On the modern day living room, game consoles have taken over
practically every necessary form of entertainment available, waging war over
who can do more and better. But with legendary pc developer Valve's steam
machines, it looks like things are about to heat up immensely.
The Rise Of Steam
It’s not surprising that Valve would want to expand its
reach beyond the desktop. After releasing several hit PC games— Counter-Strike,
Half-Life, and Left4Dead, just to name a few— it saw that getting great games
to gamers, beyond simply making them, was the real challenge.
Valve's Gabe
Newell says Valve is actively developing prototypes of its Steam Box console
So, when Valve released its digital gaming service Steam,
desktop gamers everywhere were ecstatic. After all, the Steam platform had
everything they needed: a huge catalogue of classic and newly released games;
curated and up-to-date gaming news; and social community features for promoting
friendly competition. And amazingly, all of these are presented in a single,
unified interface. Unfortunately, Steam still needed to be installed and loaded
in a separate operating system, which in Valve’s eyes wasn't very optimal. To
address that little fly in their ointment, Valve went and unveiled SteamOS, an
independent operating system that would let gamers run Steam directly on their
hardware, optimized to run at full throttle. And thus was born the Steam
Machine—hardware designed to run SteamOS without a single hiccup.
The Engines Of War
In a nutshell, competition is always a good thing. At the
recent Steam Dev Days conference, Valve CEO Gabe Newell said that he wanted
Steam Machines to be "evolving and learning," as opposed to the
"one-time monolithic release” model of the traditional hardware world.
The takeaway there is that Valve wants to not just match what other gaming
hardware manufacturers have done, but outpace them as well in the long haul
with continuous development and research (which, by the way, is actually
classic Valve culture).
Gabe Newell's
position at Valve means he can do pretty much anything he wants
Even at a glance, the feature set of Steam machines already
more than matches what the latest game consoles have on offer. The in-home
streaming function of Steam Machines lets any computer signed into your Steam
account access your entire Steam games library on your Steam Machine, which is
more than what Sony’s PlayStation 4 and Microsoft’s Xbox One can do, if at all.
Imagine this scenario: You can actually play Windows games on an Apple MacBook
Air via streaming, all from a host Steam Machine. Who’d have thought such a
thing was possible outside of running a virtual machine?
On the peripheral side, the Steam Machine controller might
seem experimental for switching out traditional buttons for programmable
touchpads and a central touch panel, but features such as Ghost Mode (which
overlays onscreen the specific central touch panel button you’re pressing) and
fully customizable inputs show how much Valve works to keep gamers focused at
all times (Nintendo could take a lesson here for the Wii U Gamepad). Steam
Machines also feature SteamVR, so game developers can easily connect any VR
gear (including the Oculus Rift) without a hitch.
Have It Your Way
But the biggest thing about Steam Machines is that you might
not even need to buy new hardware to own one.
As long as you meet Valve’s minimum specifications, any
computer installed with SteamOS is automatically a Steam Machine. And best of
all? SteamOS is free and open source, so anybody can build his or her own Steam
Machine. But if you want brand-spanking-new hardware, just pick a box from one
of Valve's hardware partners.
SteamOS is a full
Linux-based operating system by Valve
That’s the beauty of what Valve has done: It's giving
players the power of choice, without having to compromise on cost and
performance. It can be argued that consoles still have some advantages over the
Steam platform, but the open-source model that Valve has adopted here is always
going to be in favour of gamers. And hey, there’s never a downside to that.
