Gabe Newell: Valve will release its own console-like PC

[Shifty Geezer]

How near are OGL "on PC" to the use of OGL/ES on "PS3"?
It could help in porting to Linux multiplatform titles?

Nope. Porting from PS3 to Linux is going to be no easier than porting Windows PC. Porting Windows to Linux will be the easiest path (same CPU architecture, same GPU architecture, different libs and drivers).

The introduction of a Linux console PC would simplify the driver issue for devs on that particular device, but would then make adoption a factor of install base like any console, and represent considerable risk to Valve in trying to push it.

 

[Rodéric]

How near are OGL "on PC" to the use of OGL/ES on "PS3"?
It could help in porting to Linux multiplatform titles?

AlphaWolf It all depends on the easiness of porting. For the hardware, ask Asrock to make a balanced 400$ PC, and sell for cost.

Please forget about OGL/ES on the PS3, it has only been used in a couple titles at best.
(Can't remember which anymore, used to know, not a really valuable information.)

 

[AlphaWolf]

AlphaWolf It all depends on the easiness of porting. For the hardware, ask Asrock to make a balanced 400$ PC, and sell for cost.

It sounds really simple. How many units do you want? If you want a million units they are going to need to ramp production, and they will need guarantees (ie money) to ramp production. If they don't want a million units, is any developer going to bother with them?

 

[ERP]

The introduction of a Linux console PC would simplify the driver issue for devs on that particular device, but would then make adoption a factor of install base like any console, and represent considerable risk to Valve in trying to push it.

Only if the driver is actually decent.
I don't think I've every worked on a PC title (and I haven't worked on many) where we haven't had to get vendors to fix drivers during development.
It's worse with OpenGL drivers, because there just isn't the broad application base stressing them.
One of the issue with doing Mac work is that the openGL driver is "buggy" and Apple (who write the driver) never used to patch it, they would only roll out updates with new OS releases.
Spore for example is artificially restricted to not run on Mac's with earlier versions of the OS, not because of hardware features, but because of OpenGL bugs.

 

[zed]

They surely won't be putting Windows on it. They're doing this because they don't like Windows 8, and I doubt MS will make any deal with them to put out a Windows game console when they're going to have their own game console coming out in the next year or two.

Well perhaps the whole thing is just a threat to get MS is open up windows 8 more. At the moment MS are being attacked from all sides (they went from 95% of the market a couple of years ago to now around 80%), tablets,mobile,mac. One thing they havent been threatened with so far is gaming on a PC, but this is a direct threat. Im sure with this news from valve MS will at least consider it.

 

[ERP]

It sounds really simple. How many units do you want? If you want a million units they are going to need to ramp production, and they will need guarantees (ie money) to ramp production. If they don't want a million units, is any developer going to bother with them?

Yep dealing with manufacturing, distribution, support and returns is not trivial, but you can now pay companies to do that for you. You end up with no inventory management and ship directly from the factory to the consumer.
Doesn't mean it's cheap, but it's feasible if you have the money.

A better strategy for valve would be to charge license fees to a number of vendors to sell Steam badged PC's, and have some sort of qualification process for the hardware.

FWIW MS tried this with windows 7 but the vendors were upset wanted to ship cheaper boxes with Win7 logos, and Ms ended up recanting.

 

[Demirug]

Well perhaps the whole thing is just a threat to get MS is open up windows 8 more. At the moment MS are being attacked from all sides (they went from 95% of the market a couple of years ago to now around 80%), tablets,mobile,mac. One thing they havent been threatened with so far is gaming on a PC, but this is a direct threat. Im sure with this news from valve MS will at least consider it.

I am pretty sure Microsoft would prefer if everybody who want's to play buys a XBox. Anyway the SteamBox doesn't attack Windows as the operating system for your pc. If a SteamBox would be able to replace your pc it could be a threat but as long as it is only for gameing purpose it only threatened Microsofts console business to some degree.

A better strategy for valve would be to charge license fees to a number of vendors to sell Steam badged PC's, and have some sort of qualification process for the hardware.

