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

[Requia]

Ah, well that's saved me some worry. I'm still going to wait for them to polish it a bit though, as I can see myself getting frustrated with early versions. I've dabbled with linux, but I doubt I have the technical know-how to live with SteamOS at the moment.

See edit for the polished tool, but even so beta OSs are for the desperate, the stupid, and people with multiple computers.

 

[Lightknight]

Assuming that the steam box will be capable of playing normal pc games? Sure. But gaming companies don't really need to change anything. The only difference would be if steam boxes get really popular and so these companies start optmizing for them. This would essentially make steam boxes a computer console.

 

[Robert Marrs]

Its entirely possible. SteamOS is supposed to be streamlined for developers so if enough people are using it developers will probably jump on board. Valve just needs to give consumers a good reason to use SteamOS over windows 7. EA is the only one I could see avoiding SteamOS considering they insist on forcing everyone to use origin. Possibly Ubisoft as well if you take the same stance with Uplay. I really hope it works out and I really hope valve gives me a good reason to drop windows 7 but only time will tell.

 

[TomWiley]

I think the chance of major publishers latching onto the Steam Machines is slightly more likely than the same happening to the Ouya, but is to say; kinda unlikely.

 

[Nergui]

See edit for the polished tool, but even so beta OSs are for the desperate, the stupid, and people with multiple computers.

No truer words have ever been spoken of beta OSs.

Mate DirectX is king and has been so for 10 years and AMD and NVIDIA are not going to annoy the one of their biggest customers with the xbox. Just look on steam and see how many AAA games are on linux and the highest version of linux coming at 0.36% os steam user base. http://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/ If you add up all the poeple playing the varoius call duty games on steam it also out strips the people playing TF2. http://store.steampowered.com/stats/.

Doing some calculations, there are more people on steam playing TF2 than CoD variants and about three times as many playing Counter-Strike variants.

My computer's main purpose is gaming, so my hope for SteamOS is that Win7 will be the last edition of windows I will ever have on my computer.

Concerning DirectX (assuming you're referring to Direct3D), there is already a 3D api that's just as good, OpenGL. Which is fully supported by both Nvidia and AMD. There are even quite a few OpenGL games available and in development.

 

[Requia]

Doing some calculations, there are more people on steam playing TF2 than CoD variants and about three times as many playing Counter-Strike variants.

I get slightly more for all CODs than Tf2, but as you point out counter strike variation blow them both away, and I add that DOTA2 blows it *all* away.

 

[Albino Boo]

Doing some calculations, there are more people on steam playing TF2 than CoD variants and about three times as many playing Counter-Strike variants.

My computer's main purpose is gaming, so my hope for SteamOS is that Win7 will be the last edition of windows I will ever have on my computer.

Concerning DirectX (assuming you're referring to Direct3D), there is already a 3D api that's just as good, OpenGL. Which is fully supported by both Nvidia and AMD. There are even quite a few OpenGL games available and in development.

OpenGL lost to directx a decade ago. Name one AAA developer that use OpenGl instead of directx.

Doing some calculations, there are more people on steam playing TF2 than CoD variants and about three times as many playing Counter-Strike variants.

I get slightly more for all CODs than Tf2, but as you point out counter strike variation blow them both away, and I add that DOTA2 blows it *all* away.

Free to play game versus full price game, which one made more money?

 

[Nergui]

Doing some calculations, there are more people on steam playing TF2 than CoD variants and about three times as many playing Counter-Strike variants.

My computer's main purpose is gaming, so my hope for SteamOS is that Win7 will be the last edition of windows I will ever have on my computer.

Concerning DirectX (assuming you're referring to Direct3D), there is already a 3D api that's just as good, OpenGL. Which is fully supported by both Nvidia and AMD. There are even quite a few OpenGL games available and in development.

OpenGL lost to directx a decade ago. Name one AAA developer that use OpenGl instead of directx.

Valve, id, MachineGames, Rogue Entertainment. I'll leave it to you to explore what games they have made/are making.

Doing some calculations, there are more people on steam playing TF2 than CoD variants and about three times as many playing Counter-Strike variants.

I get slightly more for all CODs than Tf2, but as you point out counter strike variation blow them both away, and I add that DOTA2 blows it *all* away.

Free to play game versus full price game, which one made more money?

Hard to say, but Half-Life, it's counter strike mods and their sequels and variants have had similar sales figures. DOTA2 may be free-to-play, but Valve still makes money from it, LOTS of money.

