What I really see happening if this gets momentum is more and more publishers actually making Linux native clients for games. Once there is a large enough hardware base, the software will follow, the chicken and egg syndrome. Valve has enough weight to make this happen.

Just imagine if the Beowulf game http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beowulf:_The_Game came to Steam and ran on a Beowulf cluster!

Valve is pushing Linux for gaming, and I assume that the Steambox will be a Linux OS. There is only a very small subset of the Steam catalog that has native Linux games, so I am wondering if they are planning on supporting streaming from a PC running Steam to the TV via Steambox? There might still be some latency, but on a local network it is not going to be nearly what it would be streaming over the Internet, such as On Live or Sony's Gaikai.

My biggest question would be how are they going to handle the shared Steam account? What if the wife or kids wants to play a game on the Steambox and I want to play on my PC at the same time? The only way you can do that with the current system on multiple devices is to have one of them in offline mode, which means only one can play an online game at once. What about multiple profiles so that that each user can have their own friends lists and own achievements such as the PS3/360 do on their consoles? Currently there are not any separate profiles on a single account, you need separate Steam accounts, and separate game purchases on each account to do so.

We still use modems to connect Out of Band to routers for troubleshooting when the main WAN T1/DS3/MetroE connection is down.

I haven't used one at home since the 90s. Back then, the first broadband connection I had was downstream only, you still had to use a modem for upstream.

But they would not have their own achievements or own list of friends - doesn't matter so much to me, but it does to the kids. To do that, you need separate xblg accounts else the one account would be all you could play with online. Microsoft used to have a family plan for $100 for 4 members, but they discontinued that last spring.

They are also putting OneGuide and Skype behind the Xbox Live Gold paywall. It looks like most of the new features they have added to Xbox One will require XBL Gold.The PS4 will let you record gameplay without a PS+ account.

The main difference I see in PS+ and Xbox Live Gold is that PS+ is per PS3/PS4 where Xbox Live Gold is per account. For those of us with families, that is a substantial difference. Both of my kids and myself would be able to play under the single PS+ account for $50, where for XBL Gold each of us would require our own account, bringing the total to $180.

Postal was another that did something similar. After about a minute of play you would catch on fire when using a crack.

I am just wondering if the Internet echo chamber has blew this way out of proportion. What if they are referring to always online in another sense?

Downloading updates, games, or movies when the console is in standby mode

The ability to use it as a Media Center when it is in standby

That's just a couple examples, but I am sure there could be many other benefits of having a console that is always online that has nothing to do with DRM. After the highly visible fiascoes such as the Sim City launch and the lack of Internet availability or stability in many parts of the country, much less the world, I can't see them writing off a large percentage of potential buyers by requiring to be online to play every game, even in single player. I still have a few friends in rural areas that are on dialup that do not have access to broadband, or one on satellite with it's 500 ms ping times on a good day.

Boycotts don't usually work and even if they did, they will just blame slow sales on some other cause - piracy is always an easy target.

$500 might seem steep, but if you look at your total cost over the lifetime of the console it would probably be less expensive in the long run. It wouldn't take too many $60 games to run up the total cost of your system to higher levels, compared to getting games for a quarter of that price on Steam sales.

I hope that you can install the applications anywhere instead of only under the Steam directory without having to resort to symlinks like you do now if you want to split up your SteamApps directory to different locations.

The problem with XKCD style passwords is the more characters in a password, the more likely I am to make a typo while entering it. I mistype a typical 8 character password a couple times a day. I can imagine what it would be like with a 25 character password.

I spent a lot of time wandering around that spaceship in World's Chat. I thought it was a pretty amazing program to have an online virtual world in 1995 when I was still on dialup. I quit using it when they started wanting you to pay. I loaded up the next one, Alpha Worlds a couple times, but it never had the appeal to me that Worlds Chat did.

I see these recent wave of kickstarts as the ultimate pre-order. As a backer, I get a lower price and maybe some extras for my investment, and the knowledge that I am helping with the creation of a game that I want to play but wouldn't have got backing otherwise. As a developer, you get your funding in advance, and anything sold after the release is profit since your expenses have already been covered.

I backed Wasteland 2. I would love to see another post apocalyptic turn based RPG, since Fallout 3 went in a completely different direction in regards to game play as it's predecessors.

Eventually one of these projects will fail, or not live up to expectations, but I hope that is the rare exception.

While I would prefer the quality of Blu-Ray or the convenience of streaming, many movies are not available on those formats. Before dropping the Netflix streaming when the price increased last year, I looked at my 100+ title DVD queue and there were only 3 that I could stream, while every title in my instant queue was available as DVD.