Valve’s Piston Steam Box Will Bring PC Gaming To The Living Room

Valve is working on new hardware called the Piston Steam Box.  The Piston Steam Box will make it possible to play PC games in your living room.  Known for the Steam gaming platform, Valve has around 50 million users.  Valve has been rumored to be building a console of their own for a long time now.  Pulse2 wrote about the Steam Box rumor back in March 2012.  A few months ago, Valve launched software called Big Picture which made it possible for Windows based machines to use Xbox 360 controllers to navigate, shop, and play games.  Nvidia’s Project Shield can also use Big Picture mode when using an Nvidia-based system to play PC games in the living room through wireless video.

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EA Wanted To Acquire Valve

Electronic Arts had an interest in buying out Valve according to The New York Times.  EA was in very early stages of talks with Valve to buy them out.  If the talks had not fallen through, EA would have valued Valve at around $1 billion.  Valve co-founder Gabe Newell said that the company’s financials are confidential so it is not known how much the company is worth.

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Valve’s Steam To Start Testing “Big Picture” Mode Tomorrow

According to the New York Times, Valve Software’s Steam will start testing a TV-friendly redesign of their online store and gaming platform.  ”On Monday, the company will begin a public test of a new television-friendly interface, Big Picture, for buying Steam games and playing them on computers in the living room,” said The New York Times.  The Big Picture mode on TVs is expected to be easy to use, easy to read, and have full controller support.  Users will also be able to switch between their controllers and a keyboard/mouse.

New Steam Android App Indicates Valve Moving Beyond Game-Related Content

A leaked snapshot of the Steam app for Android shows numerous categories that do not have much to do with gaming.  The genres in the Android app index lists categories like accounting, education, photo editing, etc.  This simply indicates that Steam is planning to move beyond selling just game-related content.  Steam has already started selling e-books and movies so this is just a natural step forward.

Is Valve Working On A Gaming Console Called Steam Box?

Bellevue, Washington based Valve Corporation is best known for their social distribution network known as Steam and for the Source engine used in game development. Recent rumors have been indicating that Valve is going to get into the hardware business. They are currently playing with the idea of setting up a set-top console that would compete directly against the Xbox 360 and the PlayStation 3.
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