This sounds like an awesome idea. At first. Then you realize it's just a branded PC aimed at the living room. Buuuut a Steam-optimized PC, with a predetermined life cycle you can commit to knowing you never need to bother working on it because you'll get a new model every three or four years isn't the worst idea I've ever heard. I'm intrigued, yet suspicious. At the very least it's a better idea than the Phantom.

So, it's OnLive, but with a brand backing? I'll probably pass on this one too, but it could work. This might be better timing than all other options, but here's the one downside: will internet providers begin to throttle bandwidth because of stuff like this and NetFlix completely hogging all their resources? That's the wildcard in this equation and if the answer to that question is yes, then expect yet another failure.

At this point, pricing of this would be crucial to the success of this. If they could pull off a Steam Box cheaper than 350. I think they could be in the same ballpark as consoles.

That's not a wildcard, that's already reality. AT&T has a 150GB/month bandwidth cap. It's 250GB for Uverse but that's not available for me.

I'm not sure this is competition for Nintendo and Microsoft so much as it's a consolified PC gaming. If I were looking for a (I'm assuming) low-endish PC that could handle games and didn't want to have to worry about buying new video cards and more RAM all the time I can see this being a good option. Plus the Valve/Steam name brings a certain level of trustworthiness with it, no?

Yeah but to be honest I'd like companies to push the bandwidth envelope more. Get the FCC involved a little more with stopping these caps. Or at least raising them to a more reasonable amount. A family of four with Netflix + other streaming constantly = almost 200GB a month to be honest.