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It’s not the “Steam Box”, but Piston – Xi3′s living-room friendly small form PC – is a box with Steam in it. Technically all PCs have the potential to be boxes with Steam in them, but most aren’t designed both specifically for gaming and to fit in the palm of your hand. In fact, I’ve just attempted to lift my PC with one hand and now my fingers hurt.
I knew there was a reason I wasn’t a tech journalist.
At this weekend’s SXSW Gaming Expo, Xi3 unleashed pre-orders of the device. It’s a pricey proposition: $899.99 gets you the base version, with 8GB RAM and a 128GB internal solid state hard drive. And that’s the special SXSW price. When the expo ends on March 17th, the standard cost of $999.99 takes effect.
Xi3 also offer upgrades to the initial specs, with a 512GB SSD bumping the price to $1,649.99.
Delivery of those pre-orders won’t take effect until the console’s release in “Holiday 2013″. Xi3 CEO Jason A. Sullivan explained the timing of the pre-order launch, saying, “Given the amount of awards, media attention and gamer interest the PISTON Console has generated since it was unveiled at CES 2013 in January, we’ve become seriously concerned that we will not be able to meet the demand for PISTON Consoles this year. That’s why we have decided to begin accepting pre-orders on our PISTON Console, beginning today with the start of the SXSW Gaming Expo.”
I get that they did a lovely UI for this unholy hybrid of PC and console gaming (a few of the benefits of both and all of the downsides from the looks of things, including PC gaming's regular high price points for performance) but is this really doing anything you can't do with an HDMI cable and a couple seconds of your precious time? Specifically is it doing $1000 worth of anything? I gotta wonder how that other open source console, the Ouya would stack up on this. I was considering one of those because they're cheap and I can play my Steam games without tying up my aging laptop.
Edit to stick the video of the UI demo here:
This message was edited 1 time. Last update was at 2013/03/11 13:36:10
I beg of you sarge let me lead the charge when the battle lines are drawn
Lemme at least leave a good hoof beat they'll remember loud and long
The issue until now was that there was no one making any of these living room PC's that could run games like a normal desktop (though you were certainly able to hook up a desktop to a TV and use that TV as a monitor). Of course at $899.99 you might as well just have an Xbox or a Playstation unless you really feel like paying a $600 premium for a super tiny PC.
If they want this to be successful they're gonna need to cut down the price of these things otherwise I don't see anyone really bothering other than the die hards who buy every piece of tech that gets released.
This message was edited 1 time. Last update was at 2013/03/11 13:40:08
The silly thing about the size is it's really just for the UI and not for the compact PC, I priced out a competitive PC build in a "shuttle" size tower and it was no where near $1000. $600 and some change total I think, and that's with a monitor and extra stuff.
I beg of you sarge let me lead the charge when the battle lines are drawn
Lemme at least leave a good hoof beat they'll remember loud and long
KalashnikovMarine wrote: (a few of the benefits of both and all of the downsides from the looks of things, including PC gaming's regular high price points for performance) but is this really doing anything you can't do with an HDMI cable and a couple seconds of your precious time? Specifically is it doing $1000 worth of anything?
That's what I'm wondering too. Judging from the specs so far this machine isn't anything that couldn't be built for cheaper by someone with a little knowledge. I'm also leery of the PC-as-a-console. With a console you know that there are certain hardware limitations, but you do know that whatever game you buy should play straight away. If the Valve device requires a hardware upgrade (like a graphics card) is this something that the owner can do by themselves without voiding the warranty? Will the owner have to contact a Valve certified engineer, and will the parts be available only through Valve or can they be picked off the shelf anywhere?
From what I've seen so far I'm worried that Valve might be treading the path already carved by Apple.
This message was edited 1 time. Last update was at 2013/03/11 15:19:26
That's what I'm wondering too. Judging from the specs so far this machine isn't anything that couldn't be built for cheaper by someone with a little knowledge. I'm also leery of the PC-as-a-console. With a console you know that there are certain hardware limitations, but you do know that whatever game you buy should play straight away. If the Valve device requires a hardware upgrade (like a graphics card) is this something that the owner can do by themselves without voiding the warranty? Will the owner have to contact a Valve certified engineer, and will the parts be available only through Valve or can they be picked off the shelf anywhere?
From what I've seen so far I'm worried that Valve might be treading the path already carved by Apple.
Partially this is what Steam Cloud is for. They want to do some of the processing on their end of the servers, but that's another technical limitation as someone with slow internet won't get any benefit from that and we've already seen what happened to Sim City (though the devs have been tackling that problem pretty aggressively it seems).
KalashnikovMarine wrote: The silly thing about the size is it's really just for the UI and not for the compact PC, I priced out a competitive PC build in a "shuttle" size tower and it was no where near $1000. $600 and some change total I think, and that's with a monitor and extra stuff.
consider this
it costs $1200 or $1600
but you can play any game on steam, for free, forever
would you be interested then?
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