Steam Powered: Steam Machines at CES 2014.

Steam Machines continue to edge closer and closer to being a tangible reality, as the first generation of Valve's PC/Console brainchildren were revealed to the public recently at CES 2014. Offerings run the gambit from $6000 behemoths following a 'because we can' design philosophy, to Gigabyte's budget focused Brix Pro, that's form factor is as diminutive as its spec sheet.  The mid range is catered for by boxes of reasonable processing power that we're told will retail at around the next generation console price point, although I expect them to go a little further north of that come release day given their bills of materials.

So, pricing is all over the place, but to my mind, at this point it would seem that only the cheapest Steam Machines are going to offer gamers any kind of real value for money. It may be early days in terms of SteamOS adoption considering it's only in a beta form right now, but so far the vast majority of Steam's Linux ready games are either indie titles with meagre system requirements or from the House of Freeman's own aging back catalogue. This makes the extra grunt some of the more expensive iterations offer pretty redundant. Also, you could buy a more traditional PC for the same price of most of these that would perform exponentially more tasks and be compatible with a far broader range of games, including non-Steam ones, while offering like-for-like performance. True, you might not end up with something quite as svelte, but how often would you really be moving a Steam Machine around, anyway?

The Brix Pro

The aforementioned pint-sized Brix Pro is the only one thus far to offer a value proposition to rival the Xboxes and Playstations of this world. It rocks a mid tier fourth generation Intel i7 processor, but relies on the chip's inbuilt Iris Pro 5200 graphics solution for polygon pushing duties. This might sound like a recipe for disaster in a gaming focused machine, but it's important to remember that on board graphics solutions have come a very long way over the past few years. Indeed, nowadays as long as you're using a half decent decent processor you can expect most games to be playable, even if some of a given title's visual fidelity needs to be sacrificed to afford smooth gameplay. The Brix Pro should easily be able to handle the indie games and Valve classics that make up most of SteamOS's current storefront. Given the Brix Pro is already available in the US as a no OS, DIY kit for around the same price as the PS4 (albeit with exchange rates factored in, and with more RAM but minus a hard drive), you'd expect it to be in that ballpark should it make it to these shores. The Brix Pro might be just the ticket for some big screen Counter Strike, Left 4 Dead or Trine.

A snap happy Twitter user's photo of Valve's updated Steam
Controller concept.

Also of note from CES is that the Steam Controller has now lost its touch screen, which has been replaced by two clusters of digital directional buttons just beneath the touch pads. One analogue stick and one set of directional buttons may have been a more FPS friendly approach here, but there's still time for further changes.

A large question mark continues to loom over through which channels the public will be able to buy both Steam Machines and the Steam Controller over here in the UK. Given that Valve's hardware partners are either bespoke, usually online only, PC builders or component manufacturers rather than the Hewlett Packards or Lenovos of this world, I wouldn't expect they'll be much chance of picking one up on the high street, meaning that e-tailers are likely to be your only option. Again, though, only time will tell.

As always, check UDLR again soon for more Steam Machine, SteamOS and Steam Controller related news, information and musings.