Valve's Gabe Newell confirms Steam Box!

In an interview with The Verge, Gabe Newell confirms some details about Valve's upcoming Steam Box console. Which sounds much more interesting than the "Piston" steam console.

Steam Box


From what he said in the interview they will have 3 models on the Steam Box;

QuoteWe've heard lots of rumors about the Steam Box, including that Valve's own hardware would be "tightly controlled." Can you tell us more about Valve's own hardware effort?
The way we sort of think of it is sort of "Good, Better," or "Best." So, Good are like these very low-cost streaming solutions that you’re going to see that are using Miracast or Grid. I think we’re talking about in-home solutions where you’ve got low latency. "Better" is to have a dedicated CPU and GPU and that’s the one that’s going to be controlled. Not because our goal is to control it; it’s been surprisingly difficult when we say to people "don’t put an optical media drive in there" and they put an optical media drive in there and you’re like "that makes it hotter, that makes it more expensive, and it makes the box bigger." Go ahead. You can always sell the Best box, and those are just whatever those guys want to manufacture. [Valve's position is]: let's build a thing that’s quiet and focuses on high performance and quiet and appropriate form factors.

He confirms their Steam Box will run on Linux but said people will be free to install Windows. It still hasn't been confirmed what OS the ": let's build a thing that’s quiet and focuses on high performance and quiet and appropriate form factors.]Piston" will run on.

The Controller
It looks like the controller they are going with will resemble "normal" controllers rather than motion sensing controllers like the Wii for example but with a difference. Somehow it will respond faster than your usual controllers by using biometric data it gets from you - will have to wait and see Demo's before anyone can really understand this side of it. We can probably expect more of a Demo at GDC at the end of March.

Read more at The Verge. Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.