CES 2014 started off the video gaming year with a massive announcement from Valve – the developer that brought us Half Life and Left 4 Dead.
Gamers have been waiting for Half Life 3 for so long that they’re starting to give up hope. Forgetting about Half Life 3 for a moment, what else could Valve delight us all with?
It seems that the studio is planning to market its own Steam Machines – its own version of a gaming console that’ll run on the Steam operating system. These machines will actually be developed by 14 different companies, which will spark off a huge price and specs battle among vendors.
The 14 companies are Alienware, CyberPowerPC, Alternate, Falcon Northwest, Digital Storm, iBuyPower, GigaByte, Maingear, Next Spa, Materiel.net, Scan, Webhallen, Origin PC and Zotac.
These companies will tout machines with their own unique look and build. Then it’s all up to the customer to decide which one they like best. Entry level machines will cost $499 (CyberPower PC) and higher end models will cost up to $6,000 (Falcon Northwest).
The two ends will have a lot of difference in the specs – the CyberPower PC version will have an AMD CPU and GPU, 8GB of RAM and 500 GB of storage. The Falcon Northwest model will boast a custom chipset and have 16GB of RA and 6 TB or memory.
The Steam OS is Linux-based and will be like a PC for the machines. Steam has 65 million users right now, and if this same number of users started using the Steam machines, then this system will start to rival the PC, Xbox One and PS4. Half Life 3 seems like a minor issue now, eh?
