![]() Furthermore, he said that Steam Boxes - whatever shape they take - won't be available until after a lengthy testing. He said Valve attended CES this year primarily to meet with manufacturers and explore how a Steam Box-type interface or standard could be set up across many devices. Remember, Valve has already taken its first steps toward delivering PC games to home HDTV's with the newly launched Big Picture Mode. Big Picture is designed to simplify the process of getting PC games onto the TV by redesigning the Steam interface specially for use on a TV screen and by highlighting PC games that can be played using a standard button/thumbstick-sporting game controller.īut Valve representative Tom Giardito told PC Magazine that, in fact, Xi3 is just one of many hardware partners working with Valve. "So you could have one PC and eight televisions and eight controllers and everybody getting great performance out of it," he said. "We’re used to having one monitor, or two monitors - now we’re saying let's expand that a little bit."īut perhaps the best glimpse of what an official Steam Box might look something like is from PC-maker Xi3. Valve has invested in the company, which revealed its new modular Piston computer. The Piston, pictured above, is the size of a grapefruit and still in the development stage. The cube-shaped PC that has been optimized to play games on HDTVs using Valve's Steam service and its new Big Picture Mode. We think gaze tracking is going to turn out to be super important."Īs far as other details go, Newell mentioned that the company is looking at making the so-called Steam Box capable of delivering games to up to eight different screens in the house simultaneously. is essentially adding more communication bandwidth between the game and the person playing it, especially in ways the player isn’t necessarily conscious of. "I think you'll see controllers coming from us that use a lot of biometric data," he told The Verge. Newell said the smart minds at Valve have been attempting to improve upon the standard game controls in some interesting ways. We also think that a controller that has higher precision and lower latency is another interesting thing to have. This is not some locked box by any stretch of the imagination. ![]() "We’ll come out with our own and we’ll sell it to consumers by ourselves," Newell said of their hardware, adding, "That'll be a Linux box, if you want to install Windows you can. But the Valve head honcho did say the box would be based on the Linux operating system - perhaps not a surprise since Newell has a now-notorious dislike of Windows 8. So what will this so-called Steam Box look and operate like, exactly? Newell and Valve haven't released much in the way of exact details. This is big news, especially considering that Steam boasts some 50 million users worldwide - many of whom would probably love to have a convenient, comfortable way to play their favorite Steam-delivered PC games on their living room TV. If the Steam Deck can offer a different way to play PC games and Valve gives it the support a new console needs, there is a chance it will not suffer the same fate as its predecessors.In an interview with The Verge, Valve’s co-founder Gabe Newell confirmed that the company is working on its own gaming hardware for the living room - hardware that's specially designed to leverage its hugely popular Steam distribution service to deliver PC games and other media directly to your HDTV and perhaps other screens in the house. While Valve is primarily a software and game company, it has had success with its VR headset, the Valve Index. The Steam Deck is Valve's next attempt at cutting out a part of the console market for itself. The app is a free alternative that does the same things as the box, and is available on every major app store. In 2018 the hardware was discontinued, but the Link still exists on mobile devices and smart TVs. The Steam Link suffered a similar fate to the Steam Machines, except that it still lives on as downloadable software. The owner would have to connect a controller to the device and own a PC that ran Steam. While it was not a console, it still went after a very similar market by allowing users to stream their games to the TV. Alongside the release of the Steam Machines came the Steam Link.
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