Steam Machines, Steam Link & Steam Controller Officially Released & SteamOS Sale

Quoting: Storminator16And I'm pretty underwhelmed by the Steam controller as well. It's really not a big deal, just like this launch. The writing is on the wall.

What? The Steam Controller is awesome! One of the most innovative products to come to the PC in years.

Quoting: ChuckDaniels87I really think this is long distance race.

So few people seem to understand this. They wanted some magical overnight conversion of the entire gaming industry, and then when it doesn't happen, they're upset... Valve has done a hell of a lot more for Linux gaming than virtually anyone since Loki, and they're not done. Linux gamers ought to have more patience than this; right now, a lot of them are throwing the baby out with the bathwater. Rome wasn't built in a day.

And for the people saying the Steam Controller sucks, I have no response. Different strokes, I guess. But I've used it for nearly a month, and it's the best, most-flexible, most-compatible gamepad I've ever used. I think this also goes back to a lack of patience. It's different, and change takes time.

We all ought to stop expecting everything to be instantaneous and whining like petulant children about it.

Quoting: supermonkey77edited.

Edited, all good.


Last edited by ricki42 on 11 November 2015 at 11:48 pm UTC

You know, the lack of punch in the release is all down to developers and publishers not doing what they should.
Blame them, not Valve.

OK, I agree that the launch was lackluster, and completely overshadowed by the Fallout 4 release. I can't imagine Bethesda currently looking to break into the Linux platform...time will tell, but really skeptical...

However, I am happy that at last it's official, SteamOS is out!

Hopefully, we will soon be getting some more games. Let's also look back at these last 3 years. When I started on Linux, there was nothing in the way of commercial games...And now...well, there is much more.

Of the 866 games I have, 413 are for Linux. That's quite amazing!

EDIT- Please bring me rocket cars...


Last edited by OZSeaford on 10 November 2015 at 10:14 pm UTC

Can we stop being so insecure about Steam Machines? Seriously. No new AAA games? I personally rather have well working current ones, not rushed out of the gate ports with broken things. We all knew it will be low key, slowly moving, gathering pace effort. Let's celebrate it! I have about 10 games untouched on my Steam list, and I want to play all of them.

Enjoy what we got.

Quoting: Mountain Man

Quoting: Segata SanshiroWell, there go my extremely unrealistic hopes of a Fallout 4 release :(

I was at least hoping for a surprise Witcher 3 or Mad Max announcement since those are two games that were originally slated for Linux.

I'm not really disappointed about Fallout 4, to be honest, because Bethesda games are traditionally hellaciously buggy, and Fallout 4 appears to be no exception. It also sounds like it has been dumbed down from Fallout 3, which was already dumbed down from the orginal Fallout games.

Yeah, yeah - the grapes are sour. Face it, people - the Fallout 4 release completely outshone Steam Machine day. People care about the Controller and the Link, but they don't care about a system that can't run Fallout 4, the Witcher III or GTA V. Plain and simple.

Quoting: maodzedun

Quoting: Mountain Man

Quoting: Segata SanshiroWell, there go my extremely unrealistic hopes of a Fallout 4 release :(

I was at least hoping for a surprise Witcher 3 or Mad Max announcement since those are two games that were originally slated for Linux.

I'm not really disappointed about Fallout 4, to be honest, because Bethesda games are traditionally hellaciously buggy, and Fallout 4 appears to be no exception. It also sounds like it has been dumbed down from Fallout 3, which was already dumbed down from the orginal Fallout games.

Yeah, yeah - the grapes are sour. Face it, people - the Fallout 4 release completely outshone Steam Machine day. People care about the Controller and the Link, but they don't care about a system that can't run Fallout 4, the Witcher III or GTA V. Plain and simple.

Wii U also don't run any of these games. I find Fallout kinda interesting, but is it killer game? Not really. Gaming is huge. All these games are big but they aren't whole gaming.

Said that, I will buy Witcher III at same minute they release it on SteamOS, as for Fallout 4 and GTA V - strangely, they don't get my heart going (Saint Row IV is another matter).

The release wasn't exactly a big bang and I was hoping Half Life 3 would be released. But then again, this is a long term vision that Valve has so I'm guessing there's a few surprises down the track.

