The Steam Machines' Position in the Gaming Industry

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With the recent announcement of what computer specifications that the Steam Machines prototypes would be shipped to the lucky 300, we can kind of figure out what Valve is trying to do here;


The specifications of Steam Machine
    Low End Specs: 
  • RM719.00: Nvidia GeForce GTX 660 (2GB of GDDR5)
  • RM449.00: Intel Core i3-4330 Dual-Core
  • RM438.00: 16GB (8GBx2) of DDR3-1600 RAM
  • RM429.00: Gigabyte GA-H87N-WIFI LGA1150 Motherboard
  • RM399.00: Seagate ST1000DX001 1TB+8GB SSHD
  • RM359.00: Silverstone SFX 450Watts 80+Gold
Total not including casing: RM2793.00
     As quoted above, the Steam Machine of that variant will roughly cost around that price if you were to build it yourself in Malaysia. Considering our markup rates, this isn't exactly anywhere near to a very budget gaming machine. I had a bit of experience trying to build myself a rig with parts and this is the certainly not the way I would put together a budget gaming machine. I would had used a cheaper motherboard and also a cheaper hard disk (maybe you know, get rid of the SSHD cache) to achieve free up some space for maybe a GTX760 or an HD7950.

    What I think Valve is doing is what normal boutique systems sellers do which is basically just helping customers to build a machine suitable for their needs without the premium. Perhaps it's just a move to get people who are interested in PC gaming, but know next to nothing about hardware to move onto the PC ecosystem. I wanted to mention the Steam Machine with high end specs, but I'm afraid it's really too far fetched for a lot of people here in Malaysia especially at a rough estimated price of RM6000.

The Alienware X51
    So what is the Steam Machine's role in Valve's attempt to bring PCs to the living room? The answer is, it's just an alternative to other system builders. Let's face it, if consumers that know less to nothing wanted to buy a high end computer, who would they look for? Especially for gamers I think, they would look at Alienware and ASUS's "Gaming Desktops" which you may want to know that you are overpaying for the specs they are offering. 


     Moreover, the Steam Machines ship with Valve's native Steam OS which is based on Linux. Gabe Newell love for Open Source Software has led him to believe that a closed ecosystem has no place in the future *cough*Windows*cough*. Valve has already ported most of it's games to Linux and are encouraging game devs to do so to. The eventual departure of gaming to Linux is imminent it seems as Windows are making no moves to keep gaming on it's platform. The Steam Machines are just a catalyst to speed up the process of Linux taking over the gaming world.

Cr: Prices from Viewnet & IdealTech

    

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