Xbox chief product officer Marc Whitten appears unconcerned about the upcoming launch of Valve's Steam Machines. The Xbox executive told Engadget he considers Steam Machines to be different enough to Xbox One that the products aren't really in direct competition. "I personally don't know how to think about Steam Machines yet," he said. "I'm not knocking it or whatever. I continue to think that PC gaming - the sort of uber configuration and I can change everything and I can mod - that's an important thing and there's a lot of people that want to do that. "When you get into that living room environment, you don't want to spend any of your brain cells doing anything but being entertained. I don't want to work on it, I don't want to feel like I have to know how it works. "I would like to be blowing things up now, or watching a thing now. That's the fundamental thing that you want to do. I think there's space for both. I'm not sweating it." When asked about Gabe Newell's joke last week that Xbox One would take a while to catch up to Steam because the latter has 65 million users, Whitten laughed: "The last thing I'll ever do in my entire life is get into a flame war with Gabe Newell. There's no win in that." A line of 13 separate Steam Machines, each with different specs and price points, was revealed by Valve at CES earlier this month. Steam Machine prices range from $499 to the multiple thousands of dollars. Valve is bundling each system with the unique Steam Controller. Source - CVG
