Steam Deck proves you wrong. The PC is the strongest platform for exclusives because most of everything ends up there eventually. The Xbox has no exclusives anymore, Sony is publishing everything on PC eventually. Only Nintendo remains as never publishing on PC. If you are flexible about your choice of multiplayer-only titles (if you're even interested in that type of things) then the Steam Machine is the best console.
Sony's in trouble; their crown jewels are all on PC right now! You can buy a Steam Machine next year and play all the Spider-Mensch, the Lost Hose, the Ghouls of Yo-Kai!
The Steam Deck has sold only 4 million units in 3 years, which is a rounding error in the console market, not a huge success. The Switch 2 has generally been considered a failure (due in no small part to a serious lack of interesting exclusives at launch) and has still sold more than 10M already, while the Switch sold 154M units and the PS5 has sold 84M.
LoL can't be played on the Steam Deck. This is common among the top multiplayer games due to anticheat.
It's almost certain no one bought a Steam Deck primarily to play DotA, and it remains to be seen if any has a meaningful impact on the Steam Machine, but I doubt it.
If there is a non-zero chance that I might want to play such a game, from time to time, I can stream it.
Why would I want to limit my options for occasional AAA gaming to the graphics supported by a particular console, when I can spring for GeForce Ultimate for a month and play BF6 with amazing graphics at 120 FPS, on my TV or my laptop, or my iPad or my phone? And play with even better graphics two years from now, as the state of the art advances.
Sure a different option would likely be best for people who know they want to play AAA, all the time. Although, even for many of these people, the Steam machine is probably a great second box for many, that gets you however many 100s or 1000s of titles they have in their Steam library.
But a fear based "you might miss out occasionally" argument is unpersuasive. Especially in a world where some games are exclusive. My swanky new PlayStation is no help if everyone is raving about the new Nintendo game.
>As a gamer, why would you want to spend a few hundred bucks on a gaming box, when it isn't able to play the biggest hits? Who would want to deliberately limit their ecosystem to indie games?
???
Look at steam top 100, sure there are 2 or 3 games you wont be able to play on there, but there rest work just fine. And sure there are popular games outside steam, but even if none of them worked (which is not true), for most gamers its a non issue. (And Valve is probably not really concerned about them)
The only games this limits are online competitive (most of the time FPS) games. There are plenty of gamers, myself included, that have 0 interest in such games.
In short even if 0 online FPS games are playable on steam console(which is not true), there are still 10s of millions of gamers, who wouldn't care.
As far as why wouldn't people pick something that can play 100% of games is because they cant. Even the best PC cant play Nintendo games, not all PS games are on PC or xbox, etc. You always have a trade off. And plenty of people still buy PC's,Deck, PS5's and Switch consoles.
My guess id more people won't buy it because, they want better specs, not because a few games wont work on them.
But that still leaves millions, potentially tens of millions of people.
Nonsense. People don't buy a PS5 and regret they can't play League of Legends. There's been games exclusive to one platform or the other since the dawn of time, yet people still buy them for the games they do have.
That thing is going to run a ton of games that other consoles don't.
Few customers are going to replace their PC with it, but if you have the cash and want to add a sleek console to your living room that will also stream from your desktop in a pinch, it's probably a great deal.
No, and I understand if that's a deal-breaker for you, but for me I refuse avoid kernel level anticheat wherever possible, so I'm none too fussed about it. If a game wants to run malware, it can do it on a console where it's nice and segmented off from my general-purpose computing.
I can’t speak for brendo, but I do most of my gaming on a separate PC-class machine from my home workstation, both of which are separate from my work laptop and personal laptop.
I game primarily on my Linux PC, including multiplayer games. I do have a PS5 and other game consoles, though honestly, they see more use as set-top boxes than they do as gaming devices. I have a separate Windows laptop for work.
But not with a separate user? As a process running under your normal user can access all your files and even memory of all your running processes by that user. Its not just kernel stuff that is bad.
5 years ago, if someone told you about a commercial Linux gaming console. You were right to laugh.
Now, with IA cheating being the norm now, I think Valve has a real chance to add a microchip to "certify" its console and so playing Fornite (or over 3A) on it.
Will be a added value over a gaming PC, I don't think they will miss this opportunity for too long.
At least to start. Microsoft strongly encourages all Xbox games to also come out on PC, though they sometimes release later. I cannot find any game developed originally for Xbox Series X|S where this hasn't happened eventually (and the developers definitively aren't still working on the PC version).
I think Valve has a fairly good grasp of what they addressable market is at this point with the Steam Deck having been out for so long.
The value proposition is basically play your existing Steam library (and emulated games but that will be left unsaid) in 4k on your TV with an interface suited for it. I am not sure they are that dependent of upcoming games.
I will probably buy one because I really enjoy my Deck and I would like to play some more taxing games on a large screen from time to time and I’m never going to buy a PS5 because I have no interest in tying myself to Sony and playing exclusively on my TV.
If you can’t play Fortnite on it it sounds like a great time to line up a lawsuit against Epic Games for refusing to allow you to play Fortnite on the Steam box.
I can see developers work on SteamOS anticheat soon, once it gains more traction (chicken / egg problem though). Those games are available on mobile phones and consoles as well, so "windows" is not a requirement.
I think that the idea is that if you get enough users on Linux, it seems foolish from the game studio's perspective not to add Linux support to their anticheat.
It's possible that 'adding Linux support' would take the form of just making the anticheat optional.
Maybe playing with the anticheat enabled makes you immune to being reported for cheating (because they can verify down to the kernel level that you aren't), but you can still play without it (but without the immunity from being reported).
Obviously they wouldn't do this in today's market because there's no incentive to do so, but if a significant portion of gamers moved to Linux, offering a Linux solution might become a reasonable choice for game studios.
Optional anti-cheat could be really interesting. Make it a matchmaking option; let the players decide who they want to play with. This effectively makes "PC without Anti-cheat" a new platform in cross-platform match making.
I can imagine a whole scene popping up where everyone cheats to the max, creating whole new game modes.
This already existed in CS:GO, it was called Hack vs Hack. Private servers could choose whether to run anticheat or not. You'd see some with names like HvH and join to find people spinning in circles and comparing which aimbot was the most dominant.
> I can imagine a whole scene popping up where everyone cheats to the max, creating whole new game modes.
That would be very interesting. I also bet that people would start developing bots that play the game better than a human could and eventually it would essentially turn into digital BattleBots.
This depends heavily on how customised the linux is. Back in the day Amazon had to fork Android to add kernel-level support for DRM, otherwise the studios weren't going to permit streaming video on Fire tablets. One could imagine Valve adding an optional kernel DRM module to solve the same problem.
You still lose because the dev team has to split their attention.
And anyway I (and many other people!) have valid keys for basically all widevine streams extracted from supposedly secure android devices. That DRM approach ended up failing miserably and torrent sites are full of WEB-DLs.
But you can still stream video on normal Android devices, no? My Motorola phone supports Disney+. Why did studios object to streaming on Fire tablets unless it had kernel DRM but they're fine with streaming on easily-rootable phones?
Battlefield 6 might never run on the average Linux desktop, but I could see a future where it would run on Steam hardware in an end-to-end Secure Boot environment.
I find it much more likely that Valve enables Secure Boot on their Steam hardware.
I imagine that if this happens, it will be followed by popular Linux distros finally becoming serious about their Secure Boot implementations, instead of simply shimming it or seen as a rarely-used feature reserved for enterprise distros like RHEL.
Some of us actually think that having some sort of validation that our OS hasn't been tampered with is a feature and not a bug. It's only a problem when companies parlay that validation into anti-consumer DRM - but that's a political problem, not a technological one.
All the platforms that went all-in on secure boot like things and attestation are anti-consumer hellholes that slurp all your data. The evidence just does not look good. Maybe Linux is different, but it's swimming against the tide here. It would be the first of it's kind.
A few anti-cheat systems rather than inspecting the local machine look for things like impossibly fast target acquisition in FPS games, or the server noticing when a shot is taken on an opponent who’s supposed to be totally obscured. Those aren’t perfect, but they don’t require kernel-level anticheat.
Jesus, since when Fortnite and BF6 became gaming benchmark nowadays?
In order to 'win' a console generation there needs to be support for the games people want to play. Capitalism is a literal popularity contest, and any console that doesn't have Fortnite, COD, FIFA, etc won't win, regardless of what you or I might think of the games.
The reason why Steam can't win a console generation is simply because Microsoft, Sony, and Nintendo have enough sway over publishers (especially ones they own) than they stop popular games being available on a rival platform. They market it as 'exclusives' but really it's just anti-consumer.
Also consistently the most played game on Steam by a fair margin. That doesn't necessarily make it the most played PC game since some big titles like League and Fortnite aren't on Steam, but it's at least close.
I dont give the slightest of shits about CS but have you seen the figures? It's doing absurdly well. In addition the separate economy for skins peaked at 6 billion recently.
Why would you not need to license it? Steam isn't open source and Steam, the trademark, is owned by Valve. If we were talking about a standard distro like Fedora, no, I guess they wouldn't have to license it, but we aren't.
"what, i cant play COD online? Or Battlefield? or fifa? or Rocket League?... but thats all I play, and it costs more than a ps5?
...whats the point?"
These games have gigantic followings that ship hardware year after year. People on hackernews are substantially broader-minded than your average console gamer.
On the above basis alone, most of the regular gamers I know will not buy one of these.
There are presumably mobile games which have even bigger playerbases. Most of the "regular gamers" of this sort I know will probably not buy a console either. Does it matter?
It really says most about what people you hang out with.
It doesn't need IP, it is already THE marketplace for PC gaming. People will get a box like this to play the library they already own, or get great deals on new games.
Yeah, but console gamers don't necessarily know or care about that. If you want to cut into the console market, you kind of have to meet console gamers halfway
Not if you are playing the long game. You get console gamers by buying consoles. Steam now has the concept of parental controls and kid accounts. That's the story of why my kid has never played a console. And I have grabbed a lot of her friends as well. In 5 or 6 years when these kids are teens, they will stay with steam and play whatever works on that platform over picking up whatever Nintendo, Sony or Microsoft drop.
PC gaming had been dying because it was losing kids with the rise of tablets and phones. This is a decent solution even if it will not pay off immediately.
But only halfway. You don't need to have exactly the same market as an existing console. It's not as if the existing consoles have exactly the same market as each other either.
And Valve is already a lot more than halfway from what I can tell.
There is something vaguely amusing to me about complaining that Valve of Half-Life, Counter Strike, Portal, Team Fortress and Dota fame doesn’t have IP and giving as an alternative what I view as a minor IP, God of War.
Apparently, people have forgotten that what launched Steam is it being required to play game of the decade Half-Life 2.
Those ips are dying. They aren’t maintained. The steam platform doesn’t have any exclusives. While it doesn’t need exclusives it certainly doesn’t hurt in a competitive fight. An IP that rivals Pokémon, Mario and Zelda exclusive to steam.
What IP does Sony or MS have these days that would sell consoles? They fumbled Halo completely and Sony exclusives are now all on PC. Nintendo does have their Zelda and Mario that they have taken care of well for decades but Steam has.. every PC and console game with an emulator
I think most people would take the biggest library of past, current and future games, cheaper games and free online over those. Not to mention valve of all devs has enough legendary IPs. Kratos and many others have been on steam for years.
I bought a bunch of games for console over the years that I can't play any more.
I have about a dozen games on the switch. In another console generation, nintendo will make all my existing switch games unplayable again. I feel like you don't really buy console games. You rent them for one console generation.
I mean, I can't tell whats worse - that Nintendo has the gall to try and sell me the same game for switch that I already bought retail on the Wii several years ago. Or that I can't play a lot of my old Wii games at all any more.
But every year I end up picking up more and more games on steam. So many games. I have hundreds, and so do most of my friends. And all of those games keep running on every PC I own.
That's the value proposition of a steam box. It ships with hundreds of games that I already own and already enjoy. Fancy playing bioshock again? Sure. Factorio? Yeah hit me. Dota? Cyberpunk? Terraria? Stardew Valley? Lets go.
Once burned, twice shy. It’s going to take a few more generations to see how long they actually maintain that compatibility for going forward.
I suspect consoles will move to arm chips at some point. When they do, will Sony and Nintendo bother making a Rosetta type layer for backwards compatibility to play the games they’re selling now? I doubt it. We’ll see.
I hardly understand the headline. Steam machine is just a computer, and since it can be used for other stuff than playing games, then it can't have the cheap pricing of a console. Most consoles are sold at a loss, and the benefits are made when selling console-exclusive games. If you sell something at a loss, but users aren't forced to buy your games, then you're not gonna make any money. Hence, the Steam Machine (AKA GabeCube) is gonna be as expensive as a laptop (or slightly less expensive because of the bigger form factor and lack of portability).
On top of that, the base OS can't run a ton of games that run on console, because it runs in the way of kernel anti cheats (think: battlefield, call of duty, valorant, league of legends... the biggest games basically), while consoles are guaranteed to run most AAA games.
So with all that in mind - while I appreciate what Valve is doing a lot - I don't think it'll win the "console generation". I hardly see how it can even be called a console. It's just a PC, and that's how they call it themselves.
You're thinking of 'back in the day.' The original XBox's video card was worth more than they sold the entire system for, and the PS3 was a complete beast of computation (even if not entirely inappropriate for games...)! But in modern times (PS4 gen onward) consoles have become relatively vanilla midrange computers designed with the intent of turning profit on the hardware as quickly as possible.
The hardware cost of the PS4 was less than it's retail price from day 0 [1], and they began making a profit per unit shortly thereafter. Similarly the PS5 also reached profit per unit in less than a year. [2] XBox models from the PS4 gen onward are conspicuously similar as well.
Tariffs/inflation/everything has raised the unit cost to the point that they're probably close to running a loss again sometimes on the latest gen consoles.
> I hardly understand the headline. Steam machine is just a computer, and since it can be used for other stuff than playing games, then it can't have the cheap pricing of a console.
I don't understand this train of thought. It absolutely can have the cheap pricing of a console, as long as Steam is the default store, and the majority of users will use the console as-is and buy games on Steam.
Let me give a quick analogy: Google paid Apple 20B USD just to be the default search engine in Safari, even though users can easily change it. Defaults matter. The vast majority of people are not highly technical users who customize everything in-depth and seek out alternatives. The vast majority of people just use whatever is the default.
The main problem I see is that if this is any cheaper than it's hardware, people will buy 100s of them and stack them in server racks for CI runners or whatever. Generating only losses for Valve and making the hardware unavailable to gamers.
It needs to either be at market rate or locked down to only be useful for gaming.
I don't think they could possibly make it cheap enough for that - especially once you consider all the money being wasted on RGB/Bluetooth/a GPU you won't use.
Messing around with weird consumer hardware in a datacenter context isn't exactly attractive. If all you need is some x86 cores, an off-the-shelf blade server approach gets you far more compute in the same space with far less hassle. Even if the purchase cost is attractive, TCO won't be.
There are already small PCs without a GPU for around $200–300, and this will cost at least 2-3 times that. Valve already comfirmed, that the pricing will not be 'console like' and would match entry level PC. And PS5 is $500.
The PS3 was weird. It had a unique architecture that made it especially useful for HPC in an era before GPUs were useful for that purpose. The CPU and GPU in the Steam Machine are not particularly high-end.
Does it have IPMI? Does it have ECC ram? Racking Mac Minis is a painful enough, this form factor is less rackable than that. If you need to physically adjust the form factor per device, whatever you could've saved will be immediately lost in labor.
The PS3 was uniquely powerful, compared to its x86 peers. It wasn't just cheap - it provided the compute of 30 desktop computers in the space, power, and price envelope of one.
I think the limitation on server gear these days is electricity price vs compute, with the hardware price being an up front investment but not dominating the lifetime cost. At least at this end of the price range - it's a consumer GPU, not an A100 or anything.
Iiuc, unlike Sony’s PS3 (which were bought and used like this), Steam is the unique distributor so it would be easy for them to not allow (or make really difficult to) buying thousands of machines.
(Or they could sell it everywhere for higher price but the Machine would come with a non transferable Steam gift card.)
> It absolutely can have the cheap pricing of a console
Valve hasn't committed to a price yet, but they told Gamers Nexus that it'll be priced less like a console and more like an entry level computer (i.e. more expensive than a console).
Weird statement, because I can search for PS5 pro & see $750 price points, and entry level computers have been far far cheaper. Cheaper than Xbox series X at $650. Getting pretty solid laptops for a bit under $500 has been possible for many years now.
But "entry level computer" has a very broad interpretation available. Could be higher for sure.
Do those computers play games competently? I doubt they play them as well as the PS5 or Series X. We aren't in the days where integrated graphics instantly meant sub 20 FPS on any game no matter how simple, but I still wouldn't throw any recent triple A game at even new-ish computers with integrated graphics and expect them to perform all that well. They'll play Rocket League, Stardew Valley and Minecraft just fine, and maybe that's all they need to do, but a Steam Machine that can't play tomorrow's title roughly on par with current gen consoles seems like a losing bet unless the price is equivalently lower.
Yes. There's a peer thread below this one with more examples, but in general the biggest (and most relevant) cost you're looking at with a new computer is the video card. And a PS5 level video card is the RX 6700 XT which is like $200-$300. If you're willing to purchase second hand you can go substantially lower.
I suspect most of us are of a vaguely similar age, and when "we" were growing up, PC gaming was ridiculously expensive. A new gaming PC was thousands of dollars and then obsolete within a couple of years, leaving you constantly checking new release 'minimum system requirements.' It was quite painful and a big reason I (and I suspect others) migrated to console gaming. But now a days? I have a relatively old PC and never even bother looking at spec requirements - it'll run it, just fine.
I used to budget the bulk of my yearly tax refund for a PC upgrade of some kind. A bit over $1k every year. Something was always due for a replacement in an endless treadmill of avoiding total system obsolescence.
Now, shit just lasts forever. I upgraded from a 1st gen i7 920 _this year_ into some mid-range Ryzen 5. I'm still using the 2070 RTX I bought over 5 years ago to power the HTC Vive and a 1440p monitor; with this new CPU the gfx card is finally getting a workout and has become the bottleneck while also giving me a massively better experience.
I'm tempted by the 9070 graphics cards but honestly, I just don't need it. I can tweak settings on any AAA game and get ~50fps of real frames and I'm just fine with that. I probably won't upgrade the graphics card until I pick up a dramatically better display device that requires it. Maybe the Frame will push the issue, maybe it won't.
The Steam Machine uses a dedicated graphics chip, similar to a discrete AMD RX 7060M. Laptop chip sure, but a stone's throw from integrated graphics. These Machines will be able to keep up.
That build uses a 13 year old CPU from AliExpress, there's no accounting for taste but I think most entry level builds are aiming a little higher than that. Some newer games won't even try to run on a CPU of that vintage since it doesn't have AVX2 support.
It was released in 2016 and does support AVX2. In general what matters when building a decent rig is aiming to balance performance to optimize against bottle necks. He demonstrated the system in various modern games, for instance running Delta Force at 4k/120FPS. And the CPU was scarcely getting touched - running at around 20%.
You can spend a ton of money on a bleeding edge CPU and see 0 performance gain in almost all cases, because basically no modern games are CPU limited, or even remotely close to it, so you're sitting there with your overpriced CPU basically idling.
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I think many people are out of the loop on PC costs and performance. The days where you needed some $1000+ bleeding edge rig to even begin to play the latest stuff are long gone. Since this thread is on consoles - an approximate PS5 equivalent video card is the RX 6700 XT which is like $200-$300, and that is, by far, the biggest expense.
Gaming tends to adjust to consors, and we're nearing 6 years of gen 9 consoles. expect any "entry level gaming" computer to either be portable or competitive with the $600 price point I can grab at any major retailer.
Otherwise, sure. I can build a potato for $300 and i will probably enjoy Silksong just fine. But at that point why not buy a non-gaming laptop?
The $400 system linked above can run modern games in 4k/120FPS. And that was far from some search for the most efficient price:performance build, it was just the first thing that came up on a quick search. If one is willing to do things like buy a refurbished hardware and assume you already have an OS, you could easily bring that down to $300 and maybe even start pushing towards $200.
Gaming has just gotten so absurdly cheap, but most people's mindsets are stuck in 15 years ago, when it was absurdly expensive and consoles were really the only way to help keep it to a relatively reasonable, and stable, cost. In modern times consoles will generally be price competitive for about a year, but then fall off as hardware prices decline, yet their retail sticker price generally stays the same.
On top of this now a days just about everything also comes to PC as well, so one of the biggest arguments of the past (console exclusives) is no longer valid. Even Japan is finally bringing their stuff to PC. And there also tends to be much more competition on PC, so rare will be the time that you need to pay $60++ for a new game. Though that is one area where many Japanese studios are still lagging behind the rest.
Older games at medium settings, or shooters at low settings sure. If that's your compromise for frames then a relative potato can still play it. I'm not sure I call that "modern" in the same way something God of War Ragnarok is "modern".
>Though that is one area where many Japanese studios are still lagging behind the rest.
Its a different model. They aren't trying to sell millions of copies to report engagement and sales, so they want to lock in the smaller audience they have and get as much out of that. Nintendo style. That's why you'll see the larger public studios like Square Enix and Capcom doing western style, generous sales so their sales calls can be "we sold 20% more YoY from new releases". Koei Tecmo, not so much. And Sega seems to straddle the line depending on the franchise.
Delta Force was released in January of this year. He was running it at 4k and 120FPS in medium. If you're willing to go for 60FPS or 1920x1080 I'm certain he could have it running in ultra or whatever at 60FPS. And that was on a less than $400 PC. Similarly he was also playing CS2 (released late 2023) in medium 4k at what seemed to average around 90FPS.
For contrast most PS5 games are going to run at 1080p at the highest, which is then upscaled to 4k output, and generally capped at 60FPS.
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I think Japanese studios are simply mispricing their games. Shin Megami Tensei V is a game that could probably be quite big on the PC but instead has less than 3500 reviews (as a ballpark for sales) because of a price that's way outside the peak point on the supply:demand curve. It also has almost no regional pricing adjustments - like $50 in India and Vietnam, $40 in China, etc, for a game may as well have a label saying 'please pirate me, I don't want your patronage.'
In classical advertising it was believed that lowering the price of something was subconsciously associated with a lower quality/brand damage in the consumer, and they're probably still under this school of thought. But I think at this point it's largely obsolete, certainly in software. People, in general, just don't pay $60 (or anywhere near it) for games on PC anymore.
Defaults matter at scale. And as for scale, the Steam Deck has the most generous estimates at 7 million. For a side hustle that's great. For trying to compete with the scale of other consoles, that's not enough.
Hardware is very hard to break into. You can't treat it like software and expect to dominate.
It’s like android. You sell pixel at relatively high price but create a wave of other with cheaper alternatives, so you end up make money from being default store.
Laptops have lots of components that the Steam Machine doesn't have. The screen, keyboard, touchpad, cameras, microphones, speakers, battery, et cetera are all fairly small costs, but they add up. Plus using a Linux-based OS instead of Windows automatically knocks around $50 off the price because the price doesn't include the cost of an OEM Windows license.
I don't think the Steam Machine will be priced lower than a PS5 or Xbox (unless Valve is willing to burn money in exchange for market share), but I think that it'll be priced significantly lower than an equivalent-spec laptop (which would be in the $600-800 range based on the fact that the Steam Machine has an "AMD RDNA3 28CUs" GPU, which according to Google is roughly equivalent to an Nvidia RTX 4050, laptops containing which are priced around $600-800).
> Laptops have lots of components that the Steam Machine doesn't have. The screen, keyboard, touchpad, cameras, microphones, speakers, battery, et cetera are all fairly small costs, but they add up. Plus using a Linux-based OS instead of Windows automatically knocks around $50 off the price because the price doesn't include the cost of an OEM Windows license.
Yet's all the mini PCs I've come across are more expensive than their laptop equivalent
Because it's also about the demand, and how much you can mass produce them to reduce the cost
The 'AMD RDNA3 28CUs' is likely to be the 7600M, as all the major specs are the same (power draw and clocks is lower, but given that the Steam Machine is not a laptop, it probably will have more headroom for that).
I mean, Valve built this with the profits, at least, in no small part with the profits from selling games, DLC, and gacha skins on their storefront which has many many competitors too bozo-brained to run their stores as well as Valve does.
If any company has a business case for “we’ll sell the form factor at a loss with our store preinstalled” now it’s Valve, especially if they want to make the hardware only to prove the viability of the form factor, and especially since they already have been selling on platforms they don’t own.
Are you assuming that nobody who buys a GabeCube is going to buy a game on Steam ever again?
Is it perhaps more likely that users with a convenient box attached to their TV might want to buy more games from Steam?
Now this might be difficult to track, but stay with me. Valve makes the GabeCube. Valve owns Steam. Sales from Steam go to Valve. Users with Steam hardware play a disproportionate amount of games bought from Steam. See where this is going?
There's absolutely no difference. You can run games from other stores on a GabeCube, but most people will play Steam games. People who play more games buy more games. Just like people who mainly play Xbox buy more Xbox games.
I guess you're right, even though it's possible to change the gabecube into a workstation and use it for work, never gaming, it's really unlikely it'll ever be a significant proportion of the buyers.
Since they have the steam deck, they also probably have enough data to back their new hardware strategy
Very few consoles were sold at a loss. Some certainly were, like the fat PS3. But that was the exception, not the rule.
More relevantly, none of the current generation (ps5, xbox series, switch 2) are sold at a loss. They don't have large margins, but they are sold above cost.
The Taiwanese computer manufacturers won't be phased by thin margins; that's their modus operandi.
You're listing the losers in the market, the ones that had to drop prices to make sales. The real volume sellers weren't generally sold at a loss. Most Nintendo consoles were never sold at a loss. Sony often sold at a loss in the first year or so, but their redesigns made them profitable, and the vast majority of sales happened after redesigns. Moore's law was responsible for a large portion of the profits from hardware sales.
