This year started off with a bang for the gaming industry at the CES 2014 when Valve made a big announcement. Valve is the developers behind the Half Life franchise along with Left 4 Dead.
Fans of Half Life have been waiting for Half Life 3 for a long time, so what could Valve have announced that was bigger and better?
They said that they are going to market the Steam Machine and the machine will have Steam OS. The consoles will be developed alongside fourteen companies, who will offer them in a price and specs war.
Companies said to be taking part include Alienware, Alternate, CyberPowerPC, Digital Storm, Falcon Northwest, GigaByte, iBuyPower, Maingear, Materiel.net, Next Spa, Origin PC, Scan, Webhallen, and Zotac.
It is said that each will have an entirely different look along with build and it would depend on the consumer which they chose. The console should come in at $499 entry level and go up to as much as $6,000 for the CyberPower PC which Falcon Northwest will offer.
As expected the low and high end version do have differences when it comes to specs. The low end version of the CyberPower PC will run on the AMD CPU, have 8GB of RAM and offer 500GB of internal storage. The Falcon Northwest will offer a deluxe custom set up with 16GB of RAM and 6 TB of storage.
Steam OS is based on Linux and serves the console like a PC. There are around 65 million users at the moment and if all of these run Steam machines it would be able to rival the Xbox One, PC and PS4. It seems that for the moment fans of Half Life are going to have to do some more waiting for Half Life 3.
