How is there potential when it's going to be littered with nothing but low quality games ? Quality matters in gaming and I wouldn't have considered PC to be a quality platform for gaming before the millenium mainly due to the fact a lot of the games were low quality. It's only when PC gaming got better when consoles started to share their games and vice versa. It will not succeed at all ... 

Yep, ONLY way this would succeed is if Valve got dead serious about it and invested a couple hundred million dollars into building port tools to bring over basically all games sold on the Windows Steam shop (which would be an absolutely ludicrously massive undertaking). It would also depend upon cooperation with all the devs, and with so many teams assembling/outsourcing/disbanding, it would be nigh impossible logistically.

Failure.

And yes, I'm a big PC gamer lol. I hate Microsoft for the most part, but honestly they're the only company that could do it, they should have done that instead of 'Xbox' imho (it certainly would have been more profitable). A real PC-based console that ran a stripped but fully compatible version of windows.

Oh I know it won't succeed. But Steam Boxes are Steam's chance to break into the console industry, so when Consoles are eventually assimilated into PCs they will have a huge advantage, even against MS.

Problem is because the manufacturers are selling custom PC, a market that already exists, rather than steam consoles, its fails to reach both audiences. Not to mention those manufacturers couldn't sell the steam boxes at a loss because they aren't profitting from Steam's software sales.

Thus it has/had potential, but the execution is the major issue with it.

I've made a thread about this a few months ago. I also fail to understand what's the point of these things. I thought that it would offer PCs in console form - only one hardware, with an affordable price, coupled with Steam's ridiculous prices and sales. Instant winnner, it changes the paradigm of the industry.

But nope, they revealed SEVERAL models of the damn thing. And the prices are... pretty much the same as regular PCs...? And it runs Linux (kind of)...? Jesus, how many games on Steam are even compatible with Linux?

that's still a thing???

How is execution the issue when it was just a bad idea from the gecko ?

Even if steamOS had everything except for directx it would still fail miserably because it offers no differentiation between the PC and the console market. As blurred as the line is between console and PC they atleast have a factor that differentiates them such as easier accessiblity as well as having some high quality exclusive software. PC's have benefit of being able to do many things not related to gaming. Steam machine on the other hand will have almost nothing to differentiate it because Valve can't afford to support a huge platform as large as this. Valve has also failed to control the price that OEM's are charging which will mean that it will get a bad reputation as an overpriced console like the PS3 initially was. The controller is shit too as well.

Why didn't they realize all this ? 

The plan was bad all along and I just can't see it having any sort of potential.

I must admit I was seeing it from mainly the future of consoles perspective. Once price to power becomes low enough which could happen as early as mid this gen, Consoles will be completely obsolete, and the big 3, with the exception of Nintendo, will probably migrate wholly to digital platforms. This is inevitable if Moore's Law continues to hold. From this viewpoint, I saw SteamOS as a early entrant into this "virtual" console space. However, you are right, the diversity of a PC os like Windows 7 or OSX is not going to even be dented by SteamOS.

I would argue that the potential it had would mainly be in increasing Valve's appeal to console gamers or the mainstream in general, but I agree that the whole entire idea is pretty flawed.

Well these prices certainly aren't gonna win over many people.

Moore's law is dying as we speak right now ... The whole semiconductor industry can't continue to depend on just miniturization for performance gains and all innovations to performance gains such as SIMD model processing have being exhausted for the most part. The last miniturization technology will likely be at a 5nm process node according to ex-Intel microprocessor designer, Bob Colwell. Moore's law is not about surpassing physical limits anymore because at that point an entity would also have to surpass economical limits too as transitioning to a new process node gets prohibitively more and more expensive each time thus becoming harder to justify. Once Intel releases broadwell processors they only have 3 more shrinks left ... 

You shouldn't assume obsolete so soon this time because the whole semiconductor industry is struggling to innovate. 

No, I don't think they'll be a massive flop. Not like the Ouya. But I do think that they won't be anywhere nearly as successful as some seem to think, and they most certainly will not put that much pressure on regular home consoles, let alone "overtake them" as some would like to believe.