PC gamers and Steam lovers can rejoice, because the cat’s finally out of the bag: a Valve’s “Steam Box” is official, Gabe Newell confirmed in a recent interview with The Verge.
While we can mostly guess at what a Steam Box means for games — namely a “Big Picture Mode” console designed for your TV — Newell did talk about some of the box’s other early features. For instance, rather than just the living room, they want the Steam experience to be sharable from screen to screen, and between different rooms with ease. But beyond that, Valve’s main emphasis will be open platforms with different manufacturers, open content and a way for gamers to publish and create their own content through the Steam store or possibly even personal stores. The goal is to make things easy for publishers and developers, and ideally that trickles down to gamers as well.
It’s certainly too early to tell anything about the Steam Box, but it basically sounds like my dream console. I’m pretty pumped on Steam at the moment, mostly due to the most recent Steam sale (sorry, but you’ll hear me mention it a million times over the next, I dunno, year, so I love the idea of an affordable console that runs what I think is currently best platform for games. I love that Valve will be removing the normal restrictions we see from consoles, and can’t wait to hear more about this. I definitely recommend checking out the rest of the interview, there’s even a bit about how they have been researching biometric feedback and new controller inputs.
What do you guys think of the Steam Box? Go!
Source – The Verge
hell yeah! i have been a linux distro user for about 5 years now and its about time this system actually got some recognition. i probably wont buy a “steam box” but seeing as the games that are released for it will be for native linux, that means i will FINALLY be able to play some decent games. Im not much of a gamer, as i hate dealing with windows so much that i prefer not to use it at all.
I too am very excited Eddy, but I’m not sure how affordable it will be. If in fact the “piston” from Xi3 (that was funded by Valve) has anything to do with the actual steam box anyway. In the interview with Gamespot the guy said the price point was around $999 for the 7A. Mind you, these are modular, so you can upgrade them as you need, but that’s still more expensive than a ps3 even at launch.
Sounds awesome, but I’m still pretty skeptical. Unless I’m misunderstanding, some of the proposed features are pretty insanely ambitious – hope they get a solid product launched soon rather than staying in perpetual development limbo on some of this stuff. It will be very interesting to see how this unfolds.
I’m excited to see where this could lead even though I’m not the target audience (already have my PC hooked up to my TV). The only thing I’m worried about is if the boxes keep coming like the Xi3 then we could see hardware stagnation like we get with the mainstream consoles now. Maybe a tier’d system like we used to see with the 360’s would work to stop that? Arcade with minimum specs for cheap then a premium with all the shiny new tech for a higher price.
As somebody who has recently been searching for a small form-factor PC to double as a gaming console, Steam Box has piqued my interest. If Valve really can pull this off, they’ll have earned a customer in me.