If not XBox One or Playstation 4 - how about Steam Machine?

http://www.wired.com/gamelife/2013/11/valve-steam-machines?cid=co14000254

If these players had Steam in their living rooms, it would be a close substitute for a traditional game console — if not better. And that’s exactly what Valve’s attempting. At the Consumer Electronics Show in January, Valve and a variety of hardware partners will unveil a range of Steam Machines, television game consoles of various power levels and price points, built with commodity PC parts, that run Valve’s new Linux-based SteamOS operating system. Valve itself is nearing completion of a controller that is designed to eliminate the need for a keyboard-and-mouse setup.

“There’s a strong desire from our customers that we’ve heard for a long time,” says Valve product designer Greg Coomer. “They love all those [Steam] titles, but they also like their families. And whenever they had to go into the living room, they’ve had to abandon everything they loved about the games in the other room of the house.”

Valve doesn’t need to convince anybody to give up their Xbox. All it needs to do to disrupt the game console biz is get its current customers to bring Steam out of the computer room and onto the couch.

Click to expand...

I've been following this, as I've followed the adventures of XBox One and Playstation 4. Next year Steam will start to sell its own console. Well, sort of.

It seems to be like a modular, simplified PC that uses common PC parts and not proprietary exclusive parts. Valve seems to be doing an Android on console gaming, ie leaving the manufacturing up to third party vendors - or the users themselves.

The operating system is a heavily modified version of Linux called SteamOS. Like it says in the article, the point is to bring PC gaming out of the bedroom or office into the living room - where the consoles now live.

And you already have the 65 million Steam users, and all the games on that platform that is said to be converted - eventually.

Have you followed this?

What do you think?

ETA:
Here are the product details from the horse's mouth, so to speak.

http://store.steampowered.com/livingroom/

The thing that interests me is that apparently Steam will have its entire catalogue of 3000 games ready at the time of launch; either in native form that can be played directly off this console, or non-native code that streams from servers so that the steam box just becomes a client.

That way all the games on Steam will be available, and that has to be the largest game platform. I doubt that either PS4 or XBox will have that kind of catalogue. That also means that games like Skyrim or GTA5 and such big sellers will be available from the start. I'm not sure that these blockbusters will be available on XBox or PS4 at launch.

The thing about consoles is that they are personal computers, but they don't look and feel like personal computers. The interface hides the PC stuff away behind an impenetrable layer. But if you look in the innards of any console, you'll find the usual PC parts – although they may have been exclusively manufactured for that console. You'll find RAM, Hard drives, GPUs and processors. So, it's a PC. Except they call it a console.

That's why I think it doesn't matter that Steam OS / Steam Machine is a sort of modular PC. It's a console where the console IO layer is different from the usual. It's still a box, sitting in the living room as opposed to the bedroom or home office. It's not something you'll write your next novel on, although maybe LibreOffice will work on it since it's Linux... Maybe Scrivener will work! I can outline my next novel while I'm killing zombies in Fallout 4.

Though, I can do that already, except on the PC. One window with zombie slaughter, and the other with teenage angst... So, Steam Machine just lifts the veil, and shows that a console is a PC and a PC is a console. Or can be. I'd like that.

This is the kind of nifty things that make me interested in the Steam Machines.

http://www.escapistmagazine.com/news/view/129855-Steam-In-Home-Streaming-Monopolizes-Host-Computer

As part of Valve's initiative to spread the tendrils of Steam to the living room, the company is preparing a feature called In-Home Streaming. The service lets one computer do the heavy lifting while another computer (not necessarily a Steam Machine, but probably a Steam Machine) outputs the video/audio and handles the controls. A Q&A post on the Steam Community revealed a few points of interest about the service: specifically, how it handles a user trying to do things on the host computer while streaming is happening. The short answer is that it doesn't.

Click to expand...

The use case for this is that I could have my much more powerful desktop computer connect to Steam and be a 'streaming node', and with it I could sit in the sofa on the other side of the house in my much less powerful laptop and play games at top quality. Doing so natively on the laptop would send me to the infirmary with third degree burns.

SteamOS has been released, and the first consoles have been sent to beta testers.

http://www.techradar.com/news/software/operating-systems/first-look-valve-steamos-1208118

SteamOS is basically a variant of the mother of most modern Linux variants like Ubuntu and Mint. That arch-ancestor is called Debian, and it's a very stable and boring and safe and solid variant. There's a reason why Ubuntu and Mint use Debian, after all.

That said, while the gut of Debian IS available to users, the main interface is what you'll find in any type of console - a graphical UI for Steam itself. However, if you're savvy enough, you can drop down into the desktop, which is Gnome, to run the steambox like any computer.

You've got no excuse now. You can work on your MS while you play Halo. You don't have to get up from the sofa to go to your desktop or laptop for that.