This might not necessarily have bearing on their ability to create decent hardware for running Steam, but if I'm not mistaken ISYS Technologies (the company behind the Xi3 brand/architecture/model) started selling computers running beta versions of the Google's open source Chromium OS under the name "Chromium PC" and then sued Google for trademark infringement when Google launched the Chromebook.
I feel like that kind of behavior is probably worse than being a patent troll.
'And onto Linux' would be super cool, but I see nothing especially bad or wrong with having Windows as an option, too. Healthy competition is a wonderful thing.
I look to how successful Valve was in getting games for the Mac made. That success rate is mixed:
* All the valve games were ported.
* A bunch of casual games get ported.
* Civilization V
* Um, some of the GTA catalog, IIRC.
Frankly, it was kind of a desert. I can't imagine the Linux gaming will pick up unless the GabeN had "bet the farm" on Linux versus Windows 8. Which I don't see happening. He might hate Windows 8, but Steam games play nicely on it, TTVM.
The funny part is that the GTA ports are more playable than their Windows originals (on modern Windows boxes). There are a slew of backwards compatibility issues that now exist that make games like GTA:SA nearly unplayable.
In any case, I wouldn't put Civ5 in the "victory" category either. As with most Aspyr ports the performance is awful, and it doesn't support a bunch of pretty core features like cloud saves, or the very popular built-in mod installers that exist on PC.
Once you've made a game engine with the ability to port, it's easier to port a second time. Steam is (was?) just a store, nothing stopped people from porting to mac before steam went to it, and little more incentive was there after, especially initially. However now Valve has effectively opened up the Linux market in addition to the mac market. Additionally indie games have historically already had high multiplatform support. Now porting to linux will have the same incentive as porting to consoles; While the game engines will have to move first (Unity recently got there), I give it 5 years before making games for all PC platforms is common practice.
At a certain point, it's up to the users to show up.
I think that's what sinks OS X support. [1] And that's the big, recurring question-mark with gaming on Linux.
The vocal subgroup asks and cajoles and begs. But those devs who make the effort don't seem to find a large enough market to justify it.
[1] It didn't help that Apple's Mac App Store arrived so soon after OS X Steam showed up. Nor that mobile computing got so large to the point that PC upgrades basically stalled.
Another thing to consider about Mac gaming: since iMacs and MacBooks are essentially un-upgradable and they're not particularly designed for gaming in mind, they tend to age faster than a similarly-priced self-built tower PC (at least for gaming.)
I don't think that's going to be an issue for Linux enthusiasts, but it will be an issue for this "magic grapefruit" they're talking about.
I seem to recall gabeN posting to the effect that the average Mac running Steam was better-equipped than the average PC running Steam. If that's true, the non-upgradability might not have entered into it.
As to this "piston" thing here - I don't think upgradability will be an anchor. The whole project isn't remotely feasible unless a distro for build-your-own boxes is also launched. In which case the specifics of this box are more a blueprint for builders and a performance baseline for developers.
Sales probably wouldn't even track net adoption until the enthusiasts build out their custom rigs and start convincing their less-technical friends they can have almost all the same awesome without getting any thermal paste on their hands.
The demo unit of Piston features one ethernet port, 1/8" audio in/out, SPDIF optical audio, four USB 3.0 ports, four USB 2.0 ports (with one dedicated to keyboard input), four eSATAp ports, two Mini Display Port ports and one DisplayPort/HDMI port.
I'm the exact person Valve are targeting. I've some cash to spend on games, I have a Wii and Xbox360, I'm techie enough to build a gaming rig, but too lazy to bother. I prefer keyboard + mouse to the Xbox controller. $1,000 == £1,000 by the time it hits rip off UK. This is so far out of my price range for a gaming consol it is crazy. Like I could get 3 or 4 playstations for that. Or an Apple Air. Or 3 PC laptops. I hope it's more like £250 then maybe I'd pick one up, but the way things are looking I'm now thinking of hanging onto the xbox360 and picking up an Ouya. Most interesting Indy games will probably make it onto it anyway.
