Where the Hell is Our Steam Box?

We were promised a Steam Box and we want it now!

Ever since rumors emerged in 2012 and Valve’s Gabe “big boss” Newell started talking about the revolution he wanted to bring to our living rooms we’ve been waiting for an update.

Defined as the Xi3’s Piston, then quickly redacted we were tricked into thinking it was finally here. In the lead-up to E3 Valve kept the Steam Box concept in the dark and chose not to exhibit at all, confusing the hell out of everyone.

Now Valve is showing up at Gamescon in Cologne is August, one of their subsections showing that they are developing PC hardware. What could that be? Valve has brought us several genre revolutions with their software and now could they bring us a revolution in living room gaming?

We run down the history of the white Unicorn called the Steam Box and sort through the veil to get an idea of what might be in store for the future of gaming.

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Savvy PC users have been hooking up computers and leaning back on their couches to play games for years, replacing consoles and using fast video cards and high-res TVs to get great experiences. For the less savvy though, building a computer to replicate a console might be out of reach.

Valve recognized this and in January of 2012 announced the development of its own console, the Steam Box.

The Steam Box has developed into more of an idea, than an actual product at this point. Steam launched its Big Picture mode in 2012 to accommodate those users who were already playing games with a computer on their TVs.

Speaking with Kotaku, Valves top man Gabe Newell said he’d had a living-room-friendly PC package within a year.

"I think in general that most customers and most developers are gonna find that [the PC is] a better environment for them," Newell said. "Cause they won't have to split the world into thinking about 'why are my friends in the living room, why are my video sources in the living room different from everyone else?' So in a sense we hopefully are gonna unify those environments."

In January of 2013, Valve and the Salt Lake City-based Xi3 unveiled the Piston, a micro computer gaming platform that would sync with Valve’s Steam service and be plug-in-play ready for televisions. It was also revealed that Valve had, at least partially, funded the console-killing Piston.

Much touted as the single thing that could revolutionize home gaming; a completely customizable and scalable micro-pc that was plug-in-play ready and would offer the biggest starting line-up of games in history from Steam.

In March 2013 as details of the Xi3’s Piston were released, Valve began to distance itself from the hardware. Saying that it was developing its own hardware and that the Piston was not the promised Steam Box.

Some big issues remained with the Piston. Being a modular device is great but with the lowest end bundles starting at $999 its double what next-generation consoles from Sony and Microsoft will be retailing for when released at the end of 2013.

Valve releases the hit Half Life 2 and its subsequent episodes for Linux, as well as the Source SDK engine, the engine behind Team Fortress 2 and Half-Life 2, to support the Oculus Rift virtual reality headset.

Valve’s direct involvement with the Linux powered Xi3 Piston and being the first big developer to openly provide support and cater to the Oculus Rift has many thinking they may launch together. Oculus has said that is has no planned support for consoles, currently their focus is on PCs and next-generation mobile devices. It is possible that the elusive Steam Box concept could be the exclusive domain of Oculus Rift in the living room? Here the conspiracy theories may be going too far.

In late March Valve told Kotaku that the company no longer has any association with Xi3 project, or the Piston, which we all thought would eventually become the Steam Box. It was also important to Valve to clear up any misunderstands about its intent.

A representative of Xi3 explains: "We were asked to build a product specifically for Valve," and disputes the lack of a relationship between the companies. "For example, the assumption of many in the media has been that Piston is the ‘official' Steam Box. We've never said that and neither has Valve. That hasn't changed. But just because Valve may not ‘currently' have any ‘involvement with any product of (ours)' doesn't mean that such involvement won't exist in the future.”

In late March the trail of the mythical Steam Box went cold, going into media blackout. A few details leaked out however about Valve’s process. According to BBC News Gabe Newell of Valve shared some details about what was happening:

“We’re working with partners trying to nail down how fast we can make it,”…”We’ll be giving out some prototypes to customers to gauge their reactions, I guess, in the next three to four months.”

This kind of abrupt turnaround rarely happens in gaming where costly and time-consuming investments take place on both the hardware and software side. We’re left to wonder if it’s a real break with Xi3 or a gag to keep development details hidden.

Newell also commented to IGN that he was looking forward to the specialized input device for the Steam Box, saying: “Motion just seems to be a way of [thinking] of your body as a set of communication channels. Your hands, and your wrist muscles, and your fingers are actually your highest bandwidth – so to try to talk to a game with your arms is essentially saying ‘oh we’re gonna stop using ethernet and go back to 300 baud deal-up.’” Instead he preferred biometrics or gaze tracking.

It’s this kind of thinking from Valve that makes gamers so excited. Consoles haven’t had a revolutionary moment in decades and it looked like Value might be the ones to do it.

In June some new information developed that Valve was partnering with NVIDIA, known for its PC video cards, on its new handheld gaming platform dubbed Shield. For those willing to trudge through Forbes investment reports, it was revealed that Valve had, in fact, been working very closely to develop the ability to stream its Big Picture mode to the Android Powered Shield. At the time of the Shield’s release, July 31, the streaming Steam service is in Beta and limited to only certain games.

It was also rumored that Shield would in some way interface with Valve’s Steam Box, but in a manner as yet undefined. But hinted at the possible use of NVIDIA’s Tegra 4 chipset, the fastest mobile processor yet, would have some influence of the future Steam Box concept.

Valve, after skipping out of the console crazed E3 of 2013, announced that it would be attending Gamescon in August in Germany. While the excitement builds after Valve’s months of silence we expect them to drop a bomb that will change the video gaming landscape. Okay, that kind of hyperbole is exactly what you’re going to hear until the show actually starts and Valve makes some sort of move.

There is nothing indicating the company will drop any information on the upcoming Steam Box or even acknowledge if it still exists. Though the expectation seems to be that Valve will either unveil Steam Box or Half-Life 3, both seem as likely as Phil Fish developing the next Gears of War.

After this year’s E3 where both Sony and Microsoft paired off with their good-looking but less than revolutionary Xbox One and PlayStation 4, we’re more than ever counting on something to really shake up the industry and staleness around the slow speed of development in consoles.

Although if the Steam Box does get dropped at Gamecon you can bet the Internet is likely to explode, Steam servers will collapse, NeoGaf will be reduced to a stuttering incoherence and collective anticipation will result in mass hysteria and burning of consoles in the street.

Maybe not, but we’ll wait to be proven wrong.