Valve looks like they are working on their own Steam Box hardware - Page 2

I ask the obvious question: is this the first step toward Valve making a console of their own? Maybe the Steam Box that has been rumored (and repeatedly shot down) for months now?

"What we really want is to ship [Big Picture mode] and then learn," Coomer said. "So we want to find out what people value about that. How they make use of it. When they make use of it. Whether it's even a good idea for the broadest set of customers or not. And then decide what to do next.

"So it could be that the thing that really makes sense is to build the box that you're describing. But we really don't have a road map. And we think we're going to learn a tremendous amount through this first release."

"And if it's getting involved in shipping some kind of hardware, then we will get involved in doing that if we need to."

When asked what the team's immediate goals are, she obliquely states, "To make Steam games more fun to play in your living room." That's the team's one-year goal, at least. The challenge is making games that require a mouse and keyboard palatable to people who are used to a controller, or to people who just don't want to migrate PC controls to the comfort of their living room. Working in tandem with Steam's newly beta'd "Big Picture Mode," Ellsworth's team is creating a hardware solution to the control barriers found in many Steam games. She wouldn't give any hints as to what that solution is exactly, but she left no options off the table -- from Phantom Lapboard-esque solutions to hybrid controllers.

Ellsworth doesn't give any hints as to what form that peripheral will take, but says no options have been left off the table. It's worth noting an interesting-looking patent application Valve filed last year surfaced, featuring dual analog sticks that can be swapped out for trackballs and other inputs:



Internal beta tests on a handful of different controllers are already underway, with Valve employees able to get their hands on and try the current prototypes. Once the field is narrowed down, Ellsworth said Valve will put one or more of those controllers into gamers' hands for external beta testing. Valve already has a production line for short runs in place to make it happen, and it's likely testers will be selected through Steam, though no concrete details have been made.

...and all of this could've been easily fixed (for FPS titles as well) if the PS3 came with a thumb-trackball in the place of the right analog stick as standard. Many that would've been an awesome marriage of control pad character control with the precision of mouse-look aiming.

Valve has stayed mostly quiet about its plans to enter the hardware business, but in an interview with Kotaku at last night's Video Game Awards, Gabe Newell confirmed the company's plans to sell its own living room PC that could compete with next-generation consoles from Sony and Microsoft. The biggest revelation is that Valve seems set to release its own complete hardware and software solution. When we first reported that the company was working on a "Steam Box" back in March, it appeared that Valve was working on a prototype that would establish a baseline for hardware manufacturers, but it wasn't clear if the company would sell its own product or simply release the designs to others. Newell's comments to Kotaku provide a much clearer picture of what's happening; Newell says that he expects companies to start selling PCs designed for the living room next year — which Kotaku says could have Steam preloaded — and that Valve will create its own distinct package.

Newell suggests that the company will create its own carefully managed PC ecosystem that's distinct from the one offered by other hardware partners — a possibility that our own Sean Hollister exposed after looking at the company's comments and actions in recent years, including its aversion to Windows 8, its recent embrace of Linux, and its existing push into the living room with Steam's Big Picture Mode. Newell tells Kotaku that "our hardware will be a very controlled environment," and that some people will want a "turnkey" solution for their living room.

As a digital distribution platform, Steam is wildly successful, with more than five million concurrent users on any given day and over 50 million users in total (by comparison, Xbox Live has more than 40 million users). But Valve doesn't reap any income from the sale of hardware that runs its platform or the software it hosts, and the company doesn't control Windows, which is the most popular platform among computers running Steam.

Newell stopped short of saying that the company was building a Linux-based Steam OS, but he reportedly says that the next step for the company's living room operation is to enable Big Picture on Steam for Linux. From there, the timeline is still pretty murky — we only know that Newell expects some hardware to show up sometime next year — but Valve's intent to compete in the living room in a big way is no longer a secret.