I typically play games on PC, and that means I use Steam to purchase and manage the majority of my games. For several years now, rumor was that Valve (the company that built Steam, as well as many other popular games today) was working on a “Steam box”, some sort of computer that is specifically designed to run Steam and PC games on your TV screen.
Last week, Xi3, a hardware company, announced Piston, a very small, but powerful, PC designed to support Steam and gaming on your television. Valve apparently has a financial investment in Xi3, so is this the Steam Box? The answer seems both yes and no.
Yes, it does appear to be built specifically for Steam and it’s new big picture mode for TVs. No, because Gabe hints that other manufacturers, including Valve, have similar products that will be announced throuhout the year.
We’ll come out with our own and we’ll sell it to consumers by ourselves. That’ll be a Linux box…
I think you’ll see controllers coming from us that use a lot of biometric data. Maybe the motion stuff is just failure of imagination on our part, but we’re a lot more excited about biometrics as an input method. Your hands, and your wrist muscles, and your fingers are actually your highest bandwidth – so to try and talk to a game with your arms is essentially saying ‘oh we’re gonna stop using ethernet and go back to 300 baud dial-up.’ …Biometrics on the other hand is essentially adding more communication bandwidth between the game and the person playing it, especially in ways the player isn’t necessarily conscious of. Biometrics gives us more visibility. Also, gaze tracking. we think gaze tracking is gonna turn out to be super important.
A PC, connected to my TV, with all these features is an interesting possibility. I’m curious, though, what kind of user interface and input devices I can use (aside from the controller) if I just want to watch videos online, browse the web, check email and do all the other stuff I do, but using my TV for a monitor.