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Found a nasty little bug in Mailfeed last week that caused one of my beta users to get ~100 emails in the span of an hour. Thankfully I’ve only been soliciting friends to use the app so far - these are the kinds of things I was really worried about and need to address before any kind of official public release.
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Plugging away on my side project, https://mailfeedapp.com. Everything works at this point, though I have had some issues with some incorrectly formatted rss feeds that I’m trying to work around as best as possible. The app currently lives on Heroku, but performance is sub-optimal and I’m looking at moving towards a VPS like DigitalOcean.
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The steam machines always felt like a weird move to me. The target audience for those machines seemed very small - gamers who don’t want to buy a console, but also don’t want to build their own PC. I can kinda understand the appeal of not wanting to deal with the hassle of putting all the components together, but I could never personally justify the cost of the machine against the cost of just buying all the parts myself and spending an afternoon with a screwdriver.
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You are missing a significant market chunk. People like me. I have over 300 titles on steam. Buying a console now would mean chugging a bit of cash + re-buying/getting new games. Buying a brand new steam console would mean I get ~150 titles without any additional cost (that’s the rough number of the games already ported to Linux from my collection).
I don’t want to build my own PC just for gaming and I don’t want to run Linux anymore on my main laptop/PC. I would potentially consider getting a console from Valve especially since I expect them being better at hand picking & testing hardware against titles available on their platform.
Valve is a long haul player. People HATED Steam when it launched. Give them some time to iterate on the idea.
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I don’t want to build my own PC just for gaming and I don’t want to run Linux anymore on my main laptop/PC.
I come from a different direction, that could be served by the steam box: I could build a PC but I don’t want to mess with maintaining the Windows on top of if with system updates, virus scanners, driver updates, malware and whatnot. I used to run Windows for gaming on an external but nowadays I am too tired to care, instead opting to use consoles, since it’s less of a hassle.
The downside of Steam machines is, that it is still running Linux (nothing wrong with it per-se, I run it on all my computers), therefore the Steam games I want to play are often not available for it, at which point I have gained exactly nothing.
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In my case I’m moving more and more to an OpenBSD only setup switching only to Linux where work requires it (docker, dart, android yuck). I’m OK with the gaming library available for Linux at this point. I can see myself having a dedicated Steam console to play from time to time. In my case I would gain a machine able to play the games I own, not having to hand pick hardware for it and having more machines free to run OpenBSD :)
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From Valve’s perspective, if they had worked, they would have effectively had their own console. It was merely a coincidence that it would have been a general-purpose computer also, and I bet it would have been very badly maintained from that perspective, compared to Ubuntu or Debian. (Yes, I realize that Steam Machines are both a hardware and a software platform; I don’t think that changes it. Being a Linux distro is the hard part of that; PC hardware has been commoditized forever now.)
I imagine Valve sees it as a significant risk that Apple and Microsoft each sell software through their own channels, and that there’s nothing particularly distinctive about Steam as a store. Their community features are desperately trying to add value (I mean, what else is the motivation for Steam trading cards…?), but I personally don’t feel that they add very much. Ultimately, their market position happens to be leading but is not remotely secure; if they could have gotten to a state where most of their users were on Steam Machines, they would have been much safer.
I haven’t been following industry news, but I feel as though consoles in general have been losing momentum in favor of mobile for a lot of things, and general-purpose platforms for things with serious hardware requiremetns. So, for example, I don’t feel like Nintendo’s distribution bottleneck is anywhere near as secure as Nintendo would like it to be, since their platforms have been flopping lately. If my feeling is right, it’s a way that Valve should have known better than to try this. But it’s their loss, nobody else’s, so I’m not convinced I care. :)
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I imagine Valve sees it as a significant risk that Apple and Microsoft each sell software through their own channels, and that there’s nothing particularly distinctive about Steam as a store.
That’s how I remember the original SteamOS news being reported in 2013, that it was an attempt by Valve to do an end-run around the possibility that Apple and Microsoft would increasingly lock down their desktop OSs towards more of an app-store model, like on mobile. Since Valve effectively has the same business model (app store that takes a percentage cut of the app sales), they felt they needed their own platform to keep from being eventually locked out.
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I haven’t been following industry news, but I feel as though consoles in general have been losing momentum in favor of mobile for a lot of things,
Indeed. The problem for the console manufacturers (and especially Nintendo) is that mobile devices are good enough nowadays for casual gaming. If you want to play on a big screen, devices like the Apple TV (and probably the Nexus Player) [1] are much more cost-effective, though the number of games is still somewhat limited compared to mobile. The only thing that Nintendo has left for the casual gamer are their franchises, but I don’t think that will be enough to convince the general population to spend more, lose integration with the iOS/Android ecosystems, and deal with their oddball WiiU controllers.
[1] Since we had a 4th generation Apple TV, our XBox One has only been power up to play some Blu-Rays.
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I think Nintendo is being squeezed here more than the others are, since the games are more similar in style to what you can find on mobile. The more resilient group of console gamers are those who either mainly play sports games (e.g. Madden), or those who play FPS type games (e.g. Call of Duty), which are each a pretty huge number. There’s an interesting niche of Americans, especially less wealthy ones, who own two computing devices—a gaming console and a smartphone, but no PC/laptop—and so far they seem to be staying with that configuration.
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More work on Mailfeed - just tightening the screws and getting some areas of concern figured out before I start trying to get alpha users outside of my network.
I’ve also had some feedback from friends saying I should look at incorporating. I’m going to visit a lawyer to get some actual legal advice about this, but does anyone have any experience with doing this in Canada (Alberta) ?