Didn't the pc gaming alliance tried something like this and failed hard?

 

[joker454]

A better strategy for valve would be to charge license fees to a number of vendors to sell Steam badged PC's, and have some sort of qualification process for the hardware.

An added complication is that usually pc manufacturers insist on loading these machines with bloatware to help offset some costs. That wouldn't work well at all for a gaming box, so that stuff would have to be removed to provide a good gaming experience, rather than have stuttering frame rates from a dozen applications running in the background.

Only if the driver is actually decent.
I don't think I've every worked on a PC title (and I haven't worked on many) where we haven't had to get vendors to fix drivers during development.
It's worse with OpenGL drivers, because there just isn't the broad application base stressing them.

Assuming they went Linux, could they go with a more customized setup say where each game ships with the version of the graphics driver it supports and/or has been tested with, and that is the driver that gets run with that game? So if game X worked with driver 2.98, then when you ran that game it dynamically loaded and ran with that driver revision, while game Y that works with driver 3.76 loads and runs that revision. Steam could handle that for you where maybe it keeps a running catalog of all the drivers, and dynamically unloads the one it needs to run it's os, and loads the one the game works with. That would resolve all the driver issues, but I don't know much about Linux so I was wondering if something like that was even possible. It would also make life much easier for the developers in that once their game runs it will always run, they don't have to worry about a future driver revision breaking their game since their game will only run the driver version they approve of. They will also know exactly how their game will run on ship day as they have hand picked the driver that it will use, that will let them avoid a situation like id's Rage game had.

 

[ERP]

An added complication is that usually pc manufacturers insist on loading these machines with bloatware to help offset some costs. That wouldn't work well at all for a gaming box, so that stuff would have to be removed to provide a good gaming experience, rather than have stuttering frame rates from a dozen applications running in the background.

My assumption is that Valve would require a specific software payload for "certified" boxes, whether that's Linux or some Windows variant.
That would increase the cost of the box, because the bloatware is there because someone paid for it to be.
Big question is if you could demonstrate demand to the OEM's so they'd pay you for the certification, and would end users pay a premium for a "Steam" box.

Off topic bloatware is the biggest difference between Windows and OSX experiences IMO, if I buy a Sony laptop it comes with so much bloatware it's crippled and I have to spend hours or days removing the crap to make the machine useable, I buy a Mac laptop and it just works. The average end user just lives with the crippled windows version.

 

[Osamar]

Only if the driver is actually decent.
I don't think I've every worked on a PC title (and I haven't worked on many) where we haven't had to get vendors to fix drivers during development.
It's worse with OpenGL drivers, because there just isn't the broad application base stressing them.
...

I suppose the idea of a consoled PC is to fight against this.
So you have a driver to rule them all !!!! (Suaron (TM))

Going for the hardware. Valve has been working with Intel driver team (I have read somewhere, but I do not remember now), and Haswell is supposed to have a "much better" GPU. A Core i5 4430, 4Gb, 500Gb HD, no dvd, could it be enough? Could Intel "subside" a part (Microsoft goes ARM I go Linux).

Just flying ideas.

 

[Yemeth]

Off topic bloatware is the biggest difference between Windows and OSX experiences IMO, if I buy a Sony laptop it comes with so much bloatware it's crippled and I have to spend hours or days removing the crap to make the machine useable, I buy a Mac laptop and it just works. The average end user just lives with the crippled windows version.

Really off topic, but you should try http://pcdecrapifier.com/features . I was wasting hours to clean up PCs, laptops from friends, co-workers from this preinstalled software etc., until I found this program.

Much more convenient.

Anyway, sorry for the off topic, did not want to do it via PM as I think many people are still doing the uninstalling manually when they get a new laptop/PC.

