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Valve’s Steam has been at the forefront of digital distribution for a while now, ever since it kicked off as an initially pretty annoying way to prevent piracy for the developer’s Half-Life series. Now it seems Valve’s eyeing up Steam’s logical evolution – a fully-fledged gaming console for your living room — the “Steam Box.”
According to The Verge, sources have said that instead of making the box itself, Valve will come out with a hardware specification and platform software that’ll allow third parties to make compatible boxes, which will also be able to play any PC game.
Gabe Newell, Valve’s co-founder, has stated in the past “if we have to sell hardware we will,” but that “we’d rather hardware people that are good at manufacturing and distributing hardware do [hardware].”
There were rumours that Alienware’s new X51 mini-gaming PC box was designed with this Steam Box idea in mind, which looks more likely given that The Verge have a rough specification of a Core i7 chip backed up by 8GB of RAM and a Nvidia GPU tipped.
Apparently they’ll be a proprietary USB controller too, possibly with swappable components for different play styles. Biometric feedback is also rumoured, meaning the game should be able to respond to your emotions and pulse rate for instance.
Rumours are just that, but I’d be pretty stoked to see Valve pull something like this. It could bring PC gaming well and truly into the living room, which has been the domain of the traditional console since its launch. Let’s just hope the Steam Box doesn’t break the bank; otherwise I reckon it’d have a tough time displacing the PS3 and Xbox 360. [The Verge]
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This excites me.
A marriage between PC and console gaming would be perfect. It would make life so much easier for game developers, thus brining costs down, hopefully meaning higher quality less buggy releases, more frequently. Win for consumers.
You could either use the Steam software on a normal PC, or the specialised Steam hardware which comes with your XBMC-type OS sitting on top of Windows. The Steam hardware will all be identical so developers can target performance for that level of hardware (and custom PC users can push it further).
After imagining this concept for a while, proprietary consoles like Xbox and Playstation start to look like pointless dinosaurs, and an astronomical waste of developer time.
This is definitely the way to rescue PC gaming too (it can just piggyback on the success of living-room gaming).
Come on Valve, do this right…
A console sized PC standard not so much a console. And a more console like steam interface and steam peripherals so not so much a console itself. Steams new big picture is looking like pretty cool software.
I should imagine a couple of my chums might use this opposed to a PC if they could use a Bluetooth Keyboard and Mouse but i’m sure most of the Hardcore PC gamers prefer to use PCs. If steam are attacking the console market, why not approach Sony & Microsoft and see if they would license it for their consoles as Apps?
How could it run on the Xbox or Playstation as an app? They are PC games so need to run on a PC in whatever form factor.
If they make it so that you have idiot proof upgradable components then this would be perfect. It’s surprising someone hasn’t already made a hybrid console/pc before.
Seeing how the computer world can be pretty daunting for a home console user, I can appreciate how having a valve backed standard for PC’s will come in handy.
Knowing you want a PC, and being able to buy one that is certified to run every Valve released game will be great piece of mind. Even the back of games like Battlefield 3 might be able to say: Will run on Max (Or medium, whatever specs the box ends up having) settings on the steam box despite not being a valve game.
This is a good idea for people who want to buy into the world of PC gaming and reap the benefits like mods and user content, while keeping the world of knowing your game will always be able to run smooth that consoles give you, something that can be hard to come by in PC lands because of the many configurations a rig can take.