![Announceosaurus: Valve’s SteamOS [Updated]](https://tap-repeatedly.com/wp-content/uploads/strikingr/images/28313_steerpike_SteamOS_header-628x200.jpg)
My mind is in twain. Part of me wants to say “Well, we saw that coming.” Another part of me wants to say “Holy mudcrabs!”
Valve has been teasing three big announcements for a while now, and they’re all expected this week. The first? SteamOS, which is (almost) exactly what it sounds like. And the whole earth trembled.
Building a game engine from scratch is one of those monstrous projects you should only undertake as a hobby, or because your business is set up to develop and market engines. I tell clients this constantly; they never listen. 36 months later they’re fifteen million in the hole and and armed with two million lines of code that still can’t render an image on screen. Under the best of circumstances they produce something workable that cost twenty times as much as licensing a third party engine would have, while running one-twentieth as well.
The only computational undertaking more immediately staggering is developing a new operating system. Which Valve is not doing, to their eternal credit.
SteamOS is built on the Linux kernel – unclear whether a specific distro or they’re modding the kernel so much it’s essentially unique – so an enormous amount of foundational work is done for them. Linux has been around for a long time, and it’s well-liked. Mainstream acceptance still eludes it, but that’s due more to inertia than anything inherently unfriendly about the OS. These days you can work in some Linux distros without ever writing a line of code or seeing a command line, though in general you’ll still need computing skillz greater than your average bear’s.
SteamOS, which will be free to all and available “soon,” is built with Steam Big Picture in mind – that latter being Valve’s living room skin of the Steam environment, designed for controllers and friendlier to gamers who sit ten feet away from the screen. I actually fired up Steam Big Picture for the first time just a few days ago, and… well, for me at least, it needs some work. The interface itself is quite beautiful, but it takes 2-3 minutes to load any screen, and I can’t successfully launch a game from it… yet. I don’t know what these issues stem from, because I haven’t had a chance to look into them. My guess is they’re pretty easily solved since there’s nothing unusual about my setup.
Beyond that, the OS is viewed as a content platform rather than just a gaming platform; one can imagine that (eventually at least) you’d boot into SteamOS and stay there, period. It’s not an overlay like Windows Media Center or a shell like Windows 3.1 was atop DOS. How potent will it be as a, like, computing computer on day one? Not sure. But I suspect Valve has eyed Microsoft’s current vulnerability and at least considered that the right foundation, plus a built-in customer base of 50 million, might just carve a nice slice out of Redmond’s pie.
Valve specifically calls out the following features in SteamOS:
- Windows and Mac Game Streaming: one big drawback Linux has is software support, especially with commercial games. According to Valve, SteamOS will be 100% compatible with your existing Steam library on a Windows or Mac – they just stream from one computer to the other across your home network. Latency issues are the question mark here, especially for those with wireless networks. Valve will need this to be fantastic out of the box if SteamOS is to gain traction, because it’s going to be a while before games consistently ship for SteamOS natively and most people have tons of Steam games for Windows already and wouldn’t like buying them again for SteamOS.
- “Significant” performance increases in graphics processing: smart move to highlight this. Linux is a great OS no matter how you slice it, but driver support has always been dicey. Plus, since you’re already streaming your games across a network, you’ll want booku performance on the receiving end to prevent any additional issues. This line might be a hint that lower-end hardware will still play nice with top shelf games under SteamOS, which could in turn lower the expected price of Steam Box, which has been announced sort of generally, and confirmed by Valve, but about which we know surprisingly little.
- Media support: they’re working with “many of the media services you know and love.” Netflix, probably. Hulu for sure. Amazon Video, maybe. HBOGo… one hopes. When it comes to SteamOS, people need to be impressed by the OS part, not the Steam part. Valve understands that. For people to switch – either ditch Windows for SteamOS or just use SteamOS instead of using the perfectly good Steam client for Windows, the OS part needs to do all the things users want it to do, which in the living room means act as a home theater PC.