I'm also confused by the form factor. Presumably, one of the reasons it's so (comparatively) expensive is that it's an extremely small device (so a lot of R&D money has gone into it with lots of custom components). But does that really add much value for a gaming console? If it's going to sit in your living room, would anyone really care if it was, say, twice as big? Or a different shape?
And for all the talk of a modular, upgradable design, it looks like you more or less have to dismantle the entire thing to swap out components. In fact, it looks harder than doing so for a regular PC.
The price point is very interesting. It's way above console prices and will probably slow down adoption. That said, it might not matter to Valve. The console manufacturers _have_ to get a certain scale quickly to be able to establish an ecosystem, so they discount the cost of the hardware. Valve doesn't have to do that, the ecosystem exists i.e. Steam, so they could afford to go a little slower which means that their supply chain will be easier to manage and they'll make money on the hardware.
claims that it's based on the $999 X7A, so perhaps still higher than a $600 price point.
It's mostly speculation at this point, though. Very entertaining. What's the basis for your $600 price point, btw? It would be great to see a graph of console prices to try and get close to the expected price.
the form factor comes into play here as well I think. They could even start selling these to netcafes and businesses, and just attach the box to the back of a monitor.
PS3 was $500 for the lower version, $600 was for the bigger HD. It also didn't sell well. PS3 didn't start to pick up in sales until the price started to drop, and at the time of release PS3 was incredibly powerful.
I can't imagine someone dropping $500-$1000 on this, at that point just build your own computer people!
Unless they lock down the hardware, they will not be able to subsidize it. People will install Windows or Ubuntu on it, and use it as a standard PC, if it is cheaper than equivalent PC hardware.
You are right. Other options are to subsidize it with games (i.e. you buy console for the full hardware price and get bunch of games) or lock it down. If they decide to lock it, I would greatly appreciate if they sell it as a Gaming console + home media center (with or XBMC something).
I've always expected it to be at least $500. I mean it's a PC! And you're "only" paying $500 for a "gaming PC". I think that's how you should look at it, Or like a Mac Mini, which is $600.
Also don't forget that the ecosystem might be cheaper. I mean, the consoles might be $300, but you're paying back that subsidy many times over with $60 games. On Steam games are a lot cheaper.
> could provide access to thousands of gaming titles
Does this mean
1) the box will be based on Windows,
2) or there have been way more progress in getting publishers to port their games to Linux than what we have heard of yet,
3) or that "could" indicates that "thousands" is a meaningless hypothetical number?
I very much doubt that this is Valve's "official" steam box offering. This article is a bit more sensational than others' that have been posted on the subject today.
I think we're about to be in for a whole new console wars, except this time, instead of pushing more bits, it'll be a battle between ecosystems. It won't be a console war, but an ecosystem war.
By and large, with the exception of a few exclusives, the 360 and the PS3 have more or less the same set of games. Both were incredibly advanced and were a logical progression of the course that these systems were going. But they both more or less have the same software ecosystem. Most of the library available on one is available on the other.
Yet the Wii outsold both of them, using far less advanced technology and offering far inferior on-line play. Many people credit the control scheme, but because of the controls (and an incredible first party development house) Nintendo offered a truly unique software ecosystem.
So this current generation we've really had two software ecosystems, the 360/PS3 one and the Wii one.
So today we have three new consoles about to hit the market in the upcoming months, Valve's, the Ouya, and Project Shield, right after the Wii U.
Valve is going to offer the PC gaming ecosystem and probably the strong on-line offering that PC gamers enjoy, the Ouya and Shield are offering Android (plus some exclusives on either side), and the Wii U will continue to offer Nintendo's ecosystem. This leaves Microsoft and Sony to respond, probably with announcements this year and releases before Christmas of next, with their next offering.
