Razer brought a few big bombshells this year, the first of which being their announcement of a micro-console about the size of an AppleTV named Forge TV. It’s built on an Android TV platform allowing it to do what you’d expect with downloading games, apps and other content from the Google Play store. You can use the Forge TV's HDMI v1.4 connection to put the display to your TV or stream things from your other Android or iOS devices over to it using Google Cast.

 

It will include a Razer controller, called the Serval, that runs on bluetooth which is based on their Sabertooth Xbox controller. Unfortunately it doesn’t include a remote, but really, shouldn’t you own a Harmony by now?  It can handle up to four controllers for any multiplayer action you may want to get down to.

 

This is important because the Forge TV will come with Cortex, Razer's software that will let you stream Steam games from your PC to the Forge. This is going into beta testing this spring and will work over both wired and wireless connections. Expecting some PC gaming in the living room, Razer also announced the Turret, a keyboard and mouse setup that can rest in your lap and offer all the gaming features you’d expect from Razer’s PC peripherals. 

 

The Forge TV itself is $99.99 but doesn’t come with a controller. For that bundle the price jumps up to $149.99, which includes Cortex, which costs $39.99 as a standalone app. Serval controllers by themselves are $79.99 and the Turret is going for $129.99.

 

However this isn’t the big announcement from Razer at CES. That goes to the announcement that they’ve partnered up with several big names like Sensics to create an Open Source VR software suite along with a $199 VR hacker dev kit that will be out this summer.  The software is designed to work with multiple headsets so that the industry doesn’t end up with the mess that existed for some software in the early 90’s. OSVR’s SDK is due to be released in the second quarter of this year and has support for Unity now, with Unreal Engine 4 support coming later in January. HeroEngine and others have also promised that support is forthcoming.