Steam Box prototype coming within the next four months

"We'll be giving out some prototypes to customers to gauge their reactions, I guess, in the next three to four months."

- Valve co-founder Gabe Newell says that his company's "Steam Box" living room PC will be in some consumer hands sometime this summer. Valve is currently working on its own games console, known to the outside world as the Steam Box, with a plan to launch the hardware sometime in 2013. Newell opened up about the company's plans recently. Now Newell has told the BBC that we may well see the device in operation within the next few months. "We're working with partners trying to nail down how fast we can make it," he explained, giving an estimate of around three to four months for the prototype release. "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," he continued. Newell noted that the console's controller is one of the main talking points within the company, as Valve considers including a heart-rate monitor in the gamepad. "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," he added. "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."