One of the defining trait of this generation of machines is their ability to suspend a game in the middle of a session, and then to pick it right up from where you left it off the next time you boot up your system. Thanks to advances in low power states, as well as the relatively high RAM of these machines, Suspend/Resume has become a mainstay of this generation, being present not just in the PS Vita and Nintendo 3DS, but also the PS4 and Xbox One.
However, it will not be present in the Steam Machines when they launch later this year. Gamespot reports that according to a Github user that has identified himself as a Valve employee, the suspend and resume feature “is no longer supported” by SteamOS, and the problem stems from Linux, which the software is based on.
“It doesn’t probe and reattach the controllers to the same point in the device tree that they were in when the system was suspended,” the post says.
“Since those are the device nodes that SteamOS has open at the time of the suspend, and they route to The Noplace(tm), the controllers become unresponsive. This is a general problem in the Linux device model.”
So it sounds like Linux is creating problems with this functionality. So if you were hoping to just leave your game running on your Steam Machine for a few hours and then return to it later, well, sorry guys, you may be out of luck.
