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Re: 3 Steam Announcements

I'll like to purchase one of those controllers to try out when they release. They do look interesting.

I don't think there will be a middle ground with that controller. It's either going to be completely innovative and revolutionary or it's going to fail hard. People are so used to the norm that it took some real guts to do a re-design. I can't wait to try one.
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The world was movin' she was right there with it and she was

Kotaku has a good piece on the controller:
»kotaku.com/valves-controller-has···15579308

Steam has been great and it works very well for me. I'm interested in their new move.

If Apple sold stuff the same way, old movies or games with waning consumer interest would be significantly discounted. I don't see this happening with any other online store aside from Steam. Any cheap stuff or free offerings come with gimped play and outrageous in-app purchases.

I've spent hundreds of dollars in the last few years on Steam sales, but I've never been as excited about any other online store sale as I am with these periodic sales at Steam.

The prices seem reasonable. Sony PS3 has its moments, but nothing compares to Steam for value, in my opinion. Xbox 360? Microsoft is still selling the original Plants vs. Zombies for $14.99. Not the ridiculous in-app purchasing version, just the original. Steam sells the game of the year version as low as $1.99 on sale.

Basically, if the DRM is solid but not damaging, and nobody can trade in their games to GameStop or something similar, give us a f'n break on the damn prices. Thanks Steam. Screw other implementations if you can't match the value in pricing.

Steam makes things easy for developers and publishers, at least when compared to Microsoft, Sony, or Apple. Google might be the only other ray of light in this scenario.

Apps on the apple app store regularly go free for a weekend or holiday or go down to 99 cents. You just have to install an app that watches for sales, there are dozens of apps that just do that.

It is really the choice of the publisher, I'm very sure that itunes/apple would like to have free music or free movie rental weekend or specials (they do sometimes) however the big studios don't think that way - even for old movies that once were considered premium but are no longer.

I'm actually very curious what kind of comparison you are trying to make. Not being difficult but just genuinely curious after reading over this thread.

As a moderate Steam user but partaking in many sales and having a library of 60 games thus far, in addition to being an avid Android user (I am not an apple person so this is my comparison given for all intents and purposes the app store and play store are identical at this point) and all I can say is there is very little if any comparison. I can't really come up with anything concise and makes sense in my head except for there being little comparisons between the two other than they both deal in games and, once Valve gets everything under control, movies and music. But that is where the line ends.

Unfortunately if you want to compare the publisher end of the business model, it is hard to do because hardly anyone has come forth with solid numbers and tales of how each company handles it. Especially Valve in this case. But I imagine Valve, given the very steep discounts they often give, are doing something right and the publishers are going along amicably given more and more publishers are coming on board, sales happen, money being made, gamers throwing cash at their screens, etc.. Granted once they get into music and movies, barring it is a traditional store and not just an XBMC style library/player for your own content type dealie, I imagine it will fall in line with existing stores business models. Gotta appease those *AA's.

The app store on the other hand, in terms of games and apps and not music/movies, seems to run along the lines of publishers setting prices themselves with a set take from Apple to take into account. I imagine the weekend/holiday sales are probably something along the lines of Apple goes to some of the popular titles and brings them on board for it. It is still likely the app developer's choice.

To break into another topic: With Valve's announcement of trying to do music and movies as well, I have to say this much: The marketplace is becoming pretty flooded with me-toos and everyone is fairly competitively priced. Unless they do something extraordinary with it, I probably won't even bother. They need something more than 'it will be on Steam alongside your games' to entice people I think.
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I swear, some people should have pace-makers installed to free up the resources. Breathing and heart beat taxes their whole system, all of their brain cells wasted on life support.-two bit brains, and the second bit is wasted on parity! ~head_spaz

So let me see if I am getting all this straight after digesting this.

Don't buy a PS4.

Wait to see how this Steam thing turns out.

Build a new 2014 rig.

Wipe old rig and install Steam OS.

Install old rig in the living room.

Buy a Steam controller.

Is that sorta their goal here? I just bought an 80" TV and was thinking of getting a PS4. This sounds like another wait-n-see thing here.