- Sharing and family tools: we already heard that it’ll soon be possible to lend your Steam games to a list of friends. That alone is a big deal. It looks like SteamOS will support family sharing, so achievements and saves for a single game can be stored under multiple same-roof user accounts. They’re also including family tools so that big stack of porn games Steam doesn’t actually sell can be kept out of your four-year-old’s game library but still one sticky-fingered click away from you. Pervert.
Valve’s release indicated that lots of games – “hundreds” – would ship with native SteamOS versions in 2014. Understandable given Steam’s dominance, and desirable for developers if Valve’s serious about the performance improvements they’ve accomplished. Indeed, Valve’s enormous clout may be all it takes to eliminate many of the chicken/egg problems that Linux OSes have always had, most of which fundamentally boil down to software support. I can’t switch to Linux even if I wanted to, because there’s stuff I need (Adobe) and stuff I want (my games) that don’t work on Linux. Plus the driver support is nowhere near as good.
Now nVidia and AMD will have no choice but to release excellent SteamOS drivers for all their hardware, right alongside Windows drivers. If gamers switch over to SteamOS, they will demand it, and so will Valve. Game developers, obviously, will develop for the platform – exclusively, one imagines, should we find ourselves in a world where SteamOS is a large proportion of gamers’ only system.
The technology behind this home streaming thing is a question mark, an important one since even if all games forever go to SteamOS, most of us still have dozens or hundreds of Windows games in our regular Steam libraries.
Then there’s the simplest challenge: give me one reason why I should go to SteamOS instead of sticking with my current setup. After all, the Steam client for Windows is fantastic. What does SteamOS give me that I need?
Now, I recently said that I’d be right on board with a SteamOS if Valve were to announce such a thing, so this is all pretty exciting news to me. But older pronouncements aside, we can’t – and shouldn’t – expect the world in the first release of the operating system. I highly doubt that SteamOS will replace your Windows or Mac PC for all activities, at least not out of the gate, and possibly not ever. It all depends what Valve sees SteamOS to be.
Gabe Newell came from Microsoft, where he worked on Windows. He knows that operating systems drive the computing world. People can’t switch completely to a new one unless everything they need works on it. Even like programs aren’t good enough, because people work with other people. I can’t switch to GIMP because I need absolute compatibility with Photoshop’s .psd format. I can’t switch to SteamOS unless I can be absolutely sure that it can be my operating system through sleet and snow. Once again, however, Valve knows this.
If they just see SteamOS as a friendly living room media OS, one that runs Steam Boxes and offers a nice mid-range option between a console and a hand-built, Windows-running HTPC, fair enough. That road is more challenging because give me one reason why I should go to SteamOS instead of spending a little more and licensing a copy of Windows for my living room PC. This road is also simpler and safer, because they’re not prodding any sleeping giants.
But if Valve has ambitions for SteamOS, ambitions that maybe see it one day becoming a competitor to Windows and OS X, that could be something really… earth trembly. Valve may be one of the few companies capable of entering the OS fray. The Steam user base, customer loyalty, and technical capability enjoyed by the company puts them in a great position.
Of course they don’t say what SteamOS won’t do on the announcement page (not surprisingly), yet I find myself thinking that if Valve does a Valve, many of us may be more or less done with Windows within the next few years.
Remember, the PC was dead recently. And it’s not outlandish to say that it would still be dead were it not for Steam. Remember, not long ago we bought our games from stores, in boxes. Valve changed that, with Steam – a system I despised as intrusive and wholly unnecessary in 2004. Look at me now. In fairness to me, I didn’t see Steam becoming what Steam became.
Throughout the post I’ve been saying “Valve knows this” as regards certain business facts. Something else Valve knows: where we are today, Cloud-wise, is still transitional. Eventually the world and all its applications will be served remotely to fairly thin home PCs. The idea makes me nervous, plus I dislike losing my hobby as a PC enthusiast, but it is going to happen. Valve *ahem* knows this.
Eventually games, too, will do it. OnLive may have failed but the idea was good. Sooner or later games will stream. Valve wants to be part of that, so SteamOS may be a foundational effort. I’d bet OnLive would have done better if it had controlled the entire process, from servers all the way to the customer’s operating system. Valve may very well simply be laying the groundwork for the future of Steam – a Steam that streams games rather than sells digital product. Technically it’s just simpler for them if they say such a service requires (or runs best on) SteamOS.
