Steam Box's aims are quite simple and ambitious: make PC gaming as hassle-free as console's and bring it to the living room. It is natural to see it as a threat to consoles, but it seems that Microsoft isn't as worried about that as one would expect.
Microsoft's Xbox Chief Product Officer Marc Whitten believes that Steam Machines will co-exist along with consoles without competing with them. "I think there's space for both," he said. "I'm not sweating it."
Whitten admitted that he hasn't formalized an opinion about Steam Machines and their target audience or Valve's plans for them. "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 wanna do that." But is the number of those people large enough to make a dent in console sales? Whitten believe that this is quite unlikely.
