Be Excellent To Each Other

http://store.steampowered.com/livingroom/SteamOS/




Sounds good!

What's a living room machine?

My xbox?
My telly?

I don't know, I thought I was being dumb and hoped someone would tell me!

The streaming idea's an interesting one as it means anyone with a decent spec gaming machine doesn't have to find room for the thing in their living room to be able to play 'full' games. It does mean though that (a) you need to have a separate PC of some kind that's relatively capable to run SteamOS which is obviously extra expense and (b) your network needs to be up to the job of streaming games in full res with no input lag or whatever to make this worth while. I mention the latter point simply because I've no idea what kind of bandwidth is required for that proper experience as I've never done anything like that, it's possible it's a total non-issue.

The idea of SteamOS as a completely separate platform that games will be targetted at I'm really not buying though. Developers already need to build games for Xbox/PS3/Windows plus potential other 'secondary' platforms (OSX, Linux, Vita, 3DS, WiiU, iOS, Android, etc) so who the hell wants yet another platform to build and test for? Especially when the majority of the people that would go in for this kind of thing are almost certainly going to have the Windows machine required to play games anyway. If we were starting from scratch in terms of PC gaming then yeah, some flavour of bare-bones Linux with no MS involvement would probably be a great idea; but we're not at that stage so getting the market share to get the adoption to get the market share would be so painful I just can't see it happening for them. Valve aren't idiots though of course so no doubt they see, or think they see, something I'm missing...

That's what confuses me. With a steam Os, you might expect to be able to play all your favourite games. But in 90%+ of cases, you won't be able to. Steam's greatest asset is its game library, which this totally fails to make use of. Weird.

Unless (as some have speculated) that its a very small box that plugs into the TV which is running this and it streams from your bigger PC elsewhere

They have also said there are multiple steam announcements this week and this is just the first

It seems to imply it runs on a smart TV or something equally small, there is no mention of having to buy an extra box or anything like that to run it.

I am not especially fussed as I don't have any "living room machines", but I am pretty interested to see what comes of it.

I don't get that from it at all and it seems very unlikely to me; you're going to need an actual PC of some kind here, something that can have a new OS installed on it.

So it's Onlive for the home, then?

Isn't that what the top left corner says ? run steam as you always did on pc?

So either it's a whole new platform, which is doomed in the face of next generation consoles, or it's for playing PC games on a telly, which also seems a shit idea since for the majority you would need to have a keyboard and mouse on your lap.

It's both: it's definitely a new OS in it's own right, some flavour of Linux as it says right there on the page, but one of the main features is streaming games from another machine running Steam (e.g. your Windows PC somewhere else in the house).

I don't think the controller thing's an issue as long as you stick with games that can be played using a controller; which is 100% of cross-platform games and a shedload of the PC exclusive stuff as well. I'd say it's definitely the minority of games you'd need a keyboard and mouse for. The only question there for me is whether they can get the Xbox controller running with it as that's what people tend to prefer but given that I can plug one into my Nexus tablet and it Just Works I'm assuming that's not a problem.

Reading through that page again it seems I, somewhat embarrassingly, missed this entire section:



So they're outright promising that 'proper' games are already being written specifically for the platform itself. I'm still sceptical but I'll be interested to see what these 'AAA' games are they're talking about.

Half Life 3. If they fancied setting the cat amongst the pigeons.

AAA games are from Liverpool.

Calm down.

That would certainly sell the thing and that idea's been floated for precisely that reason but (a) I don't believe Valve would be mental enough to release it for a single niche platform as they'd be leaving so very, very much money on the table in doing so and (b) I don't believe HL3 will ever see the light of day as it's been too long since the last one and the expectation is now such that no game could actually be good enough.

I'm just quoting this for the future.... There's no way that there won't be a Half Life 2.

I can't disagree with that.

Yeah, it would be funny, though.

Yeah... That'll be someone talking in my ear at work while I'm typing.

It's fair to say that my mind is elsewhere this week.

Streaming games takes not much bandwidth and virtually no power from the client PC, as Onlive proved. That works well with a 10Mb connection, so a 100Mb or 1Gb connection should be fine, and all the client does is display pre-rendered media, so it needs no power at all.

Of course, if games are coming out specifically for SteamOS then it will need a bunch of power. It's odd, because on they're trying to do two different things that need quite different boxes.

I'm presuming it's to drive adoption for the period when there's much less available natively on SteamOS and while people still have a big library of Windows only games. If they ever got to a point when all new stuff was coming out directly on SteamOS then you could just have a single machine but until then they need a 'bridge' of sorts and this is it.

I guess they're just counting any game listed as 'Linux' on the current steam page.

Your list is almost entirely stuff that already works on Linux and very little of it's what could be called 'AAA'. The quote right up there is:



So probably not.