Back in the 16-bit days, the market showed that there can really only be two console players. Third place was a very distant third (PC Engine). But it's worth it to keep in mind that the Megadrive/Genesis and Super Famicom/SNES had wildly different software ecosystems as well.
In the generation following we had a plethora of platforms as well, and it rapidly shook down to 2 (with 3rd place so bad that Sega made one more go of it with the Dreamcast then exited the business entirely). Nobody remembers the CD-I, 3D0, Jaguar, CD32 from this generation.
Following that we had the PS2, XBOX, Gamecube and Dreamcast. It shook down to an unusual 3 this time, but the XBOX was artificial in this environment with Microsoft willing to lose tons of cash on the investment and if you look at the numbers they really just split 2nd place with the Gamecube.
Today instead of two major consoles, we have two major ecosystems. 360/PS3 and Nintendo (in transition to the WiiU)...and we're about to add 2 more to it. I don't think it'll work. Somebody's going to exit the market. It just can't sustain 4 (5 if you count iOS which is kind of stretch).
The Console business is hard and the public is fickle.
You're underselling the exclusives on PS3 and X360. For all of the Zelda, Mario, and other first party Nintendo games, you have a bunch of Uncharted, God of War, Killzone, Gran Turismo, Halo, Gears of War, Forza, Viva Pinata, etc. between PS3 and X360. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_video_games_exclusives_... - there are a lot of exclusives between the two.
I would just say Nintendo was left out of all of the cross-platform games, which is a shame. Much of the Wii's "unique" ecosystem is garbage.
We may be going through a new "shakeout" period, similar to the 3DO and Jaguar days. As for mainstream adoption, I don't see any of the newcomers (OUYA, Project Shield, Piston) taking off, but it'll be fun to see what happens.
True. Investment in first-party studios is critical to create "great" games. Most often, these are the games that push the boundaries and will be remembered, IMO.
Journey(PS3) for example came out of thatgamecompany, an awesome game studio that benefited from Sony's Santa Monica incubator.
First party games are still the "killer apps" of game consoles, although they aren't the only ones (yup, I believe ecosystems are importants, too). Nintendo is sitting on gold mine with the Wii U's MiiVerse, a twitter-like social network, but with drawings added (of course of limited size, only black and white). But it might be "just another app" if they don't invest in it.
None of the 360 exclusives are really interesting to me. I've never played a Halo or Gears of war game. A lot of the PS3 exclusives -do- interest me, I'd played the previous games in a few of the series on the PS2.
But I own a 360, and not a PS3. And I don't really feel like getting a PS3 at this point, being so late in the cycle, and owning the 360 version of -most- of the games I play.
I'm in your boat. Except I have a PS3. My best advice: get a second-hand PS3 Slim (a bit better than the last model IMHO), and start playing. The PS3 game library is pretty big now, so I'm sure you'll find what you like.
If Valve makes their new platform the only way to play Half-Life 3... that might be the first game in the series that I'll have to skip. I hate to say that, because I don't doubt that it will be an awesome game, but it's just not enough to sell me on a whole new gaming platform.
I don't see that happening, partially because it would be very un-Valve-like, and partially because it would be stupid.
Valve, in the past, has pushed for more hardware to be able to play its games, not less. Sure, it started out on Windows, but it's made a very respectable delivery platform for the Mac, and now they're on their way to Linux. Saying, "the only way to play our game is on this one specific piece of hardware you have to buy from us" would go against quite a bit of what they've been doing over the past 5 years.
Also, it would be stupid. The people who are drooling over the possibility of HL3 are PC gamers. People who invest cash in gaming rigs, who probably like building their own computers. Saying, "Want HL3? Now you have to buy our hardware!" would be more or less giving their fans the middle finger.
I expect the Steam Box will be hardware, and possibly a customized Linux distribution. And I expect that if you want to "build your own" Steam Box, you'll be able to.
I think the poster's point wasn't that there aren't any exclusives, but that the exclusives don't come down to the console hardware. That a capable team could recreate Killzone or Uncharted on the 360 and the average consumer wouldn't be able to tell the difference.
