A Good & Honest Video About The Alienware Steam Machine

Lon Seidman on youtube posted up a pretty decent video showing off the Alienware Steam Machine, it's worth a watch and has given me some more thoughts.

I think the hidden usb port for the wireless dongle is a fantastic idea, but apparently it can make the signal be a bit iffy which is a shame.

He does mention a few times about the lack of games on SteamOS, and he later clarifies it to be more about the AAA games. We will see a lot of complaints about this, and despite what people think about our still rather large library the bigger AAA games will be a problem for a lot of potential buyers.

It also highlights a major problem, and that is the filtering on SteamOS is quite pants. To show Windows games by default, and having to manually filter them to what is available. That, plus the featured section showing Windows games is a stupid major issue. I sincerely hope Valve have some new filtering up their sleeve for the SteamOS/Steam Machine official launch, otherwise I'm really going to be wondering if they want it to actually succeed. It's a ridiculous issue to not have solved already, and there has been a bug open on github about it for many months. You wouldn't expect to have to filter out Xbox games on a Playstation, so why do Valve think it's a good idea to leave it in for SteamOS? It just doesn't make sense to me right now.

It would work much better if Valve lumped all non-supported games into a category you manually select yourself, as that is what I would personally expect from it. It is the only way that would make sense to me, to only show games I can actually run on my hardware at the forefront.

Every time I log into Steam and view the store, or use Big Picture Mode I'm instantly hooked by the look of a game featured or "recommended for you", only to realise it's a Windows game. It's damned annoying.

This video reviewer isn't the only one who has come across that either, a few of the major PC news websites who did their take on it also noted it was weird.

I obviously want it to succeed for us all, but Valve need to sort this crap out. There's a lot of uncertainty about how anything will be handled, but as usual I'm sure Valve have something up their sleeve. Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.