Valve’s Gabe Newell has just announced they will be revealing their upcoming gaming hardware next week.
Valve made this announcement at Linuxcon 2013, where he also spoke at length about developing for Steam. Of course, many people believe this upcoming hardware will be the much vaunted Steambox.
Valve’s original plans for the Steambox is as a dedicated Steam gaming computer, that will have certain technical specifications, but will give consumers the flexibility to play games, play media, go online etc, and run on Linux or Windows as their customers prefer. Valve also intended to make a default model as a template for other computer manufacturers to follow.
Steambox may be comparable to MSX. MSX was a home computing standard developed and most popular in Japan in the early 80s, famous now for being a major Japanese gaming platform at the same time as the Famicom and Sega’s SG-1000. To go further, MSX was iterated upon four times over, as more and more computer manufacturers (including Sony) joined in to make the computer standard even more popular in Japan.
Valve apparently invested in bespoke computer designers Xi3 to create a small form factor gaming computer, called the Piston. At the time, it did sound like this might be close to an official Steambox, perhaps Valve’s default model. However, Xi3 later decided to release a Windows version of Piston, apparently without Valve’s knowledge. Ensuing statements from both companies indicated that whatever earlier deal they had has subsequently been dissolved.
This does not preclude Valve from contracting another company, such as Dell or Lenovo, from making their Steambox, or perhaps even engaging computer component manufacturers directly to really build it themselves. Whatever form Steambox takes, it will be interesting to see what Valve has planned after months of silence.
Image is of the Xi3 Piston.
Source: BBC
