Gabe Newell (Re)Confirms Linux Based Valve Hardware

Remember the rumor mill surrounding the Steambox last year? Valve’s living room PC gaming/console gaming hybrid solution, that would use Linux, and offer users the best of both worlds, all for a nice, affordable price? Remember how it was going to upset the console market? Remember how all of that talk came to nothing, and all we got was some bullshit hinting at a Steambox ‘standard’ earlier this year?

Well looks like the actual Valve made Steambox is still a thing, reports Eurogamer.Speaking at LinuxCon, Valve head honcho Gabe Newell confirmed that the Steambox exists, and he plans to shed more light on it some time next week.

“There are sets of issues to making sure whatever platform you have works well in a living room environment,” he said. “There are thermal issues and sound issues, but there also a bunch of input issues. So the next step in our contribution to the promotion of Linux for gaming is to release some work we’ve done on the hardware side.

“None of the proprietary 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 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 in mobile.”

Valve has already made inroads into both, living room gaming, and Linux gaming, with its Steam Big Picture Mode and Linux Steam client respectively. Unifying all of this with hardware would make Valve a real player in the world of gaming hardware, and might legitimately see the entry of a fourth contender in the gaming hardware market since the exit of Sega and entry of Microsoft back in 2001.