Gabe Newell Talks About Linux, Hints At Steambox Announcement

Gabe Newell, the founder and CEO of Valve gave a keynote yesterday at Linuxcon, where he went on to say that Linux is the future of gaming, which is interesting stuff indeed, but the real gold is that he hinted about a hardware announcement for next week! Could this be the dawn of the somewhat over speculated, rumour filled mystery machine that is the Steam Box?

Newell first wanted to make a point about the future of Linux, most notably with a statistic that impressed us here at eTeknix. Since spring last year, developers have created 198 Steam games for the open source OS, quite a busy release schedule and definitely a sign that things are changing in the industry. While that may not sound much, it’s already 10 games more than have ever been release on the Wii U, a lot more if you don’t count digital download only titles.

There is a lot of innovation in the PC industry at this time, there always has been and with bleeding edge technology always available, as well as open source operating systems that for the most part are completely free, it is easy to see why Gabe wants to focus on some combination of the two. He said that proprietary systems create friction, slowing things down, making reference to the slow update approval system used by Apple to make his point. Gabe wants something quicker and more open source.

He went on to hint that Steam would be moving to the living room, something they already tried their hand at with the Steam Big Screen Mode. He said that Linux can act as the universal unifier of mobile, the living room and gaming, people want their system to be simple to use and not be tied into buying hardware, controllers and games that only work on one system.

Will they announce the Steambox next week, I doubt it, I think we’ve all been looking at this completely wrong. I don’t think Linux are going to announce the hardware, I think they’re going to release a SteamOS based around Linux and dish out a list of minimum hardware requirement” and frankly, I hope I am right!

Thank you TechCrunch for providing us with this information.