Okay. That doesn't conflict with their point. "No one had to sell at a loss... Except every non-market leader" only proves their point.
>, but their redesigns made them profitable
No one says consoles always sell at a loss. They are sold over 6-8 years and price drops are pretty conservative (until last gen where they ceased to be). Every conse eventually becomes profitable, but not in the years where they sell the most.
Nope. Take 1 example, the PS3. It lost money in 2007 & 2008, but became profitable in 2009. They sold 16 million PS3's in 2007 and 2008 out of a total 87 million. So approximately 20% of PS3's were sold at a loss.
And the PS3 is perhaps the console that was sold at the biggest loss at the beginning due to the horrendously expensive Cell chip.
It's kind of moot, anyways. The discussion is about the consoles of 2026 competing against Steam Machine. The PS5, Xbox Series X|S and Switch 2 are all currently being sold for positive margin.
The ps3 was certainly a unique case, because despite selling at a loss it still wasn't a competitive price. The infamous "599 USD" now translates to 950 dollars today, so that really shows you how utterly expensive it was (when the PS5 pro just needed to price hike to $800).so it coming down in price for consumers and manufacturers helped it immensely.
But I do believe that was a unique case. Consoles don't typically "come back" later in life. The vita later on didn't. The Wii U and Xbox one didn't. The dreamcast sure didn't. Sony's big turnaround should be praised, but not accepted as a norm of business.
Yes, I'm aware on how consoles are monetized. They take a loss in the first few years and make up for that with software sales, which they take a 30% cut on.
I'm not dispelling if the model isn't profitable, I'm simply stating that the hardware is historically sold at razor thin margins early on, if not outright a loss (until this generation)
4 consoles 2 handhelds, and a hybrid (switch). I have no clue if the gameboy and DS were actually sold at a loss. These were pre-smartphone devices sold more like toys, so I can see them being manufactured for very cheaply in a pre-smartphone era with minimal peripheral requirements.
> That practice started with PS1 / XBox and ended with PS4/XBone.
Okay, fair enough. Atari and NES were very expensive for their time. Nintendo had a few generations to itself to revive the industry and I'm thankful, but I'm also glad their blunder ended up creating competiton in the market.
It's strange how neither you nor seemingly any of your replies have heard of the Steam Deck.
Valve sold the Deck at a loss that GabeN himself described as "aggressive and painful," 3rd party estimates put it at $150/unit for the base model.
I see no reason to believe they won't employ the same strategy for the Machine. If I can lodge my own bet, I think they'll price it somewhere between a PS5 digital and pro.
An "entry level" computer which could mean anything. The first thing I did after the announcement was put together a micro atx PC with similar specs on PCPartPicker and came up with $800, so I consider that the ceiling.
Assuming they can bring costs down at scale and subsidize a bit, I don't think undercutting the PS5 pro is unreasonable.
> An "entry level" computer which could mean anything.
Perhaps but I don't feel like Valve going out of their way to specifically say that the steam machine will not be priced like a console leaves a ton of room for interpretation. With the current state of the industry & tariffs I would be shocked if its under $1000 USD.
"Id be shocked if Valve is so out of touch they would kill this thing with an unwarranted price tag"
It happened a decade ago. Wouldn't surprise me.
My bet is it will be similar to steam deck. The starting specs will be somewhat comoetitve to a PS5 Pro but with huge compromises (in Steam Deck'Deck's case, flash storage). A model that competently competes with a proper gaming oc will probably be 1000 or so.
Valve got popularity in the handheld space because everyone else except Nintendo gave up in terms of consoles. That plus seeing the handheld PCs from china pop up showed ample opportunity. I'm not sure the same will apply here.
The Steam Deck shows they learned every available lesson from that endeavor. Why would they retread mistakes they've already proven they know not to make?
> The starting specs will be somewhat comoetitve to a PS5 Pro but with huge compromises (in Steam Deck'Deck's case, flash storage). A model that competently competes with a proper gaming oc will probably be 1000 or so.
The specs are already public, the only thing we don't know is the pricing. RTFA
>TL;DR: The Steam Machine's specs are on par or better with the PS5.
So, a ps5 pro with huge compromises? What did i miss here? Comparing a console to a PC isn't apples to apples so just looking at raw specs won't give us the full picture.
>Why would they retread mistakes they've already proven they know not to make?
Because they think the road is different today, with more people willing to follow them this time.
You can take the wrong lessons from success and catastrophically fail next time. Gaming is rife with that trend because of failed experiments, being too early to market, or completely misunderstanding what consumers resonated with.
A console is really just a PC with the word “console” tagged on the side of it. It's more of a branding exercise than a proper distinction. The only real difference is you boot up the console and it takes you straight to a game library.
As for the range of games available, it's got a lot more indie titles than console does. One rather hopes it will inspire game developers to develop more Linux-compatible anti-cheat solutions, or just host Linux versions of the game on separate servers, but I won't hold my breath. I've honestly never got the point of anti-cheat myself, it doesn't seem to work in most games. I've long thought there exist much better solutions to cheating than software ones. The simplest would be to permit cheats in the game's base servers and allow players to scan their ID (á la Online Safety Act) to access servers with a higher degree of moderation. A permanent identity-based ban would sort out the problem much more swiftly than endlessly chasing hackers.
Is money still made from console exclusives? I feel like I see less of them these days. The biggest games are cross platform monsters, and the smallest are indie games.
Crazy to think that the Horizon Zero Dawns of the world would be propping up all of console gaming??
But maybe that’s why Xbox is looking to get out. And trying new monetization strategies (gamepass is on Roku or something)
In principle the consoles themselves and the exclusives are both loss leaders. Or, sold at cost, anyway. The actual money is made from the 30% cut on any third party game sales, and the online subscriptions required to play online.
Consoles are expensive. Once a consumer has bought one, they're likely to stick with it for the generation. This is why we have flame wars about them. Only a small minority has several high-end gaming devices.
Yeah, the fanboys are in bliss right now, but seeing this pre built cost 999 (and that's my most generous estimate) will bring them back down to earth.That would still be a good deal as long as the GPU is decent. But it's not "console killer" territory in the slightest.
I do look forward to buying the decade awaited iteration on the Steam Controller, though. Very underrated piece of tech.
> I hardly see how it can even be called a console.
Rather than focus too much on the technology classification, think of it in terms of extending the Steam platform to new markets. How many new people in the market for games-on-their-tv will at least consider a Steam machine. Even with the trade-offs you mention, my guess is quite a lot. And Valve doesn't care about making money on the hardware, they are already basically printing money.
For me, the big killer feature would be if this device is approved for modern media DRM. As much as I'm tired of streaming and its level of control over how I watch TV, it's still a decent part of my media consumption, but any Linux mini-PC I connect to the TV can only do low-resolution streaming from most providers. If the steam machine is approved for high-resolution streaming, it could totally replace the smart TV stack in most homes.
Yeah. This is why I threw that all away and simply pirate for my NAS. Im not watching much new media to begin with. and they make it hell, if not impossible, to stream a lot of older shows. And of I do find them I need to compromise with how I stream it, with what account, and where.
I just got tired of all VPNs, the DRMs, and trying to tune my network just to try and get a decent feed. Instead, map a network drive once, find torrent, save to movies file, and let Plex (or Emby in my case, for historical reasons) find the metadata.
Yes, I think one of the most important things we as consumers can do is flood the zone for companies like Netflix, Disney, and Apple and keep asking about native Steam Machine apps installed directly from the Steam store that support 4k streams.
If Netflix can only get approval with Microsoft Edge or their app on Windows, with specific supported graphics hardware, I doubt there is much hope of that. They want essentially all the hardware and software locked down.
To win this console generation and outsell the PS5, Valve would have to sell 85 million Steam Machines (as of today, and likely need to sell 120 million by the end of the generation). About a 0% chance of that happening.
Valve has the advantage of practically infinite backwards compatibility.
Console generations change every decade or so and the previous console gets abandoned. Anyone who buys a Steam Machine will continue to have access to the largest collection of video games in human history. Not to mention there are emulators for every classic console already and even the Nintendo Switch has at least two great emulators for it.
Its specs seem on par with the PS5 Pro, and this doesn't even have a price or a shipping date yet.
The PS5 is already about five years old, has had a slim release and a PS5 Pro. The PS6 announcement is probably a year away, with a 2027 or 2028 release.
Valve is launching a last-gen console, probably at a price that won't be competitive, right before the PS6 comes out.
I think Digital Foundry has expects the performance to be bit below the base PS5 in most cases. It has a new generation of CPU/GPU than the PS5, but less cores/ CUs. VRAM is also only 8GB, PCs generally need more than that to match PS5 settings.
Is console generation really a statement about performance?
Where does that leave e.g. Nintendo Wii, which is generally considered to be the same generation as the Xbox 360 or PS3, despite having not nearly the performance.
As the article says, "The only way that they could mess this up is with the pricing. ... I'd expect the pricing to be super aggressive." The price to beat is the $400-$500 price point of PS5 and XBox. I'm guessing Valve is going to have a very hard time matching that. We'll know soon enough.
All they have to do is market the fact you don't have to pay for online.
PS5 + 3 years of PS Plus = $740
Steam Machine = $700
Add/remove more years of PS Plus if the SM turns out to be more/less expensive.
If you add the fact that games on PC are usually cheaper and have sales more often then it's a no brainer, but that won't convince the FIFA and COD players.
> This system won't run FIFA, GTA Online, Battlefield, Valorant or CoD, it's a nonstarter for many.
That's largely known now but still a bummer.
I wonder if anything will ever change in this area and if Valve will be able to pressure game editors or create an anti-cheat so good and for any platform to be able to change something.
It doesn't even need to be available on Steam to be fair. You can run whatever games you want. You could even run a Nintendo Switch emulator if you want
They don't even necessarily have to beat the PS5/Xbox. I already own the former but sometimes lament not being able to play the many, many PC exclusives out there (or at least nothing released in the past 10+ years since my daily driver laptop has poor specs). Just recently I was wondering whether one of those all-in-one Lenovo desktop boxes would have decent enough specs to play current-gen PC games at halfway decent settings, and my guess is that they don't, but I don't want to go through the hassle of building a PC and definitely don't want a tower with a huge footprint.
Turns out the Steam Machine is exactly what I'm looking for.
Exactly. I have both PS5 and Xbox One X, but I still connect my Steam Deck to TV to play Hades II because the game hasn't come out on those two consoles yet.
800 is probably already too much for the compromises you need to make. You happily make those compromises for a handheld due to its nature. But a desktop is a harder sell.
I think that realistically, Valve probably only need to be on par with the top of Sony’s offering hardware wise. The ability to have Steam integration on the machine (including the large amount of subpar but very cheap games) will prompt at least some movement. I’d say $800 is probably the high-end of reasonable for price point. I can certain say I’d rather just buy my kids a StreamBox than have to deal with them want full capability PCs.
I agree. Steam's prices on sales are still mostly unmatched by consoles.
Even if it is a "pricier" PS5-like machine, I'd still buy it and I bet I'd make up the difference in less than a year with just the sales games (including older games I can't play on either console).
I think most of the critiques for this are from people expecting this to be aimed at PC gamers.
I don't think it is. I think it's aimed at people that actually DON'T want to bother with building, buying, upgrading PCs, but still want to play cheap games, older games.
To this day, I can't make my PC turn on with a controller (and I've tried). Making a PC wake up as fast as a Steam Deck from sleep? Impossible.
Those little things will all add up to make this a very nice option for the non-hardcode PC game crowd.
Valve is going to steal a lot of users from console, mostly Xbox. Not PC Gaming enthusiast.
Hard disagree with that claim. The truth is anyone with a PC and a steam machine basically already has a Steam Machine. Steam doesn't need to sell at a loss like most consoles. Their only real goal is to prove that there's nothing a console can do that a PC can't do.
$699 (maybe 799 for a more premium model) seems to be a good compromise given what it would take to build a sufficiently similar PC while being close enough to the PS5/Switch. Xbox is practically dead.
I don’t think it needs to compete on price directly, if it can deliver the polish of a console. It can also play up the angle of being a full blown computer.
With the specs these devices have I don't think it's far-fetched to assume that pricing will be competitive. Maybe they will charge a bit extra if they tout all the extra stuff you can install on the Machine vs Xbox as a selling point, which they are kind of doing, to justify a slightly higher price point.
> The only possible flaw I can see is that the strap it ships with doesn't go over the top of your head. If this ends up being an issue in practice, somebody is going to make a third party strap that just fixes this problem
> There's an optional ergonomic accessories kit for the Steam Frame that adds an extra strap for your head and a pair of straps, one for each controller. These added controller straps are reminiscent of those found on the Index and seem like a reasonable investment, if the price is right.
If it can play all games on Steam _today_ at 4k60fps (even with FSR) it means I have about 570 games on my Steam library it can play in perpetuity.
Even if I play 2 hours of each game, it's still a bargain =)
And because this is Valve and I've had a stellar experience with my Steam Deck, I'm pretty confident that future games will run on it too. Most likely gamedevs will add special "Steam Machine" performance profiles like they've done with the deck. And there will be a "Steam Machine certified" checkmark on Steam.
> I have about 570 games on my Steam library it can play in perpetuity.
You presumably have other hardware that can also play the 570 games too? You’re spending more money on hardware that can do the same job your current hardware can do.
Yes and no. I have a Steam Deck and a Macbook M1 Pro, my previous Windows PC is from 2010, it ran Overwatch 1 at about 30fps on a good day and managed through multiplayer Valheim games during covid lockdowns =)
I _can_ play something like CP2077 on the Deck, but it's not exactly a worthy experience, it's better suited for stuff like Citizen Sleeper or Rogue Trader
Not OP but I happily throw money at companies that help Linux adoption and more open hardware grow. I bought the steam deck, used it for a while and gave it to a nephew (I'm not big on mobile gaming), I've bougt the Pinebook, Librem 5, and will happily throw Valve more of my hard earned cash for enabling a more open ecosystem. We need to vote with our wallets or Microsoft, Apple, Meta, et al will gladly remove your ability to own your hardware.
In my younger years I built gaming pcs. Old me has no time for that. I console game because it respects my time and I can play any major release. I’m interested in the new offering from steam as a way to play indie games I miss on console with a machine that doesn’t look out of place next to my tv.
This, plus I also find that the fact that I'm not going to spend random time thinking about upgrading my console, looking at components, etc, also respects my time (and money).
I don't play games much anymore, so maybe I'm not the right person to respond.
Why would anyone ever buy a console again? This thing has the ultimate library and works on all platforms.
Steam seems to have played the best game of chess in the industry. Sony and Microsoft were battling over exclusives and acquisitions and ways to screw over customers. This came out of left field and looks a million times better than Xbox or PS5. It has people's entire libraries on it, and the games are cheap and portable. There's no lock down. No funny business.
I almost want one. I'm excited about it and I don't even think I'd play it.
In the era of mobile games, hardware really isn't a thing anymore. Even AAA titles are niche IMO given the cost to play them at full settings. All that matters now are the exclusive titles. You refer to this derisively but really that's what made the nintendo switch, clearly the weakest compared to the PS5 and even the steam deck in the last generation the clear winner.
And do you think PC has less exclusives compared to PS5 / other consoles? How many games on Steam has never been released on consoles vs the other way round?
By that logic I'd expect this one to completely dominate.
So, we should define terms. To "dominate" should mean to sell more than or make more money than the competition, which may include taking market share from the competition. I don't doubt valve will continue to make money in an absolute sense, it already does and this likely doesn't change that.
Steam already has a monopoly in the PC space and has the "exclusives" you talk about, essentially games that never were ported to the PS5 or the switch. Thus, in order for the steam machine to take market share from the other consoles, you a) have to take console share from those players, likely by pressuring those developers to port from the consoles to PC. That could be something, but no doubt that pressure already exists, as steam already exists. I don't see how the steam machine changes that. In fact, the opposite situation exists which is why steam makes so much money, as you said. To actually dominate, it can only happen after situation c) below.
New customers or dollars cannot come from people who have a PC and can now forgo using their pc for gaming (by neglecting to upgrade their pc to keep up to date to play new AAAs), as the assumption here is they are selling the consoles at a loss (which may not be true, we'll have to find out). That if anything, is essentially a soft form of b) cannibalisation. So that isn't really "gaining market share" more so than it's changing the means of consumption of the same thing. Moreover, if they choose to sell at a loss, then I only can imagine this leading to actual cannibalisation from their existing PC customers as there isn't really any actual profit being made here.
So finally, the only route they have to expanding their player base in my mind is c) new gamers, that is casual phone players or other non-enthusiast gamers who don't really play games but will be willing to buy a console. This is how the Wii excelled in its generation and how the switch won the last one. Here, it all comes down to price and thus how much Valve is willing to sell at a loss or otherwise subsidise the steam machine using steam proper. So, this to feels like their only real route to "dominating."
As I alluded to above, a) can only happen if c) happens, as Steam already has the mindshare it does and thus it already has the same allure to developers as is the case today, and those developers are still pursuing exclusives with the PS5 and the switch. Thus, if certain developers or games are stuck on the switch or the PS5 with current conditions, they won't move enmass to the steam machine unless c) happens first and thus their calculus changes. And of course, selling at a loss means that they also run the risk of only b) occurring if they don't gain enough new players fast enough to offset the loss from selling consoles.
That leaves them not selling the hardware at a loss, then I don't really know. It's just the steam machine will likely be north of 700 usd if you're not subsidising it, and like the steam deck it will be a novelty item they may or may not make a profit off of. That I wouldn't call "domination", although they may make money overall so I don't doubt they will end up happy.
I know they get put together because of "videogames", but a gamer that plays on a console is not going to play mobile games, except those that are ports of console games onto phone.
I have a family of 4 (and both me and my wife are gamers) and a pc is expensive.
A steam machine is a great compromise.
I'm also in the market for a new secondary pc, since the other one is old: the steam machine is exactly what I want with gaming primary and also do general computing.
I use the nvidia shield to stream games, but it has issues at times depending on the game being streamed.
> Yes, Steam Machine is optimized for gaming, but it's still your PC. Install your own apps, or even another operating system. Who are we to tell you how to use your computer?
> The big thing I want to see in practice is their implementation of foveated rendering. This beautiful hack abuses the fact that human eyes have the most sharpness and fidelity at the exact centre of your field of vision, whereas your peripheral vision is abysmal at it. This means that on average you only have to render about 10% of the frame at maximum quality for it to feel like it's running at full resolution all over the screen.
> This should make the fact that the Frame is using a "weaker" CPU/GPU irrelevant. Games should look fine as long as they render the slice that needs to be in full quality fast enough.
It's not foveated rendering, it's foveated streaming. The CPU/GPU should easily be able to handle decoding video, whether foveated or not.
What they're saying is that they might have a foviated rendering solution in addition to the foviated streaming solution we know about, and we'd like to hear about it.
I generally like the OP's posts, but I really don't buy their argument. If anything, the nintendo switch winning the last generation is a great example of how hardware isn't always that important, the game library essentially is what makes a console win, and in as much as the hardware enables the breadth of the library, that's all that matters.
Like the steam deck, I don't know who other than power users who will buy it. I love the openness they will bring to the market, but that doesn't mean they will win.
I would totally buy it, if it's not silly expensive. I am not a power gamer or whatever, at all.
I absolutely do not want gaming mingled with my primary PC usage, work and stuff. For reasons of OS choice, data integrity, security and distraction management/work-play-separation. Can't over-emphasize the importance of this. But to me there is no question PC gaming is superior. However, I can't justify building a full-blown "gaming PC" just for gaming.
Some years ago, I got a PS4 Pro just to satisfy my occasional gaming urge and I love the console form factor, no tweaking and press power to play ergonomics. I wish I could install some mods for old games, tho, and the PS4 library is super limited compared to Steam. I also feel sad, the PS lock-down means unnecessary hardware obsolescence. And I hate Sony's rent seeking for online services and would never buy PS Plus.
I know quite a few people in my social sphere who are exactly in the same spot I am, who would love exactly what's shown with the Steam thingy. It will all depend on the price.
As much as I love hacking with various things, there are reasons why I buy "closed products" for myself and for my family. I like to do hacking when I want it (with ESP32, rpi etc). I don't want to be forced to serve as a free IT support guy anytime someone presses a wrong button.
When it comes to gaming consoles, I want them to serve reliably to my family. The game console must be fun, optimized for best experience and should not break. Will that be possible with an open platform where anyone can install anything?
Unfortunately buying closed systems hasn’t stopped me from being IT support:
- “why can’t I play online with EA Sports?”
- “I can’t log into Roblox!”
- “why can’t I see my sisters world in Minecraft?”
- “I’ve lost my Fortnight skins!”
- “why does Roblox keep disconnecting me on my phone [when Roblox servers go down]?”
- “Why can’t I play this game [without updating it]?”
- “this game update takes too long to download!”
If there’s one constant in life: it’s that doctors get nagged by friends for free diagnosis, mechanics, electricians, carpenters for free repairs, and software engineers for free IT support.
> The game console must be fun, optimized for best experience and should not break. Will that be possible with an open platform where anyone can install anything?
Yes, SteamOS is just that. A system that is easy to rollback if you mess things up. And you have to go deep under the covers to mess things up (switch to desktop mode, disable readonly system partition, modify wrong files).
Valve should really focus on improving the polish of the steam store, as that abomination of a (react ?) frontend breaks often in very surprising ways.
SteamOS as a console system is close to a 9/10. As far as polish of steam app/store and the ux, a fair 7/10.
That would be great - but the last gaming console that I've experienced that with has been the switch.
I recently turned on my old xbox one - literally impossible to play any game without a massive patch, debugging os software issues etc. If the steam machine just works out of the box, it'll already be miles ahead of most of the current state of consoles.
If you buy a Steam Deck and just use it as a handheld console and never select "reboot to desktop mode" it will act just like a closed console. The exceptions compared to something like a Switch:
- For some games (usually those oriented around keyboard and mouse) you need to go and select one of the community control configurations, and maybe tweak it a bit. For example, I needed to do this with FTL to make it easily playable
- Occasionally (and I've basically had to do this once, in my 2+ years with a Steam Deck) you need to go and select a different Proton version to make it work. ProtonDB tells you what to do
This is all rare though. The vast majority of games have a control setup for using a controller, and they definitely do if they've ever been released on console. And they will Just Work.
Agree. By "best experience" I also mean "don't force me to wait". But my console doesn't do that. Some online games may require patches before playing for better (anticheat) or worse reasons but thats a fault of the game supplier - not the console supplier.
> I don't want to be forced to serve as a free IT support guy anytime someone presses a wrong button.
In my experience this doesn't really end whether it's a closed product or not. If you're wiling to give free IT support, people will take it, as it's likely way faster/better than calling whatever support may or may not be offered by the company.
> Will that be possible with an open platform where anyone can install anything?
I can't see why these have anything to do with each other? If your brother goes out of his way to install a bunch of stuff and breaks everything, how can you possibly blame the system and not your brother?
One other semi-unrecognized advantage Valve has over consoles is their generous return policy. I’ve bought many games on a whim knowing if I don’t jive with it I can safely get a full refund. Contrast that with my Ps5 where my 2 year old managed to smash buttons while I was tied up on a work call and bought COD for $69 bucks… no way to refund it and I’m not a fan of shooters. Basically Fd on that one.
My experience is otherwise. I returned one game and got banned from buying other games for a month - during a sale, so I missed that sale and was out of sync with friends for a bit.
I don't give a shit for the money, but fucking my social gaming time was unforgiveable. I still use Steam, but don't fucking trust Valves return policy.
Is there anything more to this? I’ve returned dozens of games that I didn’t end up liking and the only consequence I’ve faced is that games with trading cards don’t start dropping them until 2 hours of play time, which I think is completely fair.
There most certainly is. This is not Steam’s default refund procedure in the slightest. I’d be willing to bet they were abusing the system somehow and support caught them red handed.
I'm not sure how to abuse the return system. It's not like I pirate anything from Steam. And I used the return process through Steam - exactly once, as mentioned above. If I wasn't meant to do a thing, then I would think the process should not let me do it. But I returned it in good faith, for a game that managed to make me rage quit in less than an hour - I like to think at least that I am usually patient but I wasn't putting up with that shit.
If a Valve employee with rights to look into it is reading this - I'd love to know what I did so wrong. But given that human explanations from modern software based corporations are non-existent, I will assume I was treated as per their returns policy.
And the outcome has worked in Steams favour. I buy for (account) life now, for better or for worse. As previously mentioned, I don't care about the money so much as the social.
But my decision making process to drop the significant money required for Steam hardware will assume the return/warranty is worth precisely zero.
So, Steam is planning to sell these at a loss, but isn’t planning to lock out third party OS?
What’s to stop people buying them to use for completely unrelated use cases?
I guess it depends on how big the loss is… if it is small, it might not be really worth it for most people; but any larger, I wonder how sustainable this will be.
What non-gaming use cases do you imagine people might use these for?
For normal computer use (reading email, watching videos, doing spreadsheets), there are much cheaper and better options available. If somebody wanted a Steam Machine specifically, it'd be for the GPU.
If you needed a lot of GPU compute (for AI or blockchain or whatever), it'd be cheaper to buy or rent a dedicated server with Nvidia H100s rather than buying dozens of Steam Machines.
So the only potential use cases are those that have a significant but not too significant GPU requirement. The only ones I can think of are gaming (which is the intended use case), video editing, and 3D rendering.
Video editing is less of a concern because neither Adobe Premier nor Final Cut Pro will run on Linux (to my knowledge), so you might as well buy a Mac that runs both of those very efficiently and has decent hardware.
So we're left with 3D rendering. If people want to use Steam Machines to render things in Blender, I say "let them", and I assume that Valve does too.
