Xbox One or Playstation 4? What are you getting?

[Simmy]

Jesus, those stats are frightening to say the least. Looking at that, I'm now hesitant to go for the Xbox. Surely the market won't monopolize once again though? PS4 needs competition?

I'm assuming the change (if it happens) will obviously be implemented into the NEXT-gen console, and won't affect anything to do with the Xbox One? I'm pretty set on going for the Xbox at this point but obviously don't want to make a decision I'll come to regret down the track.

Or is it safer to double up and just have 2 PS4's in the household?

 

[Mdog1]

I had this giant post all pretty much written out, and then I said to myself, I don't want to make you worried.

Basically what I was going to say is, the console industry is losing a lot of customers. I would estimate they lose at least 60m from last gen, and honestly, I think I am being generous.

That is the wii audience, the granny who bought her first console at 85, sort of audience that made Nintendo so much money.

MS will lose market share, best case scenario at this point, would be to lose 25%. Now that is by no means horrible, that would mean 61m consoles sold, but if Ninty can squeak out 20m with Wii U, and MS can get 61, Sony would need 120m to match my estimate of 200m consoles sold.

I seriously doubt Sony sells that many, or MS, and certainly Nintendo is not getting to 20m. I just like being optimistic...

So buy an Xbox, seriously they aren't going to stop making games for it. Especially if you already have a ps4 in the house. That way if Sony 2 years down the line releases The Last of Us 2, and MS releases Fable Legends, you can play both. That's when I will consider an xb1, hopefully at a reduced price.

As for competition, in capitalism, if the XB1, and Wii U were to both be discontinued, and PS4 was the only console, that would be the consumer picking the winner of the competition. You sell what we as a group like, so we bought it, and piss on the other guys. So giving Sony a monopoly, isn't exactly a bad thing. It isn't necessarily a good thing either. They might try to Institute DRM on us like MS did, or they might start doing other anti consumer things, like making me pay to play games online, wait...

 

[gourimoko]

Agree with Mdog for the most part. I think Microsoft's next "console" will be more of a set-top box with an APU. With the move towards APUs, I think both Sony and Microsoft ceded the high-end gaming market.

I'm very hopeful for Steam Machines now, as they'll be the only home console with a truly discrete GPU. Side-by-side comparisons of games will drive the market and gamers towards Steam. I am pumped for their release, and I love the business model they took.

 

[AuxiliaryPie]

Steam Machines will be amazing. Can't wait to see what they will be like in a main stream setting. Could you imagine how popular a ~$300 steam machine would be, hell i could see a sub $300 price point..just need an AMD APU and 4GB of RAM and its good to go

 

[Jack Brickman]

Agree with Mdog for the most part. I think Microsoft's next "console" will be more of a set-top box with an APU. With the move towards APUs, I think both Sony and Microsoft ceded the high-end gaming market.

I'm very hopeful for Steam Machines now, as they'll be the only home console with a truly discrete GPU. Side-by-side comparisons of games will drive the market and gamers towards Steam. I am pumped for their release, and I love the business model they took.

I think that Steam Machines really have the potential to be game-changers. You've got a box that can not only play games on its own, but stream them from any other PC you own that can run Steam. This is a huge deal to people like myself who have a gaming machine, but sometimes just want to chill in the living room. My Steam library is ludicrously large, with games of all types from the past twenty years. Obviously the Steam machine won't be able to play all of them, so being able to stream them is an incredible feature.

Once people start to realize how amazing the back catalog is for people who have even a moderately powerful PC or laptop (it doesn't take much to play most games from five years ago or older these days), and also once people who aren't familiar are introduced to the glory that is Steam sales, I really think Valve could overtake companies like Sony and Nintendo in the living room. Comparing a system like the PS4 that only has a handful of good games, no backwards compatibility, and limited sales with a program like Steam that has thousands of games (probably hundreds of thousands at this point), backward compatibility based on your hardware (and often you can find third-party fixes for games that wouldn't otherwise run on your system), and constant sales and great deals, not to mention thousands of indie games that will never see release elsewhere, is night and day.

I just wish Valve would actually make some fucking games from time to time again. :chuckles:

Steam Machines will be amazing. Can't wait to see what they will be like in a main stream setting. Could you imagine how popular a ~$300 steam machine would be, hell i could see a sub $300 price point..just need an AMD APU and 4GB of RAM and its good to go

The streaming feature will be huge for cost-effectiveness. If you already have a great gaming rig like I do, you can buy a cheaper Steam box and rely on streaming over your home network.

