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During an interview with GameSpot today at the Consumer Electronics Show Origin PC CEO Kevin Wasielewski revealed his thoughts on the state of Steam Machines and they are not great. He did however have some positive news about Valve's Steam Controller though, in that it has now been finalized after several iterations and feedback cycles.
In regards to Steam machines he said: “I think that's kind of pretty much dead, it's like a living room PC–is now the new term. Living room PCs have been around forever. That's not anything new either. But it seems like there's a legitimate demand and push for living room PCs.” This seems to be at odds with the last announcement from Valve that the release date would be sometime in 2015, but this was over half a year ago now and the only news since then was that it would not be appearing at CES this year.
While Steam Machines were always more powerful than standard living room PC's, which were generally just used for media playback, most living room PC's can now play a lot of games thanks to massive improvements in the last few years in integrated GPUs. Having said that, as you know, there is still a requirement for dedicated GPU systems when trying to run any high-end game at a decent framerate. However with advances in Steam Home Streaming, as long as there is one good gaming PC in the house, most of the need for a second gaming PC is gone and along with it, maybe some of the market for Steam Machines. So maybe Valve has partially been the cause of the failure of Steam Machines in this case.
In regards to the Steam Controller however there was much more promising news, with Wasielewski mentioning that “their controller is finalized. So now they're going to production and at GDC is when they're going to announce more stuff.”. That sure sounds like Valve will be officially announcing a release date for the controller at GDC sometime between the 2nd and the 6th of March.
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KitGuru Says: Steam machines seem like they were a very expensive experiment for Valve, what with setting up a whole dedicated lab to make and test them along with shipping out over 300 of them to testers with various hardware configurations. At the end of the day this may be a drop in the bucket for Valve financially but it still seems like a bad business decision if they are indeed abandoning the project.
At least we may soon be able to -literally- get our hand's on a Steam Controller.
I am still going to build a SteamBox, but for streaming. I don’t know why the focus is always on having a fully fledged PC in the lounge, when most gamers on Steam will already have a gaming rig setup. So streaming your existing PC to another room in your house, for me from upstairs to my lounge, using an i3 with the intel integrated graphics would be totally sufficient.
How about concentrating on the next Half Life episode VALVe ? There’s a radical thought
I live in a gamer household anyway and we have several decent PCs in the living room. They should concentrate on allowing split screen multiplayer with the controllers and bring back couch multiplayer gaming!
And Half life 3… God damn it valve
personally im tired of spending so much money on microsoft, when its a known fact they spy on us. so im going to try a steamOS gaming box.
First you need Linux gaming to get big. Then we’ll talk about SteamBox.
(these two things seem unlikely for many years at least)
Do you use anything created by Google? Because people that say that and still use Google products are funny to me.
Yup – if you live in a aptly named ‘gamer household’ – y’all appreciate allsorts of games and platforms.
+1 totally with what you said about splitscreen.
I actually would love to do splitscreen on PC — input would be mess to sort out, but where there’s a will, there’s a way, right?
regarding inputs for splitscreen mouse and keyboard gaming – You can have options for audio input/output in games, perhaps it would be possible to choose which mouse/keyboard is for each person.
LOL! You are an idiot. Google is spying on you ten times more than Microsoft ever has. We now know the NSA was working with Google. Meanwhile Microsoft is fighting the NSA and the federal government in court to protect user information.
You aren’t going to try squat. You’re just Microsoft hating troll.
well that escalated quickly, chill bro. i used windows back when it was win 3.1- i dont hate it. its just too expencive for what it is. a product thats in everything (possibly) shouldnt cost so much to have , it should be 1/10 of the current price to be competitive.
valve takes 30% of every dollar you spend on steam. so…
if you bought windows 7 on release OEM version it would have cost you 120 dollars. It was released in 2009 meaning that 7 years later you could run windows 10 after all the free upgrades for exactly 17 bucks per year. Netflix costs you 9 bucks per month. A tripe A title on steam is 60 per title. A decent video card is about 200 dollars every 2 years. how is windows too expensive and how much money are you giving to microsoft? get real.