You can run media from a potato. This will be at least 5x the cost of a cheap mini-PC. And you can't forget power draw. The Steam Machine has a 30W CPU, and I'd guess about 60W RAM which would add up to something like $120+ annually where a mini PC would cost closer to $7. 5 years later and the Steam Machine has eaten it's cost in power. Assuming it costs $500 like most consoles, you are looking at a total 5-year cost of $1100 where a mini-PC would be $100–200.
I think the mini PCs they're talking about are more likely to be N100 systems or similar that are sub 100 dollars new. Significantly less anemic, and their hardware media decode (which is well supported by software) is more than sufficient for realtime 4k playback.
> What’s to stop people buying them to use for completely unrelated use cases?
Nothing. But it doesn't mean that Valve doesn't benefit from it. Valve wants the whole gaming scheme to shift toward SteamOS. Like Google wants the whole web browsing to shift to Chrome, even you can use Chrome for stuff unrelated to Google.
If that's what happens, then I'm buying one of these right away for sure. I mean, I use steam a lot, but I certainly won't be locked in their "SteamOS". Maybe they are betting that most users will be too lazy to change the defaults and stick to SteamOS (which might very well be the case, and they have a hint of this thanks to the data they have on the Steam Deck)
I don't think they have, but it's the business model of most consoles, to be able to be very affordable. So since the headline is implying it'll do better than consoles, it's implying it'll be sold at a loss too. But honestly, I find that article BS.
I think this article makes one assumption that isn't correct.
"This means that even though Valve will be selling this hardware at a loss..."
From the reviews I have read, Valve is not planning on doing this. They are not doing an Xbox type of deal where games are overpriced and console is cheap. If I am not mistaken, I got this information from the LTT review where they talked with Valve about this directly.
They are not going to win the console generation by releasing a machine that cannot play Call of Duty, Battlefield, Valorant, Fortnite, PUBG, Apex Legends, FIFA, Madden, League of Legends, Destiny, Genshin Impact, Forza.
Maybe this is less of an issue now we’re in the digital era of console games but one of the biggest aspects for me is that if I buy one of these new machines, my existing library is just there. No starting from scratch or worrying about backwards compatibility. It’s a PC that has everything I need from the get go.
The story was the same with the Deck. Granted it took a little while for many games to be fully supported but the transparency from Valve on the store pages about compatibility was great and is in a far better state now.
I just dock my Deck but it was still worth it for the reason you say. Just Works and lets me play my decades-old Steam collection on my TV with the ease of a console.
When I buy a game (even an old one), I always had to choose between Switch and PC. But now PC has most of the advantages of the Switch, and I trust my Steam library will persist and be easily playable more than Switch (although Switch 2 compat was great! to be fair)
I think it will largely come down to price and DRM support from the AAA studios for multiplayer gaming and media apps. On the former, at $400 with one controller it will probably sell well, at over $600 I think more people might choose a PS5 instead.
With regards to DRM, it doesn't have to be as restrictive as Windows' versions, but there needs to be some cooperative effort with the game studios, and the media companies as more people expect to be able to stream Netflix/AppleTV/HBO etc. from these devices on top of gaming.
As gaming only, the most popular games tend to have a multiplayer aspect and thus far haven't been cooperative with functioning under Proton... there are solutions, but it's a matter of getting studio buyin and the effort to make it happen.
Without these, it will be a niche product and may still sell well, just not gain anything near what the consoles achieve in terms of sales.
i see a lot of complaints about certain games (windows / kernel-anti-cheat) not working. Consoles have always had exclusive titles. Windows also has them now via this anti-cheat stuff. This changes litterally nothing.
Also, you can even install windows on the box. it's one of its selling points actually... if you really want to...
kernel level anti-cheat is generally not even needed, so perhaps those companies will now consider rolling proper anti-cheat themselves rather than third-party rubbish that no one asked for.
What i also like about this console development is that it might open the door to other smaller players creating consoles in the form of mini-PC with linux and a gaming layer on there. maybe there will be (oem?)partner for valve that make more beefy machines, machines with alternate OSes (windows + skin) etc.
its a different angle that will open up many things hopefully. make it less exclusive market between essentially 3 parties.
It's the PC games library that will be the catalyst for winning.
On a PC, for $15 a month you can get a HumbleBundle subscription and get 5-6 Steam games to keep yours forever (unlike Playstation Plus "free" games). Plus 3-4 free games/month from Epic (an option, since Valve said they won't lock the hardware). Plus 3-4 games from Amazon Prime Gaming if you are a subscriber. Plus a ton of other discount websites.
Compare this to the average cost of a PS5 title and the walled garden of the Playstation Store. Not to mention that your PS5 library probably won't be playable on PS6.
Yes, AAAA games will still be expensive, but for everything else the Steam Machine will give consoles a run for their money. Cost-conscious gamer are very likely to switch.
Attached my old gaming rig to the TV to run Steam on it and it is a better experience than any consoles I have (being a gaming nerd I have everything from my old Atari 2600 and most mainstreams systems since then up to PS5).
This is good news to hear Valve going in strong for the console market.
This is really cool. I still play my series X on occasion but tend to prefer the experience I get from my Saturn and Dreamcast when I load a game and it plays without needing to update. Every time I turn on my Xbox or PC with steam/GOG I have to wait for an update of some kind.
But what about the price?! 15 year old kids are never gonna drop 800+ on this nerd box if they can play fifa for, what, 400-500? And THAT'S the demographic to win if you want to break up Big Game.
It'd be a good plan. Make HL3 a VR game since you built VR experience by making Alyx, take it to the next level by launching your own VR headset, everything is perfectly made together and HL3 launch would be as big if not bigger than GTA, and you optimize it for your own hardware.
HL3 is most likely not a VR game as Valve said they aren't working on a first party VR title (plus data mining seems to confirm). Plus they already have Alyx as the masterpiece, and it was already made with their own VR headset in mind: the Valve Index.
Maybe HLX will have some kind of VR interaction possible, as they want to push technology further with each Half life game.
Valve also said something like "ARM gaming won't be a thing for us for a very long time", but seems tides can change :) I wouldn't put too much weight into any publisher/developer saying what they aren't doing, even if they were working on HL3, they'd keep that under very tight wraps.
I mean, there are plenty of info available on the status of HL3 (code named HLX) and all point to it not being a VR title.
Also I don't think ARM is really a thing for them, even now. They want to support running software on the headset, and sure why not enable compatibility layers to play some small games, but the end goal is clearly streaming from a PC.
Maybe if some good ARM cpu hit the market they will pivot, but up until recently "ARM gaming" meant mobile phones.
> there are plenty of info available on the status of HL3 (code named HLX) and all point to it not being a VR title
Anything besides rumors? AFAIK, there is absolutely zero official information beyond the rumor mill.
> Also I don't think ARM is really a thing for them, even now.
I mean, then you're just looking the other way intentionally, they're quite literally adding support for ARM now, https://www.gamingonlinux.com/2025/11/codeweavers-launch-a-n... That's not something you do on a whim, it's a calculated step towards something.
And they're clearly setting up the new VR head to both do standalone gameplay for people without PCs, and to do streaming from PC.
None of the Steam hardware seems to have only a single use in fact, all of them are multipurpose, not sure why the VR headset should be any different, especially when what we know points to it also being multipurpose, quite explicitly so at that.
> Anything besides rumors? AFAIK, there is absolutely zero official information beyond the rumor mill.
If you count datamining as rumors, then no, nothing else. But the data mining is real data coming from valve so it's more than just "somebody said...". You can find lists of all the references to HLX found in other games, and what that tells us about the game.
>I mean, then you're just looking the other way intentionally, they're quite literally adding support for ARM now
Yes, I'm not looking the other way. But ARM is not their bread and butter and won't be for a good while. I'm fairly certain they are pushing this because they can, not because there is a strategic importance to supporting ARM. Had they been able to use a x86 cpu in the Frame, I'm sure they would have.
Plus, ARM gaming implies games made for ARM running on steam, like on mobile phones. This is "just" an emulation layer to play x86 games on ARM. Just like Apple is doing with the Game Porting Toolkit, and just like Microsoft is doing with their Windows on ARM.
Are they really pushing ARM Gaming, or PC gaming or ARM?
Not a chance. As much as I respect all the work Valve has done for gaming...this doesn't understand the market.
PC gamers will play on their PC. Couch gamers will have a PS5 or an XBox. So who is this for, couch gamers that don't have one of those? Or PC players tired of playing on a monitor?
Don't get me wrong, it's cool, and I'm definitely the target market but feel like that's pretty tiny.
Most couch gamers want their GTA or Call of Duty, which, if I read correctly, this will not run.
I am very much a PC gamer turned couch gamer. I have a capable PC sitting next to my Xbox Series X. The user experience is worse, as everytime I turn it on soemthing needs updating, I cannot control all of Windows through my gamepad. This ticks a lot of boxes for me. Might start witht the Controller first.
I don't think it'll outsell any current console. Not even the anemic and dying Xbox Series X.
I think that appropriately priced and supported, it will put Valve in a strategic position to actually compete in subsequent console generations as a real player. It's a little behind in terms of specs, but with as slow as uptake of this generation has been, I expect that developers will continue to target base PS5 specs for another six years at least (PS6 supposedly landing in 2027). Then they can drop their Steam Machine 2 in 2029 or 2030, hitting base PS6 specs at an affordable price. It's been a winning approach for Nintendo.
Just to add I'm also in this boat. We have a ASUS ROG NUC in our living room and it's a pain logging into Windows (cant find an actual tutorial to skip that works) .
It's been a great entry way into gaming for my wife (lot's of cozy games) and I also play a few games from my steam backlog (Halo, Hades 2, etc). I don't feel like we're in the minority for what a couch system is used for but maybe.
The largest hurdle for steam in the living room so far has been controller support or lack of couch co-op games.
> Really, the only thing that can go wrong with any of this hardware is the price.
The chances of any of the Steam Machines taking the market share of any of the current generation consoles is so vanishingly miniscule, that I don't think it can even compete against any of them.
It more or less competes against the Linux ecosystem of System76 machines or the Framework computers.
But against consoles? No dent at all in their market share.
I love great graphics but , Nintendo carved a nice big niche out for themselves by recognizing the constant drive for best graphics is a bit of rat race.
Nintendo has Mario, Zelda, Kirby, Donkey Kong, Starfox, Pokémon, and a few other less super famous and internationally known IP franchises. The core games and their spinoffs make more games than most children can reasonably expected to play through childhood and early adolescence. That the machine then collects dust doesn’t hurt Nintendo because they already sold it.
Yes Steam has huge library (my ‘want to play’ list is over 100 titles at this point) full of games of all genres, qualities, and niches. But Nintendo has more than enough to do what they have done for years, i.e. sit tight on their beloved IP and dole it out at varying levels of quality on strictly low end hardware and watch their earning go up.
Though, to be fair, my kids steal my Steam Deck from me more often than I try to get the Switch from them. The family share features of the Switch leave a lot to be desired.
People rarely buy a platform for the platform, they buy the platform to do the thing they want to do. A game is just a genre of software.
It is far, far better to have tons of high quality software available for a platform, than to have an amazing platform, but a limited choice of software.
They have enough first party games which only release on their hardware that people are willing to buy a Switch for nintendo games, and another gaming device for everything else.
Sad part is that I would be willing to pay a substantial mark up to be able to play some of those first party titles on my PC, but since my kids have a Switch I just settle for using it. So even if I don’t think I’d buy a console just for their games, I’m gonna end up buying it anyway and Nintendo still wins.
I'm on a Switch and will not move because of the "Game Key Card" bullshit where you have a card but still don't get the files you need to play them game.
However, Pokemon guarantees a certain amount of Switch 2 sales--Pokemon ZA sold about 6 million units.
However, the single digital service that hasn't killed my digital library at some point is Steam. Games that I bought many years ago are still fine. Sony, Microsoft, and Nintendo all killed digital games that I bought.
That having been said: I've transferred a lot of my purchasing to GoG. Steam doesn't get the benefit of the doubt anymore.
If they want to capture the console audience its better be priced like one too and not prevent me from playing multiplayer games due to Linux and anti cheat software not playing nice
Anything above $600 is DOA and that's with accepting the fact that the most popular games will be not available on the platform
Personally, I am very much over paying Sony and X-Box a monthly fee to "play games online" in 2025. I bowed out of the last console generation, but I would be up for a small form factor multimedia PC that made may Steam library accessible on my TV.
Unless it's reasonably priced who is the market for this box? If it's at 499 - 599 then it's probably selling well but at 799-899 I'm not sure who would buy it. If it's your first computer you still need more gear like screen, keyboard and mouse etc.
People who want to play video games would buy it. While us enlightened Computer Intellectuals may appreciate that there is no difference between a console and a PC, the majority of naïve computer peasants will much prefer something with the word “console” tagged on that boots straight to a game library. As for the keyboard and mouse thing, there's this other announcement they've made called the “Steam Controller” which addresses that issue.
I’m not a gamer and not into consoles, but I’m watching Valve and SteamOS from the sidelines with a lot of goodwill. It’s great to see more people buying hardware that runs on Arch — that alone is a good thing. Still, something about this feels a bit too good to be true.
By making it immutable out of the box, VAC enforcement because vastly easier and third-party multiplayer anti-cheating kernel rootkits are replaced by “attest that you are unmodified”, which Steam Linux and macOS/tvOS/iOS/iPadOS can do — but not Windows 10/11, because sealed boot functionality is behind Microsoft’s enterprise annual subscription fee paywall. This positions Steam Linux as the monopoly provider of console-gaming Linux, since no one else is doing sealed attestation Linux at scale, and opens the door for multiplayer AAA games to target Steam Linux for their day-one releases as a competitive equal to Xbox/PS5/Switch and as a better defended console platform than Windows PCs. The modifications described by OP are still possible, but won’t be compatible with multiplayer anti-cheating enforcement, which is perfectly fine; boot to sealed for competitive gaming, boot to custom for single player, everyone wins except Microsoft’s Windows division. (If Microsoft hadn’t shot off their foot with Windows 10, they could have simply enabled sealed booting for all 10/11 installations and remained competitive as a gaming platform, but I think they’re done with that business.) Nice to see my predictions pan out and I look forward to buying one :)
Immutability doesn't provide this on it's own. You can load any custom immutable image you want. What game devs want is full boot chain attestation where every part of the OS is measured and verified untampered with, and then to load their own spyware at the highest level.
The only way immutability helps here is you could have two OS images, the users own customisable one, and a clean one. Then when you try to load an anti cheat game, the console could in theory reboot in to the clean one, and pass all the verification checks to load the game.
I am, indeed, assuming that their immutable image can generate attestations chained appropriately. If not, it’s a catastrophic business error on their part to put in all that work, and I don’t consider that degree of failure likely. Definitely curious to see if they can enable the chain on existing Steamdecks or not.
Immutable images provide many benefits that are unrelated to DRM. The main one being that the entire fleet of Steam Decks/Machines are all in a known state. Updates are a matter of pushing a new OS image, you don't have to worry about migrating files, conflicting configurations, strange user changes. And if an update fails, the bootloader shows a screen where you can boot a previous OS image that worked.
It's like docker images for the whole OS. As far as I can tell, the Steam Deck does not have secure boot or any kind of attestation enabled. They have been very forward in marketing it as an open and free system you can do anything on. The hardware does have a TPM that is seemingly unused currently, not sure if it supports some form of secure boot.
> They have been very forward in marketing it as an open and free system you can do anything on.
Attested sealed images and Open and Free systems have no conflict with each other. Mod it all you want; sure, it’ll generate a different attestation than the shipping sealed image, or if your customizations turn off attestations and/or secure boot, none at all. You do you! Source code releases will never include the private key used to sign them, just as with all open source today, so either the OS’s attestation will be signed by Valve or by you or by someone else. It takes me about sixty seconds to add my own signing key to my PC BIOS today and it would not surprise me to find Valve’s BIOS implements the same, as I’m pretty certain this is basic off-the-shelf functionality on Zen4/Zen5. But, regardless, Free/Open Source is wholly unconcerned by whose release signing key is used; otherwise it wouldn’t be Free/Open! The decision to care about whose release signature is live right now is the gaming server’s decision, not Steam Linux’s, and that decision is not restricted by any OSS-approved license that I’m aware of.
Secure boot attestations plus sealed images do enable “unmodified Valve Linux release” checks to be performed by multiplayer game servers, without needing the user to be locked out of making changes at all. This is already demonstrated in macOS today with e.g. Wallet’s Apple Pay support; you can disable and mod the OS as much as you wish, and certain server features whose attestation requirements require an Apple release signature on the booted OS will suspend themselves when the attestation doesn’t match. When you’re ready to use those servers, you secure boot to an OEM sealed environment and they resume working immediately. This is live, today, on every Apple Silicon (and T2 chipped Intel) device worldwide, and has been available for developers to use for years.
Attestations are, similarly, already available on all AMD devices with a TPM today, so long as the BIOS to OS chain implements Secure Boot — not requires, but implements, as there’s no reason to deny users unsigned OS booting once you’re checking attestation signatures server-side. As you note, it remains to be seen if the Steam Box will make use of it. If they do, it coexists just fine with full reputposability and modifiable, because you can do whatever you like with the device — and, correspondingly, each game may choose to require an unmodified environment to ensure a level playing field without kernel or OS modifications.
It would be a lost opportunity for them if they were not the first fully open OS with a fully secure multiplayer environment that prohibits both third-party cheating mods and third-party DRM rootkits. VAC becomes as simple as a sysctl, and patches are still welcome. Open source for the win, and one step further towards the Linux desktop finally overtaking residential Windows, and thr ability to play console-grade multiplayer without the proliferation of on-device software-only hacks? Yes, please.
(Note that manufacturers who use Secure Boot to lock out device modifications are not in-scope here; that choice has no effect on attestations. Secure Boot is “the OS booted had this checksum and signature” with HSM backing, so that the software can’t lie. It is extremely unlikely that Valve would demand that the OS booted be signed by Valve. That would be no different than Xbox/PS5/Switch, and they’d be leaving a massive competitive advantage over tvOS on the table: device repurposeability.)
Yes, but that works just as readily on consoles as it does PCs, so it doesn’t affect immutable Steam any more or less than any other gaming steam. Sealed protections are still valuable regardless!
It affects console too, but watch game publishers disable linux support, blaming cheaters while producing graphs that don't support their arguments. While console packs and cheats are rampant, and their game servers even being hacked during competition.
If the status quo doesn’t change, then you’ll be right to have claimed here that the status quo you’ve described won’t change. But that would be worse for all of us. Besides, Linux is an excellent platform for modding games in realtime, no matter what their charts show — so certainly the sealed-attestation stuff would deny them a plausible reason to deny Linux. If Microsoft offered sealed Windows for free, they’d deny unsealed Windows as fast as humanly possible, just to stem the tide of software cheating. The next couple years will be very interesting :)
I totally agree with you, and I hope the status quo will change. But I'm still skeptical after the Steam Deck success where many games enabled anti cheat, but some did roll back like I said previously.
Attestation could help, but I'm not sure if it goes in the spirit of what Valve tries to do with their OS. The system is open and you can easily access the desktop (it's a first party feature) and thus do what you want. Maybe with a separate verified boot state without desktop but the user experience would not be great.
And in the end, like you said, they'd run to only support sealed attested systems if they could. But cheats have evolved past being run on the computer running the game. Some use DMA or are in between the keyboard/mouse and the usb port. Consoles also have their fair share of cheaters. None of those would be solved by attestation.
Valve has shown recently that it's possible to fight cheaters without kernel AC or attestation. It's just a bit more difficult and intensive so other AC providers won't go the same route.
For good reason, anticheat on linux are basically useless. Not that cheating isn't rampant on other platforms, but you don't have to leave the door open on purpose.
Not really. On linux you can just load your cheat as a kernel module and its undetectable by userspace anticheat.
On windows with kernel anti cheat you would need to find some vulnerable driver, sign your own driver, or use external cheats like DMA or vision based. This funnels cheat devs into using a few methods that anti cheat devs can focus on for detection. Is it perfect? Clearly not as there's plenty of cheaters anyway. But its much more effective than what these anti cheats can do on linux.
Precisely. And this is where secure boot + attestation comes in: making Linux able to prove itself as unmodded to the server, makes it a possible target for multiplayer game developers.
I just hope a 10' user-interface for the popular streaming services for Linux might come out of this. I switched away from Kodi as my STB exclusively because of how much a PITA it was to use streaming services from it.
It's even worse for their competitors than this acknowledges.
SteamOS on Arm (using FEX) is going to spawn a generation of £100 devices that can play lower end Windows games, stream from PC, and emulate every console from the PS2 back. It's huge.
"steam games", doesn't really mean anything. Most games are on steam nowadays. It mostly depends on the OS on which the games run. Games with kernel anti cheat: low cheaters population, runs on Windows but not Linux. Games without kernel anti cheat: low to high (think counter strike official servers) cheaters population.
Does anyone know if the foveated rendering feature of the Steam Frame depends on eye-tracking? Is it tracking the iris to determine the center of foveation, or is there some other trick to doing this?
while I would like them to succeed, I'm really not convinced it will work. The steam deck is an unexpected success but I don't think it sold at the level of the nintendo switch. And more importantly it was providing something unique but the GabeBox will compete with cheaper and more established consoles on one side and windows PC providing a better experience with steam on the other side
Anyone familiar with how they're running x86 on a snapdragon? I'm more interested in that hitting your regular android phone .. think retroarch but you can play hades 2.
The main problem was the missing second stick. It was well built, but for game where a controller is nice touch pads sort of suck compared to a stick and for games where a mouse is nice touch pads sort of suck compared to a mouse. So the only real advantage a touch pad brings is in an environment where you can't bring a mouse. I really liked the extra back buttons. with two sticks that is where all the face buttons should be, on the back.
Somewhat related, but I enjoy the topic. Is how freakishly good the mouse is for FPS type games. If you asked anyone to design a purpose built controller for a first person game they would not come up with a mouse. But somehow despite all odds that thing designed for moving a cursor around the screen is the best controller yet for looking around. Probably something about the huge throw distance compared to any other controller.
It's the only controller I use (bar the Steam Deck's built in controller) despite owning plenty of other conventional controllers. Once you get used to it and make use of Steam Input's per-game customisation and mapping it works really well, especially if you treat it as a mouse-like input rather than conventional gamepad.
The only place it suffers for me is games that aren't coded to support simultaneous gamepad and mouse input, which you can work around by mapping the joystick as a keyboard input. Otherwise it's great.
Its an odd one; the v1 controller feels cheap and definitely isn't as high fidelity as a modern PS5 controller. It struggled to match the quality of contemporary controllers at the same price point. But the touchpads worked. They shouldn't work, they should be abysmal, but with a little practice they're fantastic.
I still use mine for any driving or flying in games, the stick it does have is super accurate. And for watching movies its a great remote when you arent at the keyboard. If you turn the right pad to simulate a weighted track ball it is what I consider the best Dark Souls controller.
Whats the media experience like on SteamOS these days? Does it have built in support for media playback? I used to have Kodi running on PhantomOS but it was janky.
We heard this literally with the previous steam machine lol
There’s no doubt they’re tee’d up to radically alter the landscape. But man they better have a truly plug and play, turnkey system if they want to compete with consoles. The steamdeck even after this many years is absolutely trash at going from handheld to docked (better the other direction at least) and is incredibly hit or miss when it’s plugged into a TV in general. I had to buy a special DP->HDMI cable that forces 1080p @60 to get it to consistently appear on screen docked (LG C1 for reference).
I am excited for the steam machine. But yeah, telling me it’s a more powerful steamdeck is super exciting in some ways and eyebrow raising in others unless they got some big SteamOS overhaul coming.
Most of the deck/dock screen issues are related to dock firmware and USBC display negotiation. The steam machine has built in HDMI and Display port which are presumably relatively bog standard.
The official steam deck dock seems to be fairly buggy, it's widely complained about. I've been using an Apple USB-C to HDMI adapter and it's worked perfect on every TV I've tried it on. Since the steam machines don't use USB-C video out this wouldn't be an issue.
That may be the case but “official valve hardware is buggy even after almost 4 years” is a troubling yet true statement when their entire pitch today was literally “check out our new hardware.”
I love my deck. But a smooth experience it is not. Up until idk a year ago…? Flipping from gaming mode to desktop mode or vice versa had a solid 50-50 shot of inducing a fail state requiring a hard reset.
the problem with valve is that at least in mexico I have never seen a steam deck on display, while xbox, switch, playstation are everywhere and online the markup price from resellers is too high
"At par with PS5.." comparing hardware specs with a console loved by millions and into year 6 of it's lifecycle. I'd rather play my PS5 titles on a PS5 or a portal than on the steam machine. Steam deck is dated, went with the portal and love it.
I think the hardest battle is going to be with anti cheat. The anti cheat that developers want basically requires dystopian levels of restrictions which are against everything valve has done on SteamOS so far.
Personally I'd love if we all just went back to playing on personal servers with your real life friends or people you otherwise trust. But I don't think this is would go over well with the average online gamer.
Hard agreement from me, but my 16 year old bricked his PC on Sunday trying to enable Valorant’s BS anti-cheat, secure boot required crap. He even knew ahead of time that he couldn’t enable it, but the pull of online gaming turned off his brain. I don’t think we’re gonna win this battle and the war is probably done as well.
We know, and the game devs know too. But Kernel anti cheat is not a solution but simply a marketing feature to make their users think they try.
Just seeing all the gamers requesting a kernel AC for CS2, saying VAC does not work; but now they have banned a lot of cheaters and seem to have less cheaters than the new Battlefield which has kernel AC.
> I think the hardest battle is going to be with anti cheat. The anti cheat that developers want basically requires dystopian levels of restrictions which are against everything valve has done on SteamOS so far.
