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The Steam Box started as a glimmer of hope on The Verge nearly a year ago. At the time, there were many doubters that Valve could be making its own hardware. Today, it's not only confirmed that it is, but the company has confirmed other, major hardware partners, as well. We've been tracking this story since day one, and all the pieces are right here.
16 updates and 3454 comments below.
Mar 05 4:53p
Valve's Gabe Newell said his company wasn't canceling any projects after a recent spate of layoffs, and it certainly sounds like the company's Steam Box initiative is still on track. The co-founder told the BBC that his company plans to hand out prototype units of the TV-friendly gaming PC to "customers" in the next three to four months, in order to "gauge their reactions." While he didn't make it clear whether those "customers" are the companies who would be building the Steam Box, or actual...
Feb 13 7:42p
It's an unusual day at Valve Software, with reports of layoffs at the game company, and Valve co-founder Gabe Newell is taking the unusual step of commenting on the matter publicly. In a statement to Engadget, he told the world that despite "an unusual amount of speculation" into the company's staffing situation, none of Valve's current projects will be canceled:
"We don't usually talk about personnel matters for a number of reasons. There seems to be an unusual amount of speculation about...
3:43p
Following news last night that Valve fired engineer Jeri Ellsworth, it appears that Valve may be undergoing a more extensive staff cut in its Android and hardware development departments. Gamasutra says it has confirmed that several employees were let go from the company behind Half-Life, Portal, and Steam, and that up to 25 employees may have been cut — Valve employees described the changes as a "great cleansing" and that Valve is dealing with "large decisions."
The cuts include at least...
12:45a
When Valve first started publicly hiring hardware engineers for secret R&D projects, Jeri Ellsworth was already there: the talented maker and Commodore 64 aficionado had been snapped up to help jumpstart Valve's hardware division. There, she helped carve out a prototype lab with 3-D printers, laser cutters, and other prototyping tools, and began work on a series of original game controller prototypes to accompany Valve's Steam Box efforts — ways to use a PC game console effectively from the...
Feb 06 2:00p
Jan 30 6:40p
Valve's Steam Box may be a challenger to consoles as we know them, but Gabe Newell said today that Apple is the company's biggest threat in the living room, Polygon reports. During a lecture given at the University of Texas, Newell said that "Apple has gained a huge amount of market share, and has a relatively obvious pathway toward entering the living room with their platform." He said "I think that there's a scenario where we see sort of a dumbed down living room platform emerging — I...
Jan 09 9:38a
In an interview with Polygon's Christopher Grant, Valve product designer Greg Coomer elaborates on the rationale behind Steam's push into the living room, first with Big Picture and now with the Steam Box. Gamers on Valve's platform wanted to play on their television sets using gaming controllers, and weren't able to realize the full value of a cloud delivery platform like Steam without that piece. Once there, Valve bumped up against the limitations of PC machines, from noisy fans to crufty...
Jan 08 6:38p
In an exclusive interview with The Verge, Valve CEO Gabe Newell shed light on the company's hardware plans, confirming that its own "Steam Box" will be based on Linux OS. The Steam Box has mostly been sheathed in rumor over the past year, but we've learned a number of interesting details about the planned device -- perhaps most importantly, the Steam Box won't just be a locked-down PC console designed to be used solely in the living room. "The Steam Box will also be a server," Newell says,...
6:10p
By T.C. Sottek and Tom Warren
We just sat down for a rare and wide-ranging interview with Valve CEO Gabe Newell, who opened up to The Verge with details about the company's upcoming "Steam Box" gaming hardware, the future of the Steam digital distribution platform, and even gaming itself. For starters, Valve isn't just attacking the living room; the Steam Box will be designed to work across multiple screens in the home using networking standards like Miracast, ideally allowing users to...
2:34p
We just stopped by Valve's small booth at CES, and the company has confirmed to The Verge that it is meeting with a number of hardware and software partners to push forward with its plans to release its own console-like PC for the living room. The company isn't showing off much to the press this year, but we managed to take a look at some prototype hardware Valve has sitting out, and it's not all too surprising; right now the Steam Box looks like a small-chassis PC. Valve representative Tom...
Dec 08 3:54p
Valve has stayed mostly quiet about its plans to enter the hardware business, but in an interview with Kotaku at last night's Video Game Awards, Gabe Newell confirmed the company's plans to sell its own living room PC that could compete with next-generation consoles from Sony and Microsoft. The biggest revelation is that Valve seems set to release its own complete hardware and software solution. When we first reported that the company was working on a "Steam Box" back in March, it appeared...
Nov 16 12:47p
The Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, and Nintendo Wii are nearing their end. As powerful as they have been in the living room, gamers want more. They want better graphics, new user experiences, and more mobility, as much as those things can be at odds with one another. A new wave of game consoles is rising to meet some of those challenges, but perhaps not all: the Nintendo Wii U doesn’t seem to be that much more powerful than an Xbox 360, and the next Xbox and PlayStation are rumored to use what...
Sep 03 4:29p
In a job listing for the "industrial designer" position on Valve's website, the company has finally made its hardware ambitions explicit: Valve says "we're frustrated by the lack of innovation of in the computer hardware space, so we're jumping in." The job listing says that "even in basic input, the keyboard and mouse, haven't really changed much in any meaningful way over the years," but it stops short of naming the actual hardware that a Valve-employed industrial designer would create. For...
Apr 13 9:10a
No, Valve is totally not building a Steam Box gaming console. But it is building hardware. A new job opening at the company's R&D division has opened up today, looking for an electronics engineer with experience in prototyping and ARM / x86 hardware design.
Mar 08 5:18p
We recently heard that Valve was in the process of developing a gaming console for the Steam platform, which would see it partnering with hardware manufacturers in a gaming-world riff on Google's Android strategy. In a conversation with Kotaku, however, Valve VP of Marketing Doug Lombardi said that the company didn't have plans to ship any such hardware itself in the near future. According to Lombardi, any test units or boxes Valve had recently built were part of testing efforts for Steam's...
Mar 02 11:55p
Recently there's been chatter that Valve — the company behind the massively popular gaming service Steam — has been considering getting into the hardware business. Specifically, there have been rumors that the company has been toying with the idea of creating a proper set-top console which could potentially pose a threat to the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3. Valve co-founder Gabe Newell even recently told Penny Arcade: "Well, if we have to sell hardware we will."
At a glance that would...
Mar 11 1:23p
Xi3 opens $999.99 pre-orders for Piston gaming 'console PC' (update 2)
Xi3, one of several companies approached by Valve to work on a "Steam Box" console — though Valve now disavows involvement — has opened pre-orders for its gaming-optimized PC. The Piston, which was first shown off at CES in January, uses a small enclosure like that of Xi3's other modular computers. The $999.99 price tag gets you a 128GB SSD, a 3.2GHz quad-core AMD R464 processor with integrated graphics, and 8GB of RAM, with more details forthcoming; we've previously heard that it will be...
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