I'm still very disappointed Google isn't trying to make Android more of a "console platform", and then let a thousand OUYA-like devices bloom under it. Android may not have as many games as the others right now, but if Google was serious about getting game devs for console games, and was willing to spend a bit for that, and then if they made it easier for a lot of device makers to get that game store from them, I think they would end up having some good games in the end, and a pretty competitive console ecosystem.
I mean clearly others, like Nvidia and OUYA, are starting to move towards that anyway - whether Google helps them or not. If Google actually helped them, and allowed many others to do this, it would accelerate the process.
I know Google cares a lot more about the "TV" part of Google TV, because they want the advertising money from TV's, but they should use Microsoft's (probably mostly unintentional) Xbox strategy, where they first got the xbox in 70 million homes, and then started activating TV features. I think it's a lot easier than trying to convince people that they need a "smart TV". It would be better if they thought of it as a bonus to the console.
It would also benefit the Android ecosystem as a whole. Many people still are unwilling to switch from iOS to Android, because are afraid of losing some games. Plus, one of the major reasons people haven't switched to Macs or even Linux over time was that Windows had all the games, and a lot of people wanted Windows for being able to play all the games. So I think this strategy should be a top priority for Google, and not necessarily just something nice to do.
We had Megadrive, SNES and Master System. That's three.
I'm not sure I agree that the market can't support a variety of ecosystems. We already have PS3/Xbox/Wii, millions of people still playing PS2, iOS, Android (yes, they count, and outnumber the console platforms), and PC gaming. That's seven different platforms all doing pretty well.
That's two different generations of consoles: the Megadrive was competing against the SNES, while the Master System was Sega's previous generation console competing against the NES.
There wasn't a meaningfully successful third console in either of those generations, at least none that I recall me or my friends ever playing!
I think the poster is from Brazil, which had a very long and very interesting Master System history, which lasted well into the 16-bit era.
But you are correct, the SMS and the Famicom/NES were from the previous generation, which btw also has the same 2 ecosystem feature I've been talking about above. The Atari 7800 came in a distant 3rd to a distant 2nd dominated by the 1st place player.
the wii's attach rate was really low, so in the end developers opted not to develop for it. Talking about the software ecosystem is talking about the handful of first-party games.
To somewhat disagree, the Wii lacked the staying power I think of the other consoles because of the low end hardware it simply couldn't keep up with where software was going.
The resulted in fewer ports.
Plus if you compare the Wii ecosystem to the 360/PS3, the install base on the latter is much larger and the systems are more similar from a user POV. It's worth it just port between those two while the Wii isn't really worth it.
You're right, but I don't think that's the full picture. Even if the Wii was up to performance with the 360/PS3, there still wouldn't have been many ports because they cater to fundamentally different gameplay. Most Wii players never owned the gamepad, only the Wiimote and nunchuck combo.
I think the Wii's problem was only partially related to its performance, and much moreso related to the fact that motion gaming was a fad that ran aground fairly quickly.
It wasn't just the Wii either, remember when the iPhone came out and developers imagined a crappy future where you'd practically fall out of your chair playing a racing or flying game.
Once the novelty of Wii Sports wore off, the Wii was dead in the water. The DS in contrast was a much stronger, much longer-lasting platform that could keep its player base interested for more than a few months.
> By and large, with the exception of a few exclusives, the 360 and the PS3 have more or less the same set of games. Both were incredibly advanced and were a logical progression of the course that these systems were going. But they both more or less have the same software ecosystem. Most of the library available on one is available on the other.
You know, this part still blows my mind--and that's really my age showing, because this is one of those "new normal" states that anyone born recently won't even question: Sony spent untold amounts of R&D money making an 1+8 core system at a time when that amount of power was unheard of. Microsoft put commodity PC hardware in a plastic shell. And yet you don't see any games that are exclusive to one or the other because porting is technologically unfeasible. (On the contrary, the only "exclusives" are that way because of licencing agreements.) Does this mean that people still aren't taking advantage of the systems' respective unique hardware, after all these years?
