Valve are expecting to offer prototypes of their upcoming video games console for testing within only four months time.

Gabe Newell, Valve CEO spoke to the BBC last night to confirm the release date. With the popularity of STEAM many analysts are claiming that the STEAM BOX console has a good chance of becoming a huge success worldwide.

Gabe Newell was at the British Academy of Film and Television Arts (Bafta) Games Awards and was honoured with an Academy Fellowship.

He was unwilling to confirm or deny details about upcoming Half Life or Portal franchise titles. Portal 2 won three awards last night at the event, one for best game.

Valve's STEAM game platform has been an integral part of the Valve business model now for many years, with over 50 million registered accounts offering software for multiple platforms, including Windows, Linux and Macintosh. Often there are up to 5,000,000 users online gaming at any given time.

Valve decided to create a console to make it easy to access the service via a television set, and without a fully fledged PC.

Newell told the BBC “We're working with partners trying to nail down how fast we can make it. We'll be giving out some prototypes to customers to gauge their reactions, I guess, in the next three to four months.

There are noise issues and heat issues and being able to [deal with] that while still offering a powerful enough gaming experience is the challenge in building it.”

The company are working hard on the controller system, as they wanted to explore the inclusion of ‘sensors to measure the gamers body states.'

He added “If you think of a game like Left For Dead – which was trying to put you into a sort of horror movie – if you don't change the experience of what the player is actually feeling then it stops being a horror game. So you need to actually be able to directly measure how aroused the player is – what their heart rate is, things like that – in order to offer them a new experience each time they play.”

Kitguru says: Sounds exciting and if anyone can pull it off, Valve can.

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