The Valve and Steam Platform Discussion Thread

[OuterSpace]

PC gaming is dead.

 

[IDtenT]

OH MY GOD.

 

[Metro]

GabeN wounds me with the M+K getting brutally slammed away by a fucking controller.

 

[Infinitron]

Erik "Forbes Bro" Kain speaks: http://www.forbes.com/sites/erikkai...e-looks-awesome-but-it-wont-replace-consoles/

Steam's Big Picture Mode Looks Awesome - But It Won't Replace Consoles [Updated]

Could Valve’s Big Picture mode be the first step toward some sort of Steam Box? The Big Picture beta starts today.​

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Over at Kotaku, Jason Schreier has a great write-up on Valve’s Big Picture project.​

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Valve has created a UI for its Steam service designed to fit big screen TVs. The beta for Big Picture mode launches today.​

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And it really does look terrific. Essentially the mode is designed for people who want to hook up their PCs to their flat screen TVs and sit on the couch and play games with a controller, though gamers could also use wireless keyboard/mouse set-ups.​

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Here’s a picture of the lotus-style keyboard Valve has designed for “typing” with a controller:​

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As Schreier notes, this is an extremely innovative and intuitive design, and a huge step up from trying to type with a controller on a traditional QWERTY keyboard.​

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Steam From the Comfort of Your Couch​

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This could very well be the first step toward a Steam Box, and it’s most certainly the first step toward opening up the living room to PC gaming. True, PC gamers can already set up their towers in the living room, and play any games they like on their TV. But this adds a new layer of convenience to the process.​

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For instance, there’s a setting that allows you to boot directly to Big Picture, essentially bypassing your desktop altogether. All the convenience of Steam and PC gaming, but with added UI functionality for couch-and-controller types. Combine this with a mini gaming tower of some sort, and you basically have a PC console.​

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But traditional consoles won’t be replaced overnight. I can certainly see how games built for smaller monitors could run into problems on a big screen.​

Resolution, text size, in-game UI – all these factors may not translate as prettily as the Big Picture UI itself. The “walled garden” environment of a closed console system has its advantages as well, giving both consumers and developers the ability to know what to expect with every game.​

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Meanwhile, PC gamers are pretty happy playing at a desk with a monitor. But maybe there are more gamers out there who want a different kind of PC experience.​

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“We’re confident in some things that customers want,” Valve’s Greg Coomer told Kotaku. “They want a full-screen experience. They want to be in the living room. They want to use a game controller. They wanna have a social gaming experience. And we have this platform that lets us ship a significant portion of that experience.”​

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All told, this looks pretty amazing. As I noted yesterday, I’m much more excited about this sort of development from Valve than I am about virtual reality headsets and other wearable computing. It may not be as wonderful as a Half-Life 3 announcement, but the prospect of easily accessing the Steam catalog on your TV is an exciting one.​

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It also means that all these wonderful indie games and MMOs and free-to-play titles may find their way to the living room, bringing a sea change in the sort of games available on “consoles.” (Scare quotes because even a PC designed for the entertainment center hardly qualifies as a console.)​

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What About A Steam Box?​

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So far, no plans for hardware like a Steam Box, but Coomer told Kotaku it’s not out of the question.​

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“Each individual gamer is going to have to decide in the short term whether the value that Big Picture brings is something they want to configure for themselves,” Coomer told Schreier. “And for some users it’s going to be quite easy. For some users it might not be worth it yet. But that’s one of the things we’re going to find out when we ship. And then over time, I think we’re going to figure out which of those scenarios, or what ways do customers really want us to get involved in solving the rest of the problems that, say, our software can’t solve for them.​

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“And if it’s getting involved in shipping some kind of hardware, then we will get involved in doing that if we need to.”​

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At this point, I’d say the likely bet is that Valve will either design or partner with a computer company to create something like this. As I mentioned yesterday, the combination of Big Picture mode, designs for a moddable controller, and a move toward Linux all point in this direction.​

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For some PC gamers, none of this is going to sound very appealing. A Steam Box that is designed to be less moddable and more compact than most gaming rigs won’t appeal to the tinkerers. Controllers, I learned during the Dark Souls controversy, are widely viewed with disdain by at least a portion of the PC gaming community.​

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Schreier rightly concludes that none of this will chase away consoles in the short-term, but he thinks maybe someday Steam will be the only console we need. I doubt it, quite frankly, but the addition of Steam’s Big Picture mode is a welcome one nevertheless. Steam doesn’t need to “beat” the consoles in order to bring more entertainment to gamers.​

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For my part, I can certainly see buying a cheap second PC to play on in my living room, especially for games that work well with controllers like Skyrimand Dark Souls. Being able to play modded titles on the big screen would be great, and right now – without a really good PC UI for flat-screens – I have little incentive to drag my huge PC over to the TV when it works so much better at the desk.​

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Also, considering Valve is beginning its push into non-gaming software, this could open some interesting doors to non-gaming applications in the living room. I’m not sure how useful productivity or creativity software would be on a big screen TV, of course, but I’m willing to suspend my disbelief.​

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You can watch the trailer for Big Picture here.​

 

[Morgoth]

I never asked for this.