 

[AuxiliaryPie]

The streaming feature will be huge for cost-effectiveness. If you already have a great gaming rig like I do, you can buy a cheaper Steam box and rely on streaming over your home network.

you can already stream to your HTPC via steam now, which is something i havent tried yet but would be legit if i can use my old laptop to play games in my living room

 

[Jack Brickman]

you can already stream to your HTPC via steam now, which is something i havent tried yet but would be legit if i can use my old laptop to play games in my living room

Yeah, but I don't have one of those, so that doesn't help me much. :chuckles:

 

[gourimoko]

My concern for streaming is latency.. WiFi latency as it is pretty good, point to point. Wireless over Cat6 would be no issue. In theory user controls should work fine, a 1-2ms lag isn't THAT bad. But when it gets to 5ms or greater, it's a concern, especially if that is not the absolute max but more like the average.

But I'm primarily concerned with frame-grabbing and streaming over wifi. Obviously this would be done at something below 720p@60hz, and then interpolated to something higher using some instruction-intensive combination of lossy and lossless compression schemes. I just wonder if that can all be done in under 16ms. I mean, taking compression out of the mix and then aggregating to some color palette between 16 and 24-bits in depth would require somewhere around 1Gbps throughput. So we need substantial compression, and that will certainly (already does) create considerable loss in quality.

At present, I think even establishing a 150mbps wireless connection (guaranteed operating performance) is iffy, especially in a densely populated area. So we'd need at least 10:1 compression on a 20-bit color depth. I think you can immediately get 2:1 by dropping to 30fps and interpolating between frames. You can then probably get to 4:1 by then dropping progressive scan and going with interlacing (NTSC style) and then providing some baseline to interpolate back to a progressive frame for display. I think you could then probably get to 8:1 by using even basic RLE on small blocks (MPEG-style), so you're only sending the changes that have occurred -- but this is tricky because you can't depend on it. A game like Halo might have 98% of the screen pixels move frame to frame, so there would need to be a codec that understood motion and could compensate for that, rather than handling the picture in microblocks of pixels.

This turned into a technical paper... sorry..

Anyway, there are concerns that I have of the streaming technology. If they could instead run the games locally, and then have the rendering done remotely I think it would go a long way. Then if they could use the GPU to compress the data first, rather than rendering it out and then compressing it, that would be a tremendous help too. The games shouldn't be "streaming" from the PC to the steambox, they should be cooperatively working together to perform the intensive work PC-side and the non-intensive work STB-side.

 

[AuxiliaryPie]

My concern for streaming is latency.. WiFi latency as it is pretty good, point to point. Wireless over Cat6 would be no issue. In theory user controls should work fine, a 1-2ms lag isn't THAT bad. But when it gets to 5ms or greater, it's a concern, especially if that is not the absolute max but more like the average.

But I'm primarily concerned with frame-grabbing and streaming over wifi. Obviously this would be done at something below 720p@60hz, and then interpolated to something higher using some instruction-intensive combination of lossy and lossless compression schemes. I just wonder if that can all be done in under 16ms. I mean, taking compression out of the mix and then aggregating to some color palette between 16 and 24-bits in depth would require somewhere around 1Gbps throughput. So we need substantial compression, and that will certainly (already does) create considerable loss in quality.

At present, I think even establishing a 150mbps wireless connection (guaranteed operating performance) is iffy, especially in a densely populated area. So we'd need at least 10:1 compression on a 20-bit color depth. I think you can immediately get 2:1 by dropping to 30fps and interpolating between frames. You can then probably get to 4:1 by then dropping progressive scan and going with interlacing (NTSC style) and then providing some baseline to interpolate back to a progressive frame for display. I think you could then probably get to 8:1 by using even basic RLE on small blocks (MPEG-style), so you're only sending the changes that have occurred -- but this is tricky because you can't depend on it. A game like Halo might have 98% of the screen pixels move frame to frame, so there would need to be a codec that understood motion and could compensate for that, rather than handling the picture in microblocks of pixels.

This turned into a technical paper... sorry..

