The 5 Biggest Video Game Announcements You Missed This Week
The Game Developers Conference currently transpiring in San Francisco wraps up Friday, meaning all the major announcements have already dropped. If you missed the show or didn't catch all the news, here's a recap of the highlights. Steam Link, due in November, was arguably the show's biggest tech revelation  especially if you're a PC gamer, because it means that for a trifling 50, you can pipe games from Valve's Steam library to any screen in your house essentially lag-free. Valve's Steam is the de facto way to play games on a PC, with a digital library of nearly 4,000 titles and membership topping 100 million. The companyotherwise known for first-person blockbusters like Portal, Half-Life 2 and Counter-Strikehas been making a protracted bid to capture a more substantial share of a pie traditionally dominated by console-makers like Sony, Microsoft and Nintendo. And for another 50, you can add the company's forthcoming PC-Steam Controller also due in November to the party. Not to be confused with the 250 Shield Portable, a gamepad with a flip-screen that Nvidia launched mid-2013, Nvidia's Shield hopes to fill a gap somewhere between a Roku or Apple TV and a high-end games console or PC. It'll output 4K video content when/where available, play last-gen console games like Crysis 3 and Borderlands The Pre-Sequel natively, stream upcoming triple-A games from Nvidia's GRID service and let you stream games locally from your PC just like Valve's Steam Link. The only catch it'll cost 200, which means Nvidia has to lure a demographic that may or may not exist or materialize once the Shield arrives this May. , I know, "Not another one." But that's where we are with virtual reality in 2015 everyone's jockeying for air time. HTC and Valve's take is called the HTC Vive HTC leading, Valve consulting, and pairs wand-like, handheld controllers with a fairly standard-looking, fully wraparound headset that plugs into your PC and outputs 1080p visuals to each eye. The wrinkle the headset tracks where you are in a much larger space, so you can move around instead of standing in place, assuming they figure out how to make the headset wireless and, you know, put you in a room without trip hazards. Will the Vive include a little speaker that goes "Beep! Beep! Beep! Beep!" like the warning system in a vehicle when you get too close to a wall?, Sony's Project Morpheus is comingby mid-2016, Sony's take on virtual reality was kind-of-sort-of supposed to arrive in 2015 chalk that up more to wishful thinking on the part of the press. Thus there was some predictable sighing and hand-wringing when the company announced Project Morpheus, a VR headset for the PlayStation 4 and PS Vita, will now arrive in the first half of 2016. Hey, at least Morpheus has a release timeframe. That's more than Facebook/Oculus Oculus VR, HTC/Valve HTC Vive and Razer OSVR can say to be fair, the Oculus-powered Samsung Gear VR is reportedly coming by the end of 2015. At last check in early January, Sony said it sold 18.5 million units through December 2014. At GDC this week, it bumped that figure to 20 million units sold through February 2015, still shy of the PlayStation 4's one-and-a-half year anniversary. Rebutting gloomy analyst predictions about this generation of console gaming, the PS4 is the fastest selling video games console in history.