First things first, we had to know if Whitten had a response to Valve head Gabe Newell's jab at Xbox One's 3 million sales number. (Spoilers: he didn't.) "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," Whitten laughingly told us. Jokes aside, he's skeptical of the Valve initiative. "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 wanna do that."

Specifically, we wanted to know if he sees the initiative as competition for both the Xbox One and PlayStation 4. Frankly, he doesn't. "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," he said. "I think there's space for both. I'm not sweating it."

So far, we agree with Whitten's assessment. The living room experience on a game console like Xbox One or PlayStation 4 remains vastly superior to that of even Steam's long-running Big Picture Mode (intended for living rooms). In 2014, Valve's SteamOS and Machines initiative still needs to prove competitive with the new game consoles. With the competition stiffer than ever, we can't wait to see what everyone has in store. As Whitten said, all of this is nothing but good for gamers.