11 18 25 ABC Technology Reporter Mike Dobuski talks about new Steam Gaming Hardware

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Ginagondt Con, Colorado's Morning News. We'll step aside PlayStation, Xbox, Nintendo.
Another company is trying to take over the gaming worlds,
But does it really have enough name recognition to game
traction and can a new device really change the game?
Joining us on the ka Common Spirit Health Hotline for
our Tech Tuesday Chat is ABC News Tech reporter Mike Debuski. Mike,

(00:20):
appreciate your time as always. Okay, tell us a little
bit more about this Valve Steam Machine. If anybody plays
PC games, they probably know the word Steam. But when
you talk about this actual gaming console, I guess you
could say, what are some of the pros and cons
of what we could see in the gaming world.

Speaker 2 (00:35):
Yeah, Valve getting into the hardware space. As you mentioned,
people might be familiar with Steam, which is sort of
an online gaming marketplace. You can go on your PC,
download a game for a couple bucks and play it. Now,
this company wants to go to the next level. They
want to compete with PlayStation and Xbox, and they're doing
it with this new device that they showed off in

(00:56):
the last few days called the Steam Machine. The idea
here is that Valve wants to bridge the gap between
the two major worlds of gaming right now. The world
of PC gaming, which is expansive. You can play a
lot of different games and at very high fidelity, but
it can be pretty complicated. You have to sort out GPUs,
and a lot of people like to build their own
PCs and so on and so forth. It's kind of

(01:18):
for the really intense hardcore enthusiasts. The other side of
gaming is console gaming. This is where you find the
PS five, the Xbox, these pretty popular consoles that are
easy to plug into your TV, turn on and just
start playing. Those are great, they're very popular, but they
do have some limitations. For example, there's a limit on

(01:38):
the computing power of a PlayStation, even the high end ones,
and you're limited to certain games. Grant Torismo, the very
popular online racing game, is limited to Sony devices. Meanwhile,
Halo up until recently, was an Xbox exclusive. Valve's latest device,
which is actually called the Steam Machine, plugs into your

(01:58):
TV just like a con but it actually is a
powerful gaming computer. They say it's about six times as
powerful as they're handheld gaming device, which is called the
Steam Deck, bringing together the wide variety of games from
the PC world with the convenience of the console. That's
if they pull this all off, and if they do,
it has the potential to really shake up the gaming market.

Speaker 1 (02:20):
So, Mike, if I'm understanding this correctly, the Steam Machine
is more than just a gaming console. Does it have
PC qualities to it as well? Can you use it
as a PC and as a game on your TV?

Speaker 2 (02:32):
It runs Linux and on top of that there is
the Steam Operating System. So yes, it's a PC, it's
a computer and you can run any number of programs
on it. We have some questions around exactly how customizable
this is. That's a big part of PC gaming. People,
you know, build their own PCs for gaming purposes and
then they say, hey, maybe I want some nicer graphics.

(02:53):
I'm going to buy a better graphics processing unit or GPU,
and then I'm going to kind of switch that out
and make sure that my computer is a little bit
more powerful. The adaptability of the Steam Machine, I think
remains a bit of an open question right now, as
does the price, and that's going to be a big question.
Mark Xbox sales have been down dramatically in the last
few quarters, down twenty two percent last quarter alone, as

(03:16):
prices on that console have been rising. That's the same
story over in the PlayStation world. Their sales are actually
up slightly over last quarter or last year. Excuse me, however,
you can now spend up to seven hundred and fifty
dollars on a PlayStation device. That's a pretty far cry
and pretty out of reach from where it used to be.

(03:37):
So if Valve comes in here at a reasonable price
with the adaptability of a PC but the convenience of
a console, that could really spell danger for a lot
of these big name gaming console devices. However, it's a
smaller company, the economies of scale are still a bit
of a question mark, so they very well might come
in above those other devices as well. We'll have to

(03:59):
see exactly how this plays out, but they are going
big into hardware. There's not just the Steam Machine. They
also have a controller that goes with it that is
not proprietary. You don't have to buy it alongside the
Steam Machine. You can use whatever controller you like, but
that's available there as well, as well as a VR
headset that you can put on. So it seems like
they're trying to target meta with their Quest headsets as well,

(04:20):
which are very popular in the VR gaming space.

Speaker 1 (04:23):
That's fascinating. ABC News tech reporter Mike Debuski.

Speaker 2 (04:26):
Thanks Mike, of course, take care