UPDATED: This is every Steam Machine coming in 2015

Steam Machines at GDC 2015

Steam Machine (n.): The future of PC gaming in the living room.

We've been waiting for a long time for them (over a year in fact ... not like we're counting), and with every little leak comes the heart-wrenching news that we're going to have to wait a bit longer. Take heart fellow PC gamers, there's light at the end of the tunnel.

Steam Machines have finally started to appear.

These living room PCs come from a variety of manufacturers, but they all share one thing: they use SteamOS to give gamers a streamlined way to play PC games on the big screen. And at GDC 2015, Steam Machines are stealing all the headlines, from individual announcements to big plans from Valve itself.

The biggest news? That Steam Machines will start arriving this fall. Here are the ones we've seen and heard about so far this week.

Syber Steam Machine-X

Syber is a division of CyberPowerPC, one of the 13 Steam Machine partners Valve announced back in January 2014.

At GDC 2015 this week they finally showed off what they have in store, including a half dozen different varieties of Steam Machine.

These include the Steam Machine-Mini, Steam Machine-Mercury and Steam Machine-Switch, all of which Syber is showing off at the show.

On the low end of the six is the $450 (about £290, AU$575) Syber Steam Machine-E, with a quad-core AMD processor and NVIDIA GeForce GTX graphics. The high end is occupied by the $1,400 (about £910, AU$1,780) Steam Machine-X, the orange beast pictured here.

Asus GR8S

Asus's interesting-looking Steam Machine first appeared last summer, but at the time the company said it wouldn't be fully ready until 2015.

Well guess what year it is, and what Asus has been showing off at GDC 2015.

The slightly renamed Asus GR8S Steam Machine sports Intel i5 or i7 processors, GeForce 9-series graphics, between 4 and 6GB of DDR3 memory, and either 500GB-1TB of HDD space or 128GB-512GB of solid state storage.

It's launching at $700 (about £460, AU$900) and up.

iBuyPower SBX Steam Machine

iBuyPower was really early to reveal its Steam Machine, showing off a concept all the way back in November 2013.

At the time we noted that it would cost the same as an Xbox One - this was, obviously, before the Xbox One's price drops, since at the time it iBuyPower said its SBX Steam Machine would cost $500 (about £330, AU$640).

Zotac SN970

Zotac announced a single Steam Machine at GDC: the ZOTAC SN970.

It's an evolution of the ZBOX E-Series EN760 gaming PC, which the company points out already made a decent DIY Steam Machine for users who didn't mind installing SteamOS manually.

But for those who prefer the out-of-the-box experience, the SN970 Steam Machine will come with discrete NVIDIA GTX 970M graphics, a 6th-gen Intel chip and a Steam Controller this fall.

Maingear DRIFT

Maingear skipped GDC and took its new Steam Machine, the simply named DRIFT, to PAX East, the Boston fan convention also taking place this week.

The Maingear DRIFT packs an Intel Core i7-4790K CPU and a choice between NVIDIA GeForce GTX 980 or AMD Radeon R9 290X graphics, plus up to 16GB of DDR memory and 2 1TB solid state drives or a single 6TB HDD.

It's also "whisper quiet," according to Maingear's announcement, and 4K gaming-capable - although the best part might be Maingear's "true automotive paint finish" that's apparently available in any color.

Some versions of the DRIFT are available now, but the SteamOS-equipped DRIFT Super Stock edition will launch in November.

Digital Storm Eclipse

When Digital Storm launched its Eclipse gaming PC last year, it was another DIY Steam Machine, but now it's joined the official ranks.

The Digital Storm Eclipse Steam Machine shown off at GDC has an Intel Pentium G3220 processor, Nvidia GTX 960 2GB graphics, 8GB of DDR3 memory, and a 1TB HDD.

It's launching in the fall for $700 (about £460, AU$890).

Materiel from Material.net

French retailer Materiel.net revealed its own Fractal Design-housed Steam Machine first during CES in January, and it showed it off again at GDC this week.

The Materiel Steam Machine i working with an Intel Core i5 4440 chip, Nvidia GeForce GTX 960 OC graphics and a 1TB SSHD.

It's launching at $899 (about £590, AU$1,150).

Alternate GmbH

Representing Germany in Valve's master plans is online retailer Alternate with the simply-named Alternate Steam Machine, first revealed during CES 2014 but significantly changed since then. The box now is the chic but costly Silverstone Raven case, which looks a lot like an Xbox 360.

If you couldn't already tell, Alternate has decided to go after the high end of the market, with a machine starting at $1,099 (about £721, AU$1,414) – far beyond the consoles' price range. For that, you're looking at an Intel Core i3 chip (Haswell), Nvidia's low-power GeForce GTX 750 Ti, 8GB of RAM and 500GB of spinning storage.

The company will offer three more configurations of increasing power and price, going as far as offering up an Nvidia GTX 980 graphics card. You can expect to see this rig later this fall.

