Valve to release own Steam box

Valve boss Gabe Newell has confirmed that the company will release its own Steam Box eventually.

The news comes after Project Piston - a computer that can stream Steam games to different devices - was announced at CES this week.

Newell said that a similar Valve-developed project is in the works and it will come pre-installed with Linux.

"We'll come out with our own and we'll sell it to consumers by ourselves," he told The Verge. "That'll be a Linux box, [and] if you want to install Windows you can.

"We're not going to make it hard. This is not some locked box by any stretch of the imagination."

Newell went on to speak about his frustration over the latest Windows operating system, claiming he finds it 'unusable'.

"Windows 8 was like this giant sadness. It just hurts everybody in the PC business. Rather than everybody being all excited to go buy a new PC, buying new software to run on it, we've had a 20%+ decline in PC sales - it's like 'holy cow that's now what the new generation of the operating system is supposed to do'.

"There's supposed to be a 40% uptake, not a 20% decline, so that's what really scares me. When I started using it I was like 'oh my god...' I find [Windows 8] unusable."

Newell also revealed that the Steam Box would be capable of streaming to several different monitors at the same time.

"So you could have one PC and eight televisions and eight controllers and everybody getting great performance out of it.

"We're used to having one monitor, or two monitors - now we're saying let's expand that a little bit."