Valve co-founder and managing director Gabe Newell has quelled any doubt that his company will be launching something to rival the likes of the Xbox 720 and PlayStation 4 in the future.
PC gaming giant Valve has been rumoured to be working on hardware to support its own Steam platform for quite a long time now, although in the past the company has denied any rumours. We’ve seen leaked documents and even patented controllers and designs, which are usually pretty solid evidence that something is in the works.
Speaking to games website Kotaku at the recent Video Games Awards, Gabe Newell effectively confirmed that the software company wants to become a software and hardware company to take on the home console. From his comments to the site it’s clear that he expects that Valve won’t be the only company creating a gaming PC for the living room.
“I think in general that most customers and most developers are gonna find that [the PC is] a better environment for them,” Newell said. “Cause they won’t have to split the world into thinking about ‘why are my friends in the living room, why are my video sources in the living room different from everyone else?’ So in a sense we hopefully are gonna unify those environments.”
The company already has its own well-established software platform that caters for PC and Mac gamers, providing both a huge online store for buying and downloading games and a way of playing against others online. Gamers can add each other as friends, chat and even join each other’s games. Steam is a free download for Mac or PC, which is part of the reason it’s so wildly popular; catering for over 50 million users worldwide and around 5 million active users every day.
Exactly what Valve’s hardware will consist of it still something of a mystery, although we know that the aim is to provide something compact and powerful that connects to a HD television. We’re intrigued to see whether the company will stick to the classic mouse and keyboard combination or offer a unique controller or gamepad of its own.
Via: Kotaku