After Valve made their three pronged announcement for the Steam OS, Steam Machines and Steam Controller, many gamers questioned if they should be dropping their PlayStation 4 or Xbox One pre-orders.
Last week Valve revealed some of the specs for the Steam Machine hardware beta which will allow 300 gamers to get their hands on the living room PC based on the all game based operating system which runs on Linux.
The Steam Machine beta hardware will ship with graphic cards as high as NVidia Titan and processors as powerful as the Intel i7-4770. That is a high order even for the PS4 and Xbox One hardware specs. The kiss of death, some ma say, are the 16GB DDR3-1600 for the CPU and the 3GB DDR5 supplying the GPU. In comparison, the PS4 will feature 8GB of shared DDR5 and Xbox One’s power comes from 8GB of the less fast DDR3.
I have to admit even my mouth was watering.
However, with top end specs like these the price will likely also be equally steep. The PlayStation 4 and Xbox One will cost us $400 and $500 respectively. We suspect a proper Steam Machine that can compete with the consoles will be even more expensive than that, and the top end model should come in at around a thousand Dollars.
The Steam Machine will be running on Linux which will require developers to make all of their games compatible with Steam OS which seems unlikely at this point as well as the majority of PC gaming will be done on PC’s as it has been traditionally and those run on Windows.
With a high price and limited amount of new games available (yes, Valve says 3,000 games will be available during the beta but what are those exactly?), the equation still seems to solve for PS4 and Xbox One.
The first production Steam Machines will release sometime in 2014 at which point we will know more about the facts like price and compatibility but the new consoles are out in just a few short weeks and for those, we already know what to expect.
One of the major advantages Steam has are the incredibly low priced Steam Sales that allow PC gamers to have a library bigger than any consoles owners but with the digital age making its way onto consoles, especially PlayStation Plus, those days may be numbered as well.
Lastly, indie games were already a massive success on the PS3 and PS Vita but the PlayStation 4 will be more of a hotbed for indie titles than ever after Sony started to reveal its plans for indie devs during E3 earlier this year.
While the Steam Machines are a very cool sounding proposition, we just don’t know how much of a presence they will be making when they become a reality in 2014. And of course there is the Steam Controller which no one has even gotten their hands on yet.
What do you think, have you cancelled your pre-orders yet?
