Enter The Next Contender As Valve Team Up With Xi3 To Spawn ‘Piston’

There has been many rumours over the past couple of years about Valve finally making the leap to the console market.

Image taken by Polygon

finally making the leap to the console market. Of course no solid evidence existed until just last night when Xi3 announced “an investment from Valve Corporation” and “new Development stage computer game system,”.

The fact that Valve are indeed investing into Xi3 and not just using them as a third party company really does highlight how much time and investment Valve are taking with this new venture. After the night of breaks yesterday the initially titled “Steam Box” has now been given the more official codename of “ Piston “, which is very in-keeping with Valve’s nomenclature and a rather apt name.

This news has sent the whole video game community into a buzz especially when revealing “an integrated system that exceeds the capabilities of leading game consoles, but can fit in the palm of your hand.”. The now dubbed Piston is based on Xi3’s X7A computerand will support module updates for various hardware components, which will even allow you to update the CPU in the system.

How closely the Valve version will follow the specifications of the very impressive X7A are still unknown, although Piston is said to be based on the performance model of the X7A. Below is a table highlighting what you get with the X7A and may not reflect the end Piston model.

Feature Specification Processor Quad-core 64-bit, 3.2GHz (with 4MB of Level2 Cache) GPU Integrated GPU containing 384 programmable graphics cores Memory 4Gb – 8Gb of DDR3 RAM Storage 64Gb – 1Tb of internal solid-state SSD storage Ports 3 Display ports, 4 eSATAp 3.0 ports, 4 USB 3.0 ports, 4 USB 2.0 ports, 1Gb Ethernet port, 3 Audio ports Price $1100

This new technology is very exciting and heralds a new dawn of PC gaming in the living room, and with it a whole new platform to cement Indie Gaming into the mainstream no doubt every indie developer on Steam will now be implementing full “Big Picture” support in the wake of this announcement.

This move from Valve will no doubt upset the major console players already in the market, along with the up and coming mini consoles scheduled for release this year, as this once uncontested marketplace really begins to heat up this year.

This pairing will change PC games forever and will hopefully encourage even more developers to seriously consider the computer platform as a viable medium. Of course other consoles have particular holds on specific areas in the video gaming market, and the overlap may not be as dramatic as you may initially think. This said I am sure both Microsoft and Sony will be hoping to get Steam on to their next gen systems this time and with much better support.

Piston will no doubt be reduced to a lower price point compared to that of the X7A in order to remain competitive in the market, but this will greatly depend on the release date and overall market strategy. Expect to find out more about this pairing over the week as Valve and Xi3 promise to be showing a first glimpse of their tech at the 2013 International CES.

We will of course be keeping our eyes open for any new developments from Valve and Xi3 about their latest venture as we eagerly await more information.