 

[Infinitron]

Found this comment on the Kotaku article Microsoft gonna Microsoft.

im.thatoneguy
I mocked up a similar keyboard a few years ago. Sent it to Microsoft saying "please implement this" and actually got a real response from a developer on the XBox Live team.
He said they also mocked up something similar but decided not to implement it because they thought it would be too confusing for casual gamers. I disagreed but maybe if Steam's keyboard takes off it'll spread beyond steam.

 

[felipepepe]

With this they can make the "Steam Box" a Steam-booted PC in a small case, and just release a new model every 6 months/one year....

 

[Oriebam]

more like Steamstation amirite

 

[OuterSpace]

GabeN64

 

[JarlFrank]

BUT IT WON'T REPLACE CONSOLES

I MEAN, YOU STILL HAVE TO, LIKE, KNOW HOW TO USE A PC WHICH IS TOTALLY COMPLICATED AND STUFF

 

[Morgoth]

Who the fuck uses a PC and sits on a couch 3 meters away from the screen?

What the fuck Gabe?

 

[Shadenuat]

“We’re confident in some things that customers want,” Valve’s Greg Coomer told Kotaku. “They want a full-screen experience. They want to be in the living room. They want to use a game controller. They wanna have a social gaming experience.

No, we do not. Stop making shit up.

 

[deus101]

Apparently EA wanted to buy Valve.

 

[Multi-headed Cow]

I dunno, I have a PC hooked up to my TV and watch everything through that. Don't really play games on it though, only game I play on the TV is Bejeweled 3 which I leave Steam running in offline mode and minimized and just double click the shortcut on the desktop for the game if I wanna move a few jewels around for whatever reason.

Maybe if my TV PC had more power I'd play console shit on it, but eh. Still appreciate the feature being added but I'm not sure I'd really use it.

 

[Infinitron]

Apparently EA wanted to buy Valve.

http://gamingeverything.com/28747/ea-tried-to-purchase-valve-at-one-point/

Man, can you imagine the uproar if EA bought Valve!? Being a true “gamer’s haven”, Steam is one of the few services- and Valve one of the few companies- that are really looked up to among gamers and developers alike. EA? Not so much. But apparently the most-despised game company was attempting to acquire the least-despised game company in a deal that would have given Valve’s ownership a billion dollars.

Yep. One billion dollars. At least, that’s what the New York Times claims they have insider info detailing.

“Valve has been pursued over the years by Electronic Arts, which would very likely have valued Valve at well over $1 billion had the talks progressed that far. [This comes from] two people with knowledge of the discussion who spoke on condition of anonymity because the talks were private”.

That’s quite the deal, but it’s a good thing that Valve boss-man Gabe Newell turned them down. He said that Valve would “disintegrate” if acquired by another company.

 

[Quetzacoatl]

Does EA really think they can do another Origin? I don't see how Valve will undergo a financial difficulty large enough to make them subject themselves under the yoke of EA.

 

[Infinitron]

This article is Multi-headed Cow porn


http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/09/t...maker-with-few-rules.html?_r=3&pagewanted=all

Game Maker Without a Rule Book

THIS is no Xbox 360 or PlayStation 3.

Every way I look, the scene shifts, the battle unfolds. I have a crazy contraption strapped to my head: a boxy set of goggles that looks like a 22nd-century version of a View-Master. It immerses me in a virtual world. I whirl one way and see zombies preparing to snack on my flesh. I turn another and wonder what fresh hell awaits.

Behold the future of video games. Or at least the future as envisioned by a bunch of gamers, programmers, tinkers and dreamers at the Valve Corporation here. This is the uncorporate company that brought us the Half-Life series, the hugely influential first-person shooter game.

The Valve guys aren’t done yet. Founded 16 years ago by a couple of refugees from Microsoft, Valve makes games that wild-eyed fans play until their thumbs hurt and dawn jabs through the curtains. But what really makes Valve stand out is its foresight on technology.

