Xbox Chief Product Officer not worried about Steam Machines

"I think there's space for both," Xbox Chief Product Officer Marc Whitten told Engadget when asked whether he views Valve's Steam Machines as new competition in the living room, "I'm not sweating it."

"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 joked in the interview, but later suggested that the Steam Machine and its Steam OS are not as user-friendly as the Xbox One. "When you get into that living room environment, you don't want to spend any of your brain cells doing anything but being entertained," he said. "I don't want to work on it; I don't want to feel like I have to know how it works."

Whitten also said that he's excited about the Crystal Cove prototype of the Oculus Rift virtual reality goggles and Sony's PlayStation Now game streaming service the company announced at the show, calling it a golden age of gaming. He said that both technologies will only grow the industry, presumably to the benefit of all parties.

Recently, Whitten said that sorting out the Xbox One's tricky social functions will be the priority focus of the console's first major update.

At CES 2014 Valve revealed that 12 different manufacturers were already working on producing their own Steam Machines. You can find a roundup of what we know about them so far, here, and our thoughts on what are some of the challenges they face, here.