If anyone is capable of moving things along in this space, Valve should be it.
> Personally I'd love if we all just went back to playing on personal servers with your real life friends or people you otherwise trust. But I don't think this is would go over well with the average online gamer.
It's not the gamers that don't want this - although, yes, I do also want the option of matchmaking - it's the companies that don't allow dedicated servers, or shut down the servers after releasing that year's full-price version of the same game.
Something I haven't seen discussed at all is HDCP compliance.
Of course, games don't need that - I'd say that every game studio is aware that without streamers, you don't sell games, and streamers can't stream when HDCP gets in their way.
But for the use case of a home theater? PS4 and 5 as well as some Xbox varieties can do 4K Netflix [1], no issues. Installing Windows, I'd guess that's fine too. But Steam OS? Nope. Anything too "open" gets the boot, including Android if you dare root your device, Widevine L1 refuses to work as the TEE doesn't reveal the keys if it detects an unlocked bootloader.
Ive used my steamdeck much more than my switch 2, but I still can't play competitive multiplayers on the deck, so it is clearly a console and not a "PC gaming" experience
The largest hurdle that a Steam console will face isn't kernel-level anti-cheats or somesuch. The real problem is far more idiotic: platform exclusives. Console gamers stereotypically care that their platform has a game that others do not, I have no idea how the reasoning works, but exclusives are a major talking point for OEMs and gamers alike.
While PC likely has the most exclusives by a ridiculously large margin, it probably has the fewest AAA exclusives.
This is another status quo improvement from Valve. Great job!
That said, I feel we're trading evil gaming monopolies for a less evil monopoly. I can only truly support Valve once they start actually selling games rather than game "licenses".
What I want is GOG's transparency and philosophy with Valve's Linux and hardware investments.
SteamOS is handheld only right? What they need is a Xbox/PS alternative, you can plug in to a screen (tv/monitor) and optionally use a mouse/keyboard (valve has some huge FPS titles, like counter strike) for games that you cant play with a controller (usually competitive fps titles).
One thing that came out of the HTPC “wars” of the 2000s and 2010s was that mobile/handheld UI were more suited for the 10-foot interface, versus full-blown computers like Windows MCE.
Valve certainly won't win it, but they're bringing the heat where it wasn't before.
SteamOS is the important part here - if it is proven to be a good console experience (which the deck has basically proven already) then licensing of the OS to other manufacturers will put a lot of pressure on integrated h/w s/w manufacturers.
Unlike the handheld format, the tvbox console is fairly easy to manufacture and is tolerant of a lot of spec and price variety. Any slip up by Sony and Microsoft in specs and price will result in steam machine variants carving away market share, which could force more frequent console releases.
The steam machine will almost certainly come in at a higher price point than the PS5, but with no 'online' subscription charge and reasonably priced storage upgrades we may see these revenue streams disappear from the next console generation in order to compete.
SteamOS isn't perfect, and the variety inherent in the platform that is a strength is also a weakness. The core markets for Nintendo and for Sony aren't going anywhere.
My main game console right now is one of those little gaming boxes you can buy on Amazon for about $400, where I have installed NixOS + Jovian to get the "SteamOS" interface.
I really like it. It really does feel like a "game console"; usually when I've made my own console using Linux, it always feels kind of janky. For example, RetroPie on the Raspberry Pi is pretty cool, but it doesn't feel like a proper commercial product, it feels like a developer made a GUI to launch games.
I have like 750 games on Steam that I have hoarded over the years, in addition to the Epic Games Store and GOG, which can be installed with Heroic, and the fact that I can play them on a "console" instead of a computer makes it much easier to play in my living room or bedroom. It even works fine with the Xbox One controllers; I use the official Microsoft USB dongle to minimize latency, it works great.
I think there actually is a chance that Valve could really be a real competitor, if not a winner.
That sounds interesting because with NixOS it should be very easy to move your config to the next thing, and honestly I prefer NixOS over Arch.
What I wanted to ask you: have you converted the device into a STB as well or is that still standalone?
I'm afraid I don't know what an STB is.
Set top box [1], like an Nvidia Shield TV [2], to play (digital) TV and other programs. My point being, would you be able to have this machine function as such (not so much portable, rather standalone with a remote control). Because that way, you take the hardware STB out of the equation, saving you (on the Nvidia Shield TV Pro) a good 200 EUR.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Set-top_box
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nvidia_Shield_TV
Ah, sorry, didn't know the acronym.
I tried making it my main media center, but I couldn't figure out a way to get good quality streaming from the main services, since they limit the quality and bitrate pretty heavily for the browsers. I thought I could just live with it, but it was bad enough to really bother me. After a lot of effort to try and get things working with different emulators and user agent settings, I was unsuccessful getting the quality tolerable.
I haven't fully given up on that dream, but right now I'm just using an Nvidia Shield TV that I already had.
I installed NixOS + Jovian on my Steamdeck and it works great as well.
Nix support is built-in to SteamOS already btw, I used that to set up Ship of Harkinian for example.
Could you elaborate? Does steamOS ship the nix binary & mountpoints?
I meant they have set up the Nix directory so you can write to it without having to mess around with bind mounts, overlayfs, etc. because the system is normally read-only.
So all you have to do is install Nix as a user.
IIRC, the nix package manager can run entirely user-level on any distro. It doesn't ship on the Deck, but it's the same process there as anywhere else.
Which box is that? I personally have a Nvidia Shield with Steam Link to stream games from my gaming computer to my TV. I connected an Xbox controller and it works pretty well. I also use an old iPad for streaming games for games that don't lend themselves well to a controller.
It's obviously not a direct replacement since it still relies on my gaming machine, which not everyone has, but it gets a pretty good console experience, and it's portable.
Do you have link to the little gaming box?
Yep! https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0D733JFML?th=1
The one I ordered had 32 gigs of memory; this was more than a year ago so I'm sure there are better ones now, but I have to say that I feel like this thing "punches above its weight" in that it does seem to run a lot more stuff than I thought it would at a decent framerate.
These are the Beelink boxes.
They got very popular when they released a video of the manufacturing process. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ohwI3V207Ts
Wow these are so much more well made than I thought.
Hm, does it work well for games? I have a NUC I could use...
I have one of the higher-end beelinks. Super small, quiet, doesn't get hot and I can play modern AAA titles on it, driving my huge screen TV in my living room.
Sorry, I more meant "does Jovian work well?". I have a Beelink ME and love it, but I want a gaming "appliance" OS.
Jovian works pretty great actually. Once I got it set up it pretty much worked exactly as I expected.
Can you quantify this? Which Beelink? Are you powering a 4K TV? When you talk about playing modern AAA games, which ones, and what settings do you run at?
Fortnite, Cyberpunk, Starfield, probably others I'm forgetting
I believe the TV is 4K, yeah.
It's the Beelink SER9 AMD Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 12core/24thread AI PC Turbo Freq 5.1GHz
Thanks for this! I'm playing Cyberpunk 2077 on a 4K TV with my ROG Ally X right now, but I added an eGPU to get nicer 4K graphics. Very cool to hear that a mini is capable of playing it too!
Which is more than double the $400 box we are talking about
Very very cool! Every time I look at building a hot gaming PC I think to myself that I'm just going to play SNES games and Elden Ring, so what's the point? Something like this would be great.
Been pretty happy with my SER8 myself... though there are better models available now.
Current OS split of Steam users - 94.84% windows, 2.11% mac, 3.05% Linux.
Valve has fought tooth and nail for a decade to make that 3.05% a reality. Linux means they control their own destiny, instead of being at the mercy of Microsoft. Valve has their eyes on this prize and they’re willing to play the long game.
Everyone’s going to talk about “winning” the console generation, but winning could mean an increase of Linux’s share to 5-6%. That would be a massive win, and would be a vindication of Valve’s strategy. Valve could achieve their goals even if Sony and Nintendo sells millions of consoles more.
Valve’s strategy being that Microsoft will continue down this user-hostile and privacy-hostile experience.
Being computer-savvy means I’m still a relative outlier, but given the renewed shift away from Windows and Office; Windows unfortunately may become niche.
Why unfortunately? Isn't that a good thing? (Assuming > 0% will switch to Linux instead of iOS)
Honestly, as much as I prefer Linux for most things Linux staying pat and macOS stealing market share from Windows is almost as good as Linux taking those users. I think we’re currently seeing a trend starting of people leaving Windows for each of them, and some users for both of them.
I’d bet that most PC Windows gamers care a lot more about Steam than they do about Windows. If Microsoft did anything drastic - like blocking Steam like Apple do on iOS - it would hurt Windows severely.
Steam without content loses its value, that content is produced via Windows development tools.
Steam on Linux works really well now. I sort of built my own steam machine a few months back with a framework desktop that now sits in my TV rack. Gaming on it is a really good experience. Had to buy a PS5 controller though because I could not get the XBOX controller to work over bluetooth which was a bit of a bummer. For me the new controller is most interesting as most games have XBOX controller support (with xbox button captions) and the steam controller adopts the button naming.
I just built one of these as well. For your Xbox controller, see if this works: find any Windows PC and download the Xbox Accessories app. Connect the controller (via USB) and update its firmware. Once I did this, I was able to pair it with the framework desktop via bluetooth (under linux) reliably, and it's been rock solid ever since. Apparently some of the models shipped with buggy firmware that linux really doesn't like for whatever reason.
I tried several solutions, including an old PS3, Xbox One controller (with the official dongle) and I ended up buying an 8bitDo xbox controller. They are well manufactured (better than the xbox controller), has a built in batter (unlike the xbox controller) and has a usb dock for charging.
Highly recommend them.
If you still have the xbox controller, I'd recommend the dedicated USB wireless adapter. It's reasonably priced and very solid.
Especially if you ever use more than one controller at a time, a dedicated dongle is essential.
This is only possible due to how the console space has changed over the last 10 years. The killer app for console over PC used to be simplicity - you pop in the disc/cartridge and you just go. This is rarely true anymore. Even Switch 2 games often require waiting to download a bunch of stuff before you can play. Meanwhile the PC experience has generally gotten simpler and most games "just work", in part thanks to Steam itself.
Thank you for calling this out. As a long time console gamer, I hadn't noticed this creeping bloat until I started playing games with my young children. My son begged for a new Madden game after playing it at his friend's house.
When we got the game, it probably took us an hour of fucking around with downloads and accounts. Off the top of my head, I had to set up a parents EA account and kids account, set permissions, had to make my 7 year old an email address, had to set up two factor authentication, accept crazy terms of use, verify emails, etc.) And then once we got all that done we're dodging ads for in game points, coins, cards, card packs, cosmetics, pre-order bonuses, etc. to get to the actual game. It's so SO bad and just not fun.
It completely killed his enthusiasm for the game. My son wandered off multiple times during this process. When I joked with my wife that we could have built a PC in the time it took us to do this bullshit it was an exaggeration, but only a little.
I had this experience playing couch co-op call of duty a few years ago. I had to make a fucking account. It's not even my console.
Nintendo has wavered a tad, but they're the closet to the original experience. You pop in a thingy, hook up another controller, or two, or three, and you're off. It just works, maybe you can input a name for your guy, maybe not, maybe you just always play Waluigi so everyone knows who you are.
Nintendo is also becoming worse. Some Switch 2 games are so big you need to juggle with the internal storage and expansion SD express cards above 256Gb are simply unobtainable or priced outrageously. While you can obviously delete and redownload titles that takes a while and it's a shame the console storage can be completely filled with 4 AAA titles. That in combination with 'key carts' that are just a download key and still require internal storage has put a big brake on my game collection ambitions for the time being.
i wish console makers would be a bit more strict with policies like this cause as you indicate, it hurts whole usecase of consoles in the first place
Had to do the same with halo infinite at my friends house, tried to use some burner emails and it kept banning our 2nd player within a few minutes. Gotta love the digital future.
This is so very sad and so very ripe for disruption.
So many of the top players in our modern late stage capitalism economy fit this mold of having a terrible user experience with a large unsatisfied user base. Usually it's not even a monopoly, but all the top players are roughly equally awful to their users.
I'm tempted to start some companies to just do the thing in a way that doesn't suck for the actual paying customers. I think just doing a good/competent/user-needs-centric job at the same basic product would be enough to disrupt the market in many cases.
SteamOS isn't perfect, but it's "open" to mods like a PS5 or XBOX will never be. As an avid console gamer it's time to go back to my roots.
Some PS were open (still have my PS2Linux) and XBoxes have dev mode, even if it is stuck on UWP, and there was XNA as well.
Turns out most open consoles are full of either crapware or emulators, which is the reason Sony and Microsoft eventually gave up on some openess.
Random trivia: The PS2 Linux was purely for tax evasion.
EU had a higher tax rate for "gaming computers" than "generic computers" so Sony slapped Linux on the console to get better profits.
Good example of being confidently wrong. You are thinking of the little Basic interpreter that was on the pack-in consumer demo disc. Not the Linux Kit which was a very real initiative and had universities involved. We were using them in a big dedicated lab.
Not at all, you're mixing up with YA BASIC, that came with PS 2 demo disc.
People that weren't there keep mixing channels on this one.
To acquire PS2 Linux, you had to pay additionally 300 euros for the Linux distribution, the PS2 hard disk, and cables that would only work in monitors using sync on green signal.
Initially the price was much higher, and got reduced to around 300 in 2004.
Actually I think PS2 Linux was made so saddam Hussein could build a Beowulf cluster of PS2s
You mean PS3 Linux?
I don't know -- per Microsoft's recent announcement.. the Xbox will basically be a Windows PC in a tiny package. So, no more Xbox Live needed to play online and you can install other marketplaces on there (such as Epic and GOG).
You're speculating. Microsoft executives have made statements, but we have not seen definite announcements.
Remember when one Microsoft executive said one time that Windows 10 is the last Windows and everyone believed it?
Microsoft hasn't announced the next Xbox yet. They've been promoting the Xbox-branded ROG Ally this cycle, which is just a Windows PC in a tiny package, but that's not the next console, just a current generation SteamDeck competitor.
They've been implying there will be a greater convergence in which Windows devices feel (play) like an Xbox, but they've been saying the same things since initiatives like Xbox Play Anywhere originally launched in 2016 (almost a decade ago!), which didn't result in the Xbox Series X being a PC in 2020 (despite similar speculation that it might be at the time).
It will be interesting to see where Xbox is planning to go, but so far most of the speculation is just reading (decade old) tea leaves.
100% agree with everything you said, and also Valve is a huge value prop in the cross-platform Steam store. I already prefer Steam because I have both Windows and Mac machines and generally travel with a MacBook.
Microsoft has limited Xbox to Windows buy-once, Sony has… nothing. Valve is building an ecosystem that goes from handheld deck to Windows/Mac/Linux to console to VR.
It’s been a slow burn but that is a very nice strategy.
> reasonably priced storage upgrades
To be fair to Sony here, the PS5 uses a normal m.2 NVME SSD for storage upgrades.
And the ps3/ps4 before it used 2.5 inch sata drives.
The x86 running Windows isn’t perfect. The x86 rack system running Linux isn’t perfect. Android isn’t perfect. The Ford F150 isn’t the perfect pickup. Budweiser is far from the perfect beer.
The phrase “worse is better” has a lot of historical significance in computing. Long before that, though, Adolphus Busch started his brewing empire. If you take a brewery tour at an Anheuser-Busch brewery, they’ll tell you that the company’s flagship product, the aforementioned Budweiser, was never intended to be anyone’s favorite beer.
That’s right. One of the top selling beers in the world was never intended to be a personal favorite of a single buyer or beer drinker. What it was designed to be was unobjectionable, approachable, and good enough to serve your guests when their preferred beer runs out. There are so many varieties of beer that are so different, and they are often loved by some and despised by others. So an intentionally unremarkable but quality beverage was marketed to be a very popular second or third choice.
If most households have a Playstation and a Deck or Frame, or have a Switch and a Frame, or have a PC and a Deck then in total numbers the Steam machines just might be the top seller even if it’s not a universal favorite.
It doesn't have to dethrone anyone. If SteamOS-powered boxes start eating into the "enthusiast console" nich that alone could force Microsoft and Sony to rethink their current lock-in-heavy strategies
> then licensing of the OS to other manufacturers
They already tried that the first way around when they introduced steam machines. That didn't really work.
The fact that they now took full control is what's exiting about this steam machine.
They tried it without a flagship and without a large library of compatible games.
They now have a flagship first party Steam Machine and Proton to run games. They are also working with partners to create 3rd party Steam OS handhelds.
If steam machines sell well, we will likely see supported 3rd party offerings.
Yes. It’s the Pixel / Surface / strategy: show there is a market for premium, flagship reference devices and let those guide the second tier manufacturers.
You don’t even have to be the #1 vendor, the reference implementation does a lot of good for the ecosystem.
You don’t even have to be the #5 vendor!
Yeah I mean... can I play Fortnite, BF6 or the upcoming GTA on steamOS?
Probably not. Kernel level anti cheat is the problem. I know BF6 isn't proton safe. Fortnite is the same.
GTA VI will probably run single player on proton fine, GTA V does. Multiplayer will probably not.
The multiplayer with kernel level anti cheat will keep Sony safe through at least another generation; Microsoft is less safe as they're so vulnerable this generation anyway.
There's a circular opportunity though - if the SteamOS market share gets anywhere, then it might become worth it for these developers to support anti-cheat on the that platform. Some systems (notably BattleEye) actually have Linux support, they just need to enable it, but there's no incentive for them to do so.
> Some systems (notably BattleEye) actually have Linux support, they just need to enable it, but there's no incentive for them to do so.
This isn't really true. As GP said, there isn't a kernel level anti cheat for linux. You can switch a flick on BattleEye to run on linux but it wont be a kernel level as it is on windows. So there is an incentive for them to not turn it on because it simply is the worse version than the windows one. As far as I know even on windows you get cheats even if it is kernel level. Meaning, allowing linux you'd probably be flooded with cheaters if you already get them on windows.
> Meaning, allowing linux you'd probably be flooded with cheaters if you already get them on windows.
There's an easy way to not get cheaters, or at least to slow down their impact: stop making your games "free to play". When cheaters have to buy 60€ games everytime they get b&, eventually they'll run out of money.
That really doesn't stop cheaters. Tarkov EoD edition is $150 or so, cheaters still cheat on those. They cheat in cs2 with skins worth thousands.
That's because there's no moderation and they don't get banned. If they got banned, they wouldn't cheat.
They do get banned, what are you even talking about?
If anything the Tarkov ban treadmill is a way to drive sales. Even if some of them get disputed as fraudulent due to stolen card numbers, BSG may still come out ahead.
That's a bad conspiracy. A few k sales per month doesn't make sense for this , especially when some are fraudulent or hacked.
Battleeye games get flooded with cheaters no matter what. On most anti cheats is the same anyways. Just see tarkov for a battleeye game with rampant cheaters
Why not, isn’t it a win/win to increase the player base? What are the downsides?
After the CrowdStrike debacle, it’s amazing Microsoft isn’t coming for kernel-level gaming patches.
I don't think kernel-level anti-cheat is a big problem on company managed PCs.
GTA V multiplayer was working fine on Proton not too long ago. Haven't played in years though.
There where changes a few months ago. Multiplayer is completely non-viable since then.
These are not winner games these days. Gaming trends are so fast that indie games like the one where you play a duck with a gun is what's driving the gaming community these days.
That's a misconception. Majority of players are with the big Franchises, and they stay with them. The variety-gamers who are playing multiple different games are a minority, though they are a big crowd, loud and have for obvious reasons more attention, leading to this misconception. For example, Escape from Duckov, which you are speaking about, had at it's peak "just" roughly as many players as Battlefield 6 has on average every day. And Battlefield is the smaller one of the big games.
I don't think it's entirely the case. They are on franchises, but not the ones you think of - they're playing live service games that have been around for years. Games like League of Legends, Counterstrike, Fortnite, Dota, WoW, PUBG etc. Games like Battlefield are up there, but I don't think they're the games people mainly play over the years. (Although Fifa and GTA definitely are.)
For example, the top 10 games in Korean PC bangs last week were:
1. League of Legends
2. PUBG (I think)
3. Fifa
4. Valorant
5. Overwatch 2
6. Sudden Attack (a KR FPS game)
7. Maple Story
8. Lost Ark
9. Dungeon Fighter Online
10. StarCraft (Brood War, I believe)
The next 15: Diablo 2 Resurrection, World of Warcraft, Diablo 4, Lineage, Eternal Return, Path of Exile, Warcraft 3, Black Desert, Cyphers, Aion, Path of Exile 2, Diablo 3, StarCraft 2, Tales Runner, Final Fantasy 14.
Lineage and Brood War weren't even made in this millennium!
> I don't think it's entirely the case. They are on franchises, but not the ones you think of
I didn't name any franchise. I only mentioned Battlefield to compare it with the mentioned Duck-Game, as they are both on Steam where everyone can see the numbers. I mean if we are talking about the real big numbers, then we would be with Minecraft, Roblox, Fortnite, LoL, which are all not on Steam; making number-checking a tad harder.
> Games like Battlefield are up there, but I don't think they're the games people mainly play over the years.
As a Franchise it seems moving Fifa, very popular, but also seasonal peaks. Each new version shoves in players for a while, until they are satisfied again. Though, I don't really play them, so it's just external observation.
Man, I'm surprised DFO still in the top 10. I thought that game died out spectacularly.
To be fair Brood War was like a national pastime in Korea for many many years and there are still pro tournaments held multiple times a year that draw a decent audience. That game will never die in Korea.
That's a lot of guesswork for such a strong claim as yours. You can actually see gaming distribution on open steamdb[1] stats and every year the amount of games avg player plays grows higher and higher.
A linux native game called Banana got almost a million concurrent player peak (compared to #1 CS2 having only 1.8M). This didn't exist 10 years ago - the gaming landscape is entirely different in 2025.
This call that gamers generally play 1 game only is extremely dated especially when flavor of the month games are extremely in right now. I'm sure Valve with the biggest gaming dataset in the world didn't just dive into this blind.
1 - https://steamdb.info/charts/
> That's a lot of guesswork
It's not guesswork, it's reading the statistics. Gaming Reports are regularly showing that the majority of gamers and income is with only a handful of games/franchises.
> You can actually see gaming distribution on open steamdb[1] stats and every year the amount of games avg player plays grows higher and higher.
Yes, because the market grows. But look at the numbers, the top is always with the same games, with the same numbers, which are usually in a complete different league then the rest. The Top 5 Games have usually 10-20 times as many players as every other games. And, be aware that this is only Steam. The gaming market is much, much bigger than just steam. Steam is kinda its own bubble with a skewed view.
I'm not saying steam or indie-market is small, but people looking at PC and Indie-games develop a kind of natural filter for the real behemoths of the market.
> A linux native game called Banana got almost a million concurrent player peak
We have at the moment >3 Billion Players. 1 Million gamers for a shady shortlived hype-game is not bad, but it's not even remotely winning the market, or setting a trend. At best, it's setting a trend in a specific niche. Valve wiped out billions of value in CS-Skins some week ago. That's more market-influence than a free game with shady skin-business will ever gain.
The reality of native Linux gaming must be really sad if the top example is in essence "NFT" generator with minimal if no gameplay...
It is essentially a software toy people left running to generate random items some of which ended up being speculated on generating some money for "players".
The last 3 games I played on Linux were Hades 2, Hearthstone, Baldurs Gate 3. It is not a sad state of affairs at all
I would say that‘s a bit overly simplified, as much as the indie or indie like game scene is thriving, so is the online multiplayer scene. Gaming is huge and just because one thing is big doesn’t mean another is not. Not a zero sum game here.
Sure but not being able to play 4 games is not an indication of success either way. It's not 2012 when you had to have Call of Duty - you can not have battlefield, cod or fort nite and still never run out of incredible, popular games to play.
If you have a bunch of friends that have battlefield/cod/fortnite and want to play them, they will still do so without you, or at least heavily pressure you into getting them.
I'm not sure what could that even mean from consumer pov - I'm not going to buy a platform because some of my friends might want me to play a specific game with me?
The pressure to get more games on your platform has never been as low as it is today and has never been this low on Steam itself. You could spend a lifetime with the current Steam library and never feel bored.
From product pov Valve feels very comfortable and I bet they have the data to back up this move with basically unlimited war chest. If anything I feel like Valve is pressuring game developers of these major games here - not the other way around.
That’s exactly the thought process of every teenager ever, and also most people who want to connect with their friends through gaming beyond their teenage years.
Not everyone experiences gaming the same way.
Yea as a casual I only care about gaming with others. I don’t care about doing it on my own so my consumer behavior depends on social stuff
> I'm not sure what could that even mean from consumer pov - I'm not going to buy a platform because some of my friends might want me to play a specific game with me?
Yeah exactly. Depending how much you care about playing with friends compared to playing at all you might make that choice.
> I'm not sure what could that even mean from consumer pov - I'm not going to buy a platform because some of my friends might want me to play a specific game with me?
That's exactly how console sales worked in the past. I bought an Xbox because all my friends were playing Halo, and I wanted to join in...
The recent phenomenon of games supporting cross-play out of the gate is probably eating into this, but exclusives were a hell of a moat back in the day.
Duckov is not indie. It's a reasonably sized game backed by a large (Chinese) publisher.
Sure, but those AAA games still exist, and people still want to play them.
As a gamer, why would you want to spend a few hundred bucks on a gaming box, when it isn't able to play the biggest hits? Who would want to deliberately limit their ecosystem to indie games?
There's a nonzero chance that BF6/GTA6/etc becomes a thing that everyone wants to play. If all your friends are raging about how much fun it is and are all playing together, aren't you going to regret buying a Steam Machine?
Sure, you can still play Super Meat Boy, but that doesn't matter - they regret what they can't do.
