Valve may have decided to go it alone when it comes to manufacturing Steam controllers , but the company's getting a little help in pushing out the box itself. Valve's Greg Coomer told IGN that we'll know which companies will construct Valve's fleet of Steam Machines sometime during CES 2014, which runs from Jan. 7-10, 2014.
“There really is a pretty huge variety of machines," Coomer told IGN. “It's not a huge number of boxes. In January we're going to start to be specific about which partners there are, how many boxes there are, what kinds of specs those machines will include. Probably ballpark figures on what kind of range of prices we'll be seeing for those boxes.”
Valve's Anna Sweet promised that the companies Valve teamed up with are each making machines with varying specs and price tags to fit the company's individual customers.
"We have 65 million Steam users,” Sweet said. “They're a broad range of gamers. They all have different priorities when it comes to buying a Steam Machine. All our partners we're working with are optimizing differently for size, for price, for performance, for all those things you would expect. We think that's great, because there's a ton of different customers out there who want an experience like this, but have different priorities when they're thinking about what they want to buy.”
While the company's ditching the tried and true “one spec, one console” method console manufacturers have traditionally used, it'll be interesting to see if Valve's move boosts PC sales at all. January's still a couple month's away though, which is more than enough time to, I don't know, build your own Steam Machine.
