14 DAY TRIAL // The Steam Box was just a rumor and people have dismissed it a while ago, but it seems that Valve intentions were serious and they are planning to launch their own console, at least according to one of its engineers.
This is not the first time that a rumor about a Steam console has surfaced, but we were led to believe that it's all in the fans’ mind.
Golem.de, a German website, has attended a conference on December 29 where a Valve electronics engineer named Ben Krasnow has revealed some interesting information about the Steam Box. If it was inadvertently or by design, it remains to be seen.
According to a rough translation of the Golem.de report, the Steam Box will be Linux-based and it has been in development since 2011.
It's set to launch in 2013 and more details will be likely to surface at the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco, this coming March.
Oddly enough, the engineer has also revealed some other information about Valve's projects and they seem pretty far out and unlikely to make a 2013 debut.
The next big step for Valve, beside the Steam Box, will be Augmented Reality and Virtual Reality projects, but it's unclear whether this kind of technology will be implemented in a console or it will be launched separately.
In any case, Steam for Linux is no longer a rumor and Valve has already launched a beta version. The numbers are encouraging and raising towards one percent of the Steam user base, which is almost 600.000 active users.
A lot of games have already been announced for the Linux version of Steam and every day other developers are starting to consider Linux ports or development.
If we take into consideration that the next-generation consoles are already pretty late, this seems like the best time for Valve to enter the console race with the Steam Box.