Years of speculation, hints, teases, confirmations, and denials about Valve’s unannounced living room PC — the so-called Steam Box — might be coming to an end in the near future. The company has revealed that they will start to “roll out” information about the highly anticipated hardware sometime next week.
Valve co-founder Gabe Newell mentioned the upcoming Steam Box announcement yesterday at LinuxCon in New Orleans, saying in part:
“The next step in our contribution to this [expanding Steam to Linux] is to release some work we’ve done on the hardware side. Even more broadly in terms of the grand unification, we really don’t think that the fragmentation around the physical location or the input devices of computation is either necessary or desirable for software developers or for consumers.”
“None of the propriety closed platforms are going to be able to provide that grand unification between mobile, the living room, and the desktop. Next week we’re going to be rolling out more information about how we get there and what are the hardware opportunities that we see for bringing Linux into the living room and potentially pointing further down the road to how we can get it even more unified with mobile.”
Back in January of this year unconfirmed reports claimed Valve would debut the Steam Box sometime in 2013. While Newell didn’t specifically state that the system would get a full reveal next week, his comments do suggest that the company is finally ready to let us peak behind the curtain.
We will keep an eye out for whatever Steam Box information Valve is planning release next week, and let you know as soon as it is announced. In the meantime let us know your thoughts on living room gaming PCs. Is this something you are interested in, or would you rather stick to traditional consoles?