Steam page shows 3 announcements coming

[smackababy]

Where did Valve say you have to stop using Windows? This is what I don't get, people are flipping out as if Steam on Windows is gone. It's not. It hasn't changed at all. What we're getting is a new alternative.

The problem is it isn't an alternative to Windows as much as it is an alternative for Valve to make money. If EA had come out and said "we are releasing a Origin OS based on Linux for gamers to get away from Microsoft's closed approach." People would be throwing a fit about how EA was trying to get your money and how evil they are.

This will fracture the PC gaming market if it gets any steam (lol pun). You will have less people on each server (because you know they won't play together).

And the real problem with Linux is driver and other program support. Gaming isn't going to take off if that Razer keyboard or that Logitech mouse doesn't work. And AMD and Nvidia driver support is awful.

I just see this as a way for Valve to waste money and resources that would be better going into what made gamers care about them in the first place: their games. Steam has only caused Valve to rest on yesterday's success because they don't have to produce anything anymore.

 

[irishScott]

The problem is it isn't an alternative to Windows as much as it is an alternative for Valve to make money. If EA had come out and said "we are releasing a Origin OS based on Linux for gamers to get away from Microsoft's closed approach." People would be throwing a fit about how EA was trying to get your money and how evil they are.

This will fracture the PC gaming market if it gets any steam (lol pun). You will have less people on each server (because you know they won't play together).

And the real problem with Linux is driver and other program support. Gaming isn't going to take off if that Razer keyboard or that Logitech mouse doesn't work. And AMD and Nvidia driver support is awful.

I just see this as a way for Valve to waste money and resources that would be better going into what made gamers care about them in the first place: their games. Steam has only caused Valve to rest on yesterday's success because they don't have to produce anything anymore.

Uh, people would probably welcome such an announcement from EA; not that Origin or EA has much of a following. From all appearances this is as much an alternative to Windows as any linux distribution. I sincerely doubt you'll have to run SteamOS at any point (unless of course you're building a bonafide steam box), that would be absolutely retarded. If someone can have steam on virtually any linux distribution, that's a very good thing.

No more than the mobile world is fractured, and if the games in question use steamworks servers I imagine they could be made to play together.

Driver support is a serious issue, but this could very well help it along if it gains significant traction.

I see it as more of a long-term strategy, much like Windows Phone. It doesn't have to take the world by storm, it just has to keep growing. 10 years from now we might all be playing our PC games on linux boxes and laughing at how Microsoft and gaming went the way of the Blackberry.

 

[flexy]

How do you figure? ANYONE can publish software to Windows without any input from MS.

NOBODY can publish anything to Steam without the approval of Valve. How is going to a Valve OS for gaming going to be an improvement? :hmm:

SteamOS, a free operating system

SteamOS, a free operating system

SteamOS, a free operating system

Not only is it free, it may get rid of the immense overhead Windows has.

 

[StinkyPinky]

Where did Valve say you have to stop using Windows? This is what I don't get, people are flipping out as if Steam on Windows is gone. It's not. It hasn't changed at all. What we're getting is a new alternative.

It's a shit alternative though. Why run this when you can just run Windows and have all the same games plus a million more? The only people that would switch would be people that have a bug up their ass about Microsoft. When I see these people I feel like I'm still in 1999.

 

[smackababy]

Uh, people would probably welcome such an announcement from EA; not that Origin or EA has much of a following. From all appearances this is as much an alternative to Windows as any linux distribution. I sincerely doubt you'll have to run SteamOS at any point (unless of course you're building a bonafide steam box), that would be absolutely retarded. If someone can have steam on virtually any linux distribution, that's a very good thing.

No more than the mobile world is fractured, and if the games in question use steamworks servers I imagine they could be made to play together.

Driver support is a serious issue, but this could very well help it along if it gains significant traction.

I see it as more of a long-term strategy, much like Windows Phone. It doesn't have to take the world by storm, it just has to keep growing. 10 years from now we might all be playing our PC games on linux boxes and laughing at how Microsoft and gaming went the way of the Blackberry.

They went about their strategy for conversion very wrong. If they had instead offered discounts in the fees for Steam for developers that released Linux versions or something to actually build a Linux library, it would make sense in 3 or 4 years to start a push. As it stands now, there is vritually no real support for Linux and Valve isn't going to magically change that. They are going to have to get consumers to switch (and how they give them incentives for that, who knows) and hope that driver support catches up, otherwise all of those that switched say "well, f that; it sucks" and go back to Windows.

