Can Valve make the Steam Box affordable?

Can Valve make the Steam Box affordable?

Back in January at CES 2013, the world got a good look at a prototype of Valve’s upcoming Steam Box. The little cube PC, created by manufacturer Xi3, is essentially a PC gaming rig with modern specs, but aimed at the living room. However, as the pre-orders begin at $999, it seems unlikely that Valve can offer a powerful Steam Box at a console price.

We live in a world of smartphones and tablets, so it was never a question whether or not the Steam Box could pack powerful, sophisticated hardware into a little cube. The real question was whether or not Valve would be able to price it in an affordable way that could compete with standard game console prices. Xi3 has opened up pre-orders for the little cube PC, dubbed the Piston, and the price-to-hardware ratio certainly suggests that Valve won’t be able to price its Steam Box at that $300 to $400 game console sweet spot without taking a huge hit.

The Piston, starting at a minimum price of $999, will net you an integrated 3.2GHz quad-core AMD CPU and a 7000-series Radeon GPU, along with 8GB of RAM, and a 128GB SSD. Not to be confused with the other tiny modular PCs Xi3 offers, the Piston can only currently be customized with internal storage, and there are only three options. The 128GB SSD comes standard, and will not cost any extra, while a 256GB SSD will add another $340 onto that $999 price tag, and a 512GB SSD will add $750 onto the final price. Normally, an acceptable price for an SSD is a little less than a dollar per gig, so it would seem that storage capacity runs at a premium on the Piston. Unfortunately, a 128GB SSD just won’t be enough space if you’re an avid PC gamer, unless you meticulously wipe games from your SSD on a regular basis to make way for new ones. For reference, two big upcoming PC game releases, BioShock Infinite and StarCraft II: Heart of the Swarm, require 20GB of free space each. Those two games alone will inhabit one third of your gaming SSD.

Currently, Xi3 is offering $100 off that $999 price tag if you pre-order before March 17.

Now, the Piston isn’t a slouch in terms of gaming capability and power, but the small form-factor is no doubt responsible for the higher-priced hardware, which isn’t even top-of-the-line PC gaming hardware. So, if $1,000 won’t net you top-of-the-line PC gaming hardware, how can Valve offer a console powerful enough to play everything on Steam without a hitch, but at a price competitive with consoles? If it wants to compete with console pricing while still offering a box that can run everything on Steam perfectly, it’ll have to adopt the console-selling mindset: Take a monetary hit on the hardware, make it up somewhere else.

Sure, Valve could sell a Steam Box that trades a bit of power for a price drop. However, marketing a gaming rig with the caveat that it’ll be cheaper if you sacrifice being able to run certain games on it will be a hard sell. This’ll especially ring true when the the PS4 andXbox 720 can run all of their games just fine. Now, PC gamers understand that sentiment — that you pay for less power and sometimes can’t run a game well. That trade-off is something you have to accept as a PC gamer. If Valve is trying to market the Steam Box to the console market, though — which is the whole point of the Steam Box — then it’ll have to offer everything a console can and more. Considering Valve’s unit is running Linux (so far), and thus doesn’t offer the majority of games the PC market has to offer, the Steam Box can’t really afford more disadvantages.

Obviously though, Valve wouldn’t be where it is today if it didn’t know what it was doing in most respects. While the Piston seems like it’ll make a decent secondary gaming rig for the living room, or perhaps a no-hassle entry-level rig for new PC gamers, it won’t light the PC gaming world on fire. We haven’t seen Valve’s official Steam Box just yet, but the Piston is essentially the prototype, so it’s safe to assume one of three things of the Steam Box. Either it won’t be traditional console-level cheap, it won’t be powerful enough to run top-notch PC games at their highest settings, or Valve is going to perform monetary magic and make it affordable and as powerful as a top-of-the-line rig.