A decade ago, long before every media executive figured out that downloading was the future, Valve started an online service, Steam. It has since become for games what iTunes is to music — a huge online distributor, in its case one with more than 40 million active users and that, by some estimates, accounts for about 70 percent of the PC games bought and downloaded from the Web. Through Steam, Valve effectively collects a toll on other companies’ online game sales, in addition to making money from selling its own products.

On Monday, the company will begin a public test of a new television-friendly interface, Big Picture, for buying Steam games and playing them on computers in the living room.

“They’re on the cutting edge of the future of this industry,” says Peter Moore, the chief operating officer of Electronic Arts, a big games publisher that is both a Valve competitor and partner.

Now Valve executives think they may be onto the next big thing in games: wearable computing. The goggles I’m wearing — reminiscent of the ones Google recently unveiled to much hoopla — could unlock new game-playing opportunities. This technology could let players lose themselves inside a virtual reality and, eventually, blend games with their views of the physical world.

It’s one thing if a bottomless money well like Google wants to sink its profits into Project Glass, its own wearable-computing initiative. But for a 300-person software company like Valve, developing eyeball computers seems an absurdly ambitious — some say foolish — enterprise.

Valve’s exploration of new forms of game hardware comes as the PC, the device on which it has depended for much of its history, is changing in ways that could undermine its business. With a new PC operating system, Windows 8, coming out in October, Microsoft will start its own online marketplace for distributing software, including games. The move could take some of the, well, steam out of Steam.

Valve fosters unorthodox thinking through a corporate culture unusual even by the quirky standards of technology companies. While many start-ups pay lip service to flat organizational structures, Valve emphasizes that its workplace is truly “boss-less.”

“We don’t have any management, and nobody ‘reports to’ anybody else,” reads Valve’s handbook for new employees, which generated buzz this year when it leaked onto the Web.

Forget silly-sounding Silicon Valley job titles like code jedi or chief listener. Valve has no formal titles. The few employees who’ve put titles on business cards do so to satisfy outsiders apprehensive about working with people without labels. The same applies to Gabe Newell, one of Valve’s founders.

“I think he’s technically the C.E.O., but it’s funny that I’m not even sure of that,” says Greg Coomer, a designer and artist who was one of Valve’s first employees. (For the record, Mr. Newell is technically Valve’s chief executive.)

To spur creativity, Google management created the concept of “20 percent time,” the portion of employees’ schedules that they could commit to entirely self-directed projects. At Valve, it’s more like 100 percent time. New employees aren’t even told where to work in the company. Instead, they are expected to decide on their own where they can contribute most. Many desks at Valve are on wheels. After figuring out what they want to do, workers simply push their desks over to the group they want to join.

A few years ago, a Valve hire who had worked in special effects in Hollywood balked at wheeling his desk. The news reached Mr. Newell, who promptly picked up the desk himself and carried it to the new location, to the new employee’s embarrassment.

The man, whom Valve declined to name, is no longer with the company.

In an interview in a conference room at Valve’s headquarters, Mr. Newell says that relatively few people have left Valve over the years. When they do, it’s often because a sick parent needs help. In one case, Valve moved an employee’s parents to the Seattle area, where one of them was also able to receive better cancer treatment.

“I get freaked out any time one person leaves,” says Mr. Newell, a bearded bear of a man with John Lennon-style glasses. “It seems like a bug in the system.”

THE company has been among its industry’s leaders in engaging its audience. Valve won credibility early on with gamers by not merely tolerating the modification, or “modding,” of its games with players’ own creations but encouraging it.

The consistent originality of its games, too, has resonated with players. Portal 2 is a brainteaser that hinges on a mysterious weapon called a portal gun that a player can use to open entrances through walls, floors and ceilings, along with corresponding exits somewhere else. Players can use the gun to propel themselves across a chasm by jumping vertically into a hole and out a portal position on a wall.

The game has inspired an amusing string of fan videos in which gamers use homemade portal guns, and a dose of special effects, to cross a busy street and jump through walls of their homes.

Valve’s teams, dedicated to games and other projects, are clustered in open spaces around the five floors of the skyscraper the company occupies in this city, across Lake Washington from Seattle. Vintage pinball machines are arrayed around its corridors, and doors throughout its offices are etched with tributes to Team Fortress, a Valve game that features an evil virtual corporation that hates its customers and sells them inferior products.

“Mann Co. We sell products and get in fights,” reads the sign on the door in Valve’s lobby.

Valve has an eclectic work force. The company became interested in hiring one artist only after learning that his pastime was spray-painting graffiti art in Britain. It recently hired Leslie Redd, a school administrator, to lead an effort to use “Portal” to teach physics and other subjects in schools by offering a more engaging way to present ideas like escape velocity. Ms. Redd said that more than 2,000 teachers worldwide had registered to use the game in classes.

