Well. Someone has to say it . . .
That's some Bad Juju.

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Well, I'm not pleased, but I'll forgive them if they actually, you know, sell a bunch of Steam Machines.
Based on current pricing I'm not holding my breath; hopefully there will be "Steam Sales".

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Quoting: Vash63Isn't UE4 the most advanced open source game engine? This is free software and UE4 is not, but aren't both open source?

I think this reflects a misunderstanding of what "open source" is. According to both the original definition and the common usage, "open source" is more or less the same thing as "Free/Libre" software. It just emphasizes different issues. Just being freeware, available for no dollars, does not make something open source, nor does even the ability to look at the source code. If you can't make changes and redistribute, it ain't open source.

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I remember Master of Magic. It was a fun little game. The magic got pretty cool. If I remember right, the one thing that occasionally bugged me was that much of the development and the powerful magics you learned and so forth were eclipsed by the antics of the heroes you recruited, who could stomp their way across battlefields crushing everything in their way.

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Quoting: stss

Quoting: seveni don't wanna spell doom or anything but i don't think steammachines gonna be a success, i hope i'm wrong but i don't see them kick a dent in the xbox/PS universe

The comforting thing about this though is that Valve doesn't expect it to compete with consoles. That's just not what it was made for, and I'm pretty sure they are well aware it's catering to only a small portion of their overall users. So even if sales aren't spectacular it doesn't mean the project was a failure at all.

It's good to keep that in mind, because I think the biggest threat to steam machines is not the low quantity of people who will buy them, it's all the people who are no doubt going to be comparing steam machines to console sales and spreading FUD all over the place the moment they realize steam machines sales don't measure up (which they almost certainly won't).
It's a threat to their success because it could cause even less people to buy steam machines when people see "not successful" all over the place, even though that standard of success is an artificial one that valve was never shooting for in the first place

Welll . . . On one hand, my impression was that competing with consoles was to a fair extent exactly what they were intended to do. Not precisely, perhaps, they'll do other stuff as well, but there's a big overlap there. And so I'm kind of hoping that they will indeed successfully do that (unfortunately current price-points on Steam Machines publicized so far are not creating optimism on this front, although I doubt that's the final word).
But on the other hand, it's true that from a Linux gaming perspective, even a relative flop will be a success. I just looked up sales totals for the PS IV and the Xbox One; 20 million and ten million, respectively. I seem to remember there are currently about 1 million Linux users registered on Steam? So, say Steam Machines take 3% or less of the major console market--that is, sell 5% as many as PS IV, 10% as many as Xbone. That'd be a million units, which would double the number of Linux boxes on Steam, which would vastly improve the chances of a port beating break-even. If Steam Machines became a minor competitor in the console world, like 10% of the market, that would in a stroke catapult Linux over the Mac for purposes of PC game sales.

One nice thing is that Steam Machine success isn't self-limiting in the way that a true new console would be. That is, normally if you start a new console from scratch, a simple competitor to the big PS and Xthings and I guess Wii, one big problem is having games exist and continue to be developed for it. If you don't win big right away, whatever market share you got at the start is doomed to erode and disappear fairly soon, because developers won't bother. It's happened before if I'm not mistaken. But with the Steam Machine, it plays PC games as long as they're ported to Linux (and to some extent even if they aren't--that streaming thing). It already before release has a catalogue of over 1000 games, albeit mostly indy. If it has any success at all, that catalogue will just get bigger and higher-end, which allows Valve to build on initial mid-level success in a way that a typical new entrant to the console space could not. And near as I can figure, Valve is very good at steadily building on initial success.

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Back when I heard the game title "Gratuitous Space Battles" I thought "Wow! Cool!"
But when I started reading reviews and stuff, I always got the impression that it just wasn't really space-battle-y enough. Like, it didn't seem to actually do most of my favourite things about building space fleets and fighting battles with them. The review points out one of them: You don't actually get to fight the battle, you just sort of point your fleet at the enemy and then watch the movie.
The other thing I like about space fleet stuff is building elaborate, clever spaceships with interesting technologies calculated to do various nefarious things to the enemy. Like overwhelm them with brute firepower and/or missile swarms, or run rings around them potshotting from range, or unleash hordes of vicious fighters, or use subtle tech against which they are defenseless to disable them, or open small black holes directly in their line of flight, or use gravity rays to make them smash into each other--all using cunning ship designs to exploit the capabilities I choose to emphasize.
Anyway, I was surprised that when I looked into it, it seemed like GSB wasn't especially awesome in that department either; not terrible, but not nearly as good as one might expect for a game that didn't have to worry about all the 4X stuff and could concentrate on just the fleets.
All in all, if I want to watch a movie of an awesome space battle maybe I'll grab some classic anime or something. But for all the good 4X titles out there, I'm not sure the space battle goodness I'm looking for has really been made yet.