 

[Albino Boo]

Doing some calculations, there are more people on steam playing TF2 than CoD variants and about three times as many playing Counter-Strike variants.

My computer's main purpose is gaming, so my hope for SteamOS is that Win7 will be the last edition of windows I will ever have on my computer.

Concerning DirectX (assuming you're referring to Direct3D), there is already a 3D api that's just as good, OpenGL. Which is fully supported by both Nvidia and AMD. There are even quite a few OpenGL games available and in development.

OpenGL lost to directx a decade ago. Name one AAA developer that use OpenGl instead of directx.

Valve, id, MachineGames, Rogue Entertainment. I'll leave it to you to explore what games they have made/are making.

Doing some calculations, there are more people on steam playing TF2 than CoD variants and about three times as many playing Counter-Strike variants.

I get slightly more for all CODs than Tf2, but as you point out counter strike variation blow them both away, and I add that DOTA2 blows it *all* away.

Free to play game versus full price game, which one made more money?

Hard to say, but Half-Life, it's counter strike mods and their sequels and variants have had similar sales figures. DOTA2 may be free-to-play, but Valve still makes money from it, LOTS of money.

EA, Activision, Ubisoft all use DirectX and even Valve use DirectX on windows. You would have to sell lots of hats and customizations per user to hit the $60/£40 price point of a CoD game. Then you add in dlc, Cod is clear winner. I'm not saying valve does not make from Dota and TF2. I have over 2000 hours on TF2 but I bought the game with the orange box and haven't spent a single penny on it since, in fact I stopped playing when it went free to play. Most of valves money comes from retailing other peoples games not making their own.

 

[Albino Boo]

They are a major retailer but not a major producer. Valve haven't put out a AAA title in years and only have 2 franchise to their name. For SteamOS to be successful its going to need some of the major franchises from EA, Activision and Ubisoft to be ported.

Unless we count The Sims (a game targeted at those outside the Steam OS target audience anyway), none of those 3 have a game that outsold Half-Life 2 (and only one that outsold Half-Life, which was released in 1998 before Steam existed) on PC.

Blizzard has put up a few better selling titles (and they are kind of part of Activision now) but they're now rapidly pissing away their reputation for quality with PC gamers due to some recent products being awful, and it would be a bit surprising if they manage another Diablo 3. Plus Blizzard doesn't use Steam now, so there's no way they'd use Steam OS unless it became super popular (they'll probably never use a third party digital distribution system given their own network). Plus Blizzard puts out sequels even slower than Valve does.

If Valve is aiming where I think they are anyway, their objective will be to build up on indie titles and their own products (possibly HL3) -- much the same way Steam was until around 2007 when they got some big devs along for the ride with some big releases (having carried it on the back of Half-Life 2 and indie titles until then). Plus if they can put out an easier to work with mechanism than DirectX, some devs will go for it due to the sheer simplicity.

Also worth noting that EA DICE already expressed some interest in Steam OS.

Activision is the maker of call duty the biggest pc FPS of the current era. EA with battlefield is the second biggest, Battlefield doesn't even appear on the windows version of steam, why are EA going to port to steamOS? The only title by a AAA 3rd party developer that is confirmed currently is the latest Total war game.

With AMD and Nvidia support. Publishers are forced to support linux now. Not even EA is stupid enough to piss off the companies that allow it to exist. No publisher is. Just like they couldn't risk pissing off microsoft with the xbox and Direct X.

and PC FPS? COD isn't popular on PC. Other games like Battlefield and TF2 are, but not COD.

Mate DirectX is king and has been so for 10 years and AMD and NVIDIA are not going to annoy the one of their biggest customers with the xbox. Just look on steam and see how many AAA games are on linux and the highest version of linux coming at 0.36% os steam user base. http://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/ If you add up all the poeple playing the varoius call duty games on steam it also out strips the people playing TF2. http://store.steampowered.com/stats/.

Then why is AMD making Mantle? A direct X competitor?

And xbox is done. The PS4 is soundly beating xbox.

and Both COD games on there only add up to 26,000 peak. TF2 is 50,000+ daily peak. Individually, they can't even beat Counter Strike.