According to your logic, then no one should be currently buying a Switch 2, because it won't play GTA6. Yet people are buying that console!
Is it you, or is it the children? No, it's definitely the children who are wrong.
The Switch 2 has exclusives that people DO want. The Steam Machine does not.
Risking pedantry here, but there are some windows-only games that could be considered PC exclusive (and by extension, steam machine exclusive)
None at the AAA-tier which sell consoles.
The sale success of the Steam Deck proves you wrong. The PC is the strongest platform for exclusives because most of everything ends up there eventually. The Xbox has no exclusives anymore, Sony is publishing everything on PC eventually. Only Nintendo remains as never publishing on PC. If you are flexible about your choice of multiplayer-only titles (if you're even interested in that type of things) then the Steam Machine is the best console.
Sony's in trouble; their crown jewels are all on PC right now! You can buy a Steam Machine next year and play all the Spider-Mensch, the Lost Hose, the Ghouls of Yo-Kai!
The Steam Deck has sold only 4 million units in 3 years, which is a rounding error in the console market, not a huge success. The Switch 2 has generally been considered a failure (due in no small part to a serious lack of interesting exclusives at launch) and has still sold more than 10M already, while the Switch sold 154M units and the PS5 has sold 84M.
DotA isn't AAA tier? It's the #2 game by a big margin on Steam. And also League of Legends is just as big. How are these not AAA tier games?
LoL can't be played on the Steam Deck. This is common among the top multiplayer games due to anticheat.
It's almost certain no one bought a Steam Deck primarily to play DotA, and it remains to be seen if any has a meaningful impact on the Steam Machine, but I doubt it.
If there is a non-zero chance that I might want to play such a game, from time to time, I can stream it.
Why would I want to limit my options for occasional AAA gaming to the graphics supported by a particular console, when I can spring for GeForce Ultimate for a month and play BF6 with amazing graphics at 120 FPS, on my TV or my laptop, or my iPad or my phone? And play with even better graphics two years from now, as the state of the art advances.
Sure a different option would likely be best for people who know they want to play AAA, all the time. Although, even for many of these people, the Steam machine is probably a great second box for many, that gets you however many 100s or 1000s of titles they have in their Steam library.
But a fear based "you might miss out occasionally" argument is unpersuasive. Especially in a world where some games are exclusive. My swanky new PlayStation is no help if everyone is raving about the new Nintendo game.
>As a gamer, why would you want to spend a few hundred bucks on a gaming box, when it isn't able to play the biggest hits? Who would want to deliberately limit their ecosystem to indie games?
???
Look at steam top 100, sure there are 2 or 3 games you wont be able to play on there, but there rest work just fine. And sure there are popular games outside steam, but even if none of them worked (which is not true), for most gamers its a non issue. (And Valve is probably not really concerned about them)
The only games this limits are online competitive (most of the time FPS) games. There are plenty of gamers, myself included, that have 0 interest in such games.
In short even if 0 online FPS games are playable on steam console(which is not true), there are still 10s of millions of gamers, who wouldn't care.
As far as why wouldn't people pick something that can play 100% of games is because they cant. Even the best PC cant play Nintendo games, not all PS games are on PC or xbox, etc. You always have a trade off. And plenty of people still buy PC's,Deck, PS5's and Switch consoles.
My guess id more people won't buy it because, they want better specs, not because a few games wont work on them.
But that still leaves millions, potentially tens of millions of people.
Exactly, this competes with a second hand PS5.
Nonsense. People don't buy a PS5 and regret they can't play League of Legends. There's been games exclusive to one platform or the other since the dawn of time, yet people still buy them for the games they do have.
That thing is going to run a ton of games that other consoles don't.
Few customers are going to replace their PC with it, but if you have the cash and want to add a sleek console to your living room that will also stream from your desktop in a pinch, it's probably a great deal.
thats not accurate. they have improved, but the market does not look as you described
No, and I understand if that's a deal-breaker for you, but for me I refuse avoid kernel level anticheat wherever possible, so I'm none too fussed about it. If a game wants to run malware, it can do it on a console where it's nice and segmented off from my general-purpose computing.
Do you also game on a separate windows/Linux user?
I can’t speak for brendo, but I do most of my gaming on a separate PC-class machine from my home workstation, both of which are separate from my work laptop and personal laptop.
I game primarily on my Linux PC, including multiplayer games. I do have a PS5 and other game consoles, though honestly, they see more use as set-top boxes than they do as gaming devices. I have a separate Windows laptop for work.
But not with a separate user? As a process running under your normal user can access all your files and even memory of all your running processes by that user. Its not just kernel stuff that is bad.
5 years ago, if someone told you about a commercial Linux gaming console. You were right to laugh.
Now, with IA cheating being the norm now, I think Valve has a real chance to add a microchip to "certify" its console and so playing Fornite (or over 3A) on it.
Will be a added value over a gaming PC, I don't think they will miss this opportunity for too long.
It’s unlikely you’ll be able to play GTA 6 on any PC platform as it’s only coming out on consoles.
At least to start. Microsoft strongly encourages all Xbox games to also come out on PC, though they sometimes release later. I cannot find any game developed originally for Xbox Series X|S where this hasn't happened eventually (and the developers definitively aren't still working on the PC version).
And they might eventually steer all games into XBox store.
I am expecting the day Microsoft decides to take all their studios out of Steam, if SteamOS starts to be too much of a pain.
I think Valve has a fairly good grasp of what they addressable market is at this point with the Steam Deck having been out for so long.
The value proposition is basically play your existing Steam library (and emulated games but that will be left unsaid) in 4k on your TV with an interface suited for it. I am not sure they are that dependent of upcoming games.
I will probably buy one because I really enjoy my Deck and I would like to play some more taxing games on a large screen from time to time and I’m never going to buy a PS5 because I have no interest in tying myself to Sony and playing exclusively on my TV.
If you can’t play Fortnite on it it sounds like a great time to line up a lawsuit against Epic Games for refusing to allow you to play Fortnite on the Steam box.
I can see developers work on SteamOS anticheat soon, once it gains more traction (chicken / egg problem though). Those games are available on mobile phones and consoles as well, so "windows" is not a requirement.
If any game has DRM or anti-cheat technology which BF6 does and even most AAA games, then it cannot play it at all without it.
That is going to be a no go for any SteamOS device when an highly anticipated game gets released on day 1.
I think that the idea is that if you get enough users on Linux, it seems foolish from the game studio's perspective not to add Linux support to their anticheat.
Not necessarily, the anticheat will end up much easier to defeat on Linux.
It's possible that 'adding Linux support' would take the form of just making the anticheat optional.
Maybe playing with the anticheat enabled makes you immune to being reported for cheating (because they can verify down to the kernel level that you aren't), but you can still play without it (but without the immunity from being reported).
Obviously they wouldn't do this in today's market because there's no incentive to do so, but if a significant portion of gamers moved to Linux, offering a Linux solution might become a reasonable choice for game studios.
Optional anti-cheat could be really interesting. Make it a matchmaking option; let the players decide who they want to play with. This effectively makes "PC without Anti-cheat" a new platform in cross-platform match making.
I can imagine a whole scene popping up where everyone cheats to the max, creating whole new game modes.
This already existed in CS:GO, it was called Hack vs Hack. Private servers could choose whether to run anticheat or not. You'd see some with names like HvH and join to find people spinning in circles and comparing which aimbot was the most dominant.
> I can imagine a whole scene popping up where everyone cheats to the max, creating whole new game modes.
That would be very interesting. I also bet that people would start developing bots that play the game better than a human could and eventually it would essentially turn into digital BattleBots.
This depends heavily on how customised the linux is. Back in the day Amazon had to fork Android to add kernel-level support for DRM, otherwise the studios weren't going to permit streaming video on Fire tablets. One could imagine Valve adding an optional kernel DRM module to solve the same problem.
You still lose because the dev team has to split their attention.
And anyway I (and many other people!) have valid keys for basically all widevine streams extracted from supposedly secure android devices. That DRM approach ended up failing miserably and torrent sites are full of WEB-DLs.
But you can still stream video on normal Android devices, no? My Motorola phone supports Disney+. Why did studios object to streaming on Fire tablets unless it had kernel DRM but they're fine with streaming on easily-rootable phones?
Not at that time, no - this was several years before Google decided to ship Widevine in Android
FWIW rooting the phone is not enough to get you the widevine keys.
Also some services will just downgrade you to a lower quality stream if your device doesn’t have the appropriate keys.
ARC Raiders runs fine with anticheat on Linux. As does the Finals.
Market pressure can change game studios behavior.
Battlefield 6 might never run on the average Linux desktop, but I could see a future where it would run on Steam hardware in an end-to-end Secure Boot environment.
Gamers don't like playing with cheaters.
We’re going to have to figure out a better way of dealing with cheaters.
You could be playing against an AI model specifically trained on that game. No anti cheat is going to detect that.
I find it much more likely that Valve enables Secure Boot on their Steam hardware.
I imagine that if this happens, it will be followed by popular Linux distros finally becoming serious about their Secure Boot implementations, instead of simply shimming it or seen as a rarely-used feature reserved for enterprise distros like RHEL.
Some of us actually think that having some sort of validation that our OS hasn't been tampered with is a feature and not a bug. It's only a problem when companies parlay that validation into anti-consumer DRM - but that's a political problem, not a technological one.
It's both a technological and political problem.
All the platforms that went all-in on secure boot like things and attestation are anti-consumer hellholes that slurp all your data. The evidence just does not look good. Maybe Linux is different, but it's swimming against the tide here. It would be the first of it's kind.
But again this doesn’t solve the problem where an AI model can just play the game.
Or rebooting to a secure mode where you can only run the game and maybe discord.
A few anti-cheat systems rather than inspecting the local machine look for things like impossibly fast target acquisition in FPS games, or the server noticing when a shot is taken on an opponent who’s supposed to be totally obscured. Those aren’t perfect, but they don’t require kernel-level anticheat.
Cheating detection server side is expensive and probabilistic at best, kernel level anti cheat is a purely financial decision
Not the case - lots of games including AAA ones have these things on the Steam Deck.
anti-cheat is one thing, but i'm not aware of any DRM that doesn't work on linux? I know denuvo is one of the most popular ones and it definitely does
Jesus, since when Fortnite and BF6 became gaming benchmark nowadays?
There’s Dota 2, CS2, TF2 all of which are much better games that you’ve listed, and thousands games more.
And you can absolutely play GTA, thankfully without horrendous online. The only thing steam should do is to ban their shitty launcher for eternity.
Jesus, since when Fortnite and BF6 became gaming benchmark nowadays?
In order to 'win' a console generation there needs to be support for the games people want to play. Capitalism is a literal popularity contest, and any console that doesn't have Fortnite, COD, FIFA, etc won't win, regardless of what you or I might think of the games.
The reason why Steam can't win a console generation is simply because Microsoft, Sony, and Nintendo have enough sway over publishers (especially ones they own) than they stop popular games being available on a rival platform. They market it as 'exclusives' but really it's just anti-consumer.
That you are talking about a hypothetical game not running says enough...
Fortnite came out in '17, at some point it's no longer going to be relevant.
Counter Strike came out in '99 and it's more relevant than ever. Some games just keep going and going.
Its not the same game today as it was '99. You could try to make the argument for Fortnite but the differences are not substantial.
Point being that if changes are a given, then it's possible for it to run on Linux in the future.
I hate to break it to you, but CS is not relevant. How much money do you think it makes, compared to recent top sellers or live service/mobile games?
About $1B/year.
CS:GO is the highest grossing game on Steam, according to some sources, all agree its top 5.
Why is that irrelevant?
Also consistently the most played game on Steam by a fair margin. That doesn't necessarily make it the most played PC game since some big titles like League and Fortnite aren't on Steam, but it's at least close.
Raid shadow legends is also estimated to make around $1B/year, and there are many such mobile games.
Roblox made $3.6B in 2024. Fornite makes $3-5B/year for the past ~decade.
Genshin Impact is estimated to make ~$10B this year.
Not only in revenue, but all of the above have way more cultural impact/awareness too.
The pond is very big, but it's easy to miss that if you're in a bubble in that pond.
CS is consistently the top played game on Steam every year. Are you saying Steam isn't relevant? That's quite the claim to be making.
You didn't know what you were talking about and got caught in it.
That's fine! I was surprised too.
Something I've learned with age is it's better to have a laugh together than throw out more cover.
I dont give the slightest of shits about CS but have you seen the figures? It's doing absurdly well. In addition the separate economy for skins peaked at 6 billion recently.
thats not irrelevant
[dead]
Ah, imagine, every game on PC, on one unified platform (yet with many stores of course).
Licensing? What do you mean, licensing? Other manufacturers are free to take it. It's all open source.
Yes, you need to license SteamOS to preinstall it on devices you sell: https://store.steampowered.com/steamos/oem
Why would you not need to license it? Steam isn't open source and Steam, the trademark, is owned by Valve. If we were talking about a standard distro like Fedora, no, I guess they wouldn't have to license it, but we aren't.
It's also about protecting their brand.
If someone starts selling completely shitty "SteamOS PCs" without licensing, it'll hurt Valve more than the no-name Chinese PC manufacturer.
Licensing -> Valve can dictate minimum specs and QA requirements -> Good for everyone.
this ALONE is reason for families to buy the valve console https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/593110/view/41495750...
instant, huge parent created backlog of games available for your kids.
their biggest fight is this:
"what, i cant play COD online? Or Battlefield? or fifa? or Rocket League?... but thats all I play, and it costs more than a ps5?
...whats the point?"
These games have gigantic followings that ship hardware year after year. People on hackernews are substantially broader-minded than your average console gamer.
On the above basis alone, most of the regular gamers I know will not buy one of these.
"Will it play GTA6, and play it well, whenever that eventually comes out?"
That is the bar (in my opinion) today, you have to take your box over to rockstar and spec for that or you are just selling outdated hardware.
I assume people who choose a Steam Machine over PS5 know what they are doing.
On the other hand, people are probably dumber than I think.
For what it's worth, Rocket League plays just fine on Linux if you use Proton, but your point on the others still stands.
I've had to stop playing a few games once I made the switch-over (Destiny, GTA V), but am otherwise very happy with where SteamOS/ Proton is.
There are presumably mobile games which have even bigger playerbases. Most of the "regular gamers" of this sort I know will probably not buy a console either. Does it matter?
It really says most about what people you hang out with.
[dead]
Steam needs IP. Something as iconic as Kratos or Mario. That's how you go toe to toe with consoles.
It doesn't need IP, it is already THE marketplace for PC gaming. People will get a box like this to play the library they already own, or get great deals on new games.
> it is already THE marketplace for PC gaming
Yeah, but console gamers don't necessarily know or care about that. If you want to cut into the console market, you kind of have to meet console gamers halfway
Not if you are playing the long game. You get console gamers by buying consoles. Steam now has the concept of parental controls and kid accounts. That's the story of why my kid has never played a console. And I have grabbed a lot of her friends as well. In 5 or 6 years when these kids are teens, they will stay with steam and play whatever works on that platform over picking up whatever Nintendo, Sony or Microsoft drop.
PC gaming had been dying because it was losing kids with the rise of tablets and phones. This is a decent solution even if it will not pay off immediately.
But only halfway. You don't need to have exactly the same market as an existing console. It's not as if the existing consoles have exactly the same market as each other either.
And Valve is already a lot more than halfway from what I can tell.
There is something vaguely amusing to me about complaining that Valve of Half-Life, Counter Strike, Portal, Team Fortress and Dota fame doesn’t have IP and giving as an alternative what I view as a minor IP, God of War.
Apparently, people have forgotten that what launched Steam is it being required to play game of the decade Half-Life 2.
I think I’m old.
Those ips are dying. They aren’t maintained. The steam platform doesn’t have any exclusives. While it doesn’t need exclusives it certainly doesn’t hurt in a competitive fight. An IP that rivals Pokémon, Mario and Zelda exclusive to steam.
CS 2 is dying IP? Really? https://store.steampowered.com/charts/mostplayed
They might make Half-Life 3 PC exclusive.
Gordon Freeman and Glados should be able to handle that.
Probably not, unless they learn to count to three, those series seem to be over.
Valve seems to be more of a platform company these days (a very good one, though).
Remember Valve released HL: Alyx to promote their first VR headset.
It is not unreasonable to get a pair of titles to promote these two new products.
A man can dream, but a new HL for the Steam Machine and a new Portal for the Frame would be great.
It would also be the biggest sales pitch in the universe
"Buy a Steam Machine and get Half Life 3 for free" "Buy a Steam Frame and get Portal 3 for free"
Tech and software support should be absolutely perfect though..
What IP does Sony or MS have these days that would sell consoles? They fumbled Halo completely and Sony exclusives are now all on PC. Nintendo does have their Zelda and Mario that they have taken care of well for decades but Steam has.. every PC and console game with an emulator
I think most people would take the biggest library of past, current and future games, cheaper games and free online over those. Not to mention valve of all devs has enough legendary IPs. Kratos and many others have been on steam for years.
I know a lot more about Team Fortress, Portal and Half-Life than I know about Kratos. Valve already have their "meme IP".
I bought a bunch of games for console over the years that I can't play any more.
I have about a dozen games on the switch. In another console generation, nintendo will make all my existing switch games unplayable again. I feel like you don't really buy console games. You rent them for one console generation.
I mean, I can't tell whats worse - that Nintendo has the gall to try and sell me the same game for switch that I already bought retail on the Wii several years ago. Or that I can't play a lot of my old Wii games at all any more.
But every year I end up picking up more and more games on steam. So many games. I have hundreds, and so do most of my friends. And all of those games keep running on every PC I own.
That's the value proposition of a steam box. It ships with hundreds of games that I already own and already enjoy. Fancy playing bioshock again? Sure. Factorio? Yeah hit me. Dota? Cyberpunk? Terraria? Stardew Valley? Lets go.
How do the console makers compete with that?
Switch 2 plays all* switch 1 games.
Xbox series plays all xbox one and even a bunch of xbox 360 games
Ps5 plays all* ps4 games
Every console has moved to essentially off the shelf soc so backwards compatiblity comes as a side effect
Once burned, twice shy. It’s going to take a few more generations to see how long they actually maintain that compatibility for going forward.
I suspect consoles will move to arm chips at some point. When they do, will Sony and Nintendo bother making a Rosetta type layer for backwards compatibility to play the games they’re selling now? I doubt it. We’ll see.
It wouldn't be the first time.
Steam/Valve is the IP already. It's the default goto for gamers.
Well, they have IP, IP2, IP2 Episode 2, etc etc.
Maybe some day they'll have IP3!
Does it?
I mean, it already has a library of games vaster than all other consoles taken together.
I hardly understand the headline. Steam machine is just a computer, and since it can be used for other stuff than playing games, then it can't have the cheap pricing of a console. Most consoles are sold at a loss, and the benefits are made when selling console-exclusive games. If you sell something at a loss, but users aren't forced to buy your games, then you're not gonna make any money. Hence, the Steam Machine (AKA GabeCube) is gonna be as expensive as a laptop (or slightly less expensive because of the bigger form factor and lack of portability).
On top of that, the base OS can't run a ton of games that run on console, because it runs in the way of kernel anti cheats (think: battlefield, call of duty, valorant, league of legends... the biggest games basically), while consoles are guaranteed to run most AAA games.
So with all that in mind - while I appreciate what Valve is doing a lot - I don't think it'll win the "console generation". I hardly see how it can even be called a console. It's just a PC, and that's how they call it themselves.
> Most consoles are sold at a loss
You're thinking of 'back in the day.' The original XBox's video card was worth more than they sold the entire system for, and the PS3 was a complete beast of computation (even if not entirely inappropriate for games...)! But in modern times (PS4 gen onward) consoles have become relatively vanilla midrange computers designed with the intent of turning profit on the hardware as quickly as possible.
The hardware cost of the PS4 was less than it's retail price from day 0 [1], and they began making a profit per unit shortly thereafter. Similarly the PS5 also reached profit per unit in less than a year. [2] XBox models from the PS4 gen onward are conspicuously similar as well.
[1] - https://tech.yahoo.com/general/article/2013-11-19-ps4-costs-...
[2] - https://www.theverge.com/2021/8/4/22609150/sony-playstation-...
PS2 and PS3 were price-competitive with stand-alone DVD and Blu-Ray players (respectively) at launch.
However, Switch is another console that sold for more than component and manufacturing cost at launch.
But most of the cost that needs to be amortized is R&D.
> PS3 were price-competitive with stand-alone Blu-Ray players at launch.
We got a PS3 at home for this very reason, needless to say my brother and I were ecstatic.
Tariffs/inflation/everything has raised the unit cost to the point that they're probably close to running a loss again sometimes on the latest gen consoles.
> I hardly understand the headline. Steam machine is just a computer, and since it can be used for other stuff than playing games, then it can't have the cheap pricing of a console.
I don't understand this train of thought. It absolutely can have the cheap pricing of a console, as long as Steam is the default store, and the majority of users will use the console as-is and buy games on Steam.
Let me give a quick analogy: Google paid Apple 20B USD just to be the default search engine in Safari, even though users can easily change it. Defaults matter. The vast majority of people are not highly technical users who customize everything in-depth and seek out alternatives. The vast majority of people just use whatever is the default.
The main problem I see is that if this is any cheaper than it's hardware, people will buy 100s of them and stack them in server racks for CI runners or whatever. Generating only losses for Valve and making the hardware unavailable to gamers.
It needs to either be at market rate or locked down to only be useful for gaming.
I don't think they could possibly make it cheap enough for that - especially once you consider all the money being wasted on RGB/Bluetooth/a GPU you won't use.
Messing around with weird consumer hardware in a datacenter context isn't exactly attractive. If all you need is some x86 cores, an off-the-shelf blade server approach gets you far more compute in the same space with far less hassle. Even if the purchase cost is attractive, TCO won't be.
The RGB costs maybe 2€ to add, the bluetooth chip is maybe 50c.
There are already small PCs without a GPU for around $200–300, and this will cost at least 2-3 times that. Valve already comfirmed, that the pricing will not be 'console like' and would match entry level PC. And PS5 is $500.
It happened to the PS3
The PS3 was weird. It had a unique architecture that made it especially useful for HPC in an era before GPUs were useful for that purpose. The CPU and GPU in the Steam Machine are not particularly high-end.
And I think that was part of the reason it was one of the last consoles sold for a loss.
Does it have IPMI? Does it have ECC ram? Racking Mac Minis is a painful enough, this form factor is less rackable than that. If you need to physically adjust the form factor per device, whatever you could've saved will be immediately lost in labor.
Orgs racked PlayStation 3s back in the day. If it’s subsidised hardware it could be worth it.
you don't remember playstation clusters?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PlayStation_3_cluster
that said, practically buying hundreds of them should prove to be quite difficult.
The PS3 was uniquely powerful, compared to its x86 peers. It wasn't just cheap - it provided the compute of 30 desktop computers in the space, power, and price envelope of one.
I think the limitation on server gear these days is electricity price vs compute, with the hardware price being an up front investment but not dominating the lifetime cost. At least at this end of the price range - it's a consumer GPU, not an A100 or anything.
Iiuc, unlike Sony’s PS3 (which were bought and used like this), Steam is the unique distributor so it would be easy for them to not allow (or make really difficult to) buying thousands of machines.
(Or they could sell it everywhere for higher price but the Machine would come with a non transferable Steam gift card.)
> It absolutely can have the cheap pricing of a console
Valve hasn't committed to a price yet, but they told Gamers Nexus that it'll be priced less like a console and more like an entry level computer (i.e. more expensive than a console).
Weird statement, because I can search for PS5 pro & see $750 price points, and entry level computers have been far far cheaper. Cheaper than Xbox series X at $650. Getting pretty solid laptops for a bit under $500 has been possible for many years now.
But "entry level computer" has a very broad interpretation available. Could be higher for sure.
Do those computers play games competently? I doubt they play them as well as the PS5 or Series X. We aren't in the days where integrated graphics instantly meant sub 20 FPS on any game no matter how simple, but I still wouldn't throw any recent triple A game at even new-ish computers with integrated graphics and expect them to perform all that well. They'll play Rocket League, Stardew Valley and Minecraft just fine, and maybe that's all they need to do, but a Steam Machine that can't play tomorrow's title roughly on par with current gen consoles seems like a losing bet unless the price is equivalently lower.
Yes. There's a peer thread below this one with more examples, but in general the biggest (and most relevant) cost you're looking at with a new computer is the video card. And a PS5 level video card is the RX 6700 XT which is like $200-$300. If you're willing to purchase second hand you can go substantially lower.
I suspect most of us are of a vaguely similar age, and when "we" were growing up, PC gaming was ridiculously expensive. A new gaming PC was thousands of dollars and then obsolete within a couple of years, leaving you constantly checking new release 'minimum system requirements.' It was quite painful and a big reason I (and I suspect others) migrated to console gaming. But now a days? I have a relatively old PC and never even bother looking at spec requirements - it'll run it, just fine.
I used to budget the bulk of my yearly tax refund for a PC upgrade of some kind. A bit over $1k every year. Something was always due for a replacement in an endless treadmill of avoiding total system obsolescence.
Now, shit just lasts forever. I upgraded from a 1st gen i7 920 _this year_ into some mid-range Ryzen 5. I'm still using the 2070 RTX I bought over 5 years ago to power the HTC Vive and a 1440p monitor; with this new CPU the gfx card is finally getting a workout and has become the bottleneck while also giving me a massively better experience.
I'm tempted by the 9070 graphics cards but honestly, I just don't need it. I can tweak settings on any AAA game and get ~50fps of real frames and I'm just fine with that. I probably won't upgrade the graphics card until I pick up a dramatically better display device that requires it. Maybe the Frame will push the issue, maybe it won't.
The Steam Machine uses a dedicated graphics chip, similar to a discrete AMD RX 7060M. Laptop chip sure, but a stone's throw from integrated graphics. These Machines will be able to keep up.