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I picked up Civ V at 75% off. Playing it, I couldn't get over the simple fact that I was in a position to play it on Linux at all. We've gotten used to it pretty fast, but it was only a couple-three years ago that there just weren't any games like that out natively for Linux.

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He's certainly less well known than Yahtzee, but Shamus Young of Twentysided and things also has a lot of respect for Spec Ops: The Line, and he's no fan of brainless shooters.
http://www.shamusyoung.com/twentysidedtale/?p=16818

From this article (he did a couple others on the game):
"Some games are famous for their gameplay. Or their artwork. Or a big plot twist. This game might be the first one where the big selling point is the theme. Spec Ops asks the question: What would happen if your typical action-game badass lived in a world with consequences?"

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For the record, I don't dual boot at the moment. I have a Windows partition which came with my computer but which I've never yet booted into. I might someday though.
The problem of overcoming dual-booting is kind of multifaceted IMO. It's a bit like optimizing a complex program for performance (not that I'm a programmer): There are lots of bottlenecks all over the place and it's going to be a pain to get all of them.
But there are certain low-hanging fruit. Easier fixes or places where one fix would yield a big-ish speedup.

So for dual-booting, I suspect there are myriad reasons people do it, just because Windows has been so widely used for so long and so there has been so much software written for it, some very popular, some not so much, and other related parts of the computer ecosystem have been oriented around it for so long (hardware drivers and such).

For instance, Microsoft Office is a big barrier. LibreOffice/OpenOffice is making strides, as are cloud thingies like Google Docs. For my particular case LibreOffice is as good as MS Office and doesn't have the &$#! ribbon. But for many use cases it seems MS Office still has features other office suites lack, or they haven't managed to dig past its file format obfuscation enough to round-trip documents well. The good news is people seem to be working hard on this one.
For instance, Photoshop is a barrier. Again, the GIMP is very good but by many accounts there are things about Photoshop which the GIMP doesn't do as well. The reverse may also be true but that doesn't matter as much when Photoshop is the default that professionals build their workflow around. Also being worked on.
Actually, anything related to Adobe is a barrier, from Photoshop to Acrobat to Flash to whatever else they touch. If we could engineer the ouster of Adobe's upper management and replace them with people who didn't apparently hate Linux it would be a major victory.
For example, Visual Studio is a barrier. I don't know anything about that end of stuff but I hear it's the case.
Tax software is maybe a barrier; this is becoming less true because people are just doing their taxes on the web so the Windows-only purchased software of yesteryear is not such a thing.
And then there's all the little programs that are used by a few people each which nobody's ever written something that does that in Linux because it's a marginal thing and there aren't enough people using Linux for it to result in enough users to make it worth while. This is something that only goes away with time and increased user base and things getting more web-centric.

And then there's the gaming side of things. It's the same in spades. The big bottlenecks are the Very Popular Games, plus graphics driver problems. The little bottlenecks are all that mass of old games that will probably never get ported and aren't popular enough for anyone to have made sure they work well in Wine. I have a few of those; so far my solution has been to not play those games, which is annoying. I keep hoping Wine will get good enough that they'll start working.
The Very Popular Games will come if Steam Machines get a solid user base. So will the graphics drivers. And a lot of the Very Popular Games run very well in Wine because there are a lot of people who have worked to make that happen because they're Very Popular. Which is still annoying for the latest and greatest games, but older ones are fine, so at least there isn't a long tail of Very Popular Games which will haunt our efforts to dump the dual boot even after Linux is a popular enough gaming platform for the likes of Blizzard to target their releases on it.

Overall, overcoming the irritants which cause people to dual-boot is an incremental project. And in many cases a chicken-egg exercise (nobody will do it until Linux is more popular, Linux won't be more popular until someone does it). But one with plenty of hope; I thought the biggest barrier on the chicken-and-egg side was games, and yet here we are. I still say we could see regression unless the Steam Machine or something like it succeeds and creates the market share that the money boys need in order to continue targeting Linux as a platform. The current combination of fashion and prodding by Valve will not keep the momentum going forever IMO.

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Here's a marketing trick: Someone should offer a Steam Machine for, like, $100 . . . plus a $10/month fee for nothing in particular that goes for 4 years. That is, $580, but it looks cheap.

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