Well now, this is interesting. There have rumours circulating for a *long* time that *Half-Life* developers and operators of Steam, Valve, are preparing to shift into home console production with a TV box that would let you play all your Steam games from the comfort of your sofa. The hype train gained even more speed last week when owner Gabe Newall said that open-source operating system Linux was “the future of gaming” and they were working on a way to get it into people’s living rooms.

This morning, [a site has gone live](http://store.steampowered.com/livingroom/) that teases a hardware announcement being made next Monday 23rd at 1pm EST (10am PST, 6pm BST). From the site:

Last year, we shipped a software feature called Big Picture, a user-interface tailored for televisions and gamepads.
This year we’ve been working on even more ways to connect the dots for customers who want Steam in the living-room.
Soon, we’ll be adding you to our design process, so that you can help us shape the future of Steam.

The wording seems to point to some elements of the hardware being crowdsourced, which would certainly fit into the current trend for Kickstarter-style projects. Also, Steam is famous for being very aggressive in cheap pricing (especially so during its amazing sales), making the idea of intangible physical copies worth bearing.

I have a huge collection of PC-only Steam games that would push me towards getting one of these beauties on day one, so I’m eagerly counting down to the announcement. Also: *Half-Life 3* as a Steam Box exclusive? Could we finally be seeing the appearance of one of the most anticipated games in history? Probably not. But hey, I can dream.

*Via [Kotaku](http://kotaku.com/looks-like-well-hear-about-valves-new-hardware-on-mon-1356094018)*