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The Valve Thread

NecroMorrius

By NecroMorrius
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murray

murray

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Posted

Also:

We play with the Steam Machine, Valve's game console of the future

Valve Corporation, the video game developer responsible for Half-Life, Portal, Team Fortress , and the digital distribution platform Steam, has an ambitious plan to reinvent the video game console. But don’t expect the so-called Steam Machine to take on the Xbox One and PlayStation 4 quite yet. Right now, the company is focused on catching the attention of 65 million PC gamers who've historically turned to expensive custom rigs in the name of high-FPS entertainment — and it just might have a shot at that.

Last month, Valve invited us to its Bellevue, Washington headquarters to see one of the very first Steam Machines in action, try the Steam Controller, and obtain further insight into the company's plans.

Here’s what we learned there.

The Verge

STEAM_M_console__hero.jpg

2013-10-23_17-10-16.jpg

Edit: Damnit Alex!

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RubberJohnny

RubberJohnny

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This is interesting

The fact that Steam requires you to pop online once every few weeks is a bug rather than intentional design according to an official forum response spotted by Blue's News. "There are many components involved in Offline Mode," writes Valve poster Henryg, "some of them have known issues and bugs which we are continually working to improve. We're aware that it doesn't always work as flawlessly as we want it to, but please keep reporting bugs with Offline Mode. It is not broken 'by design'."

He also mentions that Valve are in the process of converting every game on Steam to a new authentication procedure. "Some day soon, once this work is completed, we will eliminate the old authentication system (represented by the ClientRegistry.blob file) and Offline Mode should immediately become much more robust."

Steam's offline mode has never worked quite correctly, to the irritation of many, including the OP on this forum thread. The poster works five week shifts offshore, but can't access Steam games for more than a couple of weeks because of the impromptu online authorisation issue. Henryg suggests that "Offline Mode is designed to be indefinite. You can't access any of Steam's online features such as friends lists or saved game synchronization, of course, but the client should allow you to run in Offline Mode for as long as you like."

A fix is on the way then, but why have Valve kept it so quiet? Henryg says "We have no community managers or PR people, so all the time that we spend on forums is taking away from development time." Ah, I see. well in that case GET BACK TO WORK HENRYG.

I wonder if the negative reaction to Xbones DRM (which was basically very similar to Steam) made Valve think there was a large userbase they weren't reaching.
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Shook

Shook

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It's not really for us, I'm perfectly happy building my own system, using a gamepad where it suits and mouse and keyboard otherwise.

This is for other people who are only familiar with boxes that sit under the TV and want to use gamepads.

Console gamers?

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NecroMorrius

NecroMorrius

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It'll be 100% exactly the same as the box I already have connected to my TV running big picture mode. But about 10% the size.

What else do you need to know? It's an attractive little box that runs Steam. Excitement.

You realise you actually just used the argument "if it was an Xbox one, you wouldn't like it". :lol:

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Smitty

Smitty

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It's exactly the bland hifi/VCR look Moz has gone out of his way to say is fantastically ugly in the One design.

This is an attractive little box though, apparently. LOL.

But there's no cable, grey cloud!

Seriously though there's a range of GPUs starting at Titan and going down.

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Kyouma

Kyouma

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I still don't get the excitement over this.

It's a device from VALVE for your living room that can run steam

It's getting games onto Linux

It's got a crazy innovative new controller

It might be extremely good value for money for the hardware

It might herald the release of half life 3

I view it the same way I view Google's Nexus phones.

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robdood

robdood

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It's a device from VALVE for your living room that can run steam

It's getting games onto Linux

It's got a crazy innovative new controller

It might be extremely good value for money for the hardware

It might herald the release of half life 3

I view it the same way I view Google's Nexus phones.

I'm hoping it eventually heralds the coming of a single format for gaming. Fuck this vhs/betamax shit we still have going on.

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