So, who’s about to show their age and admit to remembering when the GameBoy first came out? It was seen as being a game changer and opened the gaming world to a number of unlikely candidates who didn’t have a console themselves at home. Steams has followed Nintendo’s lead and are developing SteamBoy.
Also See: CryEngine Developer Licenses Now Available on Steam
SteamBoy will allow users to play games bought from steam, on the portable device. As it stands at the moment, Steam is pretty much only used by PC gamers; this cuts out a large proportion of potential players who don’t have PC’s, or at least not one’s suitable for gaming on. SteamBoy will open up this world of gaming opportunity to everyone, making it playable pretty much anywhere.
The SteamBoy is said to become available to the masses in 2015 and will feature Wi-Fi and 3G connectivity. It is designed to have the same controls and touchpad as the already existing Steam controller and will have a 5 inch screen. As it stands it is apparently set to come with a quad-core processor, 32GB of internal storage and 4GB of RAM.
Also See: Next-Gen Game Unreal Engine 4.1 to Support SteamOS
The company making the device said that this spec should allow users to play the “majority of current games” already on Steam. Although it hasn’t made clear if, as newer games get released, the hardware will become insufficient as memory becomes more demanding and graphics more detailed.
That’s the beauty of PC gaming – the ability to upgrade the hardware without having to buy a whole new system. But for the meantime, there certainly is a market for a portable Steam player.