I assumed they meant an entry level gaming computer, not something with potato-grade integrated graphics, but I agree it's vague.
You can build an entry level gaming computer for under $400 easily. Here [1] is one example (parts list/link in the description).
[1] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vecR26Nz_YA
That build uses a 13 year old CPU from AliExpress, there's no accounting for taste but I think most entry level builds are aiming a little higher than that. Some newer games won't even try to run on a CPU of that vintage since it doesn't have AVX2 support.
It was released in 2016 and does support AVX2. In general what matters when building a decent rig is aiming to balance performance to optimize against bottle necks. He demonstrated the system in various modern games, for instance running Delta Force at 4k/120FPS. And the CPU was scarcely getting touched - running at around 20%.
You can spend a ton of money on a bleeding edge CPU and see 0 performance gain in almost all cases, because basically no modern games are CPU limited, or even remotely close to it, so you're sitting there with your overpriced CPU basically idling.
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I think many people are out of the loop on PC costs and performance. The days where you needed some $1000+ bleeding edge rig to even begin to play the latest stuff are long gone. Since this thread is on consoles - an approximate PS5 equivalent video card is the RX 6700 XT which is like $200-$300, and that is, by far, the biggest expense.
> It was released in 2016 and does support AVX2
My mistake, I missed off the important "v4" when looking up the model. Embarrassing.
Gaming tends to adjust to consors, and we're nearing 6 years of gen 9 consoles. expect any "entry level gaming" computer to either be portable or competitive with the $600 price point I can grab at any major retailer.
Otherwise, sure. I can build a potato for $300 and i will probably enjoy Silksong just fine. But at that point why not buy a non-gaming laptop?
The $400 system linked above can run modern games in 4k/120FPS. And that was far from some search for the most efficient price:performance build, it was just the first thing that came up on a quick search. If one is willing to do things like buy a refurbished hardware and assume you already have an OS, you could easily bring that down to $300 and maybe even start pushing towards $200.
Gaming has just gotten so absurdly cheap, but most people's mindsets are stuck in 15 years ago, when it was absurdly expensive and consoles were really the only way to help keep it to a relatively reasonable, and stable, cost. In modern times consoles will generally be price competitive for about a year, but then fall off as hardware prices decline, yet their retail sticker price generally stays the same.
On top of this now a days just about everything also comes to PC as well, so one of the biggest arguments of the past (console exclusives) is no longer valid. Even Japan is finally bringing their stuff to PC. And there also tends to be much more competition on PC, so rare will be the time that you need to pay $60++ for a new game. Though that is one area where many Japanese studios are still lagging behind the rest.
Older games at medium settings, or shooters at low settings sure. If that's your compromise for frames then a relative potato can still play it. I'm not sure I call that "modern" in the same way something God of War Ragnarok is "modern".
>Though that is one area where many Japanese studios are still lagging behind the rest.
Its a different model. They aren't trying to sell millions of copies to report engagement and sales, so they want to lock in the smaller audience they have and get as much out of that. Nintendo style. That's why you'll see the larger public studios like Square Enix and Capcom doing western style, generous sales so their sales calls can be "we sold 20% more YoY from new releases". Koei Tecmo, not so much. And Sega seems to straddle the line depending on the franchise.
Delta Force was released in January of this year. He was running it at 4k and 120FPS in medium. If you're willing to go for 60FPS or 1920x1080 I'm certain he could have it running in ultra or whatever at 60FPS. And that was on a less than $400 PC. Similarly he was also playing CS2 (released late 2023) in medium 4k at what seemed to average around 90FPS.
For contrast most PS5 games are going to run at 1080p at the highest, which is then upscaled to 4k output, and generally capped at 60FPS.
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I think Japanese studios are simply mispricing their games. Shin Megami Tensei V is a game that could probably be quite big on the PC but instead has less than 3500 reviews (as a ballpark for sales) because of a price that's way outside the peak point on the supply:demand curve. It also has almost no regional pricing adjustments - like $50 in India and Vietnam, $40 in China, etc, for a game may as well have a label saying 'please pirate me, I don't want your patronage.'
In classical advertising it was believed that lowering the price of something was subconsciously associated with a lower quality/brand damage in the consumer, and they're probably still under this school of thought. But I think at this point it's largely obsolete, certainly in software. People, in general, just don't pay $60 (or anywhere near it) for games on PC anymore.
Steam machine is barely at base ps5 level in performance
I didn't say it "will", I said it "can". And since pricing is not announced yet we have no idea what they will do in the end.
Sega can also come back and announce a Dreamcast 2.
I'd rather work on likelyhoods than dreams.
Defaults matter at scale. And as for scale, the Steam Deck has the most generous estimates at 7 million. For a side hustle that's great. For trying to compete with the scale of other consoles, that's not enough.
Hardware is very hard to break into. You can't treat it like software and expect to dominate.
It’s like android. You sell pixel at relatively high price but create a wave of other with cheaper alternatives, so you end up make money from being default store.
Laptops have lots of components that the Steam Machine doesn't have. The screen, keyboard, touchpad, cameras, microphones, speakers, battery, et cetera are all fairly small costs, but they add up. Plus using a Linux-based OS instead of Windows automatically knocks around $50 off the price because the price doesn't include the cost of an OEM Windows license.
I don't think the Steam Machine will be priced lower than a PS5 or Xbox (unless Valve is willing to burn money in exchange for market share), but I think that it'll be priced significantly lower than an equivalent-spec laptop (which would be in the $600-800 range based on the fact that the Steam Machine has an "AMD RDNA3 28CUs" GPU, which according to Google is roughly equivalent to an Nvidia RTX 4050, laptops containing which are priced around $600-800).
> Laptops have lots of components that the Steam Machine doesn't have. The screen, keyboard, touchpad, cameras, microphones, speakers, battery, et cetera are all fairly small costs, but they add up. Plus using a Linux-based OS instead of Windows automatically knocks around $50 off the price because the price doesn't include the cost of an OEM Windows license.
Yet's all the mini PCs I've come across are more expensive than their laptop equivalent
Because it's also about the demand, and how much you can mass produce them to reduce the cost
The 'AMD RDNA3 28CUs' is likely to be the 7600M, as all the major specs are the same (power draw and clocks is lower, but given that the Steam Machine is not a laptop, it probably will have more headroom for that).
I mean, Valve built this with the profits, at least, in no small part with the profits from selling games, DLC, and gacha skins on their storefront which has many many competitors too bozo-brained to run their stores as well as Valve does.
If any company has a business case for “we’ll sell the form factor at a loss with our store preinstalled” now it’s Valve, especially if they want to make the hardware only to prove the viability of the form factor, and especially since they already have been selling on platforms they don’t own.
Are you assuming that nobody who buys a GabeCube is going to buy a game on Steam ever again?
Is it perhaps more likely that users with a convenient box attached to their TV might want to buy more games from Steam?
Now this might be difficult to track, but stay with me. Valve makes the GabeCube. Valve owns Steam. Sales from Steam go to Valve. Users with Steam hardware play a disproportionate amount of games bought from Steam. See where this is going?
There's absolutely no difference. You can run games from other stores on a GabeCube, but most people will play Steam games. People who play more games buy more games. Just like people who mainly play Xbox buy more Xbox games.
I guess you're right, even though it's possible to change the gabecube into a workstation and use it for work, never gaming, it's really unlikely it'll ever be a significant proportion of the buyers.
Since they have the steam deck, they also probably have enough data to back their new hardware strategy
Very few consoles were sold at a loss. Some certainly were, like the fat PS3. But that was the exception, not the rule.
More relevantly, none of the current generation (ps5, xbox series, switch 2) are sold at a loss. They don't have large margins, but they are sold above cost.
The Taiwanese computer manufacturers won't be phased by thin margins; that's their modus operandi.
Microsoft testified under oath in court that they lost money on every Xbox sold prior to the current generation.
Sega lost money on every console prior to exiting the market.
Nintendo sold various consoles at a loss (Wii U).
The PlayStation 1 through 4 sold either at a loss or break even.
You're listing the losers in the market, the ones that had to drop prices to make sales. The real volume sellers weren't generally sold at a loss. Most Nintendo consoles were never sold at a loss. Sony often sold at a loss in the first year or so, but their redesigns made them profitable, and the vast majority of sales happened after redesigns. Moore's law was responsible for a large portion of the profits from hardware sales.
Okay. That doesn't conflict with their point. "No one had to sell at a loss... Except every non-market leader" only proves their point.
>, but their redesigns made them profitable
No one says consoles always sell at a loss. They are sold over 6-8 years and price drops are pretty conservative (until last gen where they ceased to be). Every conse eventually becomes profitable, but not in the years where they sell the most.
> but not in the years where they sell the most.
Nope. Take 1 example, the PS3. It lost money in 2007 & 2008, but became profitable in 2009. They sold 16 million PS3's in 2007 and 2008 out of a total 87 million. So approximately 20% of PS3's were sold at a loss.
And the PS3 is perhaps the console that was sold at the biggest loss at the beginning due to the horrendously expensive Cell chip.
It's kind of moot, anyways. The discussion is about the consoles of 2026 competing against Steam Machine. The PS5, Xbox Series X|S and Switch 2 are all currently being sold for positive margin.
The ps3 was certainly a unique case, because despite selling at a loss it still wasn't a competitive price. The infamous "599 USD" now translates to 950 dollars today, so that really shows you how utterly expensive it was (when the PS5 pro just needed to price hike to $800).so it coming down in price for consumers and manufacturers helped it immensely.
But I do believe that was a unique case. Consoles don't typically "come back" later in life. The vita later on didn't. The Wii U and Xbox one didn't. The dreamcast sure didn't. Sony's big turnaround should be praised, but not accepted as a norm of business.
Every console that sold over a hundred million consoles had over a decade of solid sales.
Those seven consoles significantly outnumber the 50 consoles that didn't.
Even the PS3 didn't sell 100 million units. Relative flops like the xbox one or the wii U are insignificant fractions of console sales.
So, 4 consoles?
Yes, I'm aware on how consoles are monetized. They take a loss in the first few years and make up for that with software sales, which they take a 30% cut on.
I'm not dispelling if the model isn't profitable, I'm simply stating that the hardware is historically sold at razor thin margins early on, if not outright a loss (until this generation)
> So, 4 consoles?
as I said, 7 consoles.
> They take a loss in the first few years and make up for that with software sales, which they take a 30% cut on.
Some consoles took a loss in the first 1-2 years.
> until this generation
Nope. The early generations didn't sell at a loss. Atari 2600, NES, et cetera weren't. That practice started with PS1 / XBox and ended with PS4/XBone.
>as I said, 7 consoles.
4 consoles 2 handhelds, and a hybrid (switch). I have no clue if the gameboy and DS were actually sold at a loss. These were pre-smartphone devices sold more like toys, so I can see them being manufactured for very cheaply in a pre-smartphone era with minimal peripheral requirements.
> That practice started with PS1 / XBox and ended with PS4/XBone.
Okay, fair enough. Atari and NES were very expensive for their time. Nintendo had a few generations to itself to revive the industry and I'm thankful, but I'm also glad their blunder ended up creating competiton in the market.
It means the cost of hardware+dev was higher than the cost of sold consoles
It does not mean that a device was sold cheaper than its own hardware
Basically, you have r&d but that is out of the topic
It's strange how neither you nor seemingly any of your replies have heard of the Steam Deck.
Valve sold the Deck at a loss that GabeN himself described as "aggressive and painful," 3rd party estimates put it at $150/unit for the base model.
I see no reason to believe they won't employ the same strategy for the Machine. If I can lodge my own bet, I think they'll price it somewhere between a PS5 digital and pro.
> I see no reason to believe they won't employ the same strategy for the Machine.
They have already said its gonna be priced like a computer and not a console. [1]
[1] https://youtu.be/bWUxObt1efQ?si=KCNHtUt1fGqkqlOn&t=58
An "entry level" computer which could mean anything. The first thing I did after the announcement was put together a micro atx PC with similar specs on PCPartPicker and came up with $800, so I consider that the ceiling.
Assuming they can bring costs down at scale and subsidize a bit, I don't think undercutting the PS5 pro is unreasonable.
> An "entry level" computer which could mean anything.
Perhaps but I don't feel like Valve going out of their way to specifically say that the steam machine will not be priced like a console leaves a ton of room for interpretation. With the current state of the industry & tariffs I would be shocked if its under $1000 USD.
A similar spec laptop from ASUS with a 7600S is $988 on Amazon right now, and it comes with a screen, keyboard, mouse, battery, and Windows license.
I'd be shocked if Valve is so out of touch they would kill this thing with an unwarranted price tag, but I guess we'll see.
"Id be shocked if Valve is so out of touch they would kill this thing with an unwarranted price tag"
It happened a decade ago. Wouldn't surprise me.
My bet is it will be similar to steam deck. The starting specs will be somewhat comoetitve to a PS5 Pro but with huge compromises (in Steam Deck'Deck's case, flash storage). A model that competently competes with a proper gaming oc will probably be 1000 or so.
Valve got popularity in the handheld space because everyone else except Nintendo gave up in terms of consoles. That plus seeing the handheld PCs from china pop up showed ample opportunity. I'm not sure the same will apply here.
> It happened a decade ago.
The Steam Deck shows they learned every available lesson from that endeavor. Why would they retread mistakes they've already proven they know not to make?
> The starting specs will be somewhat comoetitve to a PS5 Pro but with huge compromises (in Steam Deck'Deck's case, flash storage). A model that competently competes with a proper gaming oc will probably be 1000 or so.
The specs are already public, the only thing we don't know is the pricing. RTFA
>RTFA
Okay
>TL;DR: The Steam Machine's specs are on par or better with the PS5.
So, a ps5 pro with huge compromises? What did i miss here? Comparing a console to a PC isn't apples to apples so just looking at raw specs won't give us the full picture.
>Why would they retread mistakes they've already proven they know not to make?
Because they think the road is different today, with more people willing to follow them this time.
You can take the wrong lessons from success and catastrophically fail next time. Gaming is rife with that trend because of failed experiments, being too early to market, or completely misunderstanding what consumers resonated with.
A console is really just a PC with the word “console” tagged on the side of it. It's more of a branding exercise than a proper distinction. The only real difference is you boot up the console and it takes you straight to a game library.
As for the range of games available, it's got a lot more indie titles than console does. One rather hopes it will inspire game developers to develop more Linux-compatible anti-cheat solutions, or just host Linux versions of the game on separate servers, but I won't hold my breath. I've honestly never got the point of anti-cheat myself, it doesn't seem to work in most games. I've long thought there exist much better solutions to cheating than software ones. The simplest would be to permit cheats in the game's base servers and allow players to scan their ID (á la Online Safety Act) to access servers with a higher degree of moderation. A permanent identity-based ban would sort out the problem much more swiftly than endlessly chasing hackers.
GabeCube gave me a good chuckle, thank you.
Is money still made from console exclusives? I feel like I see less of them these days. The biggest games are cross platform monsters, and the smallest are indie games.
Crazy to think that the Horizon Zero Dawns of the world would be propping up all of console gaming??
But maybe that’s why Xbox is looking to get out. And trying new monetization strategies (gamepass is on Roku or something)
In principle the consoles themselves and the exclusives are both loss leaders. Or, sold at cost, anyway. The actual money is made from the 30% cut on any third party game sales, and the online subscriptions required to play online.
Consoles are expensive. Once a consumer has bought one, they're likely to stick with it for the generation. This is why we have flame wars about them. Only a small minority has several high-end gaming devices.
Exclusives sold consoles which determined future revenues. MS messed up horrendously with both a worse console and meh exclusives.
An exclusive will sell fewer copies, so the console manufacturer will strike a beneficial deal to make up for it.
> think: battlefield, call of duty, valorant, league of legends... the biggest games basically
Do people actually play these on console? I think most people still use Windows for these?
Yeah, the fanboys are in bliss right now, but seeing this pre built cost 999 (and that's my most generous estimate) will bring them back down to earth.That would still be a good deal as long as the GPU is decent. But it's not "console killer" territory in the slightest.
I do look forward to buying the decade awaited iteration on the Steam Controller, though. Very underrated piece of tech.
> I hardly see how it can even be called a console.
Rather than focus too much on the technology classification, think of it in terms of extending the Steam platform to new markets. How many new people in the market for games-on-their-tv will at least consider a Steam machine. Even with the trade-offs you mention, my guess is quite a lot. And Valve doesn't care about making money on the hardware, they are already basically printing money.
For me, the big killer feature would be if this device is approved for modern media DRM. As much as I'm tired of streaming and its level of control over how I watch TV, it's still a decent part of my media consumption, but any Linux mini-PC I connect to the TV can only do low-resolution streaming from most providers. If the steam machine is approved for high-resolution streaming, it could totally replace the smart TV stack in most homes.
Yeah. This is why I threw that all away and simply pirate for my NAS. Im not watching much new media to begin with. and they make it hell, if not impossible, to stream a lot of older shows. And of I do find them I need to compromise with how I stream it, with what account, and where.
I just got tired of all VPNs, the DRMs, and trying to tune my network just to try and get a decent feed. Instead, map a network drive once, find torrent, save to movies file, and let Plex (or Emby in my case, for historical reasons) find the metadata.
If you pay £20/month you’ll get 720p. If you pay £0/month you get 4k original rips.
It’s just pointless paying.
Yes, I think one of the most important things we as consumers can do is flood the zone for companies like Netflix, Disney, and Apple and keep asking about native Steam Machine apps installed directly from the Steam store that support 4k streams.
But if more people didn't have locked down devices, the streamers would be forced to open up.
If Netflix can only get approval with Microsoft Edge or their app on Windows, with specific supported graphics hardware, I doubt there is much hope of that. They want essentially all the hardware and software locked down.
Won't happen. HDMI 2.0 only. This is due to HDMI forum blocking open source implementation in the Linux kernel with lawyers citing security risk
why is that a problem? if those companies don't give you options, you can pirate everything up to 4k just fine
Hmm there's a chance you simply need to make sure the Widevine drm is installed on your system
This doesn't help much. It will let the content load, but many platforms will limit you to 720p or even standard definition (gasp!!)
YouTube, for example, will give you 480p. For movies. That you bought. With money.
To win this console generation and outsell the PS5, Valve would have to sell 85 million Steam Machines (as of today, and likely need to sell 120 million by the end of the generation). About a 0% chance of that happening.
Looks cool, though
The Nintendo Switch also sold over 150 million units, and the Switch 2 has had a faster sales velocity so far.
Steam only has something like 140 million monthly active users, so moving that much hardware is incredibly far fetched.
I'm implying they'd win via a cultural victory TBH
Everyone is sinking culture on real time. So winning by throwing a bread crumb out is technically correct, but not significant.
I am up for a lego pyramid made of Steam machines.
Valve has the advantage of practically infinite backwards compatibility.
Console generations change every decade or so and the previous console gets abandoned. Anyone who buys a Steam Machine will continue to have access to the largest collection of video games in human history. Not to mention there are emulators for every classic console already and even the Nintendo Switch has at least two great emulators for it.
Surely the Steam Machine is in a newer generation than the PS5?
Its specs seem on par with the PS5 Pro, and this doesn't even have a price or a shipping date yet.
The PS5 is already about five years old, has had a slim release and a PS5 Pro. The PS6 announcement is probably a year away, with a 2027 or 2028 release.
Valve is launching a last-gen console, probably at a price that won't be competitive, right before the PS6 comes out.
I think Digital Foundry has expects the performance to be bit below the base PS5 in most cases. It has a new generation of CPU/GPU than the PS5, but less cores/ CUs. VRAM is also only 8GB, PCs generally need more than that to match PS5 settings.
Is console generation really a statement about performance?
Where does that leave e.g. Nintendo Wii, which is generally considered to be the same generation as the Xbox 360 or PS3, despite having not nearly the performance.
and do that while having none of the big multiplayer games
As the article says, "The only way that they could mess this up is with the pricing. ... I'd expect the pricing to be super aggressive." The price to beat is the $400-$500 price point of PS5 and XBox. I'm guessing Valve is going to have a very hard time matching that. We'll know soon enough.
All they have to do is market the fact you don't have to pay for online.
PS5 + 3 years of PS Plus = $740
Steam Machine = $700
Add/remove more years of PS Plus if the SM turns out to be more/less expensive.
If you add the fact that games on PC are usually cheaper and have sales more often then it's a no brainer, but that won't convince the FIFA and COD players.
This system won't run FIFA, GTA Online, Battlefield, Valorant or CoD, it's a nonstarter for many.
Sure you don't need to subscribe to PS+, but that's somewhat easier to swallow since PS+ gives you games with the subscription.
I'm still interested in this for playing older games but I have a Steam Deck and it still isn't remotely as seamless as my Switch or PS5.
> This system won't run FIFA, GTA Online, Battlefield, Valorant or CoD, it's a nonstarter for many.
That's largely known now but still a bummer. I wonder if anything will ever change in this area and if Valve will be able to pressure game editors or create an anti-cheat so good and for any platform to be able to change something.
Don't see why they'd risk it. They already had to reduce their cut just to attract players like Activision and Take Two onto their platform.
Also, making anti cheat on Linux feels like the most Anti-Linux thing to do. But I don't play many multiplayer games, so I have no skin in the game.
Valve can't even do it for cs2 on windows.
Steam Machine is just a PC. You can dual boot or use a VM or use Wine/Proton .
It can be involved but it's certainly possible
Why not? You can just install windows on it.
"Just", YMMV.
It has a custom motherboard for example, which may or may not be supported by Microsoft.
Windows works in SteamDeck, so I think it seems highly likely that Valve will provide the drivers for this device as well.
*yet
Plus a game catalog that stretches back some 30 years?
More like 50 years if you consider emulators (RetroArch is available on Steam).
It doesn't even need to be available on Steam to be fair. You can run whatever games you want. You could even run a Nintendo Switch emulator if you want
True. And that is the strength of the PC platform, its openness and being able to run whatever you want.
And +X years, because you could write your own games for it and install them without begging for permission from Valve.
>All they have to do is market the fact you don't have to pay for online.
All Sony and MS have to do it market that it can't play GTA6 at launch.
All Valve has to do is bundle it with Half-Life 3.
Or Fortnite, Genshin Impact, Roblox, Marvel Rivals or any other popular live service game. Which are the games most people care about now.
Roblox is playable thanks to the efforts of the VinegarHQ team who created the Sober wrapper
They don't even necessarily have to beat the PS5/Xbox. I already own the former but sometimes lament not being able to play the many, many PC exclusives out there (or at least nothing released in the past 10+ years since my daily driver laptop has poor specs). Just recently I was wondering whether one of those all-in-one Lenovo desktop boxes would have decent enough specs to play current-gen PC games at halfway decent settings, and my guess is that they don't, but I don't want to go through the hassle of building a PC and definitely don't want a tower with a huge footprint.
Turns out the Steam Machine is exactly what I'm looking for.
I bought a steam deck to play Age of Wonders 4. Briefly got sucked into playing a Skyrim again.
Exactly. I have both PS5 and Xbox One X, but I still connect my Steam Deck to TV to play Hades II because the game hasn't come out on those two consoles yet.
They told press that it wouldn’t be console pricing and would match entry level PC. I think it’s going to be $800
800 is probably already too much for the compromises you need to make. You happily make those compromises for a handheld due to its nature. But a desktop is a harder sell.
Is that the price point of those anymore? I see 550 ish for the base ps5 with a disc drive and closer to 750 for the pro.
I don't expect them to match either in volume but it seems like microsoft is already backing out of the dedicated console hardware space tho
I think that realistically, Valve probably only need to be on par with the top of Sony’s offering hardware wise. The ability to have Steam integration on the machine (including the large amount of subpar but very cheap games) will prompt at least some movement. I’d say $800 is probably the high-end of reasonable for price point. I can certain say I’d rather just buy my kids a StreamBox than have to deal with them want full capability PCs.
I agree. Steam's prices on sales are still mostly unmatched by consoles.
Even if it is a "pricier" PS5-like machine, I'd still buy it and I bet I'd make up the difference in less than a year with just the sales games (including older games I can't play on either console).
I think most of the critiques for this are from people expecting this to be aimed at PC gamers.
I don't think it is. I think it's aimed at people that actually DON'T want to bother with building, buying, upgrading PCs, but still want to play cheap games, older games.
To this day, I can't make my PC turn on with a controller (and I've tried). Making a PC wake up as fast as a Steam Deck from sleep? Impossible.
Those little things will all add up to make this a very nice option for the non-hardcode PC game crowd.
Valve is going to steal a lot of users from console, mostly Xbox. Not PC Gaming enthusiast.
Totally. SteamOS is everything here.
Hard disagree with that claim. The truth is anyone with a PC and a steam machine basically already has a Steam Machine. Steam doesn't need to sell at a loss like most consoles. Their only real goal is to prove that there's nothing a console can do that a PC can't do.
$699 (maybe 799 for a more premium model) seems to be a good compromise given what it would take to build a sufficiently similar PC while being close enough to the PS5/Switch. Xbox is practically dead.
I don’t think it needs to compete on price directly, if it can deliver the polish of a console. It can also play up the angle of being a full blown computer.
I think the steam machine will be 999 given they said "priced as a pc". I hope to be wrong, because at 700 it's insta buy for me.
You can tell XBox is cooked because Halo was released on the PS5.
With the specs these devices have I don't think it's far-fetched to assume that pricing will be competitive. Maybe they will charge a bit extra if they tout all the extra stuff you can install on the Machine vs Xbox as a selling point, which they are kind of doing, to justify a slightly higher price point.
> The only possible flaw I can see is that the strap it ships with doesn't go over the top of your head. If this ends up being an issue in practice, somebody is going to make a third party strap that just fixes this problem
Not even a third party: https://youtu.be/b7q2CS8HDHU?t=380
> the option of an ergonomic strap that you can hook onto the top, hook onto the back, to take more weight off the front of your head.
https://www.pcgamer.com/hardware/vr-hardware/steam-frame-spe...