Quoting: PeciskCan we stop being so insecure about Steam Machines? Seriously. No new AAA games? I personally rather have well working current ones, not rushed out of the gate ports with broken things. We all knew it will be low key, slowly moving, gathering pace effort.

I don't think we knew that at all. While it sure seems to be low key, and while Valve may be able to get away with that, and while there is some potential for a slow build on this, that doesn't mean we should have been expecting a low key launch or that that's the best idea.

Valve is a big company with a lot of muscle. There are reasons why big companies with a lot of muscle tend to use it when they're releasing a new product. The iphone would not have succeeded without the hype--it was just a smartphone, with really good fit & finish but a very high price; from a certain perspective it brought nothing really new to the table, and some of the glitz of the iphone actually comes with practical problems (eg it's slippery, easy to drop). It took big hype from a big company to turn it into <b>the phone</b>, the yardstick by which all other phones would be measured. They built a mystique, almost an ideology for the dang things, so now any feature they have must be good and any feature they don't have must have been part of Great Jobs' Plan.
There are tons of products which sell big even though they're mediocre, or even crap, because the hype worked. There are tons of products that are good but never sold because they had no hype. People will evaluate things more positively if they seem to be popular. People will buy the things other people are buying. Relentless hype makes it seem like other people are buying it. And in the case of Steam Machines, a fast hard launch with big resources would have the potential to juice the numbers, and the projected numbers, enough to solve the games problem once and for all--if Steam Machines looked like the next competition for PS 4, suddenly all the AAA companies would be releasing their games for Steam OS. Then the one serious knock on the Steam Machine with Steam OS would be gone, and it would likely be the beginning of the end for Windows domination of computer gaming. So a big splashy launch, a big push at the beginning putting everything behind it, has a very big potential upside.

Of course there is a downside. If Steam pushed the opening hard and it <b>didn't</b> do so well it would be seen as a huge flop, a disastrous mistake, and a long game would be far less workable. They may be thinking that, given the lacklustre pre-reviews by people who maybe in their opinion don't understand what the point or the intended audience are, a big push might be torpedoed by resistance from the typical hype-machine channels, and so they're better off taking their time, letting the things establish themselves and get accepted by the kind of people they think will actually like them, and then they'll be in a better position to push them forward once their niche is a bit better understood. Or something.


Last edited by Purple Library Guy on 10 November 2015 at 11:50 pm UTC

One thing I want you guys to keep in mind, the entire Steam machine concept was born out of rebellion to "Windows Store" which never materialized. The full out war that would of ensued and all the Linux goodness that could of been was just a fart in the wind compared to the hurricane that was coming down the pike. Microsoft kowtowed to Valve and no more Windows lock down (ironically it probably would of finally made Windows computing a safe affair without having to run AV all the time). So now the whole thing is just a concept to remind Microsoft to not mess with the cash cow that is the biggest game retailer on the only platform where Microsoft has the most (or really any* remaining) sway.


*People maybe too young to remember MS having to buy its way into the console wars and losing billions doing so, only in the last few years of xbox360 did MS even start to see a profit from all that work, and now the XBONE is dying and they're slowly losing whatever power they once had even here.

I think Vulkan is the key in Valve's scheme:

A crossplatform api to replace DX12 with better performances will make it easier for game publishers to port their games to SteamOS. Once gamers see the performance gained with it, they will start to convert.

Be carefull, I'm not saying this is going to happen. I think, it's what Valve is hoping for.

Edit : Have you noticed the "Optimized for SteamOS" label on a couple of games? Alien: Isolation being one of them... Interresting marketing strategy.


Last edited by Mohandevir on 11 November 2015 at 12:07 am UTC

Quoting: liamdaweI was expecting at the very least one of the Saints Row games and Rocket League

Really? You yourself just four days ago, [reported that Rocket League was not ready (that's what almost means right?)](https://www.gamingonlinux.com/articles/rocket-league-linux-port-is-almost-ready.6182).