 

[frozentundra123456]

Where did Valve say you have to stop using Windows? This is what I don't get, people are flipping out as if Steam on Windows is gone. It's not. It hasn't changed at all. What we're getting is a new alternative.

Yes, but we do not know whether that "new alternative" could someday become a required platform.

I have no problem with Steam OS, although I am not particularly interested in it, because my steam games work fine on windows on my desktop, and I have no desire to stream games or do multimedia stuff on my TV.

But WHAT IF, Steam decided to require their Steam Box running Steam OS to use steam? or what if they just decided to make Steam OS necessary to run Steam and charge for it?

You say it cant happen?? Apple did it and google also with google play. Microsoft is also trying to do it with win 8, but nobody gives a crap about their apps. This is probably an extreme example, because if we could not play games we have already purchased, there would be such a backlash that Steam would suddenly become the most hated company in history. I could see Valve however bringing out new games of their own that had to be played using Steambox on Steam OS.

I an not saying this will happen, but that it is something to think about. Despite what he has done so far for PC gaming (as well a making a buttload of money), nobody can really know Gabe's motivations.

Edit: Personally, my take on his motivations is that he has a lot of money, can afford to do whatever he wants, and just wants to give a big "F you" to MS.

 

[irishScott]

They went about their strategy for conversion very wrong. If they had instead offered discounts in the fees for Steam for developers that released Linux versions or something to actually build a Linux library, it would make sense in 3 or 4 years to start a push. As it stands now, there is vritually no real support for Linux and Valve isn't going to magically change that. They are going to have to get consumers to switch (and how they give them incentives for that, who knows) and hope that driver support catches up, otherwise all of those that switched say "well, f that; it sucks" and go back to Windows.

They also need developers, and developers need something to develop on. SteamOS gives them a stable platform as opposed to the amorphous blob of linux distributions, and then the rest of the linux community can franchise the support wherever it wants.

I wouldn't be surprised if incentives for developers who make games for SteamOS were in announcements 2 and/or 3.

I agree this looks like a longshot, but Valve doesn't have a history of being stupid. I'm not calling it dead until it dies.

 

[Red Storm]

Yes, but we do not know whether that "new alternative" could someday become a required platform.

That line right there is exactly why Valve is doing this. That's what they're thinking about the Windows App Store, except for them it's billions at risk whereas for us it's a simple hobby.

 

[BD2003]

I actually don't think Valve is going for the monopoly play on this one. I think they're headed more in the android direction - free OS that works so well with their services that people use them by default. According to their page:

Steam is not a one-way content broadcast channel, it’s a collaborative many-to-many entertainment platform, in which each participant is a multiplier of the experience for everyone else. With SteamOS, “openness” means that the hardware industry can iterate in the living room at a much faster pace than they’ve been able to. Content creators can connect directly to their customers. Users can alter or replace any part of the software or hardware they want. Gamers are empowered to join in the creation of the games they love. SteamOS will continue to evolve, but will remain an environment designed to foster these kinds of innovation.

Unless that's a flat out lie, there should be nothing stopping EA from putting Origin on SteamOS, and competing directly with steam. Just like there's nothing stopping you from installing the amazon app or MP3 store on android, allowing you to do a total end run around google's content store on "their" OS.

I think they're smart enough to realize that the days of the monopoly are over, and the days of the closed ecosystem are quickly coming to their end as well.

 

[tential]

They referenced Big Picture mode and living room.

I think it will be the Steam Box, a Linux Platform maybe? (He did say he wanted to move to linux and hated windows 8) for gaming, and some tyep of game/engine (source engine).

So
1. Steam Box
2. OS (Linux) for gaming (Partnership perhaps with a bunch of developers with promises to release fully compatible Linux versions)
3. Source Engine.

I think that's pretty reasonable and falls in line with trying to get people to move Steam into competing with the Xbox and Playstation. It hits all the 3 things too people would be worried about. Not having a decent platform to lead the assault (steam box), Windows being too bloated (Linux) and having a game engine to drive it all (New Source Engine).



I highly doubt much of anything will be subsidized. Valve's goal is to get a LOT of people making steam boxes. They don't want to be the only one, they are just spearheading it. This is similar to Nvidia releasing the shield. They're just showing what the concept will be like then letting other people take it further.

1 for 3 so far!

 

[tential]

Exactly....I don't get why all these articles are saying "now you can stream to your TV?"

Are all these people living in 1995 or what? The only thing you need to play PC games on your living-room TV is an HDMI cable.