Scan Computers 3XS ST

Scan Computers' 3XS ST Steam Machine can come in a few different loadouts, with an Intel Core i3 or i5 CPU, Nvidia GeForce GTX 750 Ti, 960 or 970 graphics, and between 8 and 16 GB of DDR3 memory.

It also comes with a minimum of 120GB of SSD space, though you'll be able to opt for more - and it's unclear what the upper limit will be.

Scan Computers' Steam Machine will run between $1,000 (about £650, AU$1,280) and $1,300 (about £850, AU$1,660).

Webhallen S15-01

Another Steam Machine that was revealed first at CES, Webhallen's Steam OS-running S15-01 comes with an Intel Core i5-4460, Nvidia GeForce GTX 960 graphics, 8GB of DDR3 memory, and a 1TB SSHD.

If these are all starting to sound the same to you, that's because they are very, very similar to one another.

Then again, a year ago we didn't even know what a Steam Machine was, so it could definitely be worse.

The Webhallen S15-01 will launch at $950 (about £620, AU$1,200).

Next Spa NextBox

Next Spa, a boutique PC hardware vendor in Italy, also first unveiled its Steam Machine during CES 2014. But, like many of the Steam Machines, NextBox has undergone some clear changes as well. The NextBox now comes in a Cooler Master Elite 110 case for an even more cubic design ID.

Neither quite as competitive as, say, Alienware with the consoles nor directly targeting the high end in terms of pricing, the NextBox will start at $799 (about £524, AU$1,028) when it lands this November. That nets players an Intel Core i3 CPU from the Haswell generation, an Nvidia GeForce GTX 750, 8GB of RAM and a spacious 1TB of mechanical storage.

Gigabyte BRIX Pro

With an Intel Iris Pro 5200 GPU instead of the Nvidia or AMD graphics most of its competitors are rocking, the Gigabyte BRIX Pro Steam Machine stands a little bit apart.

The practical difference is that it's on the low end of the price spectrum at $600 (about £390, AU$770).

The BRIX also rocks an Intel Core i7 chip, two SO-DIMM DDR3L memory slots, and a 2.5-inch hard drive of your choice.

Falcon Northwest Tiki

The FalconNW Tiki Steam Machine takes the cake easily as the most expensive Steam Machine we know of.

It starts - starts - at $2,000 (about £1,300, AU$2,550), and the highest-end version costs a full $5,000 (about £3,275, AU$6,390).

For that you get an Intel Core i7-4790K, multiple options from Nvidia's GeForce 900 series including Titan and Titan-Z class GPUs, up to 16GB of DDR3 memory, and up to 8TB of solid state/HDD drive space.

Seems like $5K might be a lot to spend for that, but that's why there will be plenty of options come this fall.

Alienware Steam Machine

Don't call it the Alpha - the Alienware Steam Machine the company is showing off at GDC looks similar, but lacks the Alpha branding.

It's full-fledged, people!

Starting at $480 (about £315, AU$610), the new Alienware Steam Machine will launch with an Intel Core i3, i5 or i7 processor, Nvidia GeForce GTX GPU, 4 to 8GB of DDR3 memory, and between 500GB and 2TB of storage.

Origin Omega

Origin, too, is showing off a Steam Machine at GDC, although this isn't one that we'd heard about until very recently.

The high performance PC maker said in February that it would support SteamOS on an Omega PC when the operating system launches, and at the show this week it showed it's willing to follow through on that.

The Origin Omega Steam Machine starts at $900 (about £590, AU$1,150) and goes up to $5,000 (about £3,275, AU$6,390) - and beyond, according to Origin.

April 02, 2015 at 04:00AM

Michael Rougeau and Nick Pino

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Interview: The messy, doomed journey of PlayStation Home, as told by its architect

Sony has officially killed PlayStation Home. This is a revisit of an interview that took place back in December with its former architect.

Original interview below...

In September this year, Sony announced that PlayStation Home will soon ask its residents to vacate the premises before closing its doors for good. Ask around and plenty of PlayStation users will tell you it's high time, but it could well be argued that Home finally has the chance to become something meaningful. Since Facebook bought Oculus VR there's been speculation that the big blue social network is working on its own Metaverse-esque social space, something PlayStation Home could have been (aided by Project Morpheus) had it stuck around.

But after six years, Sony no longer sees Home as a viable project. Not only will the social platform never make its way onto the PS4 and PS Vita, PS3 users will become totally homeless on March 31, 2015.

Naturally, the reaction has been to give Home the stamp of failure, but PlayStation own former Home Architect Oscar Clark, who launched the service, doesn't agree. "It was a massive success that everyone thinks was a failure," he tells TechRadar at Bilbao's Fun and Serious game festival. "Although it wasn't as successful as it could have been for a variety of reasons. Getting a clear strategy was difficult and it ended up being a compromise. That said, it was a pretty effective compromise in most cases. We did see a gradual evolution towards making a much more playable experience, a bigger range of games."

