By Nelson Schneider - 09/29/13 at 02:45 PM CT
It has been a long time coming, but this past week Valve, the company behind the incredible Steam PC gaming platform, made three big announcements about their intentions in the nascent 8th Generation Console Wars.
While Valve had traditionally been content to cater to the PC gaming community, recently the company’s president, Gabe Newell, has expressed nothing but disgust for Microsoft and its Windows 8 operating system. At the same time, he has flip-flopped his stance on PC gaming vs. console gaming and embraced the PlayStation 3 with a hacked-together and poorly-utilized version of Steam for Sony’s failure of a console.
With Valve’s week of Living Room announcements, however, Gaben’s true intentions have been revealed, after months of speculation and rumor mongering. Let’s take a look at each announcement in turn.
Announcement 1 – SteamOS:
It’s obvious that Gaben hates Windows 8, primarily due to fear that Microsoft will eventually lock-down the OS entirely, only allowing ‘apps’ purchased from the Windows Store to run, instead of allowing any correctly compiled ‘program’ to run. At one point I would have thought it impossible to Microsoft to do something that dumb… but that was before the Xbox One announcement. Valve’s solution for Microsoft’s potential future stupidity is to cut Windows out of the picture entirely. While Steam will still run as it always has on Windows and Mac OSX, Valve is also building a custom Linux (uh-oh) distribution focused entirely on gaming. SteamOS won’t be just a client or runtime layer running in another operating system, but will be the sole software required to play compatible (uh-oh) games.
While I love the idea of a PC operating environment that only does games, and is fully compatible with a controller, I do not love Linux. Granted, my last real interaction with Linux was in 2006 when I took some Webmastering classes at my local community college, but I’m dubious that the foundation of SteamOS has really gotten all that much better. Nobody but the beardiest of Neckbeards likes to use Linux as a desktop environment, and even system administrators that interact with Linux everyday usually do so through a remote terminal and only have to worry about setting up certain server-specific software packages. Linux is an OS that works best when it is used “set-and-forget” style on a machine that just does its thing and only requires human interaction when something goes terribly wrong. Based on the quality of their previous work, I am confident that Valve is capable of making improvements to Linux that will make the experience as user-friendly as possible. But what about things that are closely intertwined with the Linux kernel or that are heavily dependent on proprietary specifications that nVidia and AMD don’t want to share? How can Valve change the fundamental user hostility of Linux without beating up Linus Torvalds and stealing his lunch money? How can Valve force the GPU makers to provide high-quality Linux drivers where all others have failed (and indeed, when nVidia’s recent Windows driver releases have all been a bit crashy)?
But even if Valve is able to miraculously provide gamers the world over with a streamlined, friendly OS that has perfect driver support and is fully usable with only a controller, what exactly are we supposed to play on it? As of this writing, Steam for Linux supports ~200 games out of Steam’s massive library of ~2200 games. That’s not a very good percentage. Valve’s current solution to this issue of compatibility is to allow SteamOS to stream games over a local network that are running on another OS on another PC on the local network. This entire process seems completely unintuitive to me… if I have a PC capable of playing these games natively, why would I even bother booting up SteamOS? Game streaming is a tool that is meant to serve up demanding games to anemic hardware, like the nVidia Shield or the OUYA. Game streaming is a compromise that nobody should ever need to deal with. My hope is that streaming in SteamOS is only a stopgap measure put in place until Valve is able to implement a built-in emulation engine in their Linux build. And by ‘emulation engine,’ I mean WINE. Windows has been the de-facto gaming OS for decades. And before Windows, DOS was the gaming overlord (so SteamOS will need to include an integrated version of DOSbox too). If SteamOS is going to compete with Windows, SteamOS will need to be able to play ALL the games. Currently, the WINE Windows emulator for Linux gets an incredibly bad rap even from Linux apologists for being finicky, fiddly, and as user friendly as a bag of angry bobcats. If Valve can tame WINE and bake it into SteamOS as a fundamental feature, they could later scrap the ridiculous game streaming feature, or better still, keep game streaming and allow it to be an optional feature for those who choose to install SteamOS on x86 tablets.
Announcement 2 – Steam Machines:
While the ‘Steambox’ has been rumored for months (and said rumors even inspired some of us at MeltedJoystick to custom build ourselves a dedicated Steambox), Valve finally confirmed everything we in the gaming media have been speculating. There will be an official Valve-made Steambox, as well as other models made by various hardware partners. Unfortunately, Valve was much more cryptic about their hardware announcement than the other two reveals this past week, so we are still left to speculate on hardware stats and prices.
