I’d kind of love to have a Steam box, but not at $1,000.
Everyone is waiting for VALVE to announce something about the Steam Box, because the “piston” thing is technically just a “small PC you can put in your living room that will run Steam”.
Current guesses are that since the price point is way too high for a console, Valve will subsidize it so that it’s a reasonable price.
The interesting thing about it is that it’ll run Linux. Which means it’s either flop because 90% of your games won’t run, it will spur a huge shift to OpenGL(/AL etc) and Linux by major developers, or Valve has cooked up some super-fast proprietary emulation layer way better than WINE.
Gabe Newell was telling everyone at CES that the Piston is a Steam “box,” but that the Valve-created Steam Box is still under wraps.
Yeah. Which means that my assessment pretty much stands. It’s a small PC that you can put in the living room and run Steam on. Oh, and I suppose it is in some way “endorsed by Valve” which means nothing. People have been able to buy small PCs that they could put in their living room for a while - the existence of the company that makes the “Piston” is proof of that - but they haven’t taken off outside of a small circle of dedicated hobbyists. Everyone is waiting for Valve to show us what they’re going to do to change that, and endorsing a PC as a “steam box” isn’t it.
Wasn’t PS3 priced at $600 when it released? PS4 will be less than that?
[Moderating]
SenorBeef, no formal warning, let’s dial it back just a little, please. I know you aren’t specifically naming anyone but saying everyone who disagres with you in the thread are “silly snobs” and “idiots” is too close. You’re discussing video games, it’s supposed to be fun.
Thanks,
RickJay
Moderator
It better be - the PS3’s price point almost killed it.
The good news is that they’re not selling some weird proprietary homebuilt architecture this time, so keeping the price down should be relatively feasable.
Alright, I’ll dial it back, sorry. This next gen of consoles is going to set the standard for the next decade about how good games can be, so I’m hostile to any suggestion that they needn’t be too powerful. It’s bad enough that we’d be locked into the state of technology of even what would be a high-end, top of the line system of 2013/2014 for over a decade, it would be horrible if we had to be locked into a low end one because people thought that the technology available to gaming just doesn’t matter anyway, might as well save a few bucks. So I think the technology aspect is certainly relevant to the thread. But still, I was over the top as far as insulting the motivations of people who might make that case and too hostile for this thread, so I’ll try to reel in the hate beams of doom.
Anyway, regarding the entertainment center aspects of the consoles, that’s true, but what could new gen consoles do that’s so much better than the current ones? I guess the next xbox could support blu-ray. And maybe if they had a bigger hard drive they could have PVRs. But in general they already stream netflix and act as media extenders and all that, so I’m not sure there’s going to be a compelling case for people to buy next gen consoles for that aspect. People may still keep buying current gen consoles as media machines - the ps2 only recently stopped production.
I think it comes down to the fact that few people (OK, fewer people) are interested in spending the money required to create a really good gaming PC. They’re happy with spending less money and playing on their TV and buying a budget PC that just gets them online. It’s not that people think the technology doesn’t matter, but from a business standpoint, putting that much horsepower into a console is financial suicide.
The other interesting thing is price. Sony scared off everyone with the original PS3 price tag although IMO it was pretty reasonable for a media/gaming device you’d be using for a decade. But everyone wants to get into the Wii $200 market. Or what the current gen consoles are produced at. So I’m a little scared the new gen consoles could just be given something around 2008-level technology, produced for $200, and not really bring them up to modern capabilities.
I don’t think it’s going to happen, but it would be interesting that they’d be flexible if they went with full digital distribution. If they were able to make considerably more than their normal $10 comission per game by selling them through the MS/Sony store, they could subsidize the hardware to an even greater extent. They could (but wouldn’t, of course) actually give them away for free and still turn a profit if they controlled the retail space digitally. Digital distribution is very profitable - your only costs are a few cheap bits moving across the internet and the infrastructure to move it. If you cut out all the costs of retail distribution, both MS/Sony and the game publishers would see a greater portion of the profit from each sale. Significantly.
I don’t think that particular setup would be good for the consumer, though. Digital distribution has taken over PC gaming in part because there’s strong competition from like 10 major distributors, so the price competition is really strong. You can preview what MS and Sony would do with their current Xbox Arcade/whatever the sony equivelant is - games would just be always at their fixed max price. There’d be no discounting older games to get them off the shelves, used games, etc.
But it is a plausible way to sell good hardware for very cheap, knowing they’ll make it up with game sales.
I agree that this is a very real concern due to the way market pressures seem to work on these devices - fundamentally, a lot of people still have the idea that, for lack of a better term “boxes you hook up to your TV” shouldn’t cost $500. This is probably a little bit dated, and extends, probably, from as far back as the VCR, but it’s also a function of game budgets. If you are spending ten million dollars to make a game, you need to be able to sell a bloody lot of copies to break even, let alone make a profit, and you can’t sell games to people who don’t have the hardware to run them. And basic economics indicates that the more expensive the device is, the fewer people will buy it and the fewer copies of games you can sell. This double-backwards connects to the fact that the prettier you make a game look, the more it costs to make. So in multiple different ways, it’s not actually to the advantage of the hardware manufacturers to make super crazy high end consoles because A) Fewer people will buy them, meaning less sales and B) Making games that utilize their capabilities will cost more, meaning more sales are needed to make a profit.