I keep waiting for Valve to do something evil. I don’t want to hate them. I’m not even looking forward to bearing the same fierce antipathy for them that I bear toward Microsoft and Google, I’m just resigned to it happening. The more of what we do gets dominated by a single company, the more that company seems likely to embark on a Customer Fork Sodomy Initiative. So far, from Valve… nothing. No revelations that they’ve installed back doors, no adware bloated client, no “Steam now costs $19.99 a month,” no stories of hellish working conditions, nothing. I mean my god, people, Steam’s worst crime against me is that I was once locked out of my Steam account for an hour because their Steam Guard code thingy got messed up. Could they buck the tradition? Could there be no fork sodomy?
SteamOS has been a sort of ill-kept maybe-secret for a while now; they’ve long said that the Steam Box would run on Linux and Steam for Linux is already with us. Booting directly into Steam, rather than launching Steam when you boot, is a logical next step regardless of long-term plans for the system. You can bet that curiosity, if nothing else, will see me downloading the thing on day one – a day I anticipate to be before the end of this year, I might add – just for curiosity’s sake. Which means I will have to get that damned Steam Guard system working correctly.
Remember, they’ve promised three big announcements this week. Three. one two three. Could Announcement Three be something we’ve waited half our lives for, nudge wink?
Actually probably not, since they said all three announcements were tied to their living room efforts. But you know.
You can learn more about SteamOS here: http://store.steampowered.com/livingroom/SteamOS/
Hey Valve, know what would provide a 900% monetary increase to your teams working on this SteamOS thing? Lots of the moneys!
Hey Valve, know where you can get a whole bunch of the moneys from? People who give moneys to companies that make stuff!
Hey Valve, know how to get the moneys from those peoples? MAKE HALF-LIFE 3 YOU GODDAMN BASTARDS.
If I knew Gabe Newell’s personal address I would send him a singing telegram man who leaves his mouth hanging open for a decade, silent, only to say after ten years: “hi”.
Eat stale underpants, Valve.
Just because their announcements are all tied to their living room initiative doesn’t mean Half-Life 3 isn’t one of them…it just means that if it is it’ll be motion-controlled. Obviously.
What is this I don’t even… wait… I was trying to imply that the third announcement would be a 3D Steam client. You know. Three dee? Like look through blue and red glasses and your library floats out at you?
Half-Life 3? People. Come on. Let’s keep all this speculation to the realm of the plausible.
Once upon a time the business classes became enthusiastic about genuinely liberal and democratic ideas and platforms, simply because it allowed them to justify tearing down the feudal system that had placed a glass ceiling on their political and economic ambitions. But once they took power in the early 19th century they swung to the right and abandoned the more radical elements of Classical Liberalism (above all, its hostility to “unearned income”, aka rent) that a decade earlier they embraced.
Likewise, Valve is trying to supplant the traditional AAA publishing model, which means they’re going to stay awesome at least until that war is won. If they remain privately owned, they may even stay awesome once they become the Microsoft of PC gaming.
On a different note, shouldn’t we all be terrified that if someday we abandon Windows we’ll have to give up decades’ worth of backwards compatibility, which will result in the majority of the best PC games ever made becoming completely unplayable. We need to start working on a Linux-based Windows emulator designed specifically for gaming right now. We will have failed as an artistic community if we can’t play Thief in 2030.
Er, glass ceiling was the wrong term. More like concrete ceiling. Or gilded ceiling.
(And yes, I’m in the middle of the Age of Napoleon right now, thank you for asking)
You make a good point, Arouet: Thief does need to be playable in 2030. In fact, I’d rather play Thief in 2030 than I would Half-Life and all Half-Life related products. Burn, Valve.
Yuuuuuuup.
Hey Arouet– where might be a good place to get some detail on the 19th century shift you’re describing?
Thanks!
Half-Life 3 or GTFO! Woo hoo, this is fun!
