Valve boss Gabe Newell confirmed plans for a “turnkey solution” that will bring Steam to the living room with no fuss and no muss.
It sounds like the rumor of a “Steam box” console that erupted earlier this year may have been more on the money than Valve let on. The television-friendly “Big Picture” mode went live last week and at the Spike Video Game Awards on Friday, Newell said a few words about Valve’s expectations for more consumer-friendly, plug-and-play gaming PCs.
Valve expects that hardware builders will begin offering such purpose-built systems next year as a way to go head-to-head with traditional gaming consoles, and Newell said that Valve will be getting into that business as well. But as lock-down systems, these living-room boxes won’t offer the flexibility of conventional PCs.
“Certainly our hardware will be a very controlled environment. If you want more flexibility, you can always buy a more general purpose PC. For people who want a more turnkey solution, that’s what some people are really gonna want for their living room,” he tolk Kotaku. “The nice thing about a PC is a lot of different people can try out different solutions, and customers can find the ones that work best for them.”
Newell also said that Valve is now focused on getting the Linux version of Steam out of beta and bringing Big Picture to that OS. The studio is also hard at work on its next-generation game engine, which it will likely use to not make Half-Life 3.
Source: Kotaku
