During CES 2013 this past January, a tiny little gaming system from Xi3 and Valve tipped up. As you may recall, the machine was hailed as a prototype of Valve’s upcoming Steam Box Piston.
The $999 system is modular, allowing it to be easily updated. As expected, the box is specifically designed to support Steam’s Big Picture mode, with at least one version running the Linux operating system.
Unsurprisingly, it seems as if the Steam Box Piston has grabbed the support of Infinity Ward, the developers behind the Call of Duty franchise. To be sure, the studio recently published pictures that seemed to indicate it will be developing or porting some of its existing video games to Steam for Linux. The pictures turned up on the company Twitter feed and show the Steam Box Piston with an Infinity Ward sticker on the side.
The comments left along with the picture said “what’s this?” Another picture turned up of that branded Piston machine along with the comment that said “game development.” If you notice in those pictures, the Piston is the roughly diamond shaped, dark colored box. The shiny silver box that is sitting on is apparently a search appliance offering an additional 1 TB of storage.
One thing we know for sure from these pictures is that Infinity Ward is certainly developing for the Linux platform using the Piston. The game developer offered no other tidbits on what it was developing or porting over to the box. Considering the popularity of the Call of Duty franchise and the fact that it is the best-selling title for Infinity Ward, I’m sure CoD is at least one of many games in the mix.
