Quoting: kibblesAnd ignore all the people above playing this game that need to state just how above playing this game they are. God you sanctimonious puritans invade literally everything...

So you're . . . posting just to state how above, being above playing the game, you are? God you sanctimonious "Everyone must be pseudo-edgy" types invade figuratively everything . . .

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Quoting: KelsWhy shouldn't we call it controversial? Being controversial is the whole point of the game and all its marketing. If it wasn't controversial, nobody would have bought it to start with.

Very true. Which is why my basic reaction to articles about this game has been, "Yawn. Don't care."

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To me the questions revolve around the controls. OK, the AMD thing is a little worrisome, but let's imagine someone has gotten drivers much more better by the time it comes out. But the Steam Controller took Valve ages to get right, it almost seems like it was the major bottleneck for the whole project. These people are going to be doing their best to emulate the Steam Controller on this little device, but how well will they succeed?

I'm not really part of the audience for this thing, but it's interesting.

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Quoting: SethoxMy point here is that as long as you just deny an idea because you do not like it, you stagnate the community.

Of course! Everyone should support ideas because they don't like them! How could I have been so blind?

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Quoting: melkemindIt reminds me of the original Torchlight port that came out of Humble Bundle years ago. Whenever you attached anything like a hat to the head of your character, the head would disappear.

My question to all you zombiephiles is: Does being headless make a zombie more or less scary?

Heh. Tough one. On one hand, zombies tend to transmit the disease-or-whatever by bite and are generally enthusiastic biters when it comes to their offense. A zombie that grapples you and then does nothing = less scary.
On the other, are we talking about the kind of zombie you can usually only kill by bashing in their head? Because I see a potential problem there.

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I think what makes this article easy to misunderstand is that on one hand, the author says at first that this is not just a list of the AAA games, but a personal list; in comments he reinforces that, saying that he only listed the games he was interested in. But late in the article he draws conclusions more generally about the state of SteamOS gaming from the shortness of the list. For the rest of us, though, it's pretty damned hard to compare the author's personal list with the broader state of gaming. We don't know how much came through that he just wasn't interested in, we don't know how much was released not on SteamOS that he was interested in. That makes the article inconsistent; basically a personal list can't really support a general conclusion, especially if we don't have access to the inside of the person's skull.

When was Civilization: Beyond Earth released? I'd pretty surely rate that AAA.

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Of course the numbers mean something. People are impressed by big numbers. You tell someone a console has well over 1000 games at launch, there is going to be a certain "Wow! Really?" factor there.
But it's still true that people want the big popular games, and the Steam Machine is woefully short of the biggest, top-selling titles. I don't personally care--I basically don't even play the genres those games are always in--but it's a brutal fact when it comes to selling boxes.
Mind you, the few indications I've had about how many Steam Machines are actually selling give me the impression that sales have been fairly, perhaps surprisingly, brisk. Another brutal fact is that Steam is a really, really huge sales channel. There are a lot of people on it buying things, and Valve don't have to spend big money to dangle those machines on the screen half the time when you log on.

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I notice there's one criticism that keeps on cropping up, even in positive reviews by people looking at it from a console perspective:
No apps for Netflix and similar webby multimedia stuff. That's something well within Valve's power to fix, they should get on it.

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Quoting: GuestThis actually applies to Linux too for whenever you need proprietary drivers, sure it depends on distro, but I went through hell trying to install the latest proprietary nvidia drivers in Linux Mint, and still failed.

Generally agree with most of your post, but this--I have to figure the key word here is "latest". Installing the proprietary nvidia drivers on Linux Mint that Linux Mint has available to install is easier than snapping your fingers (I'm actually kind of crap at snapping my fingers, but clicking the mouse, that I can do). I can well believe that if you want to go bleeding edge, it gets a lot harder. This is not quite the same as with Windows, where just installing a driver for some things at all is apparently often a pain (I don't know for sure, haven't tried to install Windows in many a year).

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Civ V, Civ: Beyond Earth, a little Crypt of the Necrodancer.

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