Valve boss Gabe Newell has revealed that the company will be sending out prototype versions of its Steam Box to customers within the next three to four months.

“We’re working with partners trying to nail down how fast we can make it,” he told the BBC. ”We’ll be giving out some prototypes to customers to gauge their reactions, I guess, in the next three to four months.”

He did stress that Steam Box is still in the development stages and so there’s still a lot of kinks to work out before it will be ready for launch. ”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,” said Newell.

“The main thing that’s holding us up right now is we have a couple of different controller prototypes that we’re using. And that’s one of things actually we’ll be giving to customers; we’ll just give them a couple of different ones and then actually look to see what the differences are in their play patterns when they have those different controllers.”