Announcement 3 – Steam Controller:
Unlike many PC Master Race Trolls, Valve and Gaben seem to realize that playing PC games with a controller instead of a typewriter is awesome. Thus Valve has created a prototype game controller for use with SteamOS and Steam Machines (as well as other OSes on generic hardware) that they are promoting as being compatible with every game ever. This single statement has me positively drooling to get my hands on a Steam Controller to try it out (though I’m worried that Valve’s perspective is a bit myopic and their definition of ‘every’ game only includes Linux games). Ever since Steam coerced me into returning to PC gaming last year, I’ve been struggling to make certain games to conform to the way I want to play them (“Torchlight 2” put up particularly strong resistance). While I normally love Steam Big Picture mode, I find that I rarely get to use it since many of the Steam games (and non-steam games) I’ve been playing lately require Xpadder or MotionCreator to handle the interface mapping. Neither of these helper apps plays particularly nicely with Big Picture mode, especially when it comes time to switch layouts or to kill the helper app in order to play a game that supports the controller natively. If Valve can make SteamOS and the Steam Controller mesh seamlessly via their so-called ‘Shared Configurations’ feature, without the need of helper apps, they will have achieved the kind of OS/controller unity that I have been wishing from Microsoft since they first announced the original Xbox.
But what about that Steam Controller? It’s kind of weird looking, isn’t it? Instead of dual analog sticks, it has dual trackpads. I hate the trackpad on my laptop and refuse to use it if I don’t absolutely need to. And what about that button layout? Where’s the traditional 4-button diamond? Where’s the d-pad? While the Steam Controller has the traditional 4 shoulder buttons, it also has some inner grip buttons reminiscent of the ones on my old Microsoft Sidewinder (I hated that controller, primarily for its incompatibility with every game I tried to play with it) and the 4 face buttons are at the 4 corners of the central touchscreen. This touchscreen, unlike the OUYA’s horrible mouse simulator, will initially be divided into 4 clickable button regions in the prototypes, with full-surface button customization supposedly coming in later hardware revisions. According to Valve, this weird, non-traditional button layout is intended to keep the controller completely symmetrical, allowing left-handed users to swap the controller's orientation with ease. I think a better solution would be to keep a traditional asymmetrical layout, but sell an inverted version for the Lefties who want one.
Just looking at the picture of the prototype, there are two major things I don’t like. First, the lack of a diamond layout for the face buttons completely kills the ergonomics of continually holding down one button with the tip of the thumb while hitting another button occasionally with the base of the thumb. This mechanical action applies to numerous older game genres, like SHMUPs where firing constantly is imperative while occasionally doing a barrel roll or dropping a bomb, or traditional platformers, like “Super Mario Bros.,” where the held button makes the character run and the intermittent button makes the character jump. The diamond pattern has been used almost entirely without variation (see: Gamecube) since the 4th Generation, and it would be foolish of Valve to ignore ergonomic perfection in order to pander to left-handers. Second, the fact that the Steam Controller lacks a d-pad seems to indicate that nobody at Valve likes to play 2D games anymore. While analog sticks and Valve’s experimental trackpads are necessary for games with 3D movement, old-school games – notably, the type of Indie games that make up the VAST majority of Steam’s Linux catalog – are better played with a simple, digital movement axis. Furthermore, the d-pad can serve a further use by simulating a keyboard’s numpad in games like MMORPGs that have a lot of character skills mapped to different buttons. It would be nearly impossible to play a game like this using a controller without the ability to map skills to the 8 discreet directions available on a d-pad.
Out of Valve’s three big announcements regarding the future of, all of them make perfect sense, provided that Valve can bring the technical expertise to provide a flawless experience and that Valve is willing to listen to user feedback and incorporate it into their revision process. It seems that the unification of PC gaming and console gaming is only speeding up. As we hurtle toward the gaming singularity’s event horizon, I can only hope that when we all meet together on the other side, it will be Heaven, not Hell.
Comments
Jonzor - wrote on 10/07/13 at 09:57 AM CT
Furthermore, looking at the specs Valve just put out, I'm not sure this Steam Box is going to be any more cost-effective for the masses than the "Steam Box" I've currently got sitting in my office not hooked up to a TV, the existence of which has yet to blow up the console market.
Jonzor - wrote on 10/05/13 at 11:27 PM CT
Based on your opinion of the demographic at least one of those consoles makes hay off of, I doubt that threat hangs quite so certain for consoles. Mouth-breathing Madden and CoD fans that FROM WHAT I HEAR comprise the only reason the Xbox exists don't give a crap about Steam.
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 10/05/13 at 02:33 PM CT
With the PS4 and XBONE both being x86 hardware, it seems more like THEY need to worry about being serious competition for Steam. If Sony and MS can't adopt a Steam-like pricing and DRM model for digital purchases, they're going to be stuck with physical media forever, or face another XBONE-calibur backlash from the public.
dbarry_22 - wrote on 09/30/13 at 09:54 PM CT
While I am a fan of Steam, I am confident that this effort will not be serious competition to Sony's and Microsoft's consoles.
