Valve: No Plans For A Gaming Console Anytime Soon

Valve’s made it clear that it doesn’t have any plans to announce a gaming console anytime soon, as it’s focused on getting the Big Picture Mode it’s been working on out for Steam.

The company told Kotaku that all resources are being used to develop the mode.

“We’re prepping the Steam Big Picture Mode UI and getting ready to ship that, so we’re building boxes to test that on,” said Valve’s Doug Lombardi. “We’re also doing a bunch of different experiments with biometric feedback and stuff like that, which we’ve talked about a fair amount.

“All of that is stuff that we’re working on, but it’s a long way from Valve shipping any sort of hardware.”

It also clarified that the boxes which have emerged in the past week as evidence for a new console are actually being used to test the mode and have been built by Valve’s Greg Coomer, and not some prototype for a Valve console.

“Greg’s one of the guys leading the effort of the Big Picture mode,” Lombardi said. “The idea is that you can take Steam to any display. What we’re trying to do is say: ‘Here’s a box that we’re going to use for testing that’s common for Big Picture mode and get performance at a base level.’… We’re always putting boxes together. Going all the way back to the Half-Life 1 days, we built special boxes to test our software render… it’s just part of development.”

Greg posted an image of the box last year, which led people to believe it was some kind of console prototype. It was an image of a finished mini-PC, with i7 quad core, 8GB ram, Zotac Z-68 mobo w/ onnboard Nvidia mobile gfx.”

Coomer also previously mentioned “building a mini-ITX form factor PC is hard” via a tweet but didn’t give out any specifics.

Last weekend, the Verge carried a reported which claimed that Valve was prepping a set top box and its hardware and software would enable Steam’s Big Picture mode to be played on any television or larger screen setups.

It also said that Valve won’t charge any extra licensing fee to developers and they’ll be free to release games on the system. It also hinted at controller support and sensor support which may be capable of pulling players biometric date into games.

The design for the controller were posted by the Verge, which also noted the patent Valve filed last year for a “video game controller having user swapable control components.”

It appears the Big Picture mode for Steam might bring more to the table than most gamers expect it to be.