Valve is going to start making hardware!

Please read the article in full before you comment. I for one welcome the idea. We need someone with some pull to force PC OEMs and hardware makers to bother to innovate. Valve could do that with ease if they do not accept a pay-off from the major players. (The major players are Intel, AMD, and Nvidia. There are more, but those three are involved in every system you can build on the x86 platform of PCs.)

https://www.theverge.com/2012/3/2/2840932/exclusive-valve-steam-box-gaming-console

For those too lazy to read the article, the system is supposedly based upon an Alienware X51 system that has either two or four cores on the CPU running at either 3.3 or 3.4 Gigahertz with a "Discrete" Geforce 545 GPU or the slightly more potent Geforce 555 GPU. It will have 4GB of RAM, a 1TB mechanical hard drive spinning at 7200RPMs, and run Windows Seven.

Nothing more is really known at current. But if Valve starts getting involved in PC hardware, that will either be a very good thing, or a terrible thing. Mostly this will depend on if they remain honest and fair or not.

What does everyone think? I welcome your thought. Even you Mac users. Since Macs currently run on PC hardware, you have just as much relevant input as the hardcore PC lunatics like myself. (Take that as a complement. That is how it is meant.)

*Edit* Oh. the biggest problem I see is that the PSU will be 240 watts. That is woefully underpowered for a gaming system. My current PC uses about 350 watts when gaming. But it has a much more potent GPU and a less efficient CPU. Still I would think having a PSU with double the power capacity of what you expect to be drawn would make it last many times as long.

*Edit* By the way, after negating posts I have deleted, this is my 2500th post here. Time to ban me again!

 

I still say they have to make more hats.

 

After reading the comments on the page, I have the following that I would add if I cared enough to join the site:

First of all, Windows 8 is not a real OS in my never humble opinion. It is an OS strictly for phones and other sub-netbook devices. It has the worst interface I have seen in my entire life, and I do not like the idea of "Buying" an OS so I can use a mandatory application that will spy on me and attempt to sell me junk I probably do not want to begin with.

Second, Valve is a company motivated primarily by profits. They are not in the business of charity. They do not want to sit around fixing everything Microsoft screws up. Thus they want to stick with Windows Seven. It is tried and true. It works for games just fine.

Third, Valve is not even discussing "Making" PC hardware. They are actually talking about making a standardized "Valve" PC that will be the idiot mode of picking hardware. It will work, but it will not be the best, nor the best for the money.

Fourth, there is a problem with the proposed system. Everyone seems to be ignoring it. The PSU provides 240 watts. Double that and we have something manageable. But as it is, I expect these to die in a fire very quickly.

Fifth, those MS fanboys need to realize that the Xbox 360 controller/receiver for Windows is years outdated. The devices are known to burn out in months. There is no solution. The drivers are years old and are not supported. And it often is cheaper to buy another than to fight MS to get your defective receiver repaired/replaced. Until MS makes a real effort to fix this years old problem, they cannot expect anyone to trust them as a gaming company.

Sixth, Linux is a great OS, but sadly too many worship at the alter of the almighty dollar and will not risk losing their advantage to competition by releasing quality drivers for GPUs/CPUs/controllers and anything else. So Linux cannot use many modern devices. And those it can use often have lacking features compared to Windows drivers for the same device.

Seventh, If Valve does what they are saying and makes inferior gaming PCs it will be double edged. The price of compatible PSUs will double in days from release. And buying a potent PSU to ensure it does not die will cost more than half the speculative cost of the system. ($300) Remember E-Machines? Same problem. Same Solution.

Eighth, If Valve surprises us with a system like the X51 but with a slightly more potent GPU and a decent PSU and Windows 7 x64 preloaded on a tiny SSD (~60-120 GBs?) it will be a huge success. I will not buy one though. Purely because I lack the money and have the knowledge to build a better system for less money. But I will welcome them if they do.

But after typing that up, I realized I would have to register on the site to post that. So I read 355 comments for nothing... Shame on me and them.

 

Slightly off topic, but telling if you read between the lines.
https://www.theverge.com/2012/8/2/3214980/valves-source-engine-linux-opengl-direct3d

OpenGL has been a favorite of mine for ages. I played Rage and it has only one render method. You guessed it. OpenGL. It works and works fine if your drivers are not an abomination. But that is more often than not the case. Every driver release by AMD and Nvidia supports some few extra OpenGL extensions, and lacks some supported by the last version. ID software hoped to force them to consistently support OpenGL. As it turns out, they just released special hotfix drivers specifically for Rage and then brushed it under the rug again. Some may wonder why they do this. I have a hypothesis...

Having working full support of OpenGL allows people to easily see that the modern GPUs made by both AMD and Nvidia are neck and neck in terms of performance. And also shows that more expensive GPUs are rarely worth the extra money. So they play this elaborate game of pretending that they have full OpenGL support while they phase OpenGL extensions in and out of the drivers every release. The effort keeps people from being able to clearly show what performance anything has without using DirectX and Direct3D owned by Microsoft. And Microsoft then in turn pretends that certain versions of DirectX and Direct3D are not capable of working on certain OS'es like XP. (But some smart people managed to patch Crysis and Halo 2 to support DX10 in XP despite MS claiming it is physically impossible.)