Fortunately, I don’t really think your fears about what “low end” consoles will mean for gaming are grounded. The reality is that there aren’t enough people out there with high end gaming rigs to run PC games with all the widgets turned on anyway, so once again, it’s to the advantage of game makers to make games that can run on a wide variety of hardware platforms, and not spend money on graphical features that will only be seen by the elite few. (I call this the “World of Warcraft” approach - that game was designed to run on even low end systems at its launch, and look how that worked out for them.) That and the real problems with cross platform gaming (clunky controls as a result of lazy porting, lack of extensible features, etc) aren’t going to go away regardless of how powerful the next generation of consoles is.
The upside of this is that for a lot of people, graphics really ARE plateauing at a “good enough” sort of level. Which means that with any luck, game designers will get the hint and start working on other aspects of their games as a means of setting themselves apart. This may not be good news for the die hard graphical enthusiast, however.
This is an interesting thing, because both of these companies at this point already DO have the infrastructure to do this - you can buy full “retail” games with a few button presses on both XBL and PSN. But I can’t see this being anything more than an “option” even in the next generation because A) Don’t want to piss off retail because there are still a hunormous number of people who like to go to a store and buy an object and B) a nontrivial portion even of the US still has surprisingly crappy internet and would rather buy a disc than download a 10 GB game.
This actually appears to have proven untrue - at least on the Xbox side, most of the “games on demand” are not pinned at “release price”; They never reach Steam level of discounts, but it’s generally price competitive to buy a “game on demand” vs buying the same game as a disc from say, Amazon. So you’re looking at like, $20-$30 for older games.
I’m sure consolemakers would love this (Nintendo already offers roughly 90% of the library for download in addition to discs), but broadband capabilities in the US just aren’t there to put the entire console game industry online. Look at the big Xbox Live crash a few Christmases ago and even the Diablo III launch last year.
I think you may be confusing two seperate issues. The diablo 3 launch was a problem because they had insufficient servers for the demand (and this is the servers that are actually running the game, rather than distributing game content) - whereas the general broadband problem you speak of is more along the lines of people in the boonies taking 30 hours of straight downloading to get a huge game. The former problem is relatively easily fixable. Steam has enough bandwidth now that even during the Christmas sale when a billion people were downloading new games I was still able to receive games at over 3MB/s. The latter issue may be a problem.
One way to get around this is simply to charge more at retail to encourage digital distribution for those it’s practical for. This hasn’t worked in the past because publishers make you sign deals that say your normal offering price won’t be any cheaper than the retail offering price (that’s one reason why digital distributors come up with crazy sales rather than just setting a low price all the time). They do that to keep retail distributors happy. But I wonder if MS or Sony really wanted to change the game if they’d have the clout to change that. Sell digital for $50 and retail for $70 and you’d still make way more on the digital sales while not excluding people who can’t make digital work.
Let’s keep this civil and on point, gentlemen. This is a predictions thread for the next PlayStation product. If you’re not interested in that, please let it go.
Is this a record? One thread moderated by 3 different mods?
According to IGN, PS4 is going to be called ‘Orbis’, or perhaps that’s just the project codename; the processor is an AMD A10 APU which it says is a bit old, but between 8GB and 16GB RAM, which sounds enormous.
Mind you, the WiiU’s processor is fairly weedy but the games still look pretty…
Ah yeah, of course. I didn’t think of it, but it seems kind of obvious that you’d use an APU in a low cost solution. The A10 though is of the laptop/mobile/low power line, I think. That’s unfortunate.
The A10 has roughly 1/3rd to 1/4th the CPU performance of my current system, and apparently the graphics are roughly comparable to between a 6450 and 6570, which is also about 1/4rd to 1/6th of my pretty outdated video card. The latter is actually more damning - my CPU is top of the line, but my GPU is aging. The GPU performance of the A10 compared to current high end cards is roughly 1/10th or worse than current high end GPUs.
That’s actually really dissapointing. And I’m not saying that in a chest thumping way. I’m actually rooting for the next gen consoles to be more powerful because multiplatform games will be less crippled. If that’s true, this is actually significantly below my most pessimistic predictions. I mean, that would be significantly less powerful than the mid-range PC I built in 2007.
I guess it’s a reaction to the disappointing slow start to sales of the PS3 due to its initial sky-high price tag; people opted for the slightly cheaper but just as pretty XBox 360.
But then the 360 suffered as it had very poor reliability issues early one with the RRoD, which might have been in part caused by overly ambitious design. I guess they are scaling it back slightly so they can ensure they’ll actually sell and not be returned broken a few months later.
I should add that those APUs have an ability to cooperate and scale with low end video cards so if they’re going that route the end result may be better, but where the last gen of consoles could’ve competed with mid-low range PC hardware in 2004-2005, the A10 is significantly further behind relative to what’s available. In other words, if this is true, the PS4 will be significantly - roughly 6-7 years - behind the current level of mid-range power/technology, compared to the ps3 which was only a year or so behind at launch.