Steam has been one of the most wildly popular gaming services. Now rumors have it that the the company who is behind Steam is now planning to launch a Steam game console, a hardware of it’s own. This would be the first time for Valve, getting into the hardware business. The idea is to sell a set-top console that will directly rival the likes of PlayStation and Xbox 360.
While Valve hasn’t officially said anything exactly about the rumors of a Steam game console, the co-founder of the company did say, “Well, if we have to sell hardware we will.” The Verge, however, has stated that it has credible information about the company’s plans regarding gaming hardware. And that Valve is working on a strategy that would make it’s Steam console a central part of an open gaming universe. This is quite the same concept Google applied to the smartphone world with the help of Android.
This can be heard echoing in the words of Vavle’s co-founder when he said, “e’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.”
The strategy that Valve is essentially planning is that the hardware for the Steam console can be manufactured by multiple partners but the software will be provided only by Valve. The basic specs of the Steam box are being touted as Core i7 processor, 8GB RAM and an Nvidia GPU. What’s interesting is that Valve plans to develop a definite schedule for the lifecycle of it’s hardware and intends to impose no fees on software created for the platform.
The Verge goes on to reveal a lot of other details about the rumored Steam Box. You can read them here. Whether or not they turn out to be true is expected to be confirmed within the next few days.
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