It’s Official: Gabe Newell Shares Details About Valve’s Steam Box


With the first of many “Steam Box” computers making its debut at CES, Valve boss Gabe Newell has really opened up to The Verge about his company’s hardware plans, revealing that the range of gaming PCs might be even more ambitious than we would have imagined.

Some of the main things he touches on:

• Valve’s own Steam Box (Gabe actually refers to it as this) will be sold by Valve and will run Linux, though you can install Windows on it if you want. “This is not some locked box by any stretch of the imagination”, he says.

• The controller shipping with Valve’s Steam Box won’t use motion, but as expected, they will probably use some kind of biometric feedback. “Maybe the motion stuff is just failure of imagination on our part, but we’re a lot more excited about biometrics as an input method.” He also mentions gaze-tracking as being “super important”.

• Valve wants you to make your own Steam stores. “Some people will create team stores, some people will creates Sony stores, some people will create stores with only games that they think meet their quality bar. Somebody is going to create a store that says ‘these are the worst games on Steam.’ So that’s an example of where our thinking is leading us right now.”

• The Steam Box – code-named “Bigfoot” at Valve – won’t just be a PC. It’ll be a server, too, with the near future enabling you to “have one PC and eight televisions and eight controllers and everybody getting great performance out of it”. The LAN party just made a comeback. Only without all the cables.

There’s way, way more stuff – all of it interesting reading – in the full interview.

Exclusive interview: Valve’s Gabe Newell on Steam Box, biometrics, and the future of gaming [The Verge]


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