Anyone fancy the idea of a SteamStation? Because there's an outside chance you might get one. Valve are prepared to move into the console business, says Gabe Newell, for the good of the industry.

"If we have to sell hardware we will," co-founder and MD Newell told Penny Arcade. "We have no reason to believe we're any good at it; it's more we think that we need to continue to have innovation, and if the only way to get these kind of projects started is by us going and developing and selling the hardware directly then that's what we'll do."

Developing a console isn’t Valve’s priority, however. "It's definitely not the first thought that crosses our mind,” said Newell. “We'd rather hardware people that are good at manufacturing and distributing hardware do that. We think it's important enough that if that's what we end up having to do, then that's what we end up having to do."

Should the Portal, Half-Life and Team Fortress creators move into the console business, they intend on introducing some of their game development nous to the mix. "We're thinking of trying to figure out how to do the equivalent of the [Team Fortress] incremental approach in software design and try to figure out how would you get something similar to that in the hardware space as well."

Newell continued, “We just need to figure out how we can start giving these to customers and iterating on the design quickly enough without having to go off and buy ten million of them and then find out we did something mildly stupid and then having to throw them all away and start over."

Newell also reckons that the current platform holders are doing it wrong, thanks to their outdated approaches. "Internally developed proprietary graphics solutions on the consoles, they're all gone - everything in the console space is coming from the PC now, and I think that we really need to see the same thing in terms of just general attitudes about platforms."

"I would push them very hard to stop thinking of themselves as being a platform for everything that already exists and start betting on the inventiveness and the benefits that you would get by embracing a more open approach to the internet and game delivery and game business models and things like that."

So there you have it. A Valve console, with Steam at its heart and Achievements already built in? Chuck in Half-Life 3 as an exclusive launch title and it might just be impossible to resist. What do you lot reckon?