Rumor: Valve is really making a CONSOLE? Dear lord, my wallet.

Here’s a bananas one. There’s mutterings picking up about a Valve console. Yeah, brah. Completionists like me are eyeballing another console they have to buy or the voices in their head will tell mother about the sticky furred stuffed animals behind the couch. Wait, what? Anyways, it may be real. But it won’t  be like a console as generally thought.

Kotaku:

Respected tech reporter Joshua Topolsky is putting it all out there over at  The Verge, reporting that the chatter about Valve Software getting into the hardware business isn’t a tease.

He says Valve is making a console  and that we’re going to be finding out about it soon, maybe next week at the Game Developers Conference, or maybe in June at E3.

This one’s wild.

The Valve console–which seems like more of a hardware standard than say, a Steam 64 or ValveStation–would be a set-top box that can run PC games and use Steam or even competing services such as Origin, according to the report. Unlike the Xbox 360 or PlayStation 3, multiple manufacturers could be allowed to make it. Game developers wouldn’t have to pay for a licensing fee to Valve for the privilege of making games for this console, bucking the standards of Nintendo, Sony and Microsoft, which charge game creators to make games on theirs.

The box would support configurable game controllers as well as a bracelet or some other sensor that would incorporate a player’s biometric data to affect games (similar to how Nintendo’snever-released Vitality Sensor  was supposed to read a players bloodflow and stress to tweak the way a game played out in real-time.)

According to Topolsky:

Apparently meetings were held during CES to demo a hand-built version of the device to potential partners. We’re told that the basic specs of the Steam Box include a Core i7 CPU, 8GB of RAM, and an NVIDIA GPU. ..

Part of the goal of establishing a baseline for hardware, we’re told, is that it will give developers a clear lifecycle for their products, with changes possibly coming every three to four years. Additionally, there won’t be a required devkit, and there will be no licensing fees to create software for the platform.

Topolsky builds his case by combining the rumors he’s heard with recent statements from Valve boss Gabe Newell about  a willingness for Valve to make hardware  and a wariness about the expanding influence of Apple’s closed, tightly-controlled app store.

Interesting speculation. Seems that there’s far too much fire to warrant mere speculation. Even more interesting is the  reimagining  of what constitutes a console exactly. What are you lads and lasses thinking?