Valve, creators of best-selling game franchises (such as Counter-Strike, Dota 2, Half-Life, Left 4 Dead, Portal, and Team Fortress) and leading technologies (such as Steam and Source), today announced... Valve Launches First Generation Steam Machines
it's materiel.net not material.net it's a French site. EDIT : seems like info on the boxes are available here : http: //media.steampowered.com/store/steammachines/SteamMachinesBroc_WEB.PDF (remove the space)
I'm not clear on how this will work, I assume as it is using the existing steam library that it will continue to use windows games, therefore how can this run without an emulator? seems pointless buying what is essentially a linux games console with a built in emulator to run windows games. But I imagine I am missing something here, so how is this meant to work? EDIT: Nevermind, just found that the games will be developed to run natively. I did wonder that initially but sounded like such a large exercise for what is a niche product, but if Steam want to waste their time and money doing it, more power to them, I just hope that doesn't affect the price of windows game titles when they need to move money round the balance sheet.
Either some makers are also putting Windows on those machines as a dual boot config or they got their numbers wrong. I don't think Linux has that many games unless they are including the potentials from the use of WINE?
The one from Alienware looks like what you would expect a Steam Machine to look like, a console. But it's 3 times overpriced, which is to be expected with Failianware. 2450 Dollars for a system with a 4770K and 780 Ti.
With mantle hopefully delivering large performance gains soon it kind of renders the whole having to use linux thing to get around antique directx obselete anyway.
Personally, I hope this is the starting point of Windows seizing to be the one and only game platform, and Linux eventually replaces it. The only reason we "need" windows is becuase we have no other choice becuase it has all the games, and other software. So far Linux has 450 games on Steam, very respectable for a platform that has such a small marketshare.
That is if Mantle becomes as widely adopted as DirectX. I think OpenGL, and Mantle should be the main API's, both being cross-platform. And if Linux gets Mantle, that would be a good thing too. No more having to pay outragous fee's for OS's.
