Valve Software, the owner of Steam video games distribution service, denied plans to offer its own game console, or platform, any time soon. Although the company did not completely ruled out such possibility, it is certain that for now it does not make a lot of sense for the company to start selling its own video game console to compete against platforms like PlayStation or Xbox.

"We are prepping the Steam Big Picture Mode UI [a user interface for HDTVs connected to Steam-enabled PCs] and getting ready to ship that, so we are building [PC] boxes to test that on. We are also doing a bunch of different experiments with biometric feedback and stuff like that, which we have talked about a fair amount," said Doug Lombardi, marketing director at Valve, in an interview with Kotaku web-site.

It was reported earlier this week that Valve was working on a video game console powered by Windows and Steam that was supposed to become a target PC video games development system due to the fact that Valve sells tens of millions of titles via its Steam service. Apparently, this is not the case: the company just wants to ensure that games from Steam run well on HDTVs.

"It is a long way from Valve shipping any sort of hardware," added Mr. Lombardi.

Although there is clearly no smoke without fire, Valve's intention to ship a console that is based on off-the-shelf PC technologies (including ability to run PC games, which requires Windows OS) seemed weird, especially keeping in mind that Valve would have to compete against much wealthier companies like Microsoft Corp., Nintendo and Sony Corp.

Tags: Valve, Steam Box, Microsoft, Sony, Nintendo, Xbox, Playstation, Wii, Intel, Nvidia