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Following yesterday’s reveal of the long awaited Steam Box, Valve’s founder Gabe Newell has confirmed the firm will produce its own device.
Xi3 unveiled the Piston modular PC on stage at CES in Las Vegas yesterday, heralding the device as the rumoured Steam Box.
However, Newell has since confirmed to The Verge that while the Piston will be a notable Steam Box, it will not be ‘the’ Steam Box, which Valve will reportedly produce itself.
"We’ll come out with our own [hardware] and we’ll sell it to consumers by ourselves," he stated.
"Valve’s position is let’s build a thing that’s quiet and focuses on high performance and quiet and appropriate form factors."
“It’ll be a Linux box, if you want to install Windows you can. We’re not going to make it hard. This is not some locked box by any stretch of the imagination. We also think that a controller that has higher precision and lower latency is another interesting thing to have."
Whilst word of a controller set the rumour mill alight, with many theorising what features the device will incorporate, Newell confirmed that such a controller would not be motion-based.
“We’ve struggled for a long time to try to think of ways to use motion input and we really haven’t [found any],” he added. “Wii Sports is still kind of the pinnacle of that. We look at that, and for us at least, as a games developer, we can’t see how it makes games fundamentally better.
Since the news, the media has heralded Valve’s jump into the console market as ‘the biggest disruption to the console market since Microsoft launched its Xbox in 2001’ with Patrick Garratt of VG247.com labelling the move as "the single most significant move in video gaming in the past decade."
Image credit: Polygon
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