Will major game companies latch on to Steam OS and Steam Box?

[DoPo]

You would have to sell lots of hats and customizations per user to hit the $60/£40 price point of a CoD game.

I'm fairly confident they do make money off it though - not sure how it compares to CoD but I'd class it somewhere around "shitloads". They sell cosmetics yes, but they also sell the new crafting tools and armory expanders which fetch a good price and many people use them. Furthermore, there are the keys for the chests that don't drop but are only sold (and the damn chests drop like candy). And there are also the passes for tournaments. Some of these things you can actually get from the player market, yes, however Valve still take 10% of every transaction there (2x5% to be more precise, which is a minimum of 1 penny/cent/whatever each) and considering how much stuff gets sold there, I'd rate it as a good source of money. A bit more than a month back I unloaded most of my inventory and most of my stuff sold within 5 minutes of putting it on the market, the longest I "waited" to sell something[footnote]"waited" is in quotes as I didn't really wait - mostly it got sold by the time I finished putting everything there[/footnote] was about 15 minutes or so. Well, aside from the chests which don't really sell, like, at all. But yeah - I was surprised what I managed to sell - some shitty common items that had the lowest possible price still sold. That was shortly before the introduction of crafting, by the way - I expect stuff to sell even better now.

So yeah - I cannot say how much money they do make, but I'm fairly confident it's a lot.

The revenues of EA, Activision and Valve are about the same. However EA and Activision predominantly sell their own games retail and not others peoples. Valve primary business is retail of other peoples games on the PC. IF TF2 and dota was more profitable that the AAA $60/£40 games it would show in the figures. The free to play model allows Valve to make money at less risk than the AAA game but not more money. If it did it would show in the figures.

*sight* I'll repeat it just for you - I am not claiming it makes MORE money, I say it makes A LOT of money. There is a subtle difference between the two - one I said and the other I didn't but you seem to believe I did. I'd also like to point out that the big publishers also devote a shitload of money for the games themselves to the point where making millions from sales is not enough for them. Also, the big publishers are...well, as the name suggests - bigger, thus have more expenses purely because of that (like, for example, staff wages).

I suppose you start from the misconception that everything must be more profitable than an arbitrary AAA game - no, I don't think it needs to. It would be awesome, yes, but a good enough profit is also an option - I don't think every single game must be like "must beat CoD in sales or bust".

 

[Fireaxe]

Actually there's a bit of a compatibility gap where some things too recent for DOS won't run under compatibility mode at this point, and it's only going to get worse as Microsoft adds useless arbitrary shit onto Win8. Plus if we're allowing for third party support, Wine and POL have strong backwards compatibility on Linux.

GoG sell old games that run under dosbox but nothing for wine or POL because the user base of Linux is so small.

A lot of products that run under DosBox will run under Wine; DosBox goes back further is the only real difference. At this point for anything from 1994-2001, Wine is probably more reliable.

 

[Laughing Man]

Actually, if you look at the direction Microsoft are taking with Windows 8 it's hard to think Valve can't offer something in terms of a gaming OS -- plus every new Windows version makes an earlier generation of games stop working, for example Win7 can't run some games that ran fine on WinXP.

The point would be valid except that the next update to Windows 8 has shown that despite what people think MS ARE listening, remember they said with the launch of Win 8 that the Start bar was dead, that it would never return yet due to customer backlash the Start bar is due to return with the next SP. In fact the backlash against the XBox One does show that MS listen.

You're also the second person to list old gen games as having compatibility issues with newer versions of Windows, a valid point but when the competition has compatibility issues with EVERY game unless it is specifically coded for it's OS, then the argument does loose quite a bit of its validity.

 

[SomeGuyOnHisComputer]

SteamOS is just a linux distro, companies don't have to 'latch on to it' in order to support it, they just need to make decent Linux ports that can run on any system Steam runs on. I'm pretty sure it exists solely so that Valve can trust it'll always work on their hardware. Kind of like what Apple does with Macs, except not evil because it's all open. If they just used, say, Ubuntu, than an update could break the system, and the mainstream consumer wont know how to fix it. It would be a disaster that Valve has no control over.

SteamOS is necessary in order to console-ize PC gameing without MS's help.