Gabe Newell Confirms Steam Box is a Reality That Valve is Working On

Yesterday’s announcement of Valve partnering with Xi3 to bring the living room PC to the masses, excited many. But today’s reveal is going to blow your mind – even if you knew it was an eventuality. It’s been confirmed that Valve is working on bringing their own hardware to Steam fans across the globe, according to an interview The Verge conducted with Valve boss Gabe Newell.

“We’ll come out with our own and we’ll sell it to consumers by ourselves. That’ll be a Linux box, [and] if you want to install Windows you can. We’re not going to make it hard. This is not some locked box by any stretch of the imagination. We also think that a controller that has higher precision and lower latency is another interesting thing to have.”

It’s well documented that Newell isn’t a fan of Windows 8, but this confirms that Valve’s proposed “Steam Box” will allow Windows installation. Newell also gave the Valve opinion on motion controllers saying, “we can’t see how it makes games fundamentally better.” He added that the company are looking at the possibility of using biometrics data in their controllers, whilst also stating that gaze tracking could turn out to be “super important”. The openness of the platform still appears to be paramount in Newell’s eyes as he’s eager to see multiple stores for the Steam Box (codenamed “Bigfoot” at Valve).

“Some people will create team stores, some people will creates Sony stores, some people will create stores with only games that they think meet their quality bar. Somebody is going to create a store that says ‘these are the worst games on Steam.’ So that’s an example of where our thinking is leading us right now.”

And, of course, Valve are keen to break certain self-imposed boundaries by asking questions of this medium. Rather than just be a glorified Xbox or PlayStation, Newell is asking, why can’t it be a server for multiple players on different screens?

“Any PC can serve multiple monitors, so over time, the next-generation (post-Kepler) you can have one GPU that’s serving up eight simulateneous game calls, So you could have one PC and eight televisions and eight controllers and everybody getting great performance out of it. We’re used to having one monitor, or two monitors — now we’re saying lets expand that a little bit.”

The whole interview contains many interesting factoids about “Bigfoot” and is well worth a read. If all of the this comes to fruition, Valve may reap the rewards of the next generation, providing that the system is competitively priced.