It is a filthy sea they swim. And slime floats to the surface.

 

First of all, that Valve story is old -- and about a week later Valve actually debunked the story that it had current plans to sell computer hardware. What they actually were doing was building boxes to test what they call their 'big picture' initiative to make Steam work better on television screens. They also were experimenting with "biometric feedback" devices. They MAY at some point decide to go into the hardware business, but it's not (at least at the time of that article) on their agenda. Essentially, people were jumping to conclusions and the story kind of propagated around the net, the way these things do.

 

I did a bit more research on this and came to the conclusion that your original post may actually (eventually, but not any time soon) have some truth to it:
http://www.pcworld.com/article/2618...game_maker_thinking_beyond_the_gaming_pc.html

 

It could also be a combination of multiple projects. If they are not ready to roll out an OEM, they can always say the hardware was used for testing their applications and betas and such. And there is no evidence they would have to lie to do that either.

I am positive that if Valve does sell PC hardware, they will not come with a disc to install Steam from. They will doubtlessly come preloaded.

Ultimately time will tell the tale. I just hope they do not mass-produce garbage boxes.

 

Don't think Steam would come preinstalled, or else the Cartel supervision would be on their heels immediately. Look what happened to Microsoft with IE and Media Player. Valve does not want a giant lawsuit out of that, because a big part of Valve's capital is the goodwill of the general population.
Valve is the only major player that is seen as "good" by most gamers, and that's how they want to keep it.

 

They've only posted about wanting to hire an industrial designer -- all the conclusions that people are making stem from that. I looked at their job listings, and that's the only one that seems like it's focused on hardware. So whatever they are thinking of, it's NOT (at least for now) likely to be something big. That's why I said 'not any time soon'. There's still no 'there' there, so to speak. For all we know, the industrial designer is being hired to do the plumbing in their new offices (j/k, but you know what I mean). It could simply be a biometric game controller, which is what they seem to have been researching.

 

It's fact Valve spend a lot of R&D into hardware, gabe knows what they plan to do in the end with all that research.

Imo as Steam is already the main distribution service for PC game, they should just go ahead a make their own SteamOS as a linux distribution and sell shitloads of Indie games through there, and eventually convince big corps to get off Microsoft's back.

Then they could sell Valve PCs and encourage the devs to optimize their game based on Valve PCs' range of products.

Then they take over the world.

 

Does Valve make Skynet?

 

In collaboration with Microsoft and MathWorks.

 

I don't think this makes any sense. Look at Microsoft, Sony and Apple. They all have their own hardware that comes preinstalled with an app market that cannot be replaced. There's no reason to think that if Valve made a console of sorts it wouldn't come with Steam preinstalled. And I wouldn't be surprised if you were forced to use it to install any games. Why would Valve want to sell a generic PC that you might or might not install Steam on?

 

Also, the IE and Media Player issue isn't the same as Steam is, being a virtual shop which manages games.
Think about Internet Explorer, and the name is "browser"; think about Media Player, and the names are "music" and "video". There are plenty of programs which does the same things.
But think about Steam, and the only name you could give to it is "Steam". Since it is more than a virtual shop (there are games selled only on Steam) and it's more than a game friends manager (like the very old Xfire). Plus, it's all those things together.
There isn't a real alternative like there are for IE or WMP.

 

If I remember the details correctly, the reason the suit about media player and IE was successful was that it was rigged to be impossible to uninstall those things. That gave an unfair advantage to MS and the opposition was able to demonstrate that and other undesired behavior that could not be avoided without extraordinary measures being taken.

 

Nevertheless, plenty of manufacturers ship their software alongside their hardware without any issue, and in most case it's impossible to uninstall as well (xboxes, smartphones, tablets, macs, etc.). The government cracked down on MS because it had a quasi-monopoly over the market.

Otherwise they don't care, else apple would have been broken to pieces.

 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xbox_Linux

 

For the linux thing on the xbox, I think it's not a legal thing, since you have to make changes to the hardware, and anyway it's not something simple like installing a program or a OS (in those days).
You can put different OSes on smartphones, too, but it's not its real function. Also, I think that IE and WMP can be wipped from a system, but you need the skills. The same skills for a modchip or changing stuff in a telephone.

 

I applied modded firmware to my Xbox 360 before I gave it away. But that required me to break the seals and voids the warranty. MS wants people to think the universe will unravel if you mod a console they made. But it is simply not true. It is EULA nonsense that can be overlooked so long as you do not do it for profit. (Nor to pirate games.)

A "Valve" or "Steam" PC would be just the same sort of thing. People have modded phones and certain companies pretend it is a criminal offense to use a different carrier with the hardware too. No, it is not different here. (Apple... Stop pretending people are criminals before someone with money hires a competent legal team to sue you into bankruptcy for slander or something...)