If you're comparing some of Home's early-day content to futuristic racer Sodium 2, which arrived later, the service has definitely come on leaps and bounds. "You could play bloody Wipeout in PlayStation Home!" says Clark. "It was called Sodium 2 but it was basically Wipeout. They had a full MMO. Could they have done better? If they were companies with bigger pockets, sure, but there are fundamental design problems. For example there was no back button... you might have Home Square but if I went off somewhere else I was in an offshoot, I had to navigate back to the Home space.

"On most [browsers] you have a home button that sends you straight back. I couldn't, in character, walk up to a teleporter to take me back to Home Square. Which meant people went off into different avenues and got lost. People even had trouble getting out of the apartment in the early days. People didn't realise they could walk out of the door. There was a door with a sign saying walk this way. People couldn't walk out the door."

Unreal estate

But these problems were fixable. The real problem was that PlayStation Home wasn't actually home at all, and Sony was resistant to the idea of bringing it social platform to the fore of the console experience, which, Clark argues, is exactly where it needed to be.

"We were investing in the experience over time, but the one thing we would never get was the one thing that really mattered," he says. "I needed to be able to exit a game to [get to] Home. Everyone thought it was going to be the other way around. Everyone thought it would be a game launching into a new game from Home, but that wasn't the key.

"The key was getting away from your game. You finish playing your game, you go to Home so you can meet the other players, talk in character, have a bit of a laugh, then go and play something else. And we couldn't' convince the Japanese team to do that, the system software guys. There were a whole bunch of technical reasons, but the primary thing was that there wasn't the political will internally to really invest in it being a replacement of the cross-media bar. It needed to be the place where you chose the content and where you returned to after."

"The problem is, when you're the internal solution in a big games studio, none of the internal teams want to work with you. The LittleBigPlanet guys, I love them to bits, those guys were trying to do something similar. And if you think about it, the ability to have experiences that are social and connected - they were allowing created content, we weren't - but making a home space wasn't going to be a big value to them. But imagine what we had had a slightly different attitude. And actually the LittleBigPlanet [Home] space itself was brilliant, beautiful. It showed what you could do. Even in Home, you're wondering around in this beautiful space. But of course they decided to put up a picture wall, which was great. Guess what the first thing people did on the wall was… draw dicks. TTP was the acronym - time to penis."

The other problem with Home was fulfilling promises that the technology couldn't deliver, which meant it became an aspirational platform that would never reach the heights made to an excited GDC audience in 2007.

"When Phil Harrison stood up and said we were going to have trophy rooms... we couldnt have because, unless it was mandated, no one's going to make a 3D trophy for every trophy you got in a game," Clark tells us. "And the live TV sets were actually impossible at the time, we found a way to do it later - video texture on a screen - but it wasn't physically possible when it was announced. So the things we got chastised about constantly were a problem. And you need to start out with killer content like any platform. We started out with very little content."

Shopping and chopping

But wedding social networking and gaming has never been an easy task, with Nintendo's Miiverse an example of where it's perhaps been implemented a bit more assuredly - but even that still has a lot of limitations.

"I think Home was a brave experiment," says Clark. "Home was the first freemium console experience. There were massive lessons to learn… But they've been forgotten about, they've been ignored, they've been treated, in my opinion, as irrelevant. But if you look at what was there, what we did, how people spent money in the console space, the way people engaged in communities… you could completely revolutionise the way you approach consoles as a platform."

Home was a commercial success too, and saw 19 million active users at its peak. "38 million downloads, 3 million monthly active users, this is at the peak… that's not a failure. I genuinely think it was successful from a commercial point of view. It showed you could make money. There were like 20, 30 studios that made money out of home. Like five or six that made a million and a half a year, which is not big in the scheme of things, but individually those studios did pretty well. It made it possible for companies like nDreams and Lockwood to be companies at all. So it spawned a whole bunch of people doing interesting stuff. It spawned a whole load of lessons of what could be done in a social context on console. It taught me a hell of a lot."

So what happens now? Morpheus has the potential to transition Home into something amazing, but if Sony is to build its own Metaverse, it'll be on something else. Clark is convinced that we'll one day look back at Home as an early indicator of where consoles are heading, and it's hard not to agree. "The stuff we learned about 3D navigation, architectural UI. I think about 3D spaces in architectural UI now. If you think about shopping centre design, the way they lay out shopping centres, it's all about the flow of movement. And that's kind of like UI. If I see action stuff over somewhere, I can select to go over to it."

"There's an incredibly loyal community in Home. And that idea of creating a space for people to express themselves on their console of choice, with vast amounts of easy to play free content is brilliant. But it will probably be 10 years before we see its like again."

April 01, 2015 at 06:30PM

Hugh Langley