Saturday, March 3rd 2012
Valve Working On Its Own Gaming Hardware, the "Steam Box"
Valve is not short of competition in game development, publishing, or even providing digital distribution and DRM services of games made by various publishers, which went on to become an arm-shot for indie game developers. The next frontier for Valve backing up the potent open game distribution platform that Steam is, with a potent hardware platform, its very own gaming hardware platform.
The only difference here is that unlike Xbox, PlayStation or Wii, which are close-ended hardware platforms manufactured solely by the people behind them, that's Microsoft, Sony, and Nintendo, respectively, Valve's console will will be open-ended. The physical consoles will be made by various partners (just like NVIDIA GeForce is sold by various NVIDIA partners, such as EVGA, ASUS and ZOTAC). Valve will govern and mandate baseline hardware specifications, which partners have to meet, to ensure the platform delivers a consistent gaming experience to players.
Here's the kicker. Steam Box is essentially an x86 machine that's designed well enough (in form and function) to compete with consoles. Its baseline specifications are not finalized, but it's rumored that Alienware X51 was designed anticipating those baseline specifications from Valve, with the intent that it could be retroactively upgradable to Valve's Steam Box platform firmware. This makes the Steam Box more like an open-platform evolution of the first-generation Xbox, which was x86 and PC GPU-powered. Further, the idea is to give this platform control consistency that consoles enjoy, which is, having a standard game controller. Valve filed a patent for such a controller, in 2011.
Steam Box will also revolutionize the way gamers experience games, not just with visual, aural, or rumble feedback, but realtime biometric feedback, which engages more human senses. "You won't ever look back," The Verge quoted its sources as saying, commenting on this feature. To experience realtime biometric feedback, sources postulate gamers as having to wear a device that resembles a bracelet, or integrated with the main controller. The platform will also tout Valve's Big Picture mode. "With big picture mode, gaming opportunities for Steam partners and customers become possible via PCs and Macs on any TV or computer display in the house," the company is quoted as saying.
To make Steam Box immune to naysayers and cynics screaming "vaporware" from rooftops, Valve is reportedly announcing this platform later this month, at GDC.
Source:
The Verge
The only difference here is that unlike Xbox, PlayStation or Wii, which are close-ended hardware platforms manufactured solely by the people behind them, that's Microsoft, Sony, and Nintendo, respectively, Valve's console will will be open-ended. The physical consoles will be made by various partners (just like NVIDIA GeForce is sold by various NVIDIA partners, such as EVGA, ASUS and ZOTAC). Valve will govern and mandate baseline hardware specifications, which partners have to meet, to ensure the platform delivers a consistent gaming experience to players.
Steam Box will also revolutionize the way gamers experience games, not just with visual, aural, or rumble feedback, but realtime biometric feedback, which engages more human senses. "You won't ever look back," The Verge quoted its sources as saying, commenting on this feature. To experience realtime biometric feedback, sources postulate gamers as having to wear a device that resembles a bracelet, or integrated with the main controller. The platform will also tout Valve's Big Picture mode. "With big picture mode, gaming opportunities for Steam partners and customers become possible via PCs and Macs on any TV or computer display in the house," the company is quoted as saying.
To make Steam Box immune to naysayers and cynics screaming "vaporware" from rooftops, Valve is reportedly announcing this platform later this month, at GDC.
79 Comments on Valve Working On Its Own Gaming Hardware, the "Steam Box"
This will give it a massive head start.
My guess it will also be based on linux as paying for all those licences to microsoft would be stupid in monetary terms.
I'm interested to know what the Nvidia GPU will be?
If they can bring it in for under £400 I think they will be onto a winner.
I'm up for buying one as I have over £300 already spent on Steam.
Microsoft are not going to be happy about a console that can pull games from pc to console. They spent a lot of money been loss leaders on the Xbox to ensure directx and windows got the majority of games titles. A competitor in the market is going to make M$ try a few tricks to cause problems.
Firstly the Xbox would suffer in unit and games sales. So they would make sure the steam box was not in any way compatible with M$ live, DirectX or had any sort of xbox emulation. This would be direct legal force by M$ to protect itself.
Secondly M$ would protect DirectX from been emulated on steambox. This would mean all current games would need rewriting in part. M$ would probably offer steambox a cut down version of windows under licence, And with heavy restriction. Implying all games must be designed for said machine if it is a console, Or supplied with a relevant OS licensed by M$ if they wish to use DX. Meaning M$ get there cut and can influence the overall cost of the machine and up price it against there own offering.
Either way M$ have the upper hand and more control.
If valve could create a wrapper, API, or a conversion tool to rewrite part of the resourcing in a game then it would be at the discretion of the game developer. Game developers are likely more sway able since this would boost sales. But some games companies would refuse to do it based on deals already in place with M$. So you would not be guaranteed all games.
Lastly steambox would need to make money... so free games and shared titles would be an addition later in the units life to breath life back into the system.
Microsoft and Sony lose money on consuls to make it back later.
I doubt valves partners will want to lose money making these.
and if they used any kind of linux os and not win8 then many a game would require recompileing and optimising ,that dosnt make much sense given the available store full they have in win OS, i may be biased in that thought as i am a lynux phobe, looks harder:):o
imho since the bottom teir entry pc might soon be trinity APu or some such and capable of a decent high quality version of 98%of pc games its not such a tall order ,after all intel and nvidia have to compete with AMD's APu's so for price they will start puttting more performance in their low end sku's which helps it all along:D
As for the OS, that's more difficult. It could go down three ways:
1) Full blown Windows OS with a Steam interface. Sucks because consumers would be paying the full Windows tax, without being officially allowed to (or want to) use the OS.
2) A cut-down Microsoft approved Windows OS with minimal licensing fees. But why would Microsoft go through the effort of providing such an OS to a company looking to compete against its Xbox?
3) A custom SteamOS (Unix/Linux based?) that only allows for playing games they label in the "SteamPlay" category (mostly Indie games + Source games). That'd upset a lot of gamers hoping for playing Windows exclusive games. And I doubt Microsoft would take kindly to a company directly using something like WINE on a commercial product.
EDIT: Related
Just a design that fits the bill for the required needs. Did you read the link?
ASRock HTOC VisionX PCs fit the bill already, and were used in Valve's launch advertising for "Big Picture".
Doesn't make ASRock official hardware either. :p Anyone can mass-produce a rig to Valve's spec's, and get Valve's certification for Big Picture. That's the whole point.
I'd really like to see "STEAMBOX: LEVEL ONE", "STEAMBOX: LEVEL TWO", etc, each of which is certified to provide say, so many FPS..."LEVEL ONE" @ 60FPS, 720p, maybe "LEVEL TWO" is 1376x768, 120 Hz, or whatever.
Not one released box at this point offers that. I refuse to accept any device for the Big Picture platform without it meeting something similar to what I just described.
anyway, the company listed in that news article can't even keep their site up right now, so I am loath to believe they can release anything worthwhile. :p They simply aren't big enough.
Okay so apparently they're taking pre-orders for the Steam Box. but they're selling it for $1,000!!! IS FREAKING RIDICULOUS. I was excited for it but once i saw that...i mean how do they expect to sell their product at a higher price than a mid-high end gaming rig that can plug into a TV?