Valve Software: Xi3 Piston Is Just One Game System, More Incoming

From X-bit Labs: Valve Software, a major video game developer and the owner of Steam game distribution service, said that Xi3 Corp.’s Piston video game system, which is currently in development, will be only one of such “Steam Box” devices. More Steam-centered game systems are incoming from other makers; moreover, Valve will offer its own-brand gaming devices going forward.

“We will come out with our own and we will sell it to consumers by ourselves. That will be a Linux box, [and] if you want to install Windows you can. We are not going to make it hard. This is not some locked box by any stretch of the imagination. We also think that a controller that has higher precision and lower latency is another interesting thing to have,” said Gabe Newell, a co-founder and chief executive officer of Valve, in an interview with The Verge web-site.

On Tuesday Xi3 Corp. announced a development stage system optimized for computer gameplay on large high-definition television monitors. Xi3's Piston is designed specifically to support both Steam and its Big Picture mode for residential and LAN party computer gaming on larger high-def screens. While the details about Xi3 Piston are scarce, it is widely believed that the device is a small form-factor fully-fledged personal computer powered by AMD’s A-series Fusion “Trinity” or “Richland” accelerated processing unit and can be equipped with up to 1TB hard disk drive. Since the unit is a pre-production one, eventually it may gain A-series Kaveri APU with more advanced AMD Radeon HD 7000-series graphics core and up to four AMD Steamroller x86 cores.

While Valve has made an investment into Xi3 and the two companies are jointly showcasing Piston at the Consumer Electronics Show this week, Valve stresses that Xi3 Piston will not be the only Steam Box available on the market. At least three types of Steam-centered gaming devices will be available: some will just stream video games from PCs (e.g., Nvidia Shield) or even servers, other will be tightly-controlled by Valve and will render games locally, the third breed will offer something more than just Steam games.

“The way we sort of think of it is sort of ‘Good’, ‘Better’, or ‘Best’. Good are like these very low-cost streaming solutions that you are going to see that are using Miracast or Grid. […] ‘Better’ [will] have a dedicated CPU and GPU and that is the one that is going to be controlled. […] It has been surprisingly difficult when we say to people ‘don’t put an optical media drive in there’ and they put an optical media drive in there and you are like ‘that makes it hotter, that makes it more expensive, and it makes the box bigger’. Go ahead. You can always sell the ‘Best’ box, and those are just whatever those guys want to manufacture,” explained Mr. Newell.

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