Steam Box came true! After months of waiting and secret projects, Steam does no longer stay hidden and lets details come out regarding their plan to produce their own console for the games in SteamStore and the games to come. There aren’t just a few who believe that the new product of Steam will become a real competitor for the market monopolized by Xbox 720 and PlayStation 4 in the future.
Experts warn: Nintendo, Microsoft and Sony: beware! Steam Box comes! It seems that developers on the hardware side of Valve Company are working with the company Xi3, which frequently receives funds from Valve, and they will release on the market two different consoles that can run games from Steam. One of the consoles will come from Xi3 and the other one straight from Valve and will run on Linux, acting as a server.
We do not know Valve prepares, but those from Xi3 revealed that their console is named Piston and that it can be held in one hand. A test version of the console was put in the show cases of CES convention at the beginning of January (8-11). Piston may have a quad core of 3.2 GHz, 4 to 8 GB RAM and 1 TB space for games. This conformation would be good enough to run almost all games on the market today. Question remains: how much will such a console cost? Well, the answer is still unclear. If an Xi3 mini computer with these specs costs around $ 1000, then it means that the console will not be far from this price. But everything depends on the marketing strategy of developers.
It seems that the Steam Box Piston will be updated with hardware elements as soon as they appear on the market, so it is believed to have a decent price, under the prices of PlayStation 4 and Xbox 720. In addition, Piston would behave almost like a regular computer, only that its exclusive function will be that to play video games available on Steam.
We know that Steam has huge sales, so that the appearance of such a console-PC would completely reverse the situation on the software market. PSN and XBLA, software leaders for consoles, will have to keep up with the newcomer and grow much faster. If Piston will maintain regular USB ports, players can even use the keyboard and mouse to play strategy games or first person shooters, helping even more its popularization among computer game fans. The rumour that Linux would ensure the smooth running of things and would act as an operating system for Piston does only put pressure on Microsoft Windows, which reigned as the supreme leader in the niche of operating systems for a very long time.
Steam users have nothing to fear because once they bought a game, they can hold it for life, as computers recognize older versions of the game. This happens at least at the moment. On Steam you can already find more than 1800 games, while competitors have a maximum of 1000 games available; so if Steambox will be launched, it will give Steam users the opportunity to import their games, as even on launch day the console will have over 1500 games available. Valve has a good chance to go in advance with a great console that will make a splash and that will challenge competition. It all depends on the future, on the technology made available by developers and on Gabe Newell’s plans!