As separate report claims to have early specs for the so-called 'SteamBox'
With the games industry gripped by widespread rumours that Valve is building its own home games console, it has been discovered that an employee at the company last year published a picture of what could be a prototype device.
Greg Coomer, a product designer who has worked at Valve for about fifteen years, now finds himself at the centre of the latest storm of speculation after it was discovered he had posted onto his Twitter account a picture of the so-called ‘Steam Box’.
Games site Kotaku has also published further claims from an anonymous source who suggests that the console project has “just 5-10 people working on it”.
Meanwhile, tech blog the Verge says that the Valve games console could be made by a variety of partners, including Alienware.
“Apparently meetings were held during CES to demo a hand-built version of the device to potential partners,” read the Verge report.
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“We're told that the basic specs of the Steam Box include a Core i7 CPU, 8GB of RAM, and an Nvidia GPU. The devices will be able to run any standard PC titles, and will also allow for rival gaming services (like EA's Origin) to be loaded up.”
In his most recently published interview, Valve managing director Gabe Newell said “if Valve has to sell hardware, we will".
“We’re thinking of trying to figure out how to do the equivalent of the incremental approach in software design and try to figure out how would you get something similar to that in the hardware space as well,” he added.
He went on to claim that the current model for releasing hardware was too inflexible.
“The sort of old method of, you know, let’s go make a giant pile of inventory and hope that some set of applications emerge to justify this giant hardware investment doesn’t seem to be very consistent with what we’ve seen to be the fastest ways to move stuff forward,” he said.
Valve, which has a company culture that encourages R&D, product incubation and design experiments, has not commented on the latest wave of rumours.
Bad move, Valve!
looks like the 1st gen Apple TV boxes. Apple's going to sue you Valve. That might be a good thing.
Erm... let's not get too excited, that's probably just an off the shelf microATX case with an off the shelf microATX motherboard inside.
In fact, the motherboard in that Twitter picture could easily be this Zotac one: http://www.zotacusa.com/zotac-z68-itx-wifi-supreme-z68itx-b-e.html
Nothing bad about the move. Online and f2p games are starting to demand high-end PC specs. Too many people out there that would be playing these games if they didn't need a pricey PC to do it.
Now surely all they need to do is work out a way that we can download the hardware - surely that's the steam ethos?
A Steam Box console which is made up of PC parts, runs PC games so means it will run Windows, can install games and games distribution systems on it.
Sounds like it has already been done, what did they call that invention again... Ohhhh yeah, a PC.
I think this is a great product. It's basically a tv hookup pc with a dvd drive and wireless xbox controls. niceeee. :)
It looks like a PC...
It's highly unlikley that it will run windows probably linux if anything, which means that they would have to port steam and source engine etc to linux. It would probably run a custom Linux distribution made by valve with the Linux kernel to be more konsole like rather than a linux desktop.
All console are made up of pc parts, running pc games, but running their own proprietary operating systems that make them locked from upgrades and forcing you to play games encoded to run on that operating system. Don't be ignorant, this sounds like steam will an "operating system" that will allow upgrades. The problem will be ignorant people like "SOOO" whining about unfair gameplay when their friend has blazing graphics after upgrades.
