Valve’s Gabe Newell Thinks Living Room PCs Will Compete With Next-Gen Consoles

Since Gabe Newell is a pretty big deal amidst this whole “let’s play video games because everyone agrees they’re great now” thing going on these days, his thoughts about the future of the medium are particularly noteworthy. And now Newell – who’s a bigshot over at Valve – has mentioned that you’ll be able to buy a living room-friendly PC package next year.

Speaking out recently, Newell revealed that the reaction to Steam’s Big Picture interface (launched earlier this year) had been extremely strong – much, much stronger than expected, in fact. Their next step is apparently to get Steam Linux out of beta mode and onto the operating system itself.

He also mentioned that he expects companies to start selling PC set-ups for your living room next year, either because he’s psychic or because he wants companies to start making them. But Newell did add that Valve would go up against Sony and Microsoft when it comes to those all-important next-gen consoles — which sounds very similar to the rumored Steam Box from earlier this year.

Here’s what he had to say in detail:

 “I think in general that most customers and most developers are gonna find that [the PC is] a better environment for them. Cause they won’t have to split the world into thinking about ‘why are my friends in the living room, why are my video sources in the living room different from everyone else?’ So in a sense we hopefully are gonna unify those environments.”

“Well certainly our hardware will be a very controlled environment. If you want more flexibility, you can always buy a more general purpose PC. For people who want a more turnkey solution, that’s what some people are really gonna want for their living room. The nice thing about a PC is a lot of different people can try out different solutions, and customers can find the ones that work best for them.”

Whilst this information is interesting and likely important for the future of gaming, the only question we’ve really got for Gabe Newell and his team is this one: Where the f@*k is Half-Life: Episode 3?

Source: Kotaku