Recently theres be a lot of rumors being spread about Valve, the creators of the massive gaming service Steam. It has been said that Valve has been thinking of creating a proper set-top console which could potentially pose a threat to the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3. Valve co-founder Gabe Newell even recently told Penny Arcade: “Well, if we have to sell hardware we will.”
As well as this we’ve uncovered information that suggests that not only has Valve been secretly working on gaming hardware for the living room, but that the company is actively pursuing a strategy which would place Steam at the center of an open gaming universe that mirrors what Google has done with Android. Game also said that “We’d rather hardware people that are good at manufacturing and distributing hardware do [hardware]. We think it’s important enough that if that’s what we end up having to do, then that’s what we end up having to do.” which makes you wonder what they have actually got in store.
As wellas hardware obviously playing a huge part for the so called “Steam Box” but they have been hard at work trying to make the software the key backbone for this. However steam has said ” The actual devices may be made by a variety of partners, and the software would be readily available to any company that wants to get in the game.
And if that wasnt enough to be exicited about, it has been said that Alienware X51 may have been designed with an early spec of the system in mind, and will be retroactively upgradable to the software.
Apparently meetings were held during CES to demo a hand-built version of the device to potential partners. We’re told that the basic specs of the Steam Box include a Core i7 CPU, 8GB of RAM, and an NVIDIA GPU. The devices will be able to run any standard PC titles, and will also allow for rival gaming services (like EA’s Origin) to be loaded up.
We’re hearing that a wide variety of USB peripherals will be compatible with the boxes, though it will likely ship with a proprietary controller. It’s possible that the controller will even allow for swappable components, meaning that it can be reconfigured depending on the type of game you’re playing.
Halo 4‘s official limited edition console bundle has been unveiled by Microsoft.
