Revisiting the Xi3 Piston

Interestingly enough, just days after posting my commentary on the upcoming game console in development from Valve, marketing director Doug Lombardi of Valve Corporation issued a statement clarifying some misconceptions about its development. In his statement, he explained that the Xi3 Piston is not in fact the official "Steam Box" console, and that Valve only did some exploratory work with Xi3 last year before ultimately breaking off involvement for the time being. Now the Piston has become Xi3's own pet project unrelated to Valve, and they are moving forward with plans to launch it at a starting price point of $999.99 USD, with higher tier models available at additional cost.

Nope, aint our console folks.

With these facts now disclosed, I feel it necessary to do some reflections on my previous editorial. I was originally writing under the assumption that the Piston was the official Steam Box, but now it appears this is clearly not the case. In addition, it has been revealed that the Piston will likely run on Windows OS, not Linux as was also a part of my previous assumptions. For the most part, this doesn't change my opinions in relation to how I feel about Valve's upcoming Steam Box, as most if not all of my points still apply to it, but this does significantly change my perspective on the Piston.

Most notably, now that it seems the Piston will be running on Windows, this means that gamers should be able to have other options besides Steam DRM-locked games for the system. This would make me much more supportive of it if it weren't for the introduction of a new caveat; the price point.

$$$

At roughly $1000 for its starting price, this puts the system at a significant disadvantage against other upcoming living room media centers from the Big Three, which will likely be priced at half the cost of the Piston at maximum, if not certainly even less.

Nintendo has already launched their next-gen system the Wii U at the price point of ~$300 and they have had difficulty staying afloat. Considering that this is Xi3's first attempt at directly competing with the console market, they also have no real devoted following of fans to rely upon as Nintendo does if all else fails. With all this in mind, the Piston is likely destined for failure if they can't at least find some way to bring the cost under control.

Sony made the mistake of being too arrogant with the loyalty of their fanbase last round during the launch of the PS3, and they assumed that people would still buy their console anyway despite its hefty price point of $500 at launch. As it turned out, they were wrong, and the system suffered from slow adoption for quite some time before they were able to pick up some strong exclusives and drive down costs. With as steep a price as we're looking at with the Piston and no fanbase whatsoever, it's poised to fall off the sales charts immediately beyond the point of no return.

Yeah, well I'm still the only console that can grill your hamburgers.

Of course being that the Piston is essentially still a PC at its core, its one saving grace is that gamers will already have access to a large library of excellent games for it at launch, but regardless, at a minimum price point of $1000, it's only going to appeal to the hardcore PC gamer market, which would rather custom build their PCs to get more bang for their buck anyway. The large majority of console gamers will likely take little interest in the Piston when they're typically on a tight budget and they're looking for a fully-equipped media center for their living room, which they can get from the other consoles for much cheaper.

I suspect that the main culprit behind the Piston's large cost is its small form factor in conjunction with its powerful hardware. As a general rule for PCs, the more power you try to cram into a smaller space results in exponentially higher costs. This is why laptops nearly always are outperformed by desktop PCs in terms of price versus performance gained. For these reasons, if I were in Xi3's position, I would consider expanding the size of the platform to drive down the cost of the hardware, as well as consider providing an option without the solid state hard drive, as it is mostly an unneeded luxury to the average console gamer that the system would be best targeted to. With just a few simple trimmings to its base design like this, I think it could be quite competitively priced as a living room media center that can rival the Big Three and potentially pull in a new market to the PC gaming scene. As it currently stands however, the Piston is just too highly-priced to justify its existence.