Xbox One has sold over 1 million units all with AMD cards in them. Mantel will only work with AMD cards which is kind of useless to 13 of 15 most common video cards on steam. Mantel is not a competitor to directX because Intel and Nvidia are not using compatible hardware. AMD pay dice to optimize battlefield for AMD cards, so they only major developer using mantel is doing so because they are paid to do so and Dice is still using directX for all other cards. I doubt very much that Intel and Nvidia will pay a rival to license hardware to make their cards work with Mantle, especially so when directx does not require money to go to a rival chip manufacturer. I also doubt very much Mantel will successful on the PC because most operating systems use a high degree hardware abstraction layers to reduce the amount of fiddling with drivers. Yes this slows things down, but it reduces the amount of work that developers have to do get things working with the largest amount of hardware.

 

[Fireaxe]

Activision is the maker of call duty the biggest pc FPS of the current era. EA with battlefield is the second biggest, Battlefield doesn't even appear on the windows version of steam, why are EA going to port to steamOS? The only title by a AAA 3rd party developer that is confirmed currently is the latest Total war game.

While I can't find exact figures, I'm fairly confident none of the Call of Duty or Battlefield games have outsold Half-Life 2 on PC -- they have it beaten in total numbers though, but given HL2 came out in 2005 when the audience for games was much smaller it's barely an apt comparison anyway -- if HL3 doesn't break 16 million on PC alone I'd be surprised.

Plus for a Call of Duty title, Ghosts flopped and who knows, maybe it signals the beginning end of the endless stamping out of gravel and dust filled maps that make up most modern shooters (incidentally BF4 is actually outselling Ghosts on PS at least).

Regardless, if Valve can make something better than Direct X and get a good number of users, other companies will come to the party (and yes, no EA title uses Steam for digital distribution, doesn't mean they'll cut off their nose to spite their face if there are a ton of people using Steam OS who would buy Battlefield X or whatever).

 

[Fireaxe]

They aren't, Valve are the bad guy in this story, they are creating an OS that will, if it catches on result in a fragmmented PC market when in fact their is no need for it. EVERYTHING about Steam OS is redundant it has ZERO features that make it a must install over a Windows 7 or Windows 8 install, it is a compromised system that requires that you still have access to another PC to stream your full gaming library.

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.

 

[Albino Boo]

Activision is the maker of call duty the biggest pc FPS of the current era. EA with battlefield is the second biggest, Battlefield doesn't even appear on the windows version of steam, why are EA going to port to steamOS? The only title by a AAA 3rd party developer that is confirmed currently is the latest Total war game.

While I can't find exact figures, I'm fairly confident none of the Call of Duty or Battlefield games have outsold Half-Life 2 on PC -- they have it beaten in total numbers though, but given HL2 came out in 2005 when the audience for games was much smaller it's barely an apt comparison anyway -- if HL3 doesn't break 16 million on PC alone I'd be surprised.

Plus for a Call of Duty title, Ghosts flopped and who knows, maybe it signals the beginning end of the endless stamping out of gravel and dust filled maps that make up most modern shooters (incidentally BF4 is actually outselling Ghosts on PS at least).

Regardless, if Valve can make something better than Direct X and get a good number of users, other companies will come to the party (and yes, no EA title uses Steam for digital distribution, doesn't mean they'll cut off their nose to spite their face if there are a ton of people using Steam OS who would buy Battlefield X or whatever).

SteamOS is using OpeneGL which has already lost out to DirectX. I have 270 odd games on steam the vast majority of which will not work on OpenGL and there no incentive for anyone to backwards engineer them to work on OpenGL. The business model that valve is aiming at is what google used for android. The problem is that Google is at least 10 the size of valve and can afford to throw $200 million at something without betting the house. Google moved into market that had been proved by Apple and said to the big hardware manufacturers, we will write and OS with a high degree of abstraction so apps will work on most hardware and give it you for free and in return Google play has to be in there. Valve are trying to do the same thing but with product that is neither fish nor fowl and isn't proven at all. To get SteamOS to work commercially someone has put a lot of money down and at highish risk. Either valve has to go the big hardware manufacturers and offer them some kind guarantees so that they will go out and build 100k+ units each or Valve has to go the big publishers and pay them to develop for openGl and port the big existing franchises to SteamOS. Any of which is going to force valve to bet the house on the success or failure of SteamOS. None of the noises out valve indicate that that they are going to large scale launches in the major markets with their own brand hardware, if they are not willing to take the risk with their own money no one else is either.

