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Steam Hardware Plans?

[Mar 03, 2012, 12:09 pm ET] - Share - Viewing Comments

A post on The Verge follows up on recent comments by Valve's Gabe Newell about the possibility of Steam hardware by saying this is exactly what Valve is working on, and a reveal may come as early as next week at San Francisco's Game Developer's Conference (thanks Kotaku).

The article cites unnamed "sources" who say Valve is working with various hardware vendors on a "Steam Box," which sounds more exotic than "Windows PC," which is what this seems like, as word is: "Apparently meetings were held during CES to demo a hand-built version of the device to potential partners. We're told that the basic specs of the Steam Box include a Core i7 CPU, 8GB of RAM, and an NVIDIA GPU. The devices will be able to run any standard PC titles, and will also allow for rival gaming services (like EA's Origin) to be loaded up." They note a couple of possibilities that may make this more distinctive than a hardware specification, speculating it may include a proprietary controller, a biometric feedback device, and could take better advantage of Steam's "big picture mode."

This all still speculation at this point, as Valve has not responded to their request for comment.

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16.

Re: Steam Hardware Plans?

Mar 3, 2012, 13:29

Dev

commonperson wrote on Mar 3, 2012, 13:13: using Steam as the core model you've got in built launch titles in the thousands with a low point of entry with free (DCU, Star Trek Online, etc.) games all the way to low "sweet spot" games running a few dollars for the casual market. [...] God I just hope they work on steam's interface it's functional but clunky. Actually that brings up a good point. If they throw a 2tb hard drive into it, they could preload it with a ton of free games, and some bigger title steam games (skyrim, etc) and say if you buy it you don't have to spend time downloading, its already preloaded all you have to do is buy the titles and go. Heck, they could sell just the preloaded 2tb hdd on its own and probably get a decent number of sales from people who don't want to put all that downloads on their limited internet (AT&T DSL now is down to 100 gb a month, they join comcast in limited bandwidth now, together they cover quite a swath of the US population). As for the interface, its remained much the same since steam came out, yeah its clunky. If EA bothered to polish origin a bit and add all the interface features steam is missing, they'd have a better shot at getting people to use it over steam.

Subject

Comment [quote="Dev"Mar 3, 2012, 13:29][quote="commonperson"Mar 3, 2012, 13:13]using Steam as the core model you've got in built launch titles in the thousands with a low point of entry with free (DCU, Star Trek Online, etc.) games all the way to low "sweet spot" games running a few dollars for the casual market. [...] God I just hope they work on steam's interface it's functional but clunky. [/quote] Actually that brings up a good point. If they throw a 2tb hard drive into it, they could preload it with a ton of free games, and some bigger title steam games (skyrim, etc) and say if you buy it you don't have to spend time downloading, its already preloaded all you have to do is buy the titles and go. Heck, they could sell just the preloaded 2tb hdd on its own and probably get a decent number of sales from people who don't want to put all that downloads on their limited internet (AT&T DSL now is down to 100 gb a month, they join comcast in limited bandwidth now, together they cover quite a swath of the US population). As for the interface, its remained much the same since steam came out, yeah its clunky. If EA bothered to polish origin a bit and add all the interface features steam is missing, they'd have a better shot at getting people to use it over steam. [/quote]

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