There has been a lot of speculation about the Valve Steam Box recently, it is now believed an announcement might be made as early as next week. Gabe Newell, Valve’s co-founder, referred to Linux as “the future of gaming” during his speech at LinuxCon 2013. He further added that the company will reveal more information about “the hardware opportunities we see for bringing Linux into the living room” next week.
Valve has said that it is working on creating its own console, but the Steam Box project really is about creating a model that other manufacturers can follow to build their own Linux based gaming consoles. Newell said during the speech that the next step for them is to “release some work we’ve done on the hardware side.” He also said that Valve has plans to initiate a “grand unification” of gaming that’s currently done on consoles, mobile devices and PCs, according to Newell, 198 Steam games are now running on Linux. It isn’t entirely clear at this point in time if Valve is going to release an actual Linux based console next week or will it first release the model or guidelines based on which other manufacturers can build their own devices.