Valve's marketing director Doug Lombardi has refuted earlier reports that Valve is working on PC-console hybrid called the Steam Box.
However, the marketing director admitted that those reports were not entirely unsubstantiated. A few Steam Box units were actually assembled but they were only meant for internal use while testing Steam's Big Picture mode which aims to make Steam playable on large TV screens.
"All of that is stuff that we're working on, but it's a long way from Valve shipping any sort of hardware," he said. "The idea is that you can take Steam to any display. What we're trying to do is say, 'here's a box that we're going to use for testing that's common for Big Picture mode and get performance at a base level.'"
"We're always putting boxes together. Going all the way back to the Half-Life days, we built special boxes to test our software render... it's just part of development."
But in the end Doug Lombardi didn't rule out the possibility of Valve entering the hardware market in the long term.