Valve refutes Steam Box console rumours

Valve’s Doug Lombardi has refuted suggestions that it is set to move into the console market.

Speaking to Kotaku, the marketing director said that the Half Life developer was a long way from shipping any sort of hardware, and was instead focusing on bringing Steam games to TV.

"We’re prepping the Steam Big Picture Mode UI and getting ready to ship that, so we’re building boxes to test that on.

"We’re also doing a bunch of different experiments with biometric feedback and stuff like that, which we’ve talked about a fair amount. All of that is stuff that we’re working on, but it’s a long way from Valve shipping any sort of hardware."

When asked if this meant Valve would not be making a console in the near future to reveal at GDC or E3, Lombardi responded: “I think that’s accurate”.

He also debunked recent reports that product designer Greg Coomer had leaked a picture of the Steam console (pictured) on Twitter, claiming that the studio always builds similar boxes to test software render for its games.

"Greg’s one of the guys leading the effort of the Big Picture mode," he said.

"The idea is that you can take Steam to any display. What we’re trying to do is say, ‘here’s a box that we’re going to use for testing that’s common for Big Picture mode and get performance at a base level.’… We’re always putting boxes together.

“Going all the way back to the Half-Life 1 days, we built special boxes to test our software render… it’s just part of development."