I would say no. Instead, it seems more that an increasing trend to make one's SDK something that runs on commodity PC hardware--instead of an expensive, dedicated, serial-connected tester unit, as in previous generations--has fostered all the disadvantages of commodity PC hardware on the developer. It's hard to developer for 8+1 cores if you don't see the speedup on your own machine. So game software is now, by and large, PC software--software for a CPU with some small number of cores, some large amount of RAM, and a pretty massive GPU for everything else--not software targeted at special tile-drawing and sprite-drawing and audio-synthesis chips.
What this means, I think, for the next generation of consoles: ignoring UX differentiators like the Wii (and it seems like they're still the only ones differentiating on UX), the rest of the systems will probably all have roughly the same set of games. Portability is now easy, because every console is basically a PC. We don't include special hardware any more, because nobody's gonna program for it. For consumers, this means console choice will come down to something like price-point + brand-recognition, rather than any question of "what games will run on this."
The obvious exception is the one I mentioned above--platforms with enough leverage to make exclusive licensing deals. But this is, at least currently, a declining relic of a bygone age: I can see first-party (Nintendo, Valve) and fully-owned subsidiaries (Bungie) as continuing to create exclusives, but even the most heavily one-platform-at-a-time companies (Square-Enix) are now branching out all over the place, because that amount of power over the consumer is decreasingly relevant, and it captures more of the market to have some games on every platform, than to target one console's market and get "guaranteed" consumption because you're the biggest fish in the smaller pond.
In other words, in a way, console software is being "globalized" between markets, just like movies and music are being globalized between the US, Europe and Asia. You can't just release on one and then perhaps re-release on the others at some later date; you'll be missing out if you aren't everywhere.
Actually, the 360 does have a custom architecture. It has a tri-core PPC based CPU and all custom ICs for the GPU and southbridge. It was the original Xbox which was Pentium based and very close to a commercial PC, although with custom GPU and southbridge ICs as well.
I think it's more simply just an extension of the old note that no-one really hand-codes assembly anymore.
You can. And those who are really good can still see performance gains. But most people who try spend a lot of time and effort to get results that are indistinguishable-to-worse as compared to the compiler.
So it is with custom architectures. If the compiler can utilize a gaggle of DSPs or specialized GPU cores? great! Everyone wins. But if it takes some special effort to really make them sing, most people won't bother because they know that for most projects you don't have the time/expertise to pull it off.
It doesn't mean there's no point to doing specialized hardware. It just means that the SDK, compiler and libraries need to deliver enough performance to justify their inclusion.
I always wondered why there was this heterogeneity between consoles and PCs. You're playing the same games, why would it be good for anyone to have to develop/buy something twice or for one exclusively.
Hopefully the Steam Box destroys this distinction and makes a more consistent and flexible gaming landscape.
Development-wise that problem has mostly been solved. In the past cross-platform game development was done as separate projects, often handing off "porting" the game to a platform to an external team, even. Today it's more common to use engines (such as the unreal engine) which support all the major platforms (PC, 360, and PS3 typically, for first-person, high graphic-load style games), and then do the development for all versions concurrently. Typically you'd just have your regular builds set up to produce versions for each platform as a matter of routine, and you'd have a consistent testing experience for each. You'd still end up with customizations and tweaks for each individual platform but for the most part all of the hard work of targeting and optimizing for each platform is automated.
Just for another perspective, my experience doesn't really align with this. From my (biased) perspective, this sounds like "in theory" as opposed to "in practice" so I'm honestly curious if you've managed to get away from having to really deal with cross-platform differences.
I know that in theory you use a cross platform engine that hides away all the messy details from you.In practice, I've found the PS3/360 have quite different CPU/memory architectures and you start dealing with the reality of that sooner than you'd expect. Whether that requires manually down sizing certain swaths of textures or writing code that will run on the SPU, there's quite a bit of manual work involved.
