Doug Lombardi says Valve began some "exploratory work" with the company last year, but is not involved in Xi3's current products.

Valve has said it has no current connection with Xi3, the PC maker behind the $1,000 Piston.

Valve marketing director Doug Lombardi confirmed the company's position to Eurogamer. "Valve began some exploratory work with Xi3 last year, but currently has no involvement in any product of theirs."

Xi3 announced it had received an investment from Valve alongside the unveiling of the Piston, and the machine was being shown off at Valve's booth during tech expo CES 2013 in January.

The grapefruit-sized Piston features a 3.2GHz Quad Core AMD A10 processor and 8GB of RAM, and is designed to sit underneath a living room television and make use of Steam's Big Picture mode. The standard $999.99 model comes with a 128GB SSD hard drive, with 256GB and 512GB models costing $1,339.99 and $1,749.99 respectively. Xi3 is currently offering a $100 discount on all models to customers who preorder the device.

Valve is working on a Steam Box of its own, with Gabe Newell saying that a prototype should be ready for testing in the next few months.

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