Am I missing something here? You're still going to have to have a Windows box to run most games.

I think it opens up new possibilities. I REALLY dislike going to my basement to play video games. I'll be sitting in bed laying there looking at my laptop thinking "Jesus christ I wish I had an Nvidia card right now in my basement PC so I could stream games up here and play some BF4 or something." Now, this is actually a reality (or is coming soon if EA wasn't the most worsteststst of companies ever to existed).

I can't wait for this streaming.

Something else I thought of is Borderlands 2 has a hack to let you do split screen. Now though, we could just stream to 2 different televisions while only using 1 box to power it. Now, what if we could even do 2 SEPARATE games to 2 different televisions?

I see a lot of potential further down the road, right now though, it's in the stages STEAM was in back whenever that first came out (I forget the date). We moved to steam to play 1.6, we HATED IT LIKE NO OTHER, hell, we thought it would fail as the most SIMPLE things would consistently fail, but look where Steam is today? Power house status baby. So a lot can change. This is the early stages, I expect a lot of change later down the road but I'm certainly excited for Steam OS. An OS dedicated to gamers could prove to have higher performance down the road as well.

In short, this isn't for now, this is for later.

 

[Childs]

This would have been easier to pull of a few years ago when there was no Origin. If Origin ran on SteamOS, I would have no problems replacing Windows with this. But the only place where I might be able to use SteamOS is on my htpc. Well, once the football season is over. Its the only reason I have TV tuners, otherwise, I could replace the pc all together with a Roku. But EA has enough good titles that require Origin, so I couldn't really use this on my main gaming PC. I don't use Windows for anything except to run games, so whether its Windows or Linux, it doesn't really matter, as long as I can play the games I want to play.

BTW, wasn't there supposed to be two other announcements as well?

 

[tential]

I'd have to agree with nintendesert on this one. The only people who like this idea are the silly "F*** M$" crowd, aside from that Windows is completely fine for gaming. The bottom line is that valve doesn't want competition from the Windows digital store and that's all there is to it. I personally don't see myself switching to any steam OS, as it doesn't really make sense - unless Valve is using it for a steam box. But then their competition will be with consoles and I can't see that going over awfully well.

SteamOS makes perfect sense because tomorrow they will announce Steam Box later. MULTIPLE people will make Steam Box and not just Valve. Valve is attempting to compete with Xbox and PS.

Lets say Hardware for SteamBox costs 400 dollars, they sell steambox for 400 dollars. They just try to get it out there. If they don't use SteamOS or put work into it, they end up paying close to 100 dollars for Windows OS to put on it raising the cost of their console 25%. Other people who create steam box's will also have to use Windows OS with no strides into Steam OS. That's a large increase in the price of your console that goes to the competitor.

However, lets say they use Steam OS! Now, they keep the cost of the Steam Box down and get more people to adopt the Steam Box and adopt their platform which is ultimately their goal. They want people to use Steam to purchase games.

Honestly the whole MS Digital store thing is not really a threat at the moment to Steam. Gamers will use Steam and continue to use it because most have already bought into it. Unless MS Digital Store offered all the games Steam did and at a lower price would Steam be in trouble and that would take a couple years at LEAST before it even happened.

Steam OS's goal is simple. Keep the cost down for Steam Box.

 

[CottonRabbit]

I'd hate to have to reboot a different OS just to play a game. I hope this fails.

 

[tential]

This needs to happen for the steambox to be decently priced. Tacking on a $100 windows licensing fee to the steambox would kill the price of it. The only way they can go is a freely licensable OS, otherwise it will be more expensive than consoles.

I like that Valve is trying something new. They won't be ditching Windows anytime soon. I'll still need to use Windows to stream some games. MS isn't purely focused on game performance with Windows, Valve will be. I'm excited to see where a pure gaming based OS goes in terms of performance enhancements to the I/O subsystems.

Too many people jumping on one side of the fence.

Sums up what I'm trying to say perfectly.

Like I said already though, this is a longer term strategy just like Steam was when it was originally released.

 

[gorcorps]

Yeah... mine takes around 30 seconds....

That's weird. Mine's so fast I don't even see the "logging in" window a lot of the time.

 

[Childs]

I'd hate to have to reboot a different OS just to play a game. I hope this fails.

I dont see why this has to be an either/or scenario. They could make the apis for making Steam games OS independent via an abstraction layer. A write once, then build for all target platforms (Windows, Steam, Mac, Console, etc). Its not like Valve is going to stop making Windows games...that would be suicide. 10 years from now could be a different story...