Also, most game studios tend to roll their own tech which generally requires at least a small cadre of people manually targeting and optimization for each platform.
Huh? Obviously it's good for (=more money to) the publisher if you as the player buys the same game both for a console (or two!) and for a PC, and any additional platforms that may appear?
The days of walled-developer-gardens are over! The barrier to entry into the lucrative console markets are lower and lower with every day that passes .. as a developer who could never afford a PS3 or XBox dev license, I've been participating as much as I can in the open hardware arena (GP32, GP2X, Wiz, Caanoo, Open Pandora) as much as possible .. and now the dream is finally coming true!
I can't wait until the day these things start shipping - I for one welcome the opportunity to have as much diversity in this market as possible ..
The point is, between "totally tyrannically rulled wall garden", and "nicely maintained arena of culture", is a big difference!
I'm perfectly fine with Linux as a dev platform. Steam on Linux is an admission that in fact, you can use Linux to make great games. Maybe I have to sign my binaries before Valve gives them to 20 million users, but okay; I'm still going to be, locally, 100% developing on Linux, nevertheless.
FYI, a $500 PC that attaches to your TV is not going to sell well. It might be profitable and a good idea, but it's not going to stop console gaming from "winning". The magic price point is $199.
Something like the OUYA is more likely to hit the mainstream. $99 is a great price point. What people are discounting is that something like OUYA could get updated every 1-2 years unlike the 7ish year console lifecycle we are currently in. ARM keeps getting faster, it will certainly be "fast enough" soon...
Haha, well I'm no industrial designer, so who knows what it ought to look like... but if it looks like this image, you can be sure I won't ever have one sitting next to my TV.
I'm not really interested at this point anyway, but an ugly hardware design virtually seals the deal.
At the moment it's just "There will be a small PC you can plug into your TV and play games on" and I can do that for myself. What advantage will this box have over that?
It doesn't go direct to Big Picture mode though and you still have to click through UAC and firewall alerts when launching newly installed games quiet frequently. Having full control of the software stack lets them take out quite a friction points.
Adding an option to boot directly to big picture mode would be a huge problem and the Steam Windows client automatically adds firewall exceptions etc for games that you install.
Since I mainly use Linux my Windows 7 PC is basically a Steam box already.
The difference is the experience. If they can provide an experience that people find valuable and an improvement over, for them at least, just hooking up a PC to a TV then it could be advantageous.
Forget for a moment that this is "just" a linux pc running steam. Imagine for a second that this is some company launching a brand new game console. In much the same way that Sony entered the market with the PS1 or Microsoft with the XBOX. Does the installed base of games matter? Not if the console maker can drive an initial set of games on launch that are compelling enough to drive people to buy the console in large numbers, and then the installed base of consoles will incentivize other games makers to target the console. Valve has the advantage here that they are already a top tier game studio and they already have quite cozy relations with a lot of game makers and publishers.
Will it work? Maybe, maybe not, it's hard to say just now. Ultimately the market will decide. Personally I'd give it just as much chance as the WiiU, if not more, of being a major player in the console games market in 5 years.
From what I remember the big killer apps for the PS1 ,XBOX and N64 at launch were FF7, Goldeneye and Halo respectively. The important thing being that these were platform exclusive titles.
I know plenty of people who bought an N64 for goldeneye and mario kart alone and didn't buy any other titles.
Of course Valve does have an atomic bomb in the form of HL3.
Assuming they decide not to release a Windows version of HL3 (a gutsy ploy it itself, would piss off huge numbers of gamers) they would still be competing against any manufacturer who decided to sell a Linux based gaming computer. Though perhaps selling hardware is not something they are interested in from a revenue point of view and they just want gamers off Windows and onto something without a competing app store?
