While we have known Valve as a gaming giant, thanks to the ultra-powerful and successful Steam platform, the company however is continuing its push into hardware side of the things.
Valve has now announced Steam Link, a streaming device which will let you Live stream any of your PC Games, into virtually any corner of your house. The new device, which starts shiping this November, supports Windows, mac, Linux and all steam-powered machines, including the latest lineup of gaming PCs like Alienware Alpha and others.
And how much does it cost ? Well, a paltry $49. Yes, that’s almost half the cost of Razer’s Forge TV, a mini set-top box of sorts streaming PC games from any device.
Valve’s push into hardware was evident when HTC announced Vive, its own Virtual-Reality headset powered by Valve. While Oculus continues to remain the more popular name in VR, a Valve-powered VR headset offering breathtaking gaming experience through Steam games, will definitely attract a huge amount of gamers as well as developers to it.
Announced at the Mobile World Congress on Sunday, Vive shows off two 1200 x 1080 displays, a smooth 90-frames-per-second refresh rate and a bunch of motion tracking technologies. If you want to know how good are these specs, the Oculus Rift has a single 1080p panel that can refresh fast enough to support 75 FPS, and while Gear VR has a 2560 x 1440 display, it can only go as fast as 60 FPS.
