For years, PC manufacturers have been desperate to get their machines into our living rooms. They’ve tried producing smaller sexier devices, aping the design sensibilities of dedicated games consoles and they’ve tried making them look functional and discreet like DVD players or set-top boxes. But largely, they have failed: most of us still keep our PCs on a desk, in a bedroom, study or office space.
Then in 2013, after years of rumours and speculation, Valve, the company behind the dominant online PC gaming store Steam, announced that it was making a new bid for the living room with its own PC-based console, the Steam Machine. However, it wouldn’t manufacture the console itself, and there wouldn’t just be one version. Keeping to the open philosophy of the PC market, there would be multiple manufacturers, making their own versions, with different specifications. The uniting factor would be that every Steam Machine would run a Linux-based operating system named SteamOS, and that they’d all come with the dedicatedSteam controller – an innovative combination of traditional console joypad and computer mouse, developed in-house at Valve.
In November, the first dozen or so Steam Machine derivatives will hit stores, with units from Alienware, Origin and Falcon Northwest, among others. As expected, the specifications vary widely, from the entry level Alienware with an Intel i3 processor and Nvidia Geforce GTX graphics to the super high-end Falcon Northwest with Intel i7-4790K and Titan-class Nvidia GPU (GameSpot has all the specs). But the question on everyone’s lips is: what are these things for? Why do we need them?
Both the PS4 and the Xbox One are essentially PCs – they feature the same multi-core central processors, dedicated graphics chips and mammoth hard drives as desktop computers. “In fact, they’re getting more PC-like every year,” says Valve programmer Robin Walker, who once helped design seminal shooter Team Fortress but is now one of the leads on the design of the Steam Controller. “They’re trying to solve problems that we solved years ago”.
Valve’s business development specialist Erik Johnson concurs. “PC manufacturers have just had to sit there and watch a bunch of closed systems continuously get shipped into living rooms and they’ve had no part in that business, even though it’s pretty much a PC in all of these machines. And you can’t tell companies like Dell that the big problem is form factor – they’re like ‘dude, we can build anything you want!’ It’s about software. We had this theory that to get the PC into the living room we needed a user interface and a controller that works with the TV. I think we were right about that, but we were wrong about how hard it would be.”
Four years ago, Valve launched Big Picture, a special version of its Steam storefront, designed to run on a television. The new mode is essentially a “10 foot interface”. In other words an onscreen menu system designed to be viewed on a living room screen typically 10 feet away from the user; it’s the concept you find on your Sky or Virgin Media box, or indeed your games console. It meant Steam users could plug their laptop into the TV via HDMI, then browse and play games on their massive LCD screen rather than a desktop monitor. And it’s a tweaked and updated version of Big Picture that provides the UI for every Steam Machine.
And it works pretty well. Power up the Alienware Steam Machine for example, and you don’t get a standard PC desktop with tiny icons and a mouse cursor. Instead, you get what looks like a games console front-end. A Steam Machine logo appears, then you go through a familiar console set-up procedure, providing your region, letting it know the size of your TV, and signing into your Steam account.
Then you’re into the main user interface, which looks like the PS4 UI. A row of icons along the top offer all your settings, download and mail functions, while a larger row of options offers access to the Steam store, your library of games and the community features. Select Store, and all the browsing options you know from the PC version (searching by popularity, release, genre etc) are all there pretty accessible. Of course, you can go into settings and switch to a traditional Linux desktop if you want but, basically, this thing looks, runs and handles like a games console.
The most interesting element though is the controller. Valve has spent over three years designing something that can work with both joypad-centred games such as shooters and action adventures, and mouse-driven titles including strategy simulations. The end result has two large trackpads, as well as a single analogue thumb stick and multiple buttons on the fascia, shoulders and even on the innerside of the two “handles”. It’s also highly customisable – players are able to configure button settings for older Steam titles that don’t directly support the pad, and then share them online so that others don’t have to bother.
In practise, it takes a bit to get used to, but it does work. We tried Civilization V, using the right trackpad as a mouse cursor and it feels intuitive, helped a great deal by the detailed haptic sensor array beneath the trackpad, which provides little blips of tactic feedback, aping the friction you feel as you whizz a mouse over a surface.
As for shooters, during our demo, we got to try Just Cause 3 which is one of the forthcoming titles designed with Steam Controller compatibility in mind. Here, the analogue stick handles movement, while the right touchpad is used for aiming, which is incredibly accurate but also very, very sensitive. We spent a lot of time firing wildly around the screen, which – when your character has a rocket launcher and they’re standing on top of a flying aircraft – can be dangerous. Again, though, everything can be tweaked and customised, and its likely dedicated gamers will find their own way to tune the system.
And like the PS4 controller, Valve has also added motion detection in the form of a gyroscope for extra versatility. “We’ve found a lot of our hardcore FPS players are starting to map that to mouse input,” says Walker. “The gyro feeds mouse input in, and the right pad generates mouse input as well, and the controller synthesises those two inputs before it sends them to the game. So with something like CounterStrike, where you care about aim a lot, you use your right pad for large scale movement, turns etc, and your gyroscope for very fine aim on top of that. This was not something we expected, it’s not what the design was for, but they’re finding that mix of large scale and very fine movement is working for them”.
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