"Half Life" Valve Manufacturer: Sony and Microsoft to get game consoles ... - ABC Online

Nintendo, Sony and Microsoft get new competition in the gaming console market. The “Half Life” Valve manufacturer wants to produce an equal number of devices. They should operate under the name “Steam Machines”.

the already hard-fought game console market, a new rival logs on. The game developer Valve announced late Wednesday in a private family of gaming devices. The brackets with the name of Steam Machines are to come in the coming year in collaboration with several partners on the market. Valve is behind the series of games “Half-Life” and the Steam platform with PC games to download.

Consoles are running with the Linux-based operating system SteamOS that Valve had announced on Monday. First, to get prototypes for testing 300 selected Steam users. The series models from different manufacturers should differ in price, size and noise level, it said. The recent Steam client also would not replace their PC games through the console: “Everything in which we have worked in the last ten years for Steam will be more available in the future.”

The tester should access the games could offer on the Steam platform. There are approximately 3,000 titles on offer. Hundreds of them have already been transferred to SteamOS, more would be added. Valve offers SteamOS as free and free operating system that users can install on their own devices. As with the large console manufacturers can play with SteamOS also music and movies.

The games business is currently in motion. The established heavyweights got new competition from free or extremely cheap games for smartphones and tablets. Sony and Microsoft try this coming holiday season, with the new high-tech Playstation 4 and Xbox One to defend their place. Nintendo hopes that with attractive games also attracts the previously weak sales of the Wii U console.