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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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 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.
> 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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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).
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)
> 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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
$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.
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.
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’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.
"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.
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.
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.
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.
"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.
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.
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!
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 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.
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.
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.
> 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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Do you have link to the little gaming box?
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.
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.
It’s unlikely you’ll be able to play GTA 6 on any PC platform as it’s only coming out on consoles.
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.
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.
That you are talking about a hypothetical game not running says enough...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
> 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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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)
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.
> 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.
> 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.
They announced 3 products guys. The first time Valve has counted to 3.
Half Life 3 is coming.
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.
Plus a game catalog that stretches back some 30 years?
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.
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.
They told press that it wouldn’t be console pricing and would match entry level PC. I think it’s going to be $800
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
$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.
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.
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
I'm implying they'd win via a cultural victory TBH
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.
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.
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.
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.
Couldn't you use a Raspberry Pi or a mini PC for this?
> 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.
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.
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)
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
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
"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.
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.
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.
It won't outsell Quest 2, much less the real consoles, not in the next half decade anyway.
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.
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.
Love the enthusiasm but expensive versions of commodity products with last gen specs are not going to win that generation or the next one.
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.
Wasn’t that Alyx?
Perhaps Alyx walked so HL3 could run.
They announced 3 devices. 3! HL3 confirmed :D
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!
gaming *system
>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.
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.
Or the many people like myself who are willing to buy a Switch for Nintendo games and that's their only console.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Win the console generation in what sense? In outselling the PS5? The Switch 2? I have trouble picturing it being cheaper than either.
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...
> 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.
> 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.
Related:
Steam Frame https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45903325
Steam Machine https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45903404
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.
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 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.
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.
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?