> There's an optional ergonomic accessories kit for the Steam Frame that adds an extra strap for your head and a pair of straps, one for each controller. These added controller straps are reminiscent of those found on the Index and seem like a reasonable investment, if the price is right.
I don't really understand the early enthusiasm about the Steam Machine, and I happily own a Steam Deck.
"It's on par with a PS5!" You mean the thing that was launched over 5 years ago (exactly!) ?
We don't know its price yet, which is the most crucial detail.
If it can play all games on Steam _today_ at 4k60fps (even with FSR) it means I have about 570 games on my Steam library it can play in perpetuity.
Even if I play 2 hours of each game, it's still a bargain =)
And because this is Valve and I've had a stellar experience with my Steam Deck, I'm pretty confident that future games will run on it too. Most likely gamedevs will add special "Steam Machine" performance profiles like they've done with the deck. And there will be a "Steam Machine certified" checkmark on Steam.
> I have about 570 games on my Steam library it can play in perpetuity.
You presumably have other hardware that can also play the 570 games too? You’re spending more money on hardware that can do the same job your current hardware can do.
Yes and no. I have a Steam Deck and a Macbook M1 Pro, my previous Windows PC is from 2010, it ran Overwatch 1 at about 30fps on a good day and managed through multiplayer Valheim games during covid lockdowns =)
I _can_ play something like CP2077 on the Deck, but it's not exactly a worthy experience, it's better suited for stuff like Citizen Sleeper or Rogue Trader
Not OP but I happily throw money at companies that help Linux adoption and more open hardware grow. I bought the steam deck, used it for a while and gave it to a nephew (I'm not big on mobile gaming), I've bougt the Pinebook, Librem 5, and will happily throw Valve more of my hard earned cash for enabling a more open ecosystem. We need to vote with our wallets or Microsoft, Apple, Meta, et al will gladly remove your ability to own your hardware.
In my younger years I built gaming pcs. Old me has no time for that. I console game because it respects my time and I can play any major release. I’m interested in the new offering from steam as a way to play indie games I miss on console with a machine that doesn’t look out of place next to my tv.
This, plus I also find that the fact that I'm not going to spend random time thinking about upgrading my console, looking at components, etc, also respects my time (and money).
I don't play games much anymore, so maybe I'm not the right person to respond.
Why would anyone ever buy a console again? This thing has the ultimate library and works on all platforms.
Steam seems to have played the best game of chess in the industry. Sony and Microsoft were battling over exclusives and acquisitions and ways to screw over customers. This came out of left field and looks a million times better than Xbox or PS5. It has people's entire libraries on it, and the games are cheap and portable. There's no lock down. No funny business.
I almost want one. I'm excited about it and I don't even think I'd play it.
In the era of mobile games, hardware really isn't a thing anymore. Even AAA titles are niche IMO given the cost to play them at full settings. All that matters now are the exclusive titles. You refer to this derisively but really that's what made the nintendo switch, clearly the weakest compared to the PS5 and even the steam deck in the last generation the clear winner.
And do you think PC has less exclusives compared to PS5 / other consoles? How many games on Steam has never been released on consoles vs the other way round?
By that logic I'd expect this one to completely dominate.
Exclusives are intentional, those are just games that they never bothered porting
So, we should define terms. To "dominate" should mean to sell more than or make more money than the competition, which may include taking market share from the competition. I don't doubt valve will continue to make money in an absolute sense, it already does and this likely doesn't change that.
Steam already has a monopoly in the PC space and has the "exclusives" you talk about, essentially games that never were ported to the PS5 or the switch. Thus, in order for the steam machine to take market share from the other consoles, you a) have to take console share from those players, likely by pressuring those developers to port from the consoles to PC. That could be something, but no doubt that pressure already exists, as steam already exists. I don't see how the steam machine changes that. In fact, the opposite situation exists which is why steam makes so much money, as you said. To actually dominate, it can only happen after situation c) below.
New customers or dollars cannot come from people who have a PC and can now forgo using their pc for gaming (by neglecting to upgrade their pc to keep up to date to play new AAAs), as the assumption here is they are selling the consoles at a loss (which may not be true, we'll have to find out). That if anything, is essentially a soft form of b) cannibalisation. So that isn't really "gaining market share" more so than it's changing the means of consumption of the same thing. Moreover, if they choose to sell at a loss, then I only can imagine this leading to actual cannibalisation from their existing PC customers as there isn't really any actual profit being made here.
So finally, the only route they have to expanding their player base in my mind is c) new gamers, that is casual phone players or other non-enthusiast gamers who don't really play games but will be willing to buy a console. This is how the Wii excelled in its generation and how the switch won the last one. Here, it all comes down to price and thus how much Valve is willing to sell at a loss or otherwise subsidise the steam machine using steam proper. So, this to feels like their only real route to "dominating."
As I alluded to above, a) can only happen if c) happens, as Steam already has the mindshare it does and thus it already has the same allure to developers as is the case today, and those developers are still pursuing exclusives with the PS5 and the switch. Thus, if certain developers or games are stuck on the switch or the PS5 with current conditions, they won't move enmass to the steam machine unless c) happens first and thus their calculus changes. And of course, selling at a loss means that they also run the risk of only b) occurring if they don't gain enough new players fast enough to offset the loss from selling consoles.
That leaves them not selling the hardware at a loss, then I don't really know. It's just the steam machine will likely be north of 700 usd if you're not subsidising it, and like the steam deck it will be a novelty item they may or may not make a profit off of. That I wouldn't call "domination", although they may make money overall so I don't doubt they will end up happy.
You can't compare mobile and console players.
They are literally two different markets.
I know they get put together because of "videogames", but a gamer that plays on a console is not going to play mobile games, except those that are ports of console games onto phone.
There are exceptions of course.
I have a family of 4 (and both me and my wife are gamers) and a pc is expensive. A steam machine is a great compromise.
I'm also in the market for a new secondary pc, since the other one is old: the steam machine is exactly what I want with gaming primary and also do general computing.
I use the nvidia shield to stream games, but it has issues at times depending on the game being streamed.
The enthusiasm is based on:
- do you have a tv and a couch
- do you have games in your steam library that would benefit from the extra power and the setup?
If you've had steam installed through a number of christmas sales then most likely yes lol
> Yes, Steam Machine is optimized for gaming, but it's still your PC. Install your own apps, or even another operating system. Who are we to tell you how to use your computer?
That makes me very happy.
They announced 3 products guys. The first time Valve has counted to 3.
Half Life 3 is coming.
Been a decade since I've seen a Half Life 3 joke on the internet, thanks for this
Maybe try Half Life Alyx :P
Careful now, you're gonna jinx it
[flagged]
> The big thing I want to see in practice is their implementation of foveated rendering. This beautiful hack abuses the fact that human eyes have the most sharpness and fidelity at the exact centre of your field of vision, whereas your peripheral vision is abysmal at it. This means that on average you only have to render about 10% of the frame at maximum quality for it to feel like it's running at full resolution all over the screen.
> This should make the fact that the Frame is using a "weaker" CPU/GPU irrelevant. Games should look fine as long as they render the slice that needs to be in full quality fast enough.
It's not foveated rendering, it's foveated streaming. The CPU/GPU should easily be able to handle decoding video, whether foveated or not.
What they're saying is that they might have a foviated rendering solution in addition to the foviated streaming solution we know about, and we'd like to hear about it.
Implementing foveated rendering is pretty much up to the game developers.
It is for games running natively
I generally like the OP's posts, but I really don't buy their argument. If anything, the nintendo switch winning the last generation is a great example of how hardware isn't always that important, the game library essentially is what makes a console win, and in as much as the hardware enables the breadth of the library, that's all that matters.
Like the steam deck, I don't know who other than power users who will buy it. I love the openness they will bring to the market, but that doesn't mean they will win.
I would totally buy it, if it's not silly expensive. I am not a power gamer or whatever, at all.
I absolutely do not want gaming mingled with my primary PC usage, work and stuff. For reasons of OS choice, data integrity, security and distraction management/work-play-separation. Can't over-emphasize the importance of this. But to me there is no question PC gaming is superior. However, I can't justify building a full-blown "gaming PC" just for gaming.
Some years ago, I got a PS4 Pro just to satisfy my occasional gaming urge and I love the console form factor, no tweaking and press power to play ergonomics. I wish I could install some mods for old games, tho, and the PS4 library is super limited compared to Steam. I also feel sad, the PS lock-down means unnecessary hardware obsolescence. And I hate Sony's rent seeking for online services and would never buy PS Plus.
I know quite a few people in my social sphere who are exactly in the same spot I am, who would love exactly what's shown with the Steam thingy. It will all depend on the price.
As much as I love hacking with various things, there are reasons why I buy "closed products" for myself and for my family. I like to do hacking when I want it (with ESP32, rpi etc). I don't want to be forced to serve as a free IT support guy anytime someone presses a wrong button.
When it comes to gaming consoles, I want them to serve reliably to my family. The game console must be fun, optimized for best experience and should not break. Will that be possible with an open platform where anyone can install anything?
Unfortunately buying closed systems hasn’t stopped me from being IT support:
- “why can’t I play online with EA Sports?”
- “I can’t log into Roblox!”
- “why can’t I see my sisters world in Minecraft?”
- “I’ve lost my Fortnight skins!”
- “why does Roblox keep disconnecting me on my phone [when Roblox servers go down]?”
- “Why can’t I play this game [without updating it]?”
- “this game update takes too long to download!”
If there’s one constant in life: it’s that doctors get nagged by friends for free diagnosis, mechanics, electricians, carpenters for free repairs, and software engineers for free IT support.
The constant in life is that there are some people for whom you do things without expecting financial gain.
Cost want my point. It’s that if you have skills then people will call upon them.
I’m also not making a point about whether that’s a good or a bad thing, before you make that assumption too
> The game console must be fun, optimized for best experience and should not break. Will that be possible with an open platform where anyone can install anything?
Yes, SteamOS is just that. A system that is easy to rollback if you mess things up. And you have to go deep under the covers to mess things up (switch to desktop mode, disable readonly system partition, modify wrong files).
Valve should really focus on improving the polish of the steam store, as that abomination of a (react ?) frontend breaks often in very surprising ways.
SteamOS as a console system is close to a 9/10. As far as polish of steam app/store and the ux, a fair 7/10.
That would be great - but the last gaming console that I've experienced that with has been the switch.
I recently turned on my old xbox one - literally impossible to play any game without a massive patch, debugging os software issues etc. If the steam machine just works out of the box, it'll already be miles ahead of most of the current state of consoles.
If you buy a Steam Deck and just use it as a handheld console and never select "reboot to desktop mode" it will act just like a closed console. The exceptions compared to something like a Switch:
- For some games (usually those oriented around keyboard and mouse) you need to go and select one of the community control configurations, and maybe tweak it a bit. For example, I needed to do this with FTL to make it easily playable
- Occasionally (and I've basically had to do this once, in my 2+ years with a Steam Deck) you need to go and select a different Proton version to make it work. ProtonDB tells you what to do
This is all rare though. The vast majority of games have a control setup for using a controller, and they definitely do if they've ever been released on console. And they will Just Work.
and then you have to download a 100GB patch each time you turn the thing on anyway, by the time it ends installing my time slot is gone
Agree. By "best experience" I also mean "don't force me to wait". But my console doesn't do that. Some online games may require patches before playing for better (anticheat) or worse reasons but thats a fault of the game supplier - not the console supplier.
> I don't want to be forced to serve as a free IT support guy anytime someone presses a wrong button.
In my experience this doesn't really end whether it's a closed product or not. If you're wiling to give free IT support, people will take it, as it's likely way faster/better than calling whatever support may or may not be offered by the company.
> Will that be possible with an open platform where anyone can install anything?
I can't see why these have anything to do with each other? If your brother goes out of his way to install a bunch of stuff and breaks everything, how can you possibly blame the system and not your brother?
I want a console that is brother-proof. He should not be able to break it by just pressing buttons
My nephew changed the DNS settings on his PS5, some things stopped working, and took me quite a while to figure out what he had done.
Lock it down some more. Why would a user need to change their DNS ever anyway?
Custom DNS server? In my experience you can't really lock down the network settings on consoles because anyone playing might need to reconnect to wifi
One other semi-unrecognized advantage Valve has over consoles is their generous return policy. I’ve bought many games on a whim knowing if I don’t jive with it I can safely get a full refund. Contrast that with my Ps5 where my 2 year old managed to smash buttons while I was tied up on a work call and bought COD for $69 bucks… no way to refund it and I’m not a fan of shooters. Basically Fd on that one.
What about backward compatibility?
Try to run the original mario 64 on the switch without having to buy it again
I’ve made dozens of returns without a single issue on Steam.
I made one return on the PS5 in a similar situation, and it was a painful ordeal.
My experience is otherwise. I returned one game and got banned from buying other games for a month - during a sale, so I missed that sale and was out of sync with friends for a bit.
I don't give a shit for the money, but fucking my social gaming time was unforgiveable. I still use Steam, but don't fucking trust Valves return policy.
Is there anything more to this? I’ve returned dozens of games that I didn’t end up liking and the only consequence I’ve faced is that games with trading cards don’t start dropping them until 2 hours of play time, which I think is completely fair.
There most certainly is. This is not Steam’s default refund procedure in the slightest. I’d be willing to bet they were abusing the system somehow and support caught them red handed.
I'm not sure how to abuse the return system. It's not like I pirate anything from Steam. And I used the return process through Steam - exactly once, as mentioned above. If I wasn't meant to do a thing, then I would think the process should not let me do it. But I returned it in good faith, for a game that managed to make me rage quit in less than an hour - I like to think at least that I am usually patient but I wasn't putting up with that shit.
If a Valve employee with rights to look into it is reading this - I'd love to know what I did so wrong. But given that human explanations from modern software based corporations are non-existent, I will assume I was treated as per their returns policy.
And the outcome has worked in Steams favour. I buy for (account) life now, for better or for worse. As previously mentioned, I don't care about the money so much as the social.
But my decision making process to drop the significant money required for Steam hardware will assume the return/warranty is worth precisely zero.
So, Steam is planning to sell these at a loss, but isn’t planning to lock out third party OS?
What’s to stop people buying them to use for completely unrelated use cases?
I guess it depends on how big the loss is… if it is small, it might not be really worth it for most people; but any larger, I wonder how sustainable this will be.
What non-gaming use cases do you imagine people might use these for?
For normal computer use (reading email, watching videos, doing spreadsheets), there are much cheaper and better options available. If somebody wanted a Steam Machine specifically, it'd be for the GPU.
If you needed a lot of GPU compute (for AI or blockchain or whatever), it'd be cheaper to buy or rent a dedicated server with Nvidia H100s rather than buying dozens of Steam Machines.
So the only potential use cases are those that have a significant but not too significant GPU requirement. The only ones I can think of are gaming (which is the intended use case), video editing, and 3D rendering.
Video editing is less of a concern because neither Adobe Premier nor Final Cut Pro will run on Linux (to my knowledge), so you might as well buy a Mac that runs both of those very efficiently and has decent hardware.
So we're left with 3D rendering. If people want to use Steam Machines to render things in Blender, I say "let them", and I assume that Valve does too.
> What non-gaming use cases do you imagine people might use these for?
Media box under your TV? Right now I don't have a lot of options that also don't inundate me with ads.
Sure, I can build one, but if Valve can put this out at a price that makes me go "Nah. Not worth building it myself." that's a win.
You can run media from a potato. This will be at least 5x the cost of a cheap mini-PC. And you can't forget power draw. The Steam Machine has a 30W CPU, and I'd guess about 60W RAM which would add up to something like $120+ annually where a mini PC would cost closer to $7. 5 years later and the Steam Machine has eaten it's cost in power. Assuming it costs $500 like most consoles, you are looking at a total 5-year cost of $1100 where a mini-PC would be $100–200.
You can get 100-200€ Chinese mini (or micro?) PCs with an Intel N97/N100 CPU that can do this perfectly.
No need to buy an almost 1000€ massively overpowered custom gaming machine for that.
Couldn't you use a Raspberry Pi or a mini PC for this?
Sure? But RPi's are anemic and not cheap while refurb mini PC's are $400.
So, there's quite a bit of pricing room.
I think the mini PCs they're talking about are more likely to be N100 systems or similar that are sub 100 dollars new. Significantly less anemic, and their hardware media decode (which is well supported by software) is more than sufficient for realtime 4k playback.
> Steam is planning to sell these at a loss
Just a random blog's guess.
> What’s to stop people buying them to use for completely unrelated use cases?
Nothing. But it doesn't mean that Valve doesn't benefit from it. Valve wants the whole gaming scheme to shift toward SteamOS. Like Google wants the whole web browsing to shift to Chrome, even you can use Chrome for stuff unrelated to Google.
I think the explanation is that people love Valve beyond reason, so a vast majority will just use Steam on it.
Plus, Steam is bordering on a monopoly for PC gaming anyway, so, even if they install another OS, a user is probably going to end up on Steam.
If that's what happens, then I'm buying one of these right away for sure. I mean, I use steam a lot, but I certainly won't be locked in their "SteamOS". Maybe they are betting that most users will be too lazy to change the defaults and stick to SteamOS (which might very well be the case, and they have a hint of this thanks to the data they have on the Steam Deck)
What's stopping someone from using a steam deck for running emulators, SuperTuxKart, and pirated games? This isn't their first rodeo
I doubt the steam deck is sold at a loss.
You can install Windows (or Bazzite, or whatever else) on a Steam Deck as well.
Did they say they are selling at a loss?
Valve haven't said that, but the article randomly claims it.
I don't think they have, but it's the business model of most consoles, to be able to be very affordable. So since the headline is implying it'll do better than consoles, it's implying it'll be sold at a loss too. But honestly, I find that article BS.
no modern console is sold at a loss this is silly speculation
I think this article makes one assumption that isn't correct. "This means that even though Valve will be selling this hardware at a loss..." From the reviews I have read, Valve is not planning on doing this. They are not doing an Xbox type of deal where games are overpriced and console is cheap. If I am not mistaken, I got this information from the LTT review where they talked with Valve about this directly.
Honestly, if I was Valve, I wouldn't just sell it at a loss, but I would also bundle some store credit.
Getting new people into the Steam ecosystem should be worth losing a bit through the machine sales, with long term thinking.
They are not going to win the console generation by releasing a machine that cannot play Call of Duty, Battlefield, Valorant, Fortnite, PUBG, Apex Legends, FIFA, Madden, League of Legends, Destiny, Genshin Impact, Forza.
Maybe this is less of an issue now we’re in the digital era of console games but one of the biggest aspects for me is that if I buy one of these new machines, my existing library is just there. No starting from scratch or worrying about backwards compatibility. It’s a PC that has everything I need from the get go.
The story was the same with the Deck. Granted it took a little while for many games to be fully supported but the transparency from Valve on the store pages about compatibility was great and is in a far better state now.
I just dock my Deck but it was still worth it for the reason you say. Just Works and lets me play my decades-old Steam collection on my TV with the ease of a console.
When I buy a game (even an old one), I always had to choose between Switch and PC. But now PC has most of the advantages of the Switch, and I trust my Steam library will persist and be easily playable more than Switch (although Switch 2 compat was great! to be fair)
I think it will largely come down to price and DRM support from the AAA studios for multiplayer gaming and media apps. On the former, at $400 with one controller it will probably sell well, at over $600 I think more people might choose a PS5 instead.
With regards to DRM, it doesn't have to be as restrictive as Windows' versions, but there needs to be some cooperative effort with the game studios, and the media companies as more people expect to be able to stream Netflix/AppleTV/HBO etc. from these devices on top of gaming.
As gaming only, the most popular games tend to have a multiplayer aspect and thus far haven't been cooperative with functioning under Proton... there are solutions, but it's a matter of getting studio buyin and the effort to make it happen.
Without these, it will be a niche product and may still sell well, just not gain anything near what the consoles achieve in terms of sales.
They’re not gonna win the console generation, this marks the end of the console generation.
That and intermediary consoles like the PS5 Pro are blurring the lines and adapting to the popularity of PC gaming.
Related ongoing threads:
Steam Controller - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45905703
Steam Machine - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45903404
Steam Frame - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45903325
It won't outsell Quest 2, much less the real consoles, not in the next half decade anyway.
i see a lot of complaints about certain games (windows / kernel-anti-cheat) not working. Consoles have always had exclusive titles. Windows also has them now via this anti-cheat stuff. This changes litterally nothing.
Also, you can even install windows on the box. it's one of its selling points actually... if you really want to...
kernel level anti-cheat is generally not even needed, so perhaps those companies will now consider rolling proper anti-cheat themselves rather than third-party rubbish that no one asked for.
What i also like about this console development is that it might open the door to other smaller players creating consoles in the form of mini-PC with linux and a gaming layer on there. maybe there will be (oem?)partner for valve that make more beefy machines, machines with alternate OSes (windows + skin) etc.
its a different angle that will open up many things hopefully. make it less exclusive market between essentially 3 parties.
Win the console generation in what sense? In outselling the PS5? The Switch 2? I have trouble picturing it being cheaper than either.
It's the PC games library that will be the catalyst for winning.
On a PC, for $15 a month you can get a HumbleBundle subscription and get 5-6 Steam games to keep yours forever (unlike Playstation Plus "free" games). Plus 3-4 free games/month from Epic (an option, since Valve said they won't lock the hardware). Plus 3-4 games from Amazon Prime Gaming if you are a subscriber. Plus a ton of other discount websites.
Compare this to the average cost of a PS5 title and the walled garden of the Playstation Store. Not to mention that your PS5 library probably won't be playable on PS6.
Yes, AAAA games will still be expensive, but for everything else the Steam Machine will give consoles a run for their money. Cost-conscious gamer are very likely to switch.
> It's the PC games library that will be the catalyst for winning.
How does the Steam Machine affect this at all, then?
Attached my old gaming rig to the TV to run Steam on it and it is a better experience than any consoles I have (being a gaming nerd I have everything from my old Atari 2600 and most mainstreams systems since then up to PS5).
This is good news to hear Valve going in strong for the console market.
same, I just attached my old laptop with nixos + steam + jellyfin, everything running on KDE and it's been super smooth so far.
This is really cool. I still play my series X on occasion but tend to prefer the experience I get from my Saturn and Dreamcast when I load a game and it plays without needing to update. Every time I turn on my Xbox or PC with steam/GOG I have to wait for an update of some kind.
> Who are we to tell you how to use your computer?
I'm buying one just for this sentiment alone.
But what about the price?! 15 year old kids are never gonna drop 800+ on this nerd box if they can play fifa for, what, 400-500? And THAT'S the demographic to win if you want to break up Big Game.
The demographics of gaming is shifting older. Valve is clearly running towards where the ball will be.
The steam deck is also available for that 400-500 price point.
The Steamdeck has sold like 4 mil units in 3 years. Handheld PCs are an incredibly niche market.
So no Half Life 3? (':
Rumor has it that it’d be released with the VR set in 2026 ;)
It'd be a good plan. Make HL3 a VR game since you built VR experience by making Alyx, take it to the next level by launching your own VR headset, everything is perfectly made together and HL3 launch would be as big if not bigger than GTA, and you optimize it for your own hardware.
HL3 is most likely not a VR game as Valve said they aren't working on a first party VR title (plus data mining seems to confirm). Plus they already have Alyx as the masterpiece, and it was already made with their own VR headset in mind: the Valve Index.
Maybe HLX will have some kind of VR interaction possible, as they want to push technology further with each Half life game.
Valve also said something like "ARM gaming won't be a thing for us for a very long time", but seems tides can change :) I wouldn't put too much weight into any publisher/developer saying what they aren't doing, even if they were working on HL3, they'd keep that under very tight wraps.
I mean, there are plenty of info available on the status of HL3 (code named HLX) and all point to it not being a VR title.
Also I don't think ARM is really a thing for them, even now. They want to support running software on the headset, and sure why not enable compatibility layers to play some small games, but the end goal is clearly streaming from a PC. Maybe if some good ARM cpu hit the market they will pivot, but up until recently "ARM gaming" meant mobile phones.
> there are plenty of info available on the status of HL3 (code named HLX) and all point to it not being a VR title
Anything besides rumors? AFAIK, there is absolutely zero official information beyond the rumor mill.
> Also I don't think ARM is really a thing for them, even now.
I mean, then you're just looking the other way intentionally, they're quite literally adding support for ARM now, https://www.gamingonlinux.com/2025/11/codeweavers-launch-a-n... That's not something you do on a whim, it's a calculated step towards something.
And they're clearly setting up the new VR head to both do standalone gameplay for people without PCs, and to do streaming from PC.
None of the Steam hardware seems to have only a single use in fact, all of them are multipurpose, not sure why the VR headset should be any different, especially when what we know points to it also being multipurpose, quite explicitly so at that.
> Anything besides rumors? AFAIK, there is absolutely zero official information beyond the rumor mill.
If you count datamining as rumors, then no, nothing else. But the data mining is real data coming from valve so it's more than just "somebody said...". You can find lists of all the references to HLX found in other games, and what that tells us about the game.
>I mean, then you're just looking the other way intentionally, they're quite literally adding support for ARM now
Yes, I'm not looking the other way. But ARM is not their bread and butter and won't be for a good while. I'm fairly certain they are pushing this because they can, not because there is a strategic importance to supporting ARM. Had they been able to use a x86 cpu in the Frame, I'm sure they would have.
Plus, ARM gaming implies games made for ARM running on steam, like on mobile phones. This is "just" an emulation layer to play x86 games on ARM. Just like Apple is doing with the Game Porting Toolkit, and just like Microsoft is doing with their Windows on ARM. Are they really pushing ARM Gaming, or PC gaming or ARM?