Consoles are usually marketed around games, especially exclusives. If this is a standard PC it won't have any and will be around twice the price of any other console.
One big advantage I would hope for would be "The games you can see for sale will all work on your graphics card and controller, and you won't have to play around with resolution settings and 2xFSAA, or whatever, trying to find an acceptable level of prettyness you computer can cope with".
Latest rumor I read was that it was going to ship with Linux (if you google steam box linux you'll find some sources). Price, I haven't heard anything about.
As for advantages, it's probably the same as any other console, which means it comes with the same disadvantages. There will probably be steam box approved games on steam, which you will be sure will work in it, and you may also see some developers targeting it specifically.
But yes, if you know what you're doing, there probably wont be any advantage on choosing this over your own custom built PC. I don't see many developers restricting their games to steam box.
It has been claimed elsewhere[1], with reference to something said by Ben Krasnow, that the projected Steam console will run Linux. Take it with a grain of salt until you hear something official, but at least, hints can be found.
edit: For those who don't know golem.de (presumably most here), it is one of the two major respectable German IT-news sites (next to heise.de, translated as The H)
I don't know, the form factor is interesting. Even aside from the modularity, the size is very small, and not sure how you could really do that for yourself. Look at the size of the ethernet port on the back compared to the whole unit.
Edit: And yeah, you can build your own PC that could work for your living room just as well, but that's looking at a very small piece of the market who are comfortable with doing that. You are going to need more products like these to get Steam into more living rooms.
Modern 3D engines usually contain some not-insignificant amount of assembly for performance reasons. It'd require almost completely retuning, probably, undoing years of ideas since ARM is an entirely different architecture.
Modern 3D engines contain almost no assembly anymore these days, and for the rare bits that are still hand-coded assembly, platform-independent alternative codepaths always exist. We've been long past the point where raw CPU performance even matters for high-end games anymore, for some time already. Porting between e.g. PPC as used in consoles and x86 is business as usual, so I don't see why porting to ARM would be much more difficult.
The main problem right now is that ARM performance is simply not there yet. It might be somewhere in the future, but even that remains to be seen, it's not entirely clear how well ARM designs will keep scaling up as they start to approach midrange x86 chips. Right now, ARM is just starting to match Atom, which is dog-slow compared to Core i3/i5/i7, and basically useless for non-trivial gaming.
Which is exactly what a console is. I do not understand all these "but if you would pay x more you could get this and that and ..." here - yeah, you can do this, but people still buy a X-Box/PS3/whatever. The value of a console (or Steam box) is the _standardization_ i.e. all models of the Steambox are exactly the same. You test one, it works on all of them. Contrast this with the millions and millions of configurations that PCs have which are all subtle different. People can test as long as they want but can never be sure that a game will run on _your_ (or my or anyone else) PC.
The biggest value of an xbox is probably the heavily subsidised price point and access to a proprietary ecosystem and console exclusive games.
Unless Valve can pull out a huge amount of launch titles this will have a very weak ecosystem of it's own so will have to compete directly against other "gaming PC" companies such as Alienware.
- The Xbox 360 doesn't have a date/time chip. It gets its time from the cloud (Xbox Live).
- The security architectures of these platforms are extensive, to prevent piracy, cheating and malware.
I'm guessing that the days of standardization of console hardware are over; the mobile market has proven that you can innovate and increase power, and developers are happy to comply (as long as there is money in it). You can't /reduce/ computational power or feature sets easily, but you can certainly improve them.
Not entirely sure, but I don't see what the big differentiation would be with say an alienware gaming system.
It's no cheaper and if they plan on putting Linux on it then the alienware will run many more games.
I'm not seeing a dismembered human. I'm seeing some poorly drawn cartoon characters in what looks to be a prison fight, and the picture includes what could possibly be poorly drawn blood on the ground. Are you seeing something else?
I feel like that kind of behavior is probably worse than being a patent troll.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chromebook#Trademark_dispute
http://www.isys-tech.com/xi3-architecture.php