Steam Box - The End Of High Priced Consol Games?

[Barrs Court Red]

http://uk.gamespot.com/news/valve-preparing-living-room-pcs-to-compete-with-next-gen-report-6401306 If Valve pull this off, I can't see how Xbox and Playstation games can be priced so high. The value Steam has for games is one of the main reasons to use a PC for gaming these days, so this announcement will make it far more accessible to people put off with having to fork out £1k for a decent rig. If this Steam box is priced at £400 then it really could threaten the big two. As an aside, for anyone with a PC and Steam, it's well worth checking out the big picture mode.

[Monkeh]

http://uk.gamespot.com/news/valve-preparing-living-room-pcs-to-compete-with-next-gen-report-6401306 If Valve pull this off, I can't see how Xbox and Playstation games can be priced so high. The value Steam has for games is one of the main reasons to use a PC for gaming these days, so this announcement will make it far more accessible to people put off with having to fork out £1k for a decent rig. If this Steam box is priced at £400 then it really could threaten the big two. As an aside, for anyone with a PC and Steam, it's well worth checking out the big picture mode.

try 3k, 1k will on be mid ranged at best,

I love steam best thing to happen to PC gaming, the deals are fantastic and it gives a platform for indie game devlopers to get their product out there,

Console gaming is going down hill, with off the shelf sales down 11% this year again, I think the next gen consoles may be the last,

The standard of console games are not as good as they use to be with very few standout titles this year, CoD has been overdone as has the whole FPS genre, there is very little innovation at the moment which is probbily because of the big money going into failed projects,

We need more games like Dark souls which is challenging (like the old nes games) and not just an interactive story like Res Evil 6 or that god awful FF13 game a few years back,

[Nibor]

You can build a high end gaming rig easily for £1k particularly when you're only buying components, the performance returns drop off massively beyond that. At the end of the day once you can hit a consistent 30-60 fps on max res with everything turned up why would you spend double on bleeding edge hardware for 10% extra frames you can't even see?

I'd assume the steam box will run linux, so the interesting thing here will be whether Valve can get the other engine builders (Unreal, CryEngine, Frostbite etc) to work with OpenGL as well as they do with DirectX and if they can get graphics hardware manufacturers to produce drivers with similar performance in a timely fashion. Valve did a whole bunch of work with Nvidia and AMD to get left 4 dead working acceptably on Linux so they do have some influence and are willing to invest.

Games companies will want to target multiple platforms with as little extra development effort as possible and want to keep costs per game as low as possible, which is why most of them use engines which are developed separately from games. If the engines and drivers allow them to develop a game once that they can sell to a number of platforms the price competition will be much more intense.

The premium on console games is in part because of the license fee going to the manufacturer of the console which can subsidise the hardware. If linux gaming support improves we could see future consoles choose to use that as an O/S as well, why build your own? Why spend money on a supply chain if you can deliver via steam at lower cost?

The main roadblock would usually be DRM, games companies love the largely locked down and hard to crack new generation consoles. However you can combat that a great deal with a platform that verifies licenses online, and they're all happy selling to the PC market that way so maybe it won't be a problem.

In the longer term this could take a real dent out of Microsoft on the PC front - 3d gaming is pretty much the only thing stopping a lot of people using some of the more polished linux distros as well. Also - how about buying a game license once and being able to play it on any device you can run Steam on? That would be quite attractive I think.

[Barrs Court Red]

You already can?

[bcfcbs20]

I spent £700 on a nice pc I can run most games on ultra settings like Skyrim with a shit load of mods and it doesn't miss a beat.

Good article now I have a pc I won't be going back to console gaming I just sold my ps3 and about 40 games pc gaming is the way forward.

[Barrs Court Red]

I would caution that to play anything by EA you need to install and run the Origin client. It'll be interesting to see if that works with Linux.

[bcfcbs20]

I would caution that to play anything by EA you need to install and run the Origin client. It'll be interesting to see if that works with Linux.

Good point the only game I have on origin is Dragon Age origins but I don't play it too much can't stand playing with a keyboard and mouse it hurts my hands after a while.

[Barrs Court Red]

You get used to it. I couldn't imagine losing the precision of a mouse when sniping

[Nibor]

You already can?

Only for a small number of games though? If they can get the platform support right it could be universal.

[CiderHider]

Ive tried Xbox PS3 and against a half decent gaming desktop they are poor.

I also dont like these myfirst controler that you have with Xbox, sorry, not enough buttons, how will i set my macros and where can I tab to another associated promgramm?

I like the upgradability with PC gaming, with a SSD you spawn in first into all multi-player maps and get the choice of toys, graphics better, audio better, interface better.

Xbox and PS3 are lightweight, when you open them up its looks like an old 386 nothgin there, my cooling fans alone draw more power than themI just dont understand why people cplay console games and hand held games, but meh thats just me. and I guess its price too, i forgot that :laugh: