Valve Corporation has been on the forefront of gaming technology for years. They’ve used their source engine to create classics such as the half-life series, the Portal series, the Left 4 Dead series and DOTA. Also, their beloved gaming distribution platform, Steam, is used by over 50 million gamers and has over 2,000 games available for purchase. When Valve announced in late September that they would be rolling out a three tiered steam related announcement, anticipation among gaming enthusiast and critics alike ran high.
For years, the CEO of Valve Corporation, Gabe Newall, has made statements about the fact that Valve wanted to expand Steam from a desktop gaming platform into an all-inclusive entertainment entity that can be used anywhere. In 2012, Valve made a first step towards this when Steam was updated with a “Big Picture” mode which is a 10 foot UI that users could use to port their stem sessions and play their games on HDTVs. The idea of expanding the Steam universe is the main theme of the three tiered announcements made last month. As they explained it on their official release site, “Last year, we shipped a software feature called Big Picture, a user-interface tailored for televisions and gamepads. This year we’ve been working on even more ways to connect the dots for customers who want Steam in the living-room.
Soon, we’ll be adding you to our design process, so that you can help us shape the future of Steam.”
The first announcement is the most expansive of the group. Valve announced that Steam is moving from being merely a gaming distribution platform to being a full-fledged, Linux based, operating system that is designed specifically for the living room. It will allow full streaming of all steam games, family game sharing, and music/tv/movie streaming.
Of course to run SteamOS, you’ll need to own a steam compatible machine which is where the second part of the announcement comes in. People have speculated about the creation of a Steam box or console for years and finally a variation of this idea has been detailed. However, Valve is not going to be making one uniform machine for people to use. There will be multiple different Steam machines released in 2014 that gamers will be able to choose from. Their official announcement reads, “Entertainment is not a one-size-fits-all world. We want you to be able to choose the hardware that makes sense for you, so we are working with multiple partners to bring a variety of Steam gaming machines to market during 2014, all of them running SteamOS.” All of these machines are still in development and to test the prototypes Valve is sending out 300 systems to valued Steam users to beta test.
The final announcement compliments the idea of a steam machine. To go with these consoles Valve has developed a Steam Controller which it claims is compatible with every available Steam game. It will have dual track pads, haptic technology, and a touch screen. Also, it was designed to be hackable and customizable unlike other prominent gaming controllers now on the market.
With this three tiered announcement and the revelation that Valve recently purchased the trademark for Half Life 3 it looks like Steam and gaming enthusiasts have a lot to look forward to in the coming months.