I wish... https://www.uploadvr.com/valve-isnt-currently-working-on-a-n...
:(
Wasn’t that Alyx?
Perhaps Alyx walked so HL3 could run.
They announced 3 devices. 3! HL3 confirmed :D
Not a chance. As much as I respect all the work Valve has done for gaming...this doesn't understand the market.
PC gamers will play on their PC. Couch gamers will have a PS5 or an XBox. So who is this for, couch gamers that don't have one of those? Or PC players tired of playing on a monitor?
Don't get me wrong, it's cool, and I'm definitely the target market but feel like that's pretty tiny.
Most couch gamers want their GTA or Call of Duty, which, if I read correctly, this will not run.
I am very much a PC gamer turned couch gamer. I have a capable PC sitting next to my Xbox Series X. The user experience is worse, as everytime I turn it on soemthing needs updating, I cannot control all of Windows through my gamepad. This ticks a lot of boxes for me. Might start witht the Controller first.
Two of us! As mentioned, I'm probably part of the target market and will probably check it out.
It's not useless by any definition, but will it really outsell the PS5? Because that is, to me, what the headline is implying...
I don't think it'll outsell any current console. Not even the anemic and dying Xbox Series X.
I think that appropriately priced and supported, it will put Valve in a strategic position to actually compete in subsequent console generations as a real player. It's a little behind in terms of specs, but with as slow as uptake of this generation has been, I expect that developers will continue to target base PS5 specs for another six years at least (PS6 supposedly landing in 2027). Then they can drop their Steam Machine 2 in 2029 or 2030, hitting base PS6 specs at an affordable price. It's been a winning approach for Nintendo.
Just to add I'm also in this boat. We have a ASUS ROG NUC in our living room and it's a pain logging into Windows (cant find an actual tutorial to skip that works) .
It's been a great entry way into gaming for my wife (lot's of cozy games) and I also play a few games from my steam backlog (Halo, Hades 2, etc). I don't feel like we're in the minority for what a couch system is used for but maybe.
The largest hurdle for steam in the living room so far has been controller support or lack of couch co-op games.
This is often overlooked, but I'll bring this up:
When I buy a Steam console, I have more than 1000 games available for that console the moment it lands in my living room.
If I buy a ps5, I have 0.
> Really, the only thing that can go wrong with any of this hardware is the price.
The chances of any of the Steam Machines taking the market share of any of the current generation consoles is so vanishingly miniscule, that I don't think it can even compete against any of them.
It more or less competes against the Linux ecosystem of System76 machines or the Framework computers.
But against consoles? No dent at all in their market share.
>I think it's safe to say that Valve is about to win the next console generation.
For that they need to outsell the Switch 2. 10m units in 6 months.
Good luck with that.
Nintendo is in its own category in which the other competitor is also Valve. For now Nintendo is winning there.
I love great graphics but , Nintendo carved a nice big niche out for themselves by recognizing the constant drive for best graphics is a bit of rat race.
Nintendo has a tiny library.
Steam does not.
Nintendo has Mario, Zelda, Kirby, Donkey Kong, Starfox, Pokémon, and a few other less super famous and internationally known IP franchises. The core games and their spinoffs make more games than most children can reasonably expected to play through childhood and early adolescence. That the machine then collects dust doesn’t hurt Nintendo because they already sold it.
Yes Steam has huge library (my ‘want to play’ list is over 100 titles at this point) full of games of all genres, qualities, and niches. But Nintendo has more than enough to do what they have done for years, i.e. sit tight on their beloved IP and dole it out at varying levels of quality on strictly low end hardware and watch their earning go up.
Steam Deck has a tiny install base.
Switch 2 does not.
I'm mostly a PC gamer but let's be real here.
Though, to be fair, my kids steal my Steam Deck from me more often than I try to get the Switch from them. The family share features of the Switch leave a lot to be desired.
People rarely buy a platform for the platform, they buy the platform to do the thing they want to do. A game is just a genre of software.
It is far, far better to have tons of high quality software available for a platform, than to have an amazing platform, but a limited choice of software.
Very true, but that tiny library happens to occupy like 80% of the biggest IP.
They have enough first party games which only release on their hardware that people are willing to buy a Switch for nintendo games, and another gaming device for everything else.
Sad part is that I would be willing to pay a substantial mark up to be able to play some of those first party titles on my PC, but since my kids have a Switch I just settle for using it. So even if I don’t think I’d buy a console just for their games, I’m gonna end up buying it anyway and Nintendo still wins.
Many times what happens is that people buy the Switch for Nintendo games, but since third parties also publish there they just buy games there anyway.
Funnily enough, I own a Switch and a PS5. I mostly buy and play on the Switch while the PS5 main function is getting covered in a thin layer of dust.
Or the many people like myself who are willing to buy a Switch for Nintendo games and that's their only console.
I'm on a Switch and will not move because of the "Game Key Card" bullshit where you have a card but still don't get the files you need to play them game.
However, Pokemon guarantees a certain amount of Switch 2 sales--Pokemon ZA sold about 6 million units.
That's not an argument in the Steam Machine's case as you have the same situation there (even worse because you can't resell your games).
You aren't wrong.
However, the single digital service that hasn't killed my digital library at some point is Steam. Games that I bought many years ago are still fine. Sony, Microsoft, and Nintendo all killed digital games that I bought.
That having been said: I've transferred a lot of my purchasing to GoG. Steam doesn't get the benefit of the doubt anymore.
>Sony, Microsoft, and Nintendo all killed digital games that I bought.
No? All stores are still online. Some don't allow buying new games anymore (DSi Shop, Wii Shop, PS3 store for example) but redownloading still works.
The author fundamentally fails to understand the attractions and benefits of console gaming systems in the first place.
If they want to capture the console audience its better be priced like one too and not prevent me from playing multiplayer games due to Linux and anti cheat software not playing nice
Anything above $600 is DOA and that's with accepting the fact that the most popular games will be not available on the platform
Personally, I am very much over paying Sony and X-Box a monthly fee to "play games online" in 2025. I bowed out of the last console generation, but I would be up for a small form factor multimedia PC that made may Steam library accessible on my TV.
Unless it's reasonably priced who is the market for this box? If it's at 499 - 599 then it's probably selling well but at 799-899 I'm not sure who would buy it. If it's your first computer you still need more gear like screen, keyboard and mouse etc.
People who want to play video games would buy it. While us enlightened Computer Intellectuals may appreciate that there is no difference between a console and a PC, the majority of naïve computer peasants will much prefer something with the word “console” tagged on that boots straight to a game library. As for the keyboard and mouse thing, there's this other announcement they've made called the “Steam Controller” which addresses that issue.
I'd maybe buy it to get access to games I want to play on Steam that I can't get on PS5 to play on the sofa in my living room.
It's a small box, it can sit next to the tele without looking awful, and if I just need to get a controller, that's fine too.
I’m not a gamer and not into consoles, but I’m watching Valve and SteamOS from the sidelines with a lot of goodwill. It’s great to see more people buying hardware that runs on Arch — that alone is a good thing. Still, something about this feels a bit too good to be true.
By making it immutable out of the box, VAC enforcement because vastly easier and third-party multiplayer anti-cheating kernel rootkits are replaced by “attest that you are unmodified”, which Steam Linux and macOS/tvOS/iOS/iPadOS can do — but not Windows 10/11, because sealed boot functionality is behind Microsoft’s enterprise annual subscription fee paywall. This positions Steam Linux as the monopoly provider of console-gaming Linux, since no one else is doing sealed attestation Linux at scale, and opens the door for multiplayer AAA games to target Steam Linux for their day-one releases as a competitive equal to Xbox/PS5/Switch and as a better defended console platform than Windows PCs. The modifications described by OP are still possible, but won’t be compatible with multiplayer anti-cheating enforcement, which is perfectly fine; boot to sealed for competitive gaming, boot to custom for single player, everyone wins except Microsoft’s Windows division. (If Microsoft hadn’t shot off their foot with Windows 10, they could have simply enabled sealed booting for all 10/11 installations and remained competitive as a gaming platform, but I think they’re done with that business.) Nice to see my predictions pan out and I look forward to buying one :)
Immutability doesn't provide this on it's own. You can load any custom immutable image you want. What game devs want is full boot chain attestation where every part of the OS is measured and verified untampered with, and then to load their own spyware at the highest level.
The only way immutability helps here is you could have two OS images, the users own customisable one, and a clean one. Then when you try to load an anti cheat game, the console could in theory reboot in to the clean one, and pass all the verification checks to load the game.
I am, indeed, assuming that their immutable image can generate attestations chained appropriately. If not, it’s a catastrophic business error on their part to put in all that work, and I don’t consider that degree of failure likely. Definitely curious to see if they can enable the chain on existing Steamdecks or not.
Immutable images provide many benefits that are unrelated to DRM. The main one being that the entire fleet of Steam Decks/Machines are all in a known state. Updates are a matter of pushing a new OS image, you don't have to worry about migrating files, conflicting configurations, strange user changes. And if an update fails, the bootloader shows a screen where you can boot a previous OS image that worked.
It's like docker images for the whole OS. As far as I can tell, the Steam Deck does not have secure boot or any kind of attestation enabled. They have been very forward in marketing it as an open and free system you can do anything on. The hardware does have a TPM that is seemingly unused currently, not sure if it supports some form of secure boot.
> They have been very forward in marketing it as an open and free system you can do anything on.
Attested sealed images and Open and Free systems have no conflict with each other. Mod it all you want; sure, it’ll generate a different attestation than the shipping sealed image, or if your customizations turn off attestations and/or secure boot, none at all. You do you! Source code releases will never include the private key used to sign them, just as with all open source today, so either the OS’s attestation will be signed by Valve or by you or by someone else. It takes me about sixty seconds to add my own signing key to my PC BIOS today and it would not surprise me to find Valve’s BIOS implements the same, as I’m pretty certain this is basic off-the-shelf functionality on Zen4/Zen5. But, regardless, Free/Open Source is wholly unconcerned by whose release signing key is used; otherwise it wouldn’t be Free/Open! The decision to care about whose release signature is live right now is the gaming server’s decision, not Steam Linux’s, and that decision is not restricted by any OSS-approved license that I’m aware of.
Secure boot attestations plus sealed images do enable “unmodified Valve Linux release” checks to be performed by multiplayer game servers, without needing the user to be locked out of making changes at all. This is already demonstrated in macOS today with e.g. Wallet’s Apple Pay support; you can disable and mod the OS as much as you wish, and certain server features whose attestation requirements require an Apple release signature on the booted OS will suspend themselves when the attestation doesn’t match. When you’re ready to use those servers, you secure boot to an OEM sealed environment and they resume working immediately. This is live, today, on every Apple Silicon (and T2 chipped Intel) device worldwide, and has been available for developers to use for years.
Attestations are, similarly, already available on all AMD devices with a TPM today, so long as the BIOS to OS chain implements Secure Boot — not requires, but implements, as there’s no reason to deny users unsigned OS booting once you’re checking attestation signatures server-side. As you note, it remains to be seen if the Steam Box will make use of it. If they do, it coexists just fine with full reputposability and modifiable, because you can do whatever you like with the device — and, correspondingly, each game may choose to require an unmodified environment to ensure a level playing field without kernel or OS modifications.
It would be a lost opportunity for them if they were not the first fully open OS with a fully secure multiplayer environment that prohibits both third-party cheating mods and third-party DRM rootkits. VAC becomes as simple as a sysctl, and patches are still welcome. Open source for the win, and one step further towards the Linux desktop finally overtaking residential Windows, and thr ability to play console-grade multiplayer without the proliferation of on-device software-only hacks? Yes, please.
(Note that manufacturers who use Secure Boot to lock out device modifications are not in-scope here; that choice has no effect on attestations. Secure Boot is “the OS booted had this checksum and signature” with HSM backing, so that the software can’t lie. It is extremely unlikely that Valve would demand that the OS booted be signed by Valve. That would be no different than Xbox/PS5/Switch, and they’d be leaving a massive competitive advantage over tvOS on the table: device repurposeability.)
There's hardware level (on a separate device) ability to capture video and send key/mouse now. Impossible to be detected by anticheat. https://wiki.sipeed.com/hardware/en/kvm/NanoKVM_Pro/cua.html
Yes, but that works just as readily on consoles as it does PCs, so it doesn’t affect immutable Steam any more or less than any other gaming steam. Sealed protections are still valuable regardless!
It affects console too, but watch game publishers disable linux support, blaming cheaters while producing graphs that don't support their arguments. While console packs and cheats are rampant, and their game servers even being hacked during competition.
If the status quo doesn’t change, then you’ll be right to have claimed here that the status quo you’ve described won’t change. But that would be worse for all of us. Besides, Linux is an excellent platform for modding games in realtime, no matter what their charts show — so certainly the sealed-attestation stuff would deny them a plausible reason to deny Linux. If Microsoft offered sealed Windows for free, they’d deny unsealed Windows as fast as humanly possible, just to stem the tide of software cheating. The next couple years will be very interesting :)
I totally agree with you, and I hope the status quo will change. But I'm still skeptical after the Steam Deck success where many games enabled anti cheat, but some did roll back like I said previously.
Attestation could help, but I'm not sure if it goes in the spirit of what Valve tries to do with their OS. The system is open and you can easily access the desktop (it's a first party feature) and thus do what you want. Maybe with a separate verified boot state without desktop but the user experience would not be great.
And in the end, like you said, they'd run to only support sealed attested systems if they could. But cheats have evolved past being run on the computer running the game. Some use DMA or are in between the keyboard/mouse and the usb port. Consoles also have their fair share of cheaters. None of those would be solved by attestation.
Valve has shown recently that it's possible to fight cheaters without kernel AC or attestation. It's just a bit more difficult and intensive so other AC providers won't go the same route.
For good reason, anticheat on linux are basically useless. Not that cheating isn't rampant on other platforms, but you don't have to leave the door open on purpose.
They are as useless on linux as they are on Windows. How many cheaters on the latest games with Kernel AC?
Not really. On linux you can just load your cheat as a kernel module and its undetectable by userspace anticheat.
On windows with kernel anti cheat you would need to find some vulnerable driver, sign your own driver, or use external cheats like DMA or vision based. This funnels cheat devs into using a few methods that anti cheat devs can focus on for detection. Is it perfect? Clearly not as there's plenty of cheaters anyway. But its much more effective than what these anti cheats can do on linux.
Precisely. And this is where secure boot + attestation comes in: making Linux able to prove itself as unmodded to the server, makes it a possible target for multiplayer game developers.
gaming *system
Related:
Steam Frame https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45903325
Steam Machine https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45903404
I just hope a 10' user-interface for the popular streaming services for Linux might come out of this. I switched away from Kodi as my STB exclusively because of how much a PITA it was to use streaming services from it.
Please win. This is the first system with the ability to stop the walled garden nightmares that are consoles.
It's even worse for their competitors than this acknowledges.
SteamOS on Arm (using FEX) is going to spawn a generation of £100 devices that can play lower end Windows games, stream from PC, and emulate every console from the PS2 back. It's huge.
You don't need Valve for that, Chinese brands like Anbernic, Ayn or Ayaneo are smashing the market right now.
What is the multiplayer cheating situation like on Steam games?
(Technology, demographics, popularity?)
"steam games", doesn't really mean anything. Most games are on steam nowadays. It mostly depends on the OS on which the games run. Games with kernel anti cheat: low cheaters population, runs on Windows but not Linux. Games without kernel anti cheat: low to high (think counter strike official servers) cheaters population.
Does anyone know if the foveated rendering feature of the Steam Frame depends on eye-tracking? Is it tracking the iris to determine the center of foveation, or is there some other trick to doing this?
Needs eye tracking and it's foveated streaming not rendering.
If Valve nails the price point, this could be a real shift and not just for gaming, but for how people think about "consoles" vs PCs
while I would like them to succeed, I'm really not convinced it will work. The steam deck is an unexpected success but I don't think it sold at the level of the nintendo switch. And more importantly it was providing something unique but the GabeBox will compete with cheaper and more established consoles on one side and windows PC providing a better experience with steam on the other side
Anyone familiar with how they're running x86 on a snapdragon? I'm more interested in that hitting your regular android phone .. think retroarch but you can play hades 2.
This is all I know: https://github.com/FEX-Emu/FEX
This exists already for Android with Winlator, GameHub, and others.
Steam Controller 1 wasn't good IMO and is now accumulating dust.
The main problem was the missing second stick. It was well built, but for game where a controller is nice touch pads sort of suck compared to a stick and for games where a mouse is nice touch pads sort of suck compared to a mouse. So the only real advantage a touch pad brings is in an environment where you can't bring a mouse. I really liked the extra back buttons. with two sticks that is where all the face buttons should be, on the back.
Somewhat related, but I enjoy the topic. Is how freakishly good the mouse is for FPS type games. If you asked anyone to design a purpose built controller for a first person game they would not come up with a mouse. But somehow despite all odds that thing designed for moving a cursor around the screen is the best controller yet for looking around. Probably something about the huge throw distance compared to any other controller.
It's the only controller I use (bar the Steam Deck's built in controller) despite owning plenty of other conventional controllers. Once you get used to it and make use of Steam Input's per-game customisation and mapping it works really well, especially if you treat it as a mouse-like input rather than conventional gamepad.
The only place it suffers for me is games that aren't coded to support simultaneous gamepad and mouse input, which you can work around by mapping the joystick as a keyboard input. Otherwise it's great.
Its an odd one; the v1 controller feels cheap and definitely isn't as high fidelity as a modern PS5 controller. It struggled to match the quality of contemporary controllers at the same price point. But the touchpads worked. They shouldn't work, they should be abysmal, but with a little practice they're fantastic.
The rumble is really weird.
I asked a coworker today about those and he said it's the only controller he cares to use at all, especially for FPS.
I don't know. I couldn't really get used to it, it has a weird feeling to it.
I still use mine for any driving or flying in games, the stick it does have is super accurate. And for watching movies its a great remote when you arent at the keyboard. If you turn the right pad to simulate a weighted track ball it is what I consider the best Dark Souls controller.
Whats the media experience like on SteamOS these days? Does it have built in support for media playback? I used to have Kodi running on PhantomOS but it was janky.
Isn't Steam Machine just a glorified PC? What am I missing? Can't I just plug my PC on the TV and install SteamOS on it?
It has CEC for a more seamless console like experience on the TV. You won't be able to do that with a regular PC.
Consoles win a marketshare by having games ported or developed for their hardware, improving experience.
What Valve offers is just one more PC configuration
If it doesn't play GTA 6 or CoD or whatever sports games are cool these days it won't win, but it sure looks interesting.
Steam has even added accessibility to their machines. Sure it's just Orca and ESpeak TTS, but I mean Steam Big Picture works.
Putting the steam machine in the same category as a console didn't make sense to me a decade ago and doesn't make much sense to me today.
We heard this literally with the previous steam machine lol
There’s no doubt they’re tee’d up to radically alter the landscape. But man they better have a truly plug and play, turnkey system if they want to compete with consoles. The steamdeck even after this many years is absolutely trash at going from handheld to docked (better the other direction at least) and is incredibly hit or miss when it’s plugged into a TV in general. I had to buy a special DP->HDMI cable that forces 1080p @60 to get it to consistently appear on screen docked (LG C1 for reference).
I am excited for the steam machine. But yeah, telling me it’s a more powerful steamdeck is super exciting in some ways and eyebrow raising in others unless they got some big SteamOS overhaul coming.
Most of the deck/dock screen issues are related to dock firmware and USBC display negotiation. The steam machine has built in HDMI and Display port which are presumably relatively bog standard.
This is the steamdeck official dock plugged into my LGC1, which is one model in a very popular line of TV’s, via hdmi.
The official steam deck dock seems to be fairly buggy, it's widely complained about. I've been using an Apple USB-C to HDMI adapter and it's worked perfect on every TV I've tried it on. Since the steam machines don't use USB-C video out this wouldn't be an issue.
That may be the case but “official valve hardware is buggy even after almost 4 years” is a troubling yet true statement when their entire pitch today was literally “check out our new hardware.”
I love my deck. But a smooth experience it is not. Up until idk a year ago…? Flipping from gaming mode to desktop mode or vice versa had a solid 50-50 shot of inducing a fail state requiring a hard reset.
Literally every USB-C dock I've ever used with any laptop has these sorts of issues.
On the flip side, I'm pretty confident AMD will be able to output to DisplayPort
Yeah but what laptop is trying to be a gaming rig on your tv via a separate $100 dock?
Random guy excessively overusing mango pics and making bold statements is definitely worth attention
This feels like Valve's iPhone, while the original 2012 Steam Machines were the Newton.
I don't think they're even trying to do that. But they will kill Xbox.
the problem with valve is that at least in mexico I have never seen a steam deck on display, while xbox, switch, playstation are everywhere and online the markup price from resellers is too high
Maybe a bit early to call it, but I'm hoping for it as well.
"At par with PS5.." comparing hardware specs with a console loved by millions and into year 6 of it's lifecycle. I'd rather play my PS5 titles on a PS5 or a portal than on the steam machine. Steam deck is dated, went with the portal and love it.
I think the hardest battle is going to be with anti cheat. The anti cheat that developers want basically requires dystopian levels of restrictions which are against everything valve has done on SteamOS so far.
Personally I'd love if we all just went back to playing on personal servers with your real life friends or people you otherwise trust. But I don't think this is would go over well with the average online gamer.
Hard agreement from me, but my 16 year old bricked his PC on Sunday trying to enable Valorant’s BS anti-cheat, secure boot required crap. He even knew ahead of time that he couldn’t enable it, but the pull of online gaming turned off his brain. I don’t think we’re gonna win this battle and the war is probably done as well.
If anti-virus software can function in user mode, anti-cheat software can too. https://www.theverge.com/news/692637/microsoft-windows-kerne...
We know, and the game devs know too. But Kernel anti cheat is not a solution but simply a marketing feature to make their users think they try.
Just seeing all the gamers requesting a kernel AC for CS2, saying VAC does not work; but now they have banned a lot of cheaters and seem to have less cheaters than the new Battlefield which has kernel AC.
That depends on Microsoft.
> I think the hardest battle is going to be with anti cheat. The anti cheat that developers want basically requires dystopian levels of restrictions which are against everything valve has done on SteamOS so far.
If anyone is capable of moving things along in this space, Valve should be it.
> Personally I'd love if we all just went back to playing on personal servers with your real life friends or people you otherwise trust. But I don't think this is would go over well with the average online gamer.
It's not the gamers that don't want this - although, yes, I do also want the option of matchmaking - it's the companies that don't allow dedicated servers, or shut down the servers after releasing that year's full-price version of the same game.
What restrictions are you talking about?
It was fine like 10 years ago
Something I haven't seen discussed at all is HDCP compliance.
Of course, games don't need that - I'd say that every game studio is aware that without streamers, you don't sell games, and streamers can't stream when HDCP gets in their way.
But for the use case of a home theater? PS4 and 5 as well as some Xbox varieties can do 4K Netflix [1], no issues. Installing Windows, I'd guess that's fine too. But Steam OS? Nope. Anything too "open" gets the boot, including Android if you dare root your device, Widevine L1 refuses to work as the TEE doesn't reveal the keys if it detects an unlocked bootloader.
[1] https://help.netflix.com/de/node/23888
[2] https://help.netflix.com/de/node/23889
FWIW, you do not need an unlocked bootloader to root an Android device.
Ive used my steamdeck much more than my switch 2, but I still can't play competitive multiplayers on the deck, so it is clearly a console and not a "PC gaming" experience
Year of linux desktop..I mean console.. . Confirmed?
what I wish this device had:
1) front speaker instead of this magnetic panel that is only for esthetic
2) wireless charging pad on top
3) home router functionality - just attach 4g modem to usb-a
4) matter hub for smart home
They could advertise you getting 7in1 devices for the same price:
- game console
- smart speaker like alexa
- smart tv (miracast, google cast, airplay)
- smart home hub for matter devices
- home router
- wireless charging pad
- mini home server (private cloud, home backup, vpn, pihole)
Then with software wish it could easily have app store like umbrel: https://umbrel.com
Love the enthusiasm but expensive versions of commodity products with last gen specs are not going to win that generation or the next one.
The largest hurdle that a Steam console will face isn't kernel-level anti-cheats or somesuch. The real problem is far more idiotic: platform exclusives. Console gamers stereotypically care that their platform has a game that others do not, I have no idea how the reasoning works, but exclusives are a major talking point for OEMs and gamers alike.
While PC likely has the most exclusives by a ridiculously large margin, it probably has the fewest AAA exclusives.
> I have no idea how the reasoning works
The reasoning works like this: I want to play that game.
hth
That does not, in fact, help. Exclusives not releases. Why care that a game is not accessible on a different platform.
This is another status quo improvement from Valve. Great job!
That said, I feel we're trading evil gaming monopolies for a less evil monopoly. I can only truly support Valve once they start actually selling games rather than game "licenses".
What I want is GOG's transparency and philosophy with Valve's Linux and hardware investments.
Releasing a box that cannot play any multiplayer or sports games is so silly.
So this will only play pc games?
Yeah, only millions of them
by not making a console
> Valve does nothing and still wins.
Who would have thought that not actively engaging in enshittification can be a secret winning recipe!
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SteamOS is handheld only right? What they need is a Xbox/PS alternative, you can plug in to a screen (tv/monitor) and optionally use a mouse/keyboard (valve has some huge FPS titles, like counter strike) for games that you cant play with a controller (usually competitive fps titles).
One thing that came out of the HTPC “wars” of the 2000s and 2010s was that mobile/handheld UI were more suited for the 10-foot interface, versus full-blown computers like Windows MCE.
They just announced exactly what you are asking for https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45903404
SteamOS is not a handheld. It is an OS. And did you even open the link?