14 DAY TRIAL // The Steam Machines from Valve is the proverbial elephant in the room that no one is willing to talk about it. Everybody wants Valve to succeed, and many gamers are rooting for them, but not many people actually believe that it will be a success.
Linux gaming has come a long way; there's no point in denying that. More progress has been made in this department in the past three years than in all the Linux history. Valve has been a great engine for this change, and it's still the main force behind it, but their goals are shrouded in secrecy and no one really knows what their schedule is and how far they are willing to go.
People tend to forget that Valve is a privately owned company that's not listed anywhere. No one actually knows what profits they have, so we can't figure out just how much money or effort they want to put into this endeavor. What we do know is that Valve didn't invest money into its console / PC hybrid, and they let other companies, many of them relatively unknown, do most of the work. It's not a reassuring decision.
PC gaming with high frame rate is expensive
The PC master race invests a lot of money into hardware. Sure, the PC graphics will trump console graphics any day of the week, in any game, but it's done with a high cost. I play games on PC, and I can lie to myself that I don't invest a lot of money, but it would be just that, a lie or a rationalization. The truth is that I change my graphics card almost every two years, and I don't choose a cheap one; I change the processor in the same manner, and every few years I also change the motherboard and the DDRAM.
I could have bought all the consoles on the market with the money I spent on my PC in the past four years, but I don't regret any of it. The ability to change that setting to Very High in any game makes me smile every single time. I know what the price of gaming is, and I also know that the announced Steam Machines are extremely expensive and very few people will buy them.
The elephant in the room is failure
We need to talk about failure, even if we absolutely want Valve to succeed. The truth is that you need an expensive Steam Machine to play latest games at high settings and to pay a few thousands of dollars for a worthy one is not something that you can do at once. I have an expensive Steam Machine, which is my PC, but I've built it over the years, and the financial impact was not that big. Coughing up that sum all at once is difficult, even for dedicated PC gamers.
So, the Linux community needs to think about the possibility of a failure or a semi-failure. Maybe SteamOS has advanced enough so that it doesn't need to be on life-support for the company, but I feel that some of the ports and investments from publishers for Linux, like 2K or Warner Bros., might only be fueled by their relationship with Valve.
Right now, with the prices listed on the official website, I don't see the Steam Machines taking off, but I also think that Valve has a few aces up its sleeve and that we'll see some significant changes in their attitude when we approach the November launch date.