Valve's Steam Box to be revealed next week?

Gabe Newell, managing director of Valve, has said that Linux is the future of gaming before promising some more information on Valave's mysterious Steam Box console as early as next week

Gabe Newell, co-founder and managing director of Valve, has given a keynote at LinuxCon in New Orleans this week in which he proclaimed Linux to be the "future of gaming". Valve's highly successful game platform Steam launched on Linux at the beginning of this year and the company's rumoured Steam Box hardwareis said to be Linux-based. But, despite Newell's assertions, Linux currently accounts for less than one percent of a gaming market dominated by the likes of Xbox and PlayStation. However, Newell did let slip an interesting bit of news concerning the Steam Box: "Next week we're going to be rolling out more information about how we get there and what are the hardware opportunities we see for bringing Linux into the living room," he said. Before we jump headlong into rumour territory of a fully-formed product reveal, there is also the possibility that Valve is planning a new type of service or a device to help third-party manufacturers develop their own Linux-based gaming hardware. Newell spent time praising Linux openness and also touched on unification with mobile devices and the second screen possibilities. And although the current Linux gaming landscape is a touch bleak, Newell reminded his audience that there are currently 198 Steam games on the OS. And, even though PCs are declining year-on-year, Steam is seeing its own digital distribution model grow by 76 per cent. Steam missed out on inclusion for the Digital Media Service of the Year award at this year's T3 Gadget Awards presented by Ford SYNC, but we'd still encourage you to vote for your favourite and be in with a chance of winning a PS4.