No. And none of this tier stuff either. The point of the Steamboxen is to kill the windows dependency of games, probably why they are future proofing them so much. They'll last 3-5 years in their present iteration and at that point it will be moot.
OK, you don't have to hide it, but there still needs to be some kind of guide about how games will play on your Steam Machine.
This is not a big deal right now, but what about in, say, 6 years? You have an original Steam Machine and a new game JUST came out. It doesn't run on your Steam Machine because yours doesn't have a Whatsit Quantum Coprocessor. Shouldn't the Steam UI, you know, let you know that before you go about buying and downloading that 30GB game??
And I don't want tiers, either, but Valve did say they'd have something to say about this; I'm simply speculating about what it could be.
I would think that the Steam environment will do a lot of your thinking for you. It'll check your hardware, suggest upgrades (since the boxes will evidently be upgradable), etc...
It would have to be some sort of rolling release I think, because this year's gold hardware will be next year's silver or bronze.
> I'm pretty sure they'll build in the equivalent of the windows performance score that can be sent to Steam's servers, and they'll simply be able to show you the games that will run best on your machine and hide games that simply won't run at all.
You'd need to know before you buy the hardware, though.
They can do just the same for the Steambox and use it to display the performance for games on similar systems - if they want to.
There has to be a plan for that.
The trouble is in getting unbiased results. I doubt Valve would want to test each model themselves.
edit: or maybe a triplet, CPU index, GPU index, Storage index.
Or maybe they'll have a minimum spec that gets bumped every 2 years, so a game can say "runs on all Steam Machines (2014+)".
But it's clear there's going to have to be some way of "tranching" the different hardware levels, because nothing will kill this idea faster than a general public who's heard that you can never be quite sure if a game you buy will run on your particular Steam Machine.
But then I realize something: where do people get Steam games from? The Steam store online! I'm pretty sure they'll build in the equivalent of the windows performance score that can be sent to Steam's servers, and they'll simply be able to show you the games that will run best on your machine and hide games that simply won't run at all.
Thoughts? I think that, as with the controller, this is a really important aspect of getting this whole big idea to work.