14 DAY TRIAL // Gabe Newell, the leader of Valve, says that the hardware division of his company will begin testing its Steam Box in the coming months, although it is not clear whether the public will get information about them or whether only companies will be involved.
VG247 is quoting the executive as saying, “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. There are noise issues and heat issues and being able to that while still offering a powerful enough gaming experience is the challenge in building it.”
Newell does talk about customers, but it seems that Valve is more interested in dealing with companies than in selling its Steam Box directly to gamers at this point.
Once more, the Valve leader talked about the potential that biometric tracking has to change the experience of playing a video game.
He adds, “If you think of a game like Left For Dead – which was trying to put you into a sort of horror movie – if you don’t change the experience of what the player is actually feeling then it stops being a horror game.”
Newell says that arousal is a good way to assess how engaged a player is with the experience that’s in front of him.
The Steam Box has recently been in the news because the development team at Treyarch, in charge of much of the Call of Duty franchise, has posted images that suggest the company might be testing the device that Xi3 produced.
Steam is interested in getting into the hardware business in order to make sure that it can stand up to rivals like Sony, Microsoft and Nintendo, who are all introducing new gaming devices.