Anyway, there are concerns that I have of the streaming technology. If they could instead run the games locally, and then have the rendering done remotely I think it would go a long way. Then if they could use the GPU to compress the data first, rather than rendering it out and then compressing it, that would be a tremendous help too. The games shouldn't be "streaming" from the PC to the steambox, they should be cooperatively working together to perform the intensive work PC-side and the non-intensive work STB-side.

 

[Mdog1]

I know we have been over this before, but I really want to get a steam machine, just not right now. The price/performance ratio just isn't there for me.

Maybe the next wave of them will be, I am waiting until at least the 880gti, more than likely I will wait until the 20nm process comes out.

I don't play fps games, so I really just want to play rps on my 70 inch. Don't need to buy a new monitor that way, although as they become cheaper I might pick up a 4k monitor just for kicks.

 

[Simmy]

Thanks for all that info Mdog1. Really helpful.

Forgive my ignorance, but until I read the above posts, I knew nothing about this "Steam Machine"!

So after doing some minor research, I'm assuming this unit enables you to play your Steam games via a console? I don't know much about Steam (only play Football Manager on it - more of a console gamer) but can someone explain this in laymen terms? Does it directly challenge the XB1/PS4? Will you buy physical games for the console? Or is it all stream based for PC games? I'm a little confused as to whether this falls more into the PC or console games market?

 

[Jack Brickman]

Thanks for all that info Mdog1. Really helpful.

Forgive my ignorance, but until I read the above posts, I knew nothing about this "Steam Machine"!

So after doing some minor research, I'm assuming this unit enables you to play your Steam games via a console? I don't know much about Steam (only play Football Manager on it - more of a console gamer) but can someone explain this in laymen terms? Does it directly challenge the XB1/PS4? Will you buy physical games for the console? Or is it all stream based for PC games? I'm a little confused as to whether this falls more into the PC or console games market?

You can technically buy physical games for Steam, but they typically just include a code that you use to download the actual game. It's unlikely any Steam machines will have an actual CD slot.

You'll overlook that when you partake in your first Christmas or Summer sale and see all the cheap fucking games that you'd never see on sale on any other console.

 

[Simmy]

You can technically buy physical games for Steam, but they typically just include a code that you use to download the actual game. It's unlikely any Steam machines will have an actual CD slot.

You'll overlook that when you partake in your first Christmas or Summer sale and see all the cheap fucking games that you'd never see on sale on any other console.

Makes sense. But I guess what I'm trying to say for example is, will games like NBA2K, FIFA, GTA etc. etc. be available on Steam? Or will the Steam Machine only offer PC-based games as per what it currently offers in its catalogue?

 

[Jack Brickman]

Makes sense. But I guess what I'm trying to say for example is, will games like NBA2K, FIFA, GTA etc. etc. be available on Steam? Or will the Steam Machine only offer PC-based games as per what it currently offers in its catalogue?

The NBA 2K games are already on Steam. FIFA won't be because EA insists on being a bitch and trying to make people download Origin even though literally no one wants to. As far as I know, all the GTA games except the most recent one have made it to Steam, and that one should be on PC by the end of the year.

As a side note, EA will probably change their tune once Steam Machines come out. They tried to compete with Origin but mostly nobody gave a shit. I literally never open Origin unless it's specifically to play an EA game, but I have Steam open whenever my PC is on. This is a battle that EA really needs to just give the fuck up. I haven't bought a game on Origin since the last Battlefield game, and I won't be buying any future games on it. I doubt I'm alone. They need to accept that and release their games on Steam. They'll make more money.

 

[Mdog1]

Makes sense. But I guess what I'm trying to say for example is, will games like NBA2K, FIFA, GTA etc. etc. be available on Steam? Or will the Steam Machine only offer PC-based games as per what it currently offers in its catalogue?

SM's are Linux based, and unless Steam becomes giant dicks, you will be able to run dual os' s so you can have windows and the steam os, which would allow you to then play any game.

The biggest problem at this point, other than price performance (price/performance is jmo) is that the biggest games almost always have windows requirements, so you have to buy your sm, and a windows license.

So the steam client is limited in the games they can offer. EA for example has their own Origin service, but with a sm, as it is completely an open system, you can in fact download origin, and buy EA games.

Completely different from consoles. You have a closed ecosystem, such as PSN, vs an open one, where you could have 30 different places you buy games on.

At least that is the way I understand it, maybe I am 100 wrong, and Gour or Aux will correct me.