Anyways, I'm off to buy some games to support all that Valve (and the games devs) have done so far. ^_^

It's a long-term attempt. The real attempt is not SteamOS / SteamBox but the SteamLink. They're trying to get into the living room market attrachting the Windows & XBox users. By streaming, not by SteamOS. SteamOS is just the playground for a bigger picture of them providing their own console. It's the playground to show off the market, before they go on their own. SteamBox has the same issue as PCs: Different specs. And that gap is gonna close some day if you ask me. They will allow others to produce, but sooner or later, we'll see a Valve SteamBox if the concept of SteamLink somehow shows off.

I guess this to happen a year after Vulkan. Let's see what Valve has in shelve.


Last edited by STiAT on 11 November 2015 at 12:52 am UTC

well at least we already have the 358 driver series from nvidia that has some Vulkan support, also Intel's vulkan driver has been released. I'm not sure about AMD yet, but this is good to see things are moving along at a steady pace. I'm sure we won't be seeing anything ground breaking for 3 to 6 months at least. I just can't wait to see Wayland and Mir gain Vulkan support, which that will be awesome.

I scooped up Victor Vran during the sale. Pretty dang fun so far, more action game than your standard Diablo-esque loot em up. I also appreciate how much of a ****sucker the narrator is.

The only thing that really disappoints me is Rocket League. It's not my most anticipated game, but how are you gonna offer it with steam machine pre-orders (advertising it with the SteamOS icon no less) and then they can't bothered to finish by time of release. Just seems unprofessional to me :/

Don't get me wrong, I was also hoping for some big releases; especially after you lot kept building the anticipation ;) But the more I think about it, people buying Steam Machines today already have a fairly large library to look at, and if they're from a console background there's bound to be some titles they have played yet. Some devs might also be avoiding launching the same week as Fallout 4.

I'm disappointed that Witcher 3 wasn't released today. But really I didn't expect it much. It probably won't come out for another year or so.


Last edited by Shmerl on 11 November 2015 at 2:49 am UTC

Quoting: Mountain ManI know from personal experience that Steam for Linux throws up the survey request far less frequently than it does on Windows. I went nearly two-years without a single survey request in Linux, but I would get one every couple of months in Windows, which was ironic considering that at the time, I booted into Windows only occasionally and used Linux almost every single day. I've heard from a number of other people who have had the exact same experience.

I'm starting to wonder if the bolded is exactly the reason. For a bit over a year, I've been running Steam almost daily on my gaming PC, I got the survey once early on. Today, I started Steam on my laptop, just to check out the sale, I don't use it much to play anymore. And of course, the survey pops up. Both run Linux, Ubuntu on PC, Fedora on laptop. Maybe the hardware survey has a higher chance of coming up when Steam notices some change compared to your usual setup, rather than polling people completely at random. Valve anyway knows what OS you're using to connect, they don't need a survey for that.
Don't know, just a suspicion I have. If anyone here has a second Linux machine that they don't usually use for Steam, maybe even with a different distro, try starting Steam a few times to see if you get the survey, would be interesting if this is reproducible.

Quoting: ricki42

Quoting: Mountain ManI know from personal experience that Steam for Linux throws up the survey request far less frequently than it does on Windows. I went nearly two-years without a single survey request in Linux, but I would get one every couple of months in Windows, which was ironic considering that at the time, I booted into Windows only occasionally and used Linux almost every single day. I've heard from a number of other people who have had the exact same experience.

I'm starting to wonder if the bolded is exactly the reason. For a bit over a year, I've been running Steam almost daily on my gaming PC, I got the survey once early on. Today, I started Steam on my laptop, just to check out the sale, I don't use it much to play anymore. And of course, the survey pops up. Both run Linux, Ubuntu on PC, Fedora on laptop. Maybe the hardware survey has a higher chance of coming up when Steam notices some change compared to your usual setup, rather than polling people completely at random. Valve anyway knows what OS you're using to connect, they don't need a survey for that.
Don't know, just a suspicion I have. If anyone here has a second Linux machine that they don't usually use for Steam, maybe even with a different distro, try starting Steam a few times to see if you get the survey, would be interesting if this is reproducible.

This seems to be exactly the reason. I had never got the survey, until I switched daily gaming to Linux and very few times that I went back to windows I got asked to do the survey. Not sure how "time" plays in this, but anyway, last month I changed my graphics card and sure enough, in the beginning of this month I got asked to do the survey on Linux. It does actually make sense for valve to be interested in knowing your "new" hardware, not just random sampling.