“The Pis-what? Who? Never heard of it.” – Valve
The Steam Box — if it’s going to be the future of gaming, it needs to get its s–t together, because things are starting to get confusing.
Back in January hardware manufacturer Xi3 Corporation unveiled the Piston. According to Xi3, Valve was providing them with financial and technical support, and the Piston was shown at both Xi3 and Valve’s booths at this year’s CES. So yeah, all evidence seemed to indicate this was the first official 3rd party Steam Box.
Since then things have got weird…
Late last week Xi3 confirmed the Piston will launch this Holiday for a whopping $1000. Valve immediately distanced themselves from Xi3 and the Piston, releasing this statement…
“Valve began some exploratory work with Xi3 last year, but currently has no involvement in any product of theirs.”
Xi3 then called bulls–t on Valve’s statement…
“We reaffirm the fact that we received an investment from Valve Corporation (as we previously disclosed during the 2013 International CES trade show), and we did so with Valve’s written permission. Second, we were asked to build a product specifically for Valve, and both companies showcased this product—the Piston Console—in their respective booths at CES 2013.”
Soooo yeah, what the hell is going on here? Is Xi3 exaggerating Valve’s involvement in the development of the Piston? Is Valve throwing Xi3 under the bus for some reason? Possibly because they don’t want the Piston competing with their own 1st party Steam Box?
All I know is Valve better get itself sorted before the holidays (and find a way to price it’s new console below a thousand freakin’ dollars) or the Steam Box’s future looks dark.
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It looks like a cheese grater you would order from The Sharper Image.
I was thinking something for making tea, but yeah.
It is, however, cheaper than the Sharper Image Cheese Grater.
But it won’t help you make you a quesadilla, so eh.
I was thinking Sharper Image dog chew toy
Isn’t that like all bad relationships, using each other?
Valve tries hard to be the Can-do-no-wrong Guy, but I think they are showing their faults. The Half-Life 2 Episodes seemed like a failed test (was a cool idea, but it’s like shifting Feature Films to Television format)… now they’re confused on where to go. The Steam-box sounds less exciting every time I hear about it.
The Steambox is shaping up to be “Linux PC” so it is very unexciting.
Valve is stumbling along and shitting on themselves every chance they get. If it wasn’t for them buying small studios that were making the games released under Valve’s name they’d have not released anything since Half-Life 2.
So is this Neglect Emotionally or Separate Entirely?
I think Valve is just trying to back away from how terrible Xi3′s little doohickey is, because for a thousand dollars you could just go ahead and build a decent gaming PC.
So who is this thing for exactly?
Well, aside from it also running on freakin’ Linux the official Steam Box is going to be more or less than same thing.
Which is kind of my point. If the Steam Box is priced more than the next gen consoles it will never move. Why would I waste a thousand dollars on this when I could just upgrade/build a gaming PC for the same amount or less.
I was agreeing with you. I don’t really get the Steam Box. Consoles are popular because they’re easy to deal with and cheap. If this is neither, I don’t see the point. It absolutely needs to be sub-500-dollars, or it’s just going to be a weird little curiosity for super Valve fans to own.
What do we want? Unfair!
When do we want it? Change!
What do we want? Time Travel!
When do we want it? Irrelevant!
a thousand dollars? lolwut?
I clicked this article thinking this was some type of new vaporizer, but sadly, it is not.
Give one to Lebron James.
Hey, worked for the Beats By Dre headphones.
This sucks
I was really excited about this, but its starting to sound like nothings really coming out of Valves end for a while. Think I’m just going to go ahead and build my own gaming PC after the summer.
A thousand dollars? Like a 1 then three 000s behind it? NothanksI’mgood.