Meet Steamboy: the portable Steam Machine
A teaser video posted to YouTube has shown off a few glimpses of a portable gaming device designed to play your Steam library on the go.
Before Valve delayed the Steam Controller -- and by extension the whole Steam hardware family -- we'd seen a few Steam Machine designs, mostly based around small-form factor desktop cases.
The Steamboy, according to its teaser video, goes even smaller, offering a Steam Machine that's been packed into a handheld gaming device.
The video was posted to YouTube at the end of E3, the Electronic Entertainment Expo in LA. At 43 seconds long, there are a lot of quick shots of the Steamboy, but very little information.
The Steamboy has a XABY control scheme, similar to an Xbox controller, but also features the dual touch pads of the Steam Controller.
The Steamboy team spoke to The Escapist saying that the handheld device should feature a Quad-Core CPU, 4GB RAM, a 32GB built-in memory card, and a 5-inch 16:9 touchscreen. Connectivity will come via WiFi and 3G and it should play "the majority of current games in Steam". The Steamboy team is aiming for a 2015 launch.
The team is a third party group, not affiliated with Valve but that's certainly in keeping with Valve's partnerships in terms of the Steam Machine.
Given the long lead time of the project, we're a little surprised at the Steamboy manufacturers giving out even a basic spec sheet -- we'd anticipate that going through quite a few iterations before it arrives on the market. At the very least, we'd be hoping for 4G/LTE connectivity rather a bog standard 3G.
It also seems very closely tied to the Steam Controller, given the look of its touchpads, and that particular project has been sent back to the drawing board to "make the controller a lot better". It's quite conceivable that a big change in the Controller could necessitate more than a few alterations to the Steamboy as well.
Wild and unfettered speculation aside, we'll update this story if any additional information comes to hand.