Valve has been significantly bolstering the sheer amount of content and features it provides through Steam. The company has recently started offering software and dished out a ‘Big Picture’ interface suited well for TV screens. The company believes that by next year, it will be able to ship entire PC packages perfectly suited to living rooms.
Currently, the living room space is dominated by the TVs and the content and entertainment they provide. But Valve has been working on hardware of its own, although details of these plans are not known yet. The company apparently intends to pack the power of Steam with its own hardware and target the living room audience.
The company is quite hopeful with these plans, given the fact that the users’ response to the Big Picture interface has been excellent. Valve now hopes to get Steam Linux out of beta soon and develop its hardware on this platform.
This much was revealed by Gabe Newell of Valve. Newell stated that Valve envisions that by next year, such PCs would be shipped out which can be connected to TV sets, and can be used to launch Steam right away. Moreover, given the awesome collection of games that Steam offers, Valve can pitch its PC as an alternative to popular game consoles.
According to Newell, “I think in general that most customers and most developers are gonna find that [the PC is] a better environment for them. 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.”
If Valve is able to offer some hardware which can neatly pair up with the TVs and adds a whole host of new dimensions to living room entertainment, it may indeed be able to gain traction among the users.
Source: Kotaku
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