Well, it's the above, or get the SteamBox, or get a cheap, small, quiet, underpowered box for the living room with SteamOS and stream a game to the living room from the beast PC elsewhere in your house.

You can still run Steam on a PC in your living room via Big Picture and get a controller if you don't want to use SteamOS.

that might be their plan however I'm not sure it will be a winning one.

There are too many console only titles to make it an either/or thing. While many gamers own both PC and a console, not so many gamers ONLY own a PC (and most of those that are PC only are so because a PC fits their lifestyle, perhaps they are in a dorm or a flatmate share thing, or in their parents house).

I just can't imagine any steambox stealing market share from the consoles. At least not for several years. Yet another blow for windows as a consumer OS, yes. For example if I'd happily jettison my PC running XP if a steambox can eventually replace it.

Maybe it will be steambox vs ps5/xbox2

I see steam has started accepting Beta Applicants via an achievement system. I would like to do it, but have no controller for my system so I fail the first achievement.

I think this could be a good research opportunity to see what case people fall under and give a semi-educated guess on how well this could work out.

Personally I have a bunch of PC titles I would love to see on a console in that form with gamepad controls. There are also some console only titles I would love to see moved over to the PC. At the very least Steam seems to be pushing hard for the one side of the equation. In my house it would come down to being able to play on the console and then move over to the PC if I choose or someone wants the TV for something else. And with cloud saves it makes it easy to make that move between.

And on a similar note with their greenlight system, it makes it that much easier to get indie titles into the living room. Microsoft and Sony do this somewhat but aren't as easy to go about it. And it requires developing for those consoles specifically. With SteamOS and the Steambox indie developers should have a better time at it with less cross-developing required.
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I swear, some people should have pace-makers installed to free up the resources. Breathing and heart beat taxes their whole system, all of their brain cells wasted on life support.-two bit brains, and the second bit is wasted on parity! ~head_spaz

Just playing what-if here: Sony has been rewarded by its solid strategy this go around of listening to gamers, and helping indie titles. It can't escape their notice that since this iteration of consoles is solidly a PC architecture the porting cost for developers has dropped hugely. The barrier of a whole special architecture is not there. A PC title can run on the PS4 without compromise.

If the people who masterminded their turnaround in the mindshare of gamers before and during E3 are still at the helm and why wouldn't they be, they could out-steam steam. Steam think the world needs a new controller to usher PC gaming to TVs but perhaps the world just needs lower barriers to more publishers, and steam/apple style game pricing - definitely doable with the fully digital distribution system.

An uber controller (remember the Wi-U?) may not be the key.

I'm pretty sure the controller aspect was designed moreso to get traditional keyboard/mouse controlled titles into the living room without having to actually deal with a keyboard and mouse in the living room. While a lot of titles have added gamepad support recently, and ironically enough using Microsoft's Xinput API, there's a lot of titles (some older) that are not gamepad supported. And some game genres just can't be done that well with gamepads. Basically having a reprogrammable pad like this with haptic touchpads gives them that open to map keyboard controls per game and hopefully make it intuitive.

Mind you I honestly can't say whether I think it will work out or not. It may just as well fail horribly. Don't know. But it is an attempt at least to get a subsection of games that have been traditionally stuck on the PC on a console.
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I swear, some people should have pace-makers installed to free up the resources. Breathing and heart beat taxes their whole system, all of their brain cells wasted on life support.-two bit brains, and the second bit is wasted on parity! ~head_spaz

I think you guys are overthinking it.

The Steam Machine / Steam OS is not aimed at PC gamers. We already have Steam on our own machines and are giving them money fairly regularly. The controller still isn't actually aimed at PC users, although a lot of us do use controllers so it has more of an appeal than the other two.

The Steam Machine is aimed at console gamers, the people who don't use a PC for gaming and currently only have a choice between the Xbox One and the PS4. It is essentially trying to reinvent the way console gamers play games. Whether it works or not is based on the console price more than anything. The game library is there.

I guess we will see how it looks when it is released. Products like this and Nvidia Shield look nice, but so far, the jury is out as to how good it is.
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