Valve said to be working on ‘Steam Box’ gaming console

Valve, in case you didn't already know, is that wonderful company that has brought us hits such as the Half Life series and Steam. Recently there has been talks of Valve producing their own hardware and The Verge has unveiled some more information on the topic.

They have gathered information that hints at the fact Valve has been working on a gaming console in secret. The rumoured deployment strategy involves Steam possibly being the centre of this gaming console. OEMs would then produce hardware to run Valve's software on, mimicing what Google has done with Android.

Valve co-founder, Gabe Newell said in a recent interview 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.”

If Valve does decide to pursue this avenue they may deliver a software bundle to be distributed to hardware manufacturers such as Asus and Samsung.

Further information The Verge gathered suggests the company has been working on hardware specifications with OEMs (think of the 3 P's; performance, power, portability.) Specifications could include an Intel i7 CPU, 8 GB of RAM and a Nvidia GPU. This would mean any PC title available today would be able to run on this ‘Steam Box,' as well as offer support for other game libraries such as EA's Origin.

The ‘Steam Box' could be seen as soon as GDC in a few days time or later this year at E3.

Kitguru says: It looks as if things are about to become a lot more interesting in the gaming console world.

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