Smach Zero: a portable Steam Machine

[TheGreatNads]

I'm excited by the idea of a portable Steam console, and I would be interested In seeing more information about it, but no, I'm not that excited by what I imagine the actual product will be. There are too many unanswered questions:

Hardware wise, who the heck is the company making this? Is there any reason to believe they're a credible hardware designers? I mean this both in terms of the durability of the hardware and the comfort of the buttons etc. One gets the impression this is another sketchy product made by the sorts who do those SNES and emulators and the like which generally are highly flawed machines.

Games? Assuming this is going to run SteamOS(if not, then one has reason to be even more skeptical) and basically be capable of doing what a regular Steam Machine would, first there's a question of how powerful this thing will be(which will limit what you can play on it) and how much resources will be used by other OS features and basically anything that isn't games. It's not even clear to me how well supported Steam Machines are going to be software wise, so this is a concern. Then there are questions about how well those mouse/keyboard games would translate to this machine without some kind of extra development work.

What about storage and installation? Plenty of Steam games take up a decent amount of space and take time to install, how doable would it be to say have multiple games installed on this thing?

Then there's the standard things one would wonder about with any handheld, like battery life and price for example. As I said, the idea of this "Steamboy" sounds cool, but I don't have much confidence that it will live up to its potential. The idea of PS3/Vita compatibility also sounded awesome when it was announced as well, but it hasn't and will never live up to the potential for various reasons. So while I'm curious about this, I'm not going to get my hopes up any.

[Kong Wen]

Wow, it looks like this was not a myth after all.

[VictorViper]

At $300 I might be tempted to help this project along with a preorder. Exciting!

[Sharecrow]

That's actually pretty tempting to me...wow...

[The Shoemaker]

Hmmm, I guess expecting $150 for a HD handheld was a bit silly of me.

I am pretty interested, as I play a lot on the go, and there's a lot of Steam games I'd like to try. Plus I always hear it's so cheap to play on Steam, but I don't really care to play on my computer.

[Spore]

I'm worried about what kind of hardware will be driving this thing if it's only 300 dollars. If this suave looking, relatively cheap handheld device is running mobile phone hardware (ARM and a Tegra or something) then I can't imagine many games on Steam to actually be compatible with it. But if it's running standard computer components then how can it possibly cost so little, have such a small form factor, and have a reasonable battery life?

A comparable looking device is the Nvidia Shield pictured below. It is able to run Android games (Yes, Valve has actually ported Portal and Half-Life 2 to Android. You can find them on the Play Store).



You might be thinking what the point of such a limited device is. Well, you technically can play normal Windows games on it, but there is a catch. The game has to be running on your desktop computer and streamed to the handheld (like the WiiU pad or I'm told like the Vita). Of course, Nvidia also stipulates that you must have an Nvidia graphics card in your computer for that to work. So, I'm wondering if the SteamBoy will just end up doing something like that, but being GPU vendor agnostic (Nvidia or AMD). In that case the hype would deflate significantly.

Fake Edit: Well, I already typed all that stuff so I'm keeping it. I re-read the original press release that said "...it will be possible to play the majority of current games in Steam." which I guess confirms that it is using non-phone hardware. That said I'm interested to see what they can fit in with such a tiny price. If it works, I'll have a long, long list of easy to run games for buyers ignorant of the PC games market to check out.

Real Edit: Turns out I had roughly the same skepticism I have today exactly one year ago. Pretty neat!

[Kong Wen]

Fake Edit: Well, I already typed all that stuff so I'm keeping it. I re-read the original press release that said "...it will be possible to play the majority of current games in Steam." which I guess confirms that it is using non-phone hardware. That said I'm interested to see what they can fit in with such a tiny price. If it works, I'll have a long, long list of easy to run games for buyers ignorant of the PC games market to check out.

A couple points to consider.

1. This is only going to be $300 for people who pre-order. Presumably this is to amass some kind of seed funds. We don't know how much it'll cost when it goes to retail. $500?
2. It's not coming to market until over a year from now (October - December 2016). If they don't start production until later, they can avail themselves of the gradually-decreasing price of quality parts.
3. What makes "computer parts" so much more expensive than e.g. a Vita that it would be expected to cost twice as much? They can use cheap parts and lower specs to get this thing out there, as long as it can run Steam OS and a satisfying-enough handful of games.

[pdSlooper]

My two most played Steam games are Dungeons of Dredmor and Terraria. Still not seeing how they'll play on that thing.

[Kong Wen]

My two most played Steam games are Dungeons of Dredmor and Terraria. Still not seeing how they'll play on that thing.

Terraria is on Vita. How does it play on that?

[Spore]

3. What makes "computer parts" so much more expensive than e.g. a Vita that it would be expected to cost twice as much? They can use cheap parts and lower specs to get this thing out there, as long as it can run Steam OS and a satisfying-enough handful of games.

Vitas, 3DS's, and phones are all subsidized by the manufacturer company with the expectation that they'll make their money back in licensing and service fees. SteamBoy can't possibly have any of that. This company needs to succeed via profit from the console itself.

ArsTechnica reached out and confirmed that it will be an x86 processor. Namely, it will be using an AMD SoC which are meant to combine CPU and GPU into a low performance and low cost package. I guess we'll see how it fares, given the Nvidia Shield portable could run Half-Life 2 on low settings at between 30 and 60 at 720p. SteamBoy will be more expensive and come out later so it should at least exceed that... Let's just hope they specify what hardware they will actually be using by the start of preorders. A few people are in here talking about looking at this to check out the PC exclusives they never got to experience, and it would be a shame to enter that world with subpar hardware. However, it will probably run Volgarr the Viking really well which already puts it ahead of the bulk of handhelds.

Also, I'm not too worried about how most games will play on this. If these pads are actually the same technology Valve uses (though I'm not sure how they would get them), then they should demonstrably work well with both gamepad and mouse games. Also, if anybody finds a picture of the back of the device post it here. I want to see what kind of triggers it has. The Steam Controller has 6 buttons on the back which is pretty badass, and also probably pretty necessary given many PC games expect users to have a keyboard which has... several buttons.