Valve Answers Steam Box Speculation

By Lawrence Sonntag | 08 March 2012 | 12 Comments

The guys at PC Gamer managed to nail Doug Lombardi with a tranquilizer dart and get a (fairly) straight answer about the Steam Box rumors floating around.

“We’ve always been very public with wanting to play with biometric feedback and new input devices, and yeah we are playing around with that stuff,” Lombardi said. ”We do think we have an interesting idea there and we’re pushing in different directions with that… but all that is a long way from Valve shipping a hardware device.”

I’m going to read between the lines a little and guess the situation is thus: they have neat ideas, and are trying to see if those neat ideas make for a good gaming experience. That means that all the other very important details like what games it’ll play and how it’ll interact with Steam have probably not even been looked at yet.

Bottom line — it’s not happening soon, and that’s if it happens at all.

There are lots of other details about Valve’s experiments with biometrics over on the PC Gamer story, so go check it out if you’re interested. Doug’s a big guy, so props to the writer that wrestled him to the ground. He gets feisty when he’s cornered.

[via PC Gamer]

12 Comments

Posted by Landon Robinson on 08 March 12 at 8:05pm

Classy answer Valve. Very classy.
Still can’t count to 3 though.
- Posted by Rafael on 09 March 12 at 10:41am
  
  Where is the Like button?
- Posted by Flabawoogl on 09 March 12 at 1:17pm
  
  Just like this Rafael, +1, awesome comment bro
- Posted by Thulfiqaar on 09 March 12 at 3:40pm
  
  +1
- Posted by Lawrence Sonntag on 09 March 12 at 3:54pm
  
  You guys want me to add a +1 button to individual comments now don’t you.
  - Posted by GrimFaceJoey on 09 March 12 at 7:32pm
    
    Yea pretty much :-)
  - Posted by Mugenite on 10 March 12 at 4:14am
    
    +1
  - Posted by Ted on 10 March 12 at 7:28am
    
    When you wrote that reply you already knew the answer….. +1
Posted by MagnusDune on 09 March 12 at 9:44pm

Bah, work on getting steam on consoles, you’d improve sales more that way. forget the steambox imho
Posted by Ted on 10 March 12 at 7:32am

When the rumor started I actually tried to think about what a “Steam Box” would be and the only things I could think of were amazingly awesome. Knowing their PC ties, the device would have to be PC compatible, if not a PC all on its own. But wouldn’t it be cool if it was both a PC and a console. Meaning you could plug it in to your TV and set it up with the ease of a console and play with a controller or you could hook up a monitor and keyboard and mouse. Plus the operating system and stuff would probably look like and work like Steam does now. Not to mention that you’d be able to download games at disgustingly low prices.
Posted by zx2654 on 12 March 12 at 1:08pm

I want steambox
Posted by Nexus105 on 02 August 12 at 8:15am

imo i could see valve pulling this off in the future, and have high hopes it’ll be quite cheap here in the UK when it releases. :D

CMON VALVE YOU CAN DO IT!!!