Don’t Expect Valve’s Steam Box To Be Pricey [D.I.C.E. 2013]
A brand new gaming console can really be a beautiful thing. After all, you’re getting brand new features never dreamed of in a console before, all while getting the absolute best looking graphics imaginable. There’s a bit of a problem with new consoles, however: they’re usually pretty damn expensive, from $300, $400, or sometimes even as high as $600 at launch!
Gabe Newell doesn’t think that the Steam Box needs to be like that. Instead, you can expect to see the different Steam Boxes start at $100 and go down towards $0. “The price point that’s going to be hit is going to be much, much lower than things we’ve traditionally seen in living room devices. Better, it’s basically a PC in the console form factor and at the console price point. There’s nothing really magical about the hardware – this is the great thing about PC, is that it’s been evolving so quickly.”
The reason why the Steam Box can be so cheap has to do with the fact that it’s designed to stream games from your PC, rather than render the game itself. Some people might think that this will limit the amount of people who can fully utilize the Steam Box, and maybe it will a little, but you have to realize that at this time Steam is only available for the PC. I wouldn’t market the Steam Box to be like a console, but rather I’d be trying to appeal to the PC players who want to get a bit more use out of their PCs. We’ll just have to see how successful Valve is here in the near future.