If I’m switching to a new OS it has to be because I can’t do something. SteamOS with a Halflife 3 or Fallout 4 I can’t play on Windows would be something. Isn’t that the Halo gambit?
I did buy an entirely new computer for XCOM so know thyself…
Good point, Irony, though the Halo gambit worked.
I don’t see it as a scheme. The way the company is set up all but precludes it anyway. In many ways SteamOS is a very safe business decision for Valve, which believes that the Steam Box concept has legs in the living room and would need an OS for it regardless. While Windows is the obvious choice, it also tacks a lot of overhead onto the system – greater hardware leading to higher cost, leading, possibly, to the Steam Box pricing itself out of success as Microsoft so recently did with the Surface.
It’s hardly the strangest, riskiest, or costliest thing being worked on inside Valve’s walls – compared to what Michael Abrash and his team have been doing with their time, SteamOS is practically pedestrian.
Like you, if I switch to a new OS it’s usually to fulfill a need. Right now, there’s no silver bullet media center OS solution. SteamOS might be that, in which case it would probably fill a void that companies from Microsoft to Google to Apple have been desperately trying to fill since the late 1990s.
I’m sorry Xtal, but I tried. Our combined efforts to bring this comment section down to standard internet combox levels has yielded no fruit. And Valve, such a ripe target! *Sigh* .
@Arouet: “On a different note, shouldn’t we all be terrified that if someday we abandon Windows we’ll have to give up decades’ worth of backwards compatibility, which will result in the majority of the best PC games ever made becoming completely unplayable. We need to start working on a Linux-based Windows emulator designed specifically for gaming right now. We will have failed as an artistic community if we can’t play Thief in 2030.”
This so much. As a person who regularly bemoans the churn of console hardware and difficulties of playing older console games natively, and as a person who adores GOG and emulators, the thought of a new OS striking all that out scares me. I’m all for progress and all but I’m not comfortable with throwing out all those babies with the bathwater. Think of the babies!
Either way, this is all really exciting and fascinating. I was hopeful the Ouya would shake up the space beneath the TV a bit but… yeah. Valve have got the OS now, the hardware soon I suspect, the digital infrastructure, the products, the resources, the consumers and goodwill to make this thing work more than any other company out there.
With regards to the symbols. The O is the OS. The [ ] is the hardware for it to go in [0 ], and the O+O could be the OS coupled with Half-Life 3 to make Gordon Freeman’s spectacles. I don’t know. I think it would take Half-Life 3 as an exclusive to SteamOS to sell the hardware to drive the Windows-to-Linux shift for AAA devs. A lot of smaller devs already support Linux. Valve forced Steam via HL2 so it’s not an outside possibility. What about the Steam Box, like the Orange Box but with: the console, HL3, L4D3, Portal 3, TF3? Eeesh.
I’m not so convinced it would take an exclusive title like Half-Life 3 to make SteamOS palatable to devs…I think Steam’s penetration would make SteamOS potentially very appealing to a lot of consumers, especially if it turns out to legitimately deliver on some things that Windows/OSX do not so much. Increasingly there’s a demand for a “media box” kind of thing, as Microsoft has noted with XBox One, and if SteamOS can deliver that then I think they’ll get a good install base, which in turn will appeal to devs.
And when I really think about it, I could imagine SteamOS being something I’d use on one of my machines: I definitely use multiple machines day to day, a desktop for gaming and a more budgety laptop for most other things, and SteamOS could pretty well fill the role on the former while I continued to run something more…I don’t know…practical on the latter.
Having just dragged my Big PC out to the living room as a sort of prototype, I can say that (A) there’s no really good living room OS that does everything and (B) there will be a growing market for such a thing.
I’m juggling a hodgepodge of Windows Media Center, Steam, and browsers, with a whole lot of squinting at small icons and text despite enlargifying it. It works, but it ain’t the integrated, unified system I’d like. That may be where SteamOS plans to fit in, and if it does a good job it’ll be very good for Valve.
Steam Big Picture does not do a very good job, at least not for me. As mentioned above, any screen switch necessitates a 1-3 minute spinning clock (Google has suggestions).
It also won’t actually launch any games. That’s sort of a bigger problem.
The next Announceosaur is due at 1pm today. Steam Bigger Picture? Steam Sofa? Steam Porn Collection Organizer?
And there’s the hardware. No surprise, but the fact that there’ll be different models from different manufacturers does seem like a big step in the right direction toward entering the living room space…something Microsoft can’t seem to get its head around.
And “more to say very soon on the topic of input”…will Announceosaur Tertius be an input device? I can’t imagine they’d save a gamepad for last, so…wasn’t there a clever bastard who flippantly said something about motion-controlled Half-Life earlier? I think there was.
My thoughts exactly, Dix – the tone of that FAQ response practically states that the final blast will be control based, but Steam Pad would be Steam Yawn. (then again, the Big Announcement today was basically “it’s not called Steam Box any more”).
Last I heard, Mike Abrash was spending Valve money on wearables. Steam Glass? This… this I doubt. I don’t think they’ve had enough time to mature it, and it’s Steam Risky. I can’t speculate, but I’m mighty curious.
On a meta level – if my inbox is any indication – the big picture (eh? eh?) is beginning to dawn on the industry at large. It’s obvious yet some are just now beginning to grasp it. Valve isn’t releasing an OS, and Valve isn’t releasing a gaming PC. Valve is making a play for the living room, and it’s been getting its Steam Ducks in a Steam Row for quite a while. It’s going to change the landscape, unless my eyes deceive me.
I’ve got it: Steam Power Glove!
Steam Activator?
Steam Roll n’ Rocker?
Steam U-Force?
ALL OF THOSE THINGS?!
Steam Neural Link.
I now have a 42″ TV hooked up to my PC and use Windows 7 with a larger text DPI to make reading easier. Icons are slightly bigger too and Big Picture works like a dream using a pad. It’s perhaps a little clunky using mouse and keyboard though. So all this TV-friendly talk will work out very well for me as, yes, Windows 7 and certain games with non scaling small text and HUD elements isn’t really cut out for a 42″ TV over a metre away.
And then it was a controller anyway. That just dashes all my dreams of being like that douchey kid in The Wizard. And I had an aluminum briefcase picked out and everything!
OK silliness aside, that controller looks very interesting. Reading about all the features is even more interesting. Seems they really thought this stuff through. And that’s coming from someone who accuses Valve of trying to be way too creative/revolutionary/outside-the-box-y/naval-gaze-y.
Perhaps they took a break from sniffing their own jocks and wearing their computers long enough to actually come up with something useful. I could see this replacing both my PS3 controller hooked to PC and my keyboard on lap, mouse on armrest setups.
I’m a bit dubious about the thumbpads – I’ve never liked dealing with that kind of input with my thumbs much.
I think the really interesting bit here is the touch screen, though that’s not completely mind-blowing at this point and might end up being clumsy. Not as clumsy as trying to play an RTS with a console controller, perhaps, but still moreso than keyboard and mouse. I suppose we’ll see what they do with this.
Harbor Master, it’s pretty obvious from reading the history of that period. Durant covers it pretty well in Rousseau and Revolution and The Age of Napoleon; the bourgeois was far to left of the peasantry of Feudal France before the revolution, a complete reversal from after the revolution, not because of the Terror, but because they had succeeded in snatching political power from the nobility of the Ancien Régime to match their economic influence (as Durant argues this was the primary cause of the French Revolution). Another thing I noticed: the most influential liberal thinkers of the late 1700s were from still Feudal France and Germany rather than more capitalistic England.
But if you really want to see the sea change take place, look at how economic theory changed. Case in point: Henry George has always been lumped in with socialists and other left-wing thinkers of the mid to late 1800s, even though his ideas are just Smith and Ricardo restated. But he published Progress and Poverty in 1879, not 1779, and for that he is still marginalized as a populist.
