Xi3 Corporation today announced that it is accepting pre-orders for its Steam Box / PISTON Console.
The list price of Xi3’s PISTON Console starts at $999.99. Any PISTON Console pre-order placed between now and the end of SXSW 2013 (11:59 p.m. CST, Sunday, March 17, 2013), will receive a $100 discount off the list price, with pre-ordered PISTON Consoles shipped in time for the 2013 Holiday Season. (The special PISTON Console pre-order page is found at https://xi3.com/buy_now-piston.php.)
We first heard about PISTON in January 2013 when Xi3 announced that it had received an investment from Valve Software to work together to develop a "development stage product" based on Linux and Steam’s Big Picture mode.
It is worth noting however that, although PISTON is still powered by Steam for Linux, Valve was not mentioned anywhere in PISTON’s official announcement.
For $999.99, the base version of PISTON boasts a 3.2GHz quad-core AMD accelerated processing unit, a Radeon 7000-series GPU that supports up to 3 monitors simultaneously, 8 GB RAM and 128GB solid state hard drive. The 256 GB model costs $1,340 and the 512 GB model costs $1,750.
Last year, Valve CEO Gabe Newel shared his vision of Steam Box as an open platform that can be manufactured by different manufacturers. It is quite possible that we’ll see other Steam Boxes released by different companies under different brands.