For the past several months, Valve and its founder Gabe Newell have been out in the press promoting their ideas about a "Steam Box", a small gaming PC that would run games featured on Valve's Steam PC game download service on a big screen TV. PC maker Xi3 is working with Valve on the "Piston" PC that will run Steam's Big Picture mode.
Today, Don Mattrick, the president of the Interactive Entertainment Business at Microsoft, chimed in on Valve's chances for competing with its Steam Box concept. The Verge reports that Mattrick simply said, "No", when asked if the Steam Box could in fact compete with Microsoft's Xbox console business.
Mattrick was still respectful of Newell and Valve, which has its main office in downtown Bellevue, Washington, just a few miles down the road from Microsoft's Redmond campus. Mattrick said that he "loves Gabe" and Valve is "doing some innovative stuff." However, he added, "The scale of products and things that are being brought to market are probably a little bit richer when I look at Sony, Nintendo, Apple, and Google."
Mattrick also believes that Microsoft should continue to manage the Xbox game catalog carefully, rather than open the experience up more for third party game developers. He stated, "We're trying to make sure that what exists upon our service on our system is done to a quality level and has interest for people who are likely to use it."
As we reported before, Microsoft announced recently it will no longer update its XNA game creation toolset, which was first promoted several years ago as a way for small independent development teams to make downloadable games for the Xbox 360.
Source: The Verge | Image via Xi3
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