Essentially, how often will Valve upgrade its Steam Box? Certainly more than every 6-7 years. For those of you thinking right now: "you can ugprade it yourself!", well, yes you could , but that defeats the whole purpose of having one standardized spec for developers to target. Throw in a new graphics card here and there, and you've suddenly splintered your user base into those with PCs, Official Steam Boxes from Valve, and Official Steam Boxes from Valve that have been upgrade by the users. And now, certain games will only work on some combination of those three.
I'm a fan of Valve, their games, and their culture, and want to see this succeed. I'm sure they've put much thought into scenarios like this and trust them to make the right decision.
I image the Official Steam Box from Valve (OSBfV) wouldn't actually be that upgradable. I would want something that would fit aesthetically with my TV, XBox, etc. Trying to make the OSBfV cheap enough to entice consumers, yet pack enough of a punch for "gamers" (I really dislike that stereotype, but that isn't the point) would, I imagine, require not quite interchangeable hardware, much like the XBox. But, don't discount that Steam could easily release a OSBfV1, 2, 3 etc every other year with the latest and greatest (that fits in the form factor and budget constraints).
The other possibility is that their Steam Box fits with their "games as a service" model. Imagine if they charged a monthly/yearly fee and occasionally shipped out hardware upgrades to all Steam Box owners.
We'll be doing that model in 2013 with a B2B SaaS service that benefits from an onsite edge node to reduce latency, among other things.
The hardware isn't sold, it's leased, but the effect is the same: we manage the onsite hardware, fix it when it breaks (next day replacement), and send out new hardware every few years. The hardware is literally plug and play, and works correctly behind a NAT router with DHCP.
We actually decide what hardware a customer gets (it's based on load -- standard provisioning stuff), although customers can upgrade to a system they don't actually need for a fee.
I think this approach is way better for customers, and the response so far has been extremely positive. No longer do they have to worry about provisioning and maintaining hardware, or even deciding what to buy. Of course they don't know the best way to provision hardware for our software. Why would they?
It'd be really interesting to see this approach done in the consumer space.
If they enter the hardware market I suspect they will make different Steam boxes and have them meet certain specifications. Like Steambox A to run a certain list of games, and Steambox B to run the latest games at full performance. With such clusters of performance they could have pre-defined scripts to tweak the performance so that even a older Steambox can run the latest titles decently (make at lower details/resolution) or drop compatibility altogether if a decent performance cannot be achieved. That would be an "organized" segementation of the PC gaming scene.
This being said I am not sure this is really going to be necessary because there has not been much of race for graphics in game recently on PC - I still have a GPU from 2 years ago and it still runs all games very well, even the latest ones. This may change with the introduction of new consoles, but I am not too sure about that yet.
This isn't actually a big problem. Comparing to the current situation, Valve will just release their own hardware with a massive user base, and have that platform be the target spec for PC games. That is the stock Steam Box and Valve with developers will make sure all games run perfectly on that.
All custom specs will be handled like they are now, expect now there is a single target spec everyone agrees on.
> Throw in a new graphics card here and there, and you've suddenly splintered your user base...
Given how aggressively they've pushed to make their games work on Mac and Linux (going against the grain of the industry), and given the years of massive user configuration surveys, and the fact that they've essentially run a fractured ecosystem for years, I'd bet they have something up their sleeve here... or they have a reason why this isn't as big a problem as it's been in the past.
Essentially, how often will Valve upgrade its Steam Box? Certainly more than every 6-7 years. For those of you thinking right now: "you can ugprade it yourself!", well, yes you could , but that defeats the whole purpose of having one standardized spec for developers to target. Throw in a new graphics card here and there, and you've suddenly splintered your user base into those with PCs, Official Steam Boxes from Valve, and Official Steam Boxes from Valve that have been upgrade by the users. And now, certain games will only work on some combination of those three.
I'm a fan of Valve, their games, and their culture, and want to see this succeed. I'm sure they've put much thought into scenarios like this and trust them to make the right decision.