 

[tuna]

Assuming they went Linux, could they go with a more customized setup say where each game ships with the version of the graphics driver it supports and/or has been tested with, and that is the driver that gets run with that game? So if game X worked with driver 2.98, then when you ran that game it dynamically loaded and ran with that driver revision, while game Y that works with driver 3.76 loads and runs that revision. Steam could handle that for you where maybe it keeps a running catalog of all the drivers, and dynamically unloads the one it needs to run it's os, and loads the one the game works with. That would resolve all the driver issues, but I don't know much about Linux so I was wondering if something like that was even possible. It would also make life much easier for the developers in that once their game runs it will always run, they don't have to worry about a future driver revision breaking their game since their game will only run the driver version they approve of. They will also know exactly how their game will run on ship day as they have hand picked the driver that it will use, that will let them avoid a situation like id's Rage game had.

This is of course pointless and would not work when they upgrade the HW of the "Steam box".

 

[zed]

If a SteamBox would be able to replace your pc it could be a threat but as long as it is only for gameing purpose it only threatened Microsofts console business to some degree.

Ppl said the same thing with tablets, Oh you cant do this and that (advanced programming etc) on them like you can on PCs, thus theyre no threat. But look at the last quarter PC shipments/sales, they were down a massive 8%! Im assuming this valvebox can surf the net. For lots of ppl (eg my partner) thats all they need a PC for, she doesnt even use a PC now, i.e. she just uses the ipad for all her computing needs.

hmm isnt it obvious, Driver issues on this linuxbox are gonna be a lot less than on windows/mac. I assume they will all ship with the same GPU/CPU/memory etc just like a console. i.e. the developers would of tested it on your exact machine, unlike PC development where even if they test on 100 rigs, most likely none match your hardware.

 

[joker454]

This is of course pointless and would not work when they upgrade the HW of the "Steam box".

Uhh, why wouldn't it?

 

[ERP]

hmm isnt it obvious, Driver issues on this linuxbox are gonna be a lot less than on windows/mac. I assume they will all ship with the same GPU/CPU/memory etc just like a console. i.e. the developers would of tested it on your exact machine, unlike PC development where even if they test on 100 rigs, most likely none match your hardware.

There is a certain class of driver issue that certainly goes away, hopefully you won't be getting random GPU errors because of your sound or network driver, but that doesn't make it any easier to write a high quality Open-GL driver.
An my limited experience with OpenGL drivers from the primary GPU vendors and from Apple is that they have plenty of bugs in them.
D3D drivers do as well, but they are far more exhaustively tested by the broad array of D3D games than the OpenGL drivers are.

 

[Mobius1aic]

I like the idea of a Valve box being a highly optimized and standard but sorta-closed PC, in the "Nexus fashion" as someone hinted at earlier in the thread.

With some control over the actual hardware and the software involved (especially if it was Linux based), a Steambox could easily be $250 with an AMD A10 APU, 4 GB DDR3-1866, and smallish HDD. There would be some cost savings in making it unupgradeable and skipping on the unnecessary components that would inflate the cost, making it like most laptop mobos.

At $400, Valve could offer something more substantial with a Cape Verde GPU and perhaps an Intel i3 or keep the AMD A10.

Valves games by themselves are I think an easily attractive feature for a Steambox, though in the long run, Valve would have to become a much bigger studio to continue feeding it's own product fresh software. However, it's pretty obvious many PC and indie devs would on board to the Steambox, even if Linux based and Valve offers assistance in porting over.

 

[Rodéric]

I wonder what input device they'll pick up for that box, they were saying they wanted more innovation in that area after all...

 

[Shifty Geezer]

Controllers and tablets. They need controllers. Maybe one with an integrated trackball, but I think that's unlikely. I imagine a split dual-stick controller that extends horizontally and can clamp around a whole host of smartphones (paying me lots of patent royalties!).

 

[Gerry]

Controllers and tablets. They need controllers. Maybe one with an integrated trackball, but I think that's unlikely. I imagine a split dual-stick controller that extends horizontally and can clamp around a whole host of smartphones (paying me lots of patent royalties!).

Didn't they have some patent which involved a customisable controller? I'm sure I saw a picture with a drop-in thumbstick on the left and a trackball on the right.

I could have been hallucinating I suppose...

 

[tuna]

Uhh, why wouldn't it?

Because old drivers will not work on new hardware.