Is your country accepting refugees from the U.S. regime?

Minimum viewing distance in turn is a function of how many bodies are in front of the monitor. It takes a bigger monitor for four players than for one.

A PC in the living room could play couch multiplayer if it existed. Until the Steam Machine, it didn't exist in numbers big enough to draw attention from notable publishers.

Let me give you a list of examples of the posts I'm talking about. But if Slashdot is an unreliable source about the prevalence of living room PCs as of the fourth quarter of 2013, I'd be glad to consider other sources.

Few people who prefer to play PC games already own PC-compatible gamepads. For example, how many people have installed drivers to use a Wii Remote or a Dual Shock 3 on a PC? How many people have bought the PC receiver for Xbox 360 wireless controllers?

Please explain why it doesn't. Consider a case where people are visiting my home for whatever reason, and we end up getting an itch to play a video game together, and the others didn't bring their PCs because it was a spontaneous gathering as opposed to a LAN party planned weeks in advance. If there isn't already a PC connected to the TV, these people have to crowd around a desktop PC monitor.

First, as Anonymous Coward explained in this post, if a player first learned how to play a game using the gamepad control scheme, the player is more likely to want to continue to play with a gamepad than if a player first learned on mouse and keyboard. So if you suggest playing together on a Steam Machine, someone else who owns a Steam Machine is more likely to be willing to use the extra Steam Controllers that you bought than someone who uses only the mouse and keyboard. Besides, it's much more convenient to bring a Steam Controller from home than to bring an entire desktop PC rig from home.

I think what's meant is the freedom to obtain and use games that happen not to be released on Steam yet. How many games in the Not on Steam sale are ported to desktop Linux?

And a VCR lets you illegally copy movies. True, commercial DS games are proprietary, but amateur games and applications (such as anything using DLDI) are made to be copied. Or are you arguing that amateur games and applications deserve not to exist?

Not even in the Virtual Console section of the Wii Shop?

If you're trying to fit two to four people around a monitor, pixels don't matter quite as much as inches. Case in point: During the fifth generation, people played GoldenEye on N64 despite each of four players getting about a 144x112 pixel window. And during the sixth generation, people played console-style games on a PS2, Xbox, or GameCube and SDTV even though PCs accepted USB gamepads and had more pixels.

60 MB at 1 Mbps takes 8 minutes. Let's say 10 minutes for overhead. Schedule it to run while you sleep.

The problem comes when licensing such libraries becomes cost prohibitive or requires the developer to give up the keys to his own kingdom.

Has there been news either way as to whether software from "unknown sources" can be installed on a Steam Machine?

Funny you mentioned the Game Boy. Both the Nintendo DSi and the Nintendo 3DS, the successors to the Game Boy line, get operating system updates. I don't own one, so I can't tell you how frequent they are.

That's the point. Xbox One was supposed to refresh receipts every day. Steam does so every couple weeks. That and the Steam sales are apparently a big enough difference.

I thought it was the second, the first being OUYA. How does Steam's greenlight process compare to OUYA's sandbox process?

The problem with sharing is that you lend your entire library at once. When you log back in, the other user is kicked out even if playing a different game. Besides, what do you do if you want to play a multiplayer game with someone else living in or visiting your home?

Then what's a better platform for developers who want to reach users of Windows, OS X, desktop Linux, Android, iOS, Windows RT, Windows Phone, and the game consoles? Making a program work on more than one platform requires severe modifications, sometimes including translation of every line of code into a different programming language. Windows Phone 7 and Xbox Live Indie Games, for example, couldn't run anything but verifiably type-safe .NET CF CIL. And all except the first four require permission from the operating system publisher before your code will even run, and said permission is not guaranteed.