Steam Machines

The next of Valve's Steam installments is Steam Machines (not Steam Box it would seem).

More here: http://store.steampowered.com/livingroom/SteamMachines/

Looks like you can follow the steps on that page if you want a chance at being a hardware beta tester.

They will ship prototype hardware to 300 testers, sometime this year.

You can complete the steps in any order. Once you’ve completed all of the steps, you’ll be awarded a special badge, and you’ll officially be among the pool of people from whom we’ll choose beta participants / hardware recipients.

On October 25th, the list will be locked. So complete the quest before then!

 

It should run in time. Wine is always in constant development.
I still have to try the free-to-play version too.
Sometimes certain games require a "patched" version of Wine to get it running.

Me too with family. I spend more time testing games than actually playing them. But I devote about an hour a day to testing and then on the weekends I have more time to actually play.
Then again, I play games with my wife and kids.

 

Me too. That is why I'm going to keep trying on SWTOR. I play that with my daughter. We also play Diablo 3, Neverwinter Online and all 4 of us play original NWN together.

 

I don't really play all the 200+ games I have, nowhere near in fact. A lot of the games I purchased during sales on GOG or steam, I'll admit I have some I never tried so far. There may be more games I haven't tried yet that I've had to give up, but I feel confident that given time, wine will eventually be able to handle those games.

For the most part I am quite happy with the games I have working, almost all my favorites. As with others, I switched to Linux because I was fed up with the closed source world, I wanted to really be in control of my computer. Knowing that I could play most of my favorite games was really the only thing I needed to know to make the permanent switch.

But I am very happy with the recent developments, I really do hope to see many new games be released on day one with a Linux version. I have a lot of respect for Valve since they have been pushing the pc gaming world to face Linux.

 

Yeah me too. I have played most of my games at one point or another, but some get neglected since I'm currently playing another game.
I don't mind because some day I'll get to them. I love so many different kind of games that I always need a break from one genre.
I really love RPG games but have found that a single game can take months to even a year to complete. Most FPS's are linear and a lot shorter. So I'll play an RPG but take breaks to do some FPS and then go back to the RPG.

Yeah, same for me. A few of my favorite games play really well too. Some don't play as smoothly as in Windows, but they still play. As Wine gets better, they will eventually play just fine.

Like Alan Wake. It was just slow. No matter what resolution or graphical setting I adjusted, it was still slow. I still need to test it with Wine 1.7.1 to see if the new threading helped that game.

CryEngine games run GREAT, but there are no shadows. Not sure why, but some day Wine & Direct X should be able to run shadows properly.

If Valve really has success as we are hoping, then maybe some of these larger companies will port their older games to Linux so I won't have to use Wine...