CrazyGPU said:
hansrob00 said:
It it was a company like Madcatz, I would agree with you, but this is Valve, and with Valve, comes it's massive catalog of games, steam sales, free online, mod support, and every other benefit that Steam customers enjoy.
The steam machines immediately will not be successful market sharewise ,but will be successful hardware wise. This means that it's manufacturers combined will probably set out to sell a few million over however long and they will get it, but Microsoft and Sony will not have to worry about it immediately, but over time they will as Valve continues to make improvements and learn from their mistakes. I imagine something like not necessarily death from a thousand cuts, but serious injury from a thousand cuts over a long period of time. In year 1 or year 2, steam machines will not be a problem, but it's 3rd year they'll have to address it and to keep customers from moving over to pc ,which by the way is happening right now. That's what I think is going to happen.
As for some of your other points, building and running a pc is pretty easy and most games you can play from the couch. Most things are actually automatic anymore. Again, it really is not that expensive to have your game look better compared to the consoles. I'm saying this from personal experience.
As for Nintendo's power, I think the lack of third party support has as much to do with bad wii u sales and 3rd party games selling poorly as it does with the power. Power was a factor, but bad sales didn't help. Even before the current gen consoles were out, 3rd party support wasn't that great and even the games themselves weren't selling that well. If anything, Nintendo has a brand problem in that your average customer just thinks kiddie games when they think Nintendo. They need to rebrand themselves somehow in a way that they don't lose that family friendly image but at the same time be able to cobble together enough so called "hard core" gamers to make their consoles more viable.
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I think the mistake is that steam machines varies from integrated graphics to sli machines that cost 5000 uss. How are 3rd parties going to target the platform? you will have to find out minimum hardware requirements for each game. A console gamer is not used to that. A console gamer will buy a console in which every game will run. I think the only market that steam machines can steal buys from is PC. Its sad. I would have love to have one good steam machine at let say 800 USS that runs better than consoles and replace a PC, but that is not how things are going.
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I have seen the alienware alpha go as low as $400, usually for $450. I'm not sure where you are getting your estimates from. It runs pretty much any and every single one of steam's games in medium to high settings though I would recommend an upgrade of ram to 8 gb. I haven't seen how well the Linux variant performs, so it may actually do better because it doesn't Windows weighing it down. You can watch youtube videos on it. Developers don't have to specifically target steam machines because the steam machines simply piggy back onto the steam store. This is also the reason that it doesn't have to be successful market share wise. If the Xbox only sold a few million units, over a 2 year period, that would be disastrous because they rely on market share to attract 3rd parties to port their games over. However Steam machines can pull that off because the companies only need to make a profit off of the machine. The steam machines already have the user base of a 100+ million steam memberships in order to attract 3rd parties to piggy back off of.
As for minimum requirements, there is steam's refund policy if a game doesn't work well. I think Steam also specified that the machines had to be within certain parameters so it would run most games decently. The only ones I haven't seen work on them, are games like AC: Unity or the recent Batman, which were a mess of PC port to begin with.
Steam can also do what google play does, which creates a game is incompatible label on the store page, when it detects your computer hardware or have the game not appear at all.
The points that people bring up as to why steam machine will not be successful, are all valid points. I disagree however because they are all fixable problems. Will it be immediate? No. The reason long term that I believe is potentially very competitive is because of what Valve brings to the table. Steam itself - its massive catalog of games, free online, backwards compatibility going back to the 90s, mod support, steam sales, and the other benefits that pc gamers enjoy.
Again, Steam machines probably its first year out, will start out small and as problems are fixed and more games are compatible, it will pick up in popularity to the point that Microsoft and Sony will have to start shielding their businesses from having their sales siphoned off more noticeably as time goes on. That's my prediction.
