It’s hard to tell if Valve is always flying by the seat of its pants, or if it’s carefully calculated this “shrug, we’ll figure it out” image to make us think they’re all just hanging out and high-fiving all day.
Anyway, there’s been plenty of speculation about what Valve is up to hardware-wise, whether it’s crafting a cheaper PC box to faciliate Steam purchases for the masses, wearable computing, or something else entirely. (It's probably a bit of everything).
According to an interview with Valve hardware designer Jeri Ellsworth over at Engadget, we’ll have a better idea of what Valve is cooking up next year, when one of its ideas goes beta.
What is this idea? No one knows, but Valve has the resources to do small production runs for a beta test that will likely be figured out through Steam. We do, however, know Valve’s internal motto.
“To make Steam games more fun to play in your living room,” said Ellsworth.
As broad a mandate as that might be, it also gives you a pretty good idea what direction Valve’s headed in. With all these people dragging PCs into the living room, maybe Valve’s got some plans to make that less of a logistical headache. Plus, Ellsworth said it's a few years out before we see anything from them regarding wearable computing.