 

[Dankk]

That's weird. Mine's so fast I don't even see the "logging in" window a lot of the time.

How many games do you have installed? In my experience it seems to depend on that. After a fresh reformat, Steam boots up pretty quickly but once I get to like ~300 games installed there's considerable slowdown. Of course it probably also has to do with the fact that Steam is installed on my slower spindle drive.

 

[Nintendesert]

Not only is it free, it may get rid of the immense overhead Windows has.

You don't understand the difference between a closed and open ecosystem. So moving on.



Here's my other issue with this that was mentioned earlier, it has the potential to fragment the PC market when we are FINALLY getting all the consoles onboard x86 and we can finally see software better written for PC hardware. Then we have a renewed focus of the APU and Intel giving us better minimum graphics and here we are, after decades of PC gaming being a niche hobby, having the biggest and arguably best game distribution company moving into a whole new direction.

It's mind boggling and frustrating.

 

[irishScott]

You don't understand the difference between a closed and open ecosystem. So moving on.



Here's my other issue with this that was mentioned earlier, it has the potential to fragment the PC market when we are FINALLY getting all the consoles onboard x86 and we can finally see software better written for PC hardware. Then we have a renewed focus of the APU and Intel giving us better minimum graphics and here we are, after decades of PC gaming being a niche hobby, having the biggest and arguably best game distribution company moving into a whole new direction.

It's mind boggling and frustrating.

Unless you count the XBONE, I'm pretty sure consoles don't run Windows (or use Windows drivers), and the vast majority of Linux PCs use x86 hardware too, so...

I honestly don't get what all the fuss is about. Windows games aren't going to stop working, and Valve isn't going to make the switch to linux overnight. As mentioned, there are solutions to fragmentation on the PC that can't exist on smartphones/tablets, usually due to performance limitations (imagine emulating iOS on Android).

Besides, what would you have Valve do? Bet the farm on the hope that Microsoft plays nice in the future and doesn't slowly seal off Windows?

There's nothing mind-boggling about this either. In fact releasing it now makes a lot of sense, so the steam box can come in on the coat-tails of the next console generation.

 

[evident]

You still have to do that to play most of your games. That's how you play the non-Linux games, boot up your existing PC.

ok, so why would the prospect of dual booting make my life easier?

 

[homebrew2ny]

I think I am going to reserve judgment until we have a real product to flesh out here. No need to jump to feverish conclusions based on so little.

 

[Nintendesert]

Unless you count the XBONE, I'm pretty sure consoles don't run Windows (or use Windows drivers), and the vast majority of Linux PCs use x86 hardware too, so...

I honestly don't get what all the fuss is about. Windows games aren't going to stop working, and Valve isn't going to make the switch to linux overnight. As mentioned, there are solutions to fragmentation on the PC that can't exist on smartphones/tablets, usually due to performance limitations (imagine emulating iOS on Android).

Besides, what would you have Valve do? Bet the farm on the hope that Microsoft plays nice in the future and doesn't slowly seal off Windows?

There's nothing mind-boggling about this either. In fact releasing it now makes a lot of sense, so the steam box can come in on the coat-tails of the next console generation.

It's mind boggling and frustrating from a PC gamer that's seen our industry given the death sentence over and over again and surviving it all then seeing what seems like the light at the tunnel tarnished by the business needs of these companies over and over again.

I think we've already acknowledged that this is being done for Valve's business interests.

 

[smackababy]

Unless you count the XBONE, I'm pretty sure consoles don't run Windows (or use Windows drivers), and the vast majority of Linux PCs use x86 hardware too, so...

I honestly don't get what all the fuss is about. Windows games aren't going to stop working, and Valve isn't going to make the switch to linux overnight. As mentioned, there are solutions to fragmentation on the PC that can't exist on smartphones/tablets, usually due to performance limitations (imagine emulating iOS on Android).

Besides, what would you have Valve do? Bet the farm on the hope that Microsoft plays nice in the future and doesn't slowly seal off Windows?

There's nothing mind-boggling about this either. In fact releasing it now makes a lot of sense, so the steam box can come in on the coat-tails of the next console generation.

Dreamcast actually ran a custom version of Windows CE. They had a prototyped 'full' version of Windows CE on it as well, but it never made it past prototype.

 

[BD2003]

ok, so why would the prospect of dual booting make my life easier?

On a PC with an SSD, you could swap OSes in 10 seconds or so. All they'd need to do to convince people those ten seconds are worth it is to show the same game running faster on SteamOS than Windows.