 

[Albino Boo]

They aren't, Valve are the bad guy in this story, they are creating an OS that will, if it catches on result in a fragmmented PC market when in fact their is no need for it. EVERYTHING about Steam OS is redundant it has ZERO features that make it a must install over a Windows 7 or Windows 8 install, it is a compromised system that requires that you still have access to another PC to stream your full gaming library.

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.

Most WinXP games will run in compatibility mode and even those that don't can be run under dosbox.

 

[Fireaxe]

They aren't, Valve are the bad guy in this story, they are creating an OS that will, if it catches on result in a fragmmented PC market when in fact their is no need for it. EVERYTHING about Steam OS is redundant it has ZERO features that make it a must install over a Windows 7 or Windows 8 install, it is a compromised system that requires that you still have access to another PC to stream your full gaming library.

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.

Most WinXP games will run in compatibility mode and even those that don't can be run under dosbox.

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.

 

[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.

 

[Nergui]

SteamOS is using OpeneGL which has already lost out to DirectX. I have 270 odd games on steam the vast majority of which will not work on OpenGL and there no incentive for anyone to backwards engineer them to work on OpenGL. The business model that valve is aiming at is what google used for android. The problem is that Google is at least 10 the size of valve and can afford to throw $200 million at something without betting the house. Google moved into market that had been proved by Apple and said to the big hardware manufacturers, we will write and OS with a high degree of abstraction so apps will work on most hardware and give it you for free and in return Google play has to be in there. Valve are trying to do the same thing but with product that is neither fish nor fowl and isn't proven at all. To get SteamOS to work commercially someone has put a lot of money down and at highish risk. Either valve has to go the big hardware manufacturers and offer them some kind guarantees so that they will go out and build 100k+ units each or Valve has to go the big publishers and pay them to develop for openGl and port the big existing franchises to SteamOS. Any of which is going to force valve to bet the house on the success or failure of SteamOS. None of the noises out valve indicate that that they are going to large scale launches in the major markets with their own brand hardware, if they are not willing to take the risk with their own money no one else is either.

You seem to misinformed about SteamOS and OpenGL. This is not a new OS developed by Valve. It is a streamlined version of a Debian distro of GNU/Linux which has been in continuous development for just over two decades. As to it's proven record, as of Nov 2013, 482 of the 500 fastest super computers use GNU/Linux as their OS.
http://www.top500.org/statistics/details/osfam/1

OpenGL has been in continuous development over a similar period.

The view that OpenGL lost out to Direct3D is inaccurate. While D3D is the most used games API, it is limited to Windows OSs and Xbox consoles. OpenGL on the other hand is cross-language and multi-platform and used by a far larger number of applications and devices. It is also more advanced than Direct3D.

Here's a wikipedia article for further reading. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_OpenGL_and_Direct3D

(Captcha - time and paper)(is this a reference to the little room?)

 

[SonOfVoorhees]

As in Steambox exclusive titles? Or just insuring there is a Steambox release as well?

I doubt both of them will happen. I think Steambox will just get the games that PC gets through Steam as the Steambox isnt a seperate entity from Steam on the PC. If that makes sense. So if PC Steam gets GTA5, then so will the Steambox, but i cant see GTA5 being released on Steambox only and not PC.

Imagine the outcry if Steambox got a very popular game released on it but not for the PC.

 

[Albino Boo]

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.

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.

You seem to misinformed about SteamOS and OpenGL. This is not a new OS developed by Valve. It is a streamlined version of a Debian distro of GNU/Linux which has been in continuous development for just over two decades. As to it's proven record, as of Nov 2013, 482 of the 500 fastest super computers use GNU/Linux as their OS.
http://www.top500.org/statistics/details/osfam/1

OpenGL has been in continuous development over a similar period.

The view that OpenGL lost out to Direct3D is inaccurate. While D3D is the most used games API, it is limited to Windows OSs and Xbox consoles. OpenGL on the other hand is cross-language and multi-platform and used by a far larger number of applications and devices. It is also more advanced than Direct3D.

Here's a wikipedia article for further reading. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_OpenGL_and_Direct3D

(Captcha - time and paper)(is this a reference to the little room?)

OPenGL is not being used for PC game development or ports is it. In the context of games on the PC DirectX is king. SteamOS is controlled by valve in the same way that Android is open source by all changes come from google. Thats the point of it, its a free OS but standardised and has the resources of a multi billion dollar company sitting behind it.