“As soon as the land of any country has all become private property, the landlords, like all other men, love to reap where they never sowed, and demand a rent even for its natural produce…They are the only one of the three orders whose revenue costs them neither labour nor care, but comes to them, as it were, of its own accord, and independent of any plan or project of their own.” -Adam Smith
“Take now… some hard-headed business man, who has no theories, but knows how to make money. Say to him: “Here is a little village; in ten years it will be a great city-in ten years the railroad will have taken the place of the stage coach, the electric light of the candle; it will abound with all the machinery and improvements that so enormously multiply the effective power of labor. Will in ten years, interest be any higher?” He will tell you, “No!” Will the wages of the common labor be any higher…?” He will tell you, “No the wages of common labor will not be any higher…” “What, then, will be higher?” “Rent, the value of land. Go, get yourself a piece of ground, and hold possession.” And if, under such circumstances, you take his advice, you need do nothing more. You may sit down and smoke your pipe; you may lie around like the lazzaroni of Naples or the leperos of Mexico; you may go up in a balloon or down a hole in the ground; and without doing one stroke of work, without adding one iota of wealth to the community, in ten years you will be rich! In the new city you may have a luxurious mansion, but among its public buildings will be an almshouse.”- Henry George
“Ground-rents are a still more proper subject of taxation than the rent of houses. A tax upon ground-rents would not raise the rents of houses. It would fall altogether upon the owner of the ground-rent, who acts always as a monopolist, and exacts the greatest rent which can be got for the use of his ground.” -Adam Smith
“The tax upon land values is, therefore, the most just and equal of all taxes. It falls only upon those who receive from society a peculiar and valuable benefit, and upon them in proportion to the benefit they receive.” -Henry George
See? Exactly the same. And yet only Smith is revered, because he had the good fortune to be around when capitalists needed an ideological weapon against the landed aristocracy.
http://www.mutualist.org/id70.html
That essay is a bit of an anarchist polemic and you don’t have to agree with everything it says but it gets the point across that the theory of marginal utility, created in the mid 1800s, may have been an attempt to clean classical liberalism of its uncomfortable implications.
And I’m writing this from after the announcements about the controller were made. Full disclosure: I dislike Valve (in part because everyone else loves them) but I’m going to try and put forth some reasonable questions.
Who is this aimed toward? It seems like it would mostly appeal to a section (maybe a large section) of the PC market. While a great deal of computing infrastructure runs on Linux, most people don’t know or have direct interaction with Linux. As a layman, if anyone can build a steam machine, will Valve enforce minimum hardware standards so you can be sure if you buy one it will run all the games? Does the controller sacrifice mouse precision (it might be good enough but people who care will want the bet)? As a console gamer why would I transition to a new console that I have to learn when I can stick with existing properties that I’m familiar with an have invested significant time or money into?
To me, it actually seems like this is Valve’s attempt to hedge against a growing trend of walled gardens in PC ecosystems and get a slice of the living room entertainment pie.
I think despite its similarities Valve is probably not trying to enter the console race. Valve’s not making them themselves, for one thing, and there’s not a lot of talk about traditional selling points like exclusive titles. I think in some ways their angle is a step too far: SteamOS is, I think, still the big deal here, because it attempts to address the compatibility nightmare that can still arise when one tries to be a PC gamer. That’s the big barrier to entry, in general, and because of multiple manufacturers being involved and suchlike I’m not positive that Steam Machines will solve that problem particularly. The reason it works for console manufacturers is because they’re the only ones making the things, so developers know without a doubt what the hardware’s going to look like.
The result of Valve’s gambit seems to be, to me at least, a machine that occupies a sort of netherworld between being a PC and being a console. I’m guessing that ultimately means that the target audience will end up being “people who already use Steam a bunch” (PC gamers) because no one else will necessarily be clear on what they’re jumping in for (and, as I mentioned, there aren’t really system exclusives or something to point at and attract newcomers with content). This is Valve saying to PC gamers: aren’t you tired of shoehorning your machine into a gaming role? Here’s one that’s made for it! And that’s more about the OS than anything.
The controller’s a non-starter, I think; existing PC gamers will at least be fine with keyboard and mouse, though I could imagine using the controller for certain kinds of games that work well with controllers (the same kind of stuff I play on consoles), but I don’t think it’s going to convince people outside of the PC gaming sphere that this is really much more like their PS3.