This year, Mr. Newell hired Yanis Varoufakis, a Greek economist, after being impressed with Mr. Varoufakis’s personal blog, which he fills with commentary on the European financial crisis. Mr. Varoufakis, who had never heard of Valve and is not a gamer, is studying the workings of the virtual economies of Valve games, in which players can barter and sell items like hats and armor. He said he was drawn to the job partly by Valve’s “completely anti-authoritarian” culture that, to his surprise, seemed to be working.

“What does Valve have to add to our perception of the evolution of corporate structures in the future?” he said in a Skype interview from the Greek island of Aegina. “Let’s face it, the current state of that culture leaves a lot to be desired.”

Valve’s most striking recruiting campaign is a recent move to establish a hardware group to develop technologies that can enhance the playing of games. The company posted a job listing for an industrial designer, hinting that it planned to get into the computer business itself. “We’re frustrated by the lack of innovation in the computer hardware space, though, so we’re jumping in,” the listing read. “Even basic input, the keyboard and mouse, haven’t really changed in any meaningful way over the years.”

Valve also recruited Jeri Ellsworth, an inventor and self-taught chip designer, whose pinball machines decorate Valve’s offices. Ms. Ellsworth recently gave a tour of Valve’s hardware laboratory, proudly showing off 3-D printers, a laser cutter and other industrial tools used to cobble together hardware prototypes. While interviewing for the job, she said, she was dubious about Valve’s interest in hardware.

“At one point, I said a hardware lab could be very expensive, it could be like a million dollars,” she recalled. “Gabe said, ‘That’s it?’ ”

A DRIVING force behind Valve’s most far-out hardware project, wearable computing, is being led by Michael Abrash, a veteran of technology and game companies who helped Valve get off the ground in the 1990s by licensing its important game software from his employer at the time, Id Software. To Mr. Abrash, glasses that project games in front of players’ eyes are an obvious next step from today’s versions of wearable computers, smartphones and tablets.

While Google’s glasses will display texts and video conferences, Valve has greater technical challenges to overcome with augmented-reality games. It has to figure out how to keep stable an image of a virtual object (say, a billboard) that is meant to be attached to a real-world object (the side of a building) while a player moves around. Otherwise, the illusion would be shattered.

Mr. Abrash said glasses capable of credible augmented-reality games could be three to five years away, though he said virtual reality glasses would arrive sooner. He said Valve hadn’t decided whether it would make glasses itself. But its ultimate goal is to share its designs freely so other hardware companies can make glasses, too.

“Gabe has a saying, which is, ‘We will do what we need to do,’ ” Mr. Abrash says. “We don’t particularly want to be a company that makes hardware in large quantities. It’s not what we do.”

Mr. Moore of Electronic Arts doubts that wearable-computing projects championed by the likes of Mr. Newell and Sergey Brin of Google will connect with the mainstream. “It’s appealing to them because they live in that outer fringe of I.Q. and money,” he says.

Mr. Newell’s technology vision is one reason that his comments this summer about Windows 8, which he called a “catastrophe for everyone in the PC space,” caused such an industry stir. He elaborated on some of his concerns more recently, saying he was troubled by a trend in computing toward devices that are less open to developers like Valve than they used to be. Apple kicked off the shift with its App Store for iOS devices, through which Apple controls the distribution of software that people can install on their iPhones and iPads, and takes a cut of the proceeds as well.

Mr. Newell concedes that this approach has been successful for Apple. He says, however, that he is concerned that Microsoft is taking a similar approach for Windows 8 applications, which will need to be distributed through a Microsoft app store if they take advantage of the most modern features in the operating system. Valve worries that Microsoft’s control will undermine Steam on Windows 8 by creating a bottleneck for updates to games.

“We would say to Microsoft, we understand all these frustrations about the challenges to your business,” he said. “But trying to copy Apple will accelerate, not slow, Microsoft’s decline.”

Mark Martin, a spokesman for Microsoft, declined to comment.

SOME game executives say it’s ironic that such concerns come from Valve, which has become a gatekeeper with Steam. Last year, the company had a dust-up with Electronic Arts over Steam’s policy of taking a cut of all revenue generated from a game, like the sale of virtual goods, even after a player has bought the game. As a result, E.A. is not selling a number of its latest games through Steam.

Valve says that without such a policy, developers could easily game the Steam system by making all their software free and charging consumers for additional content later. It is worth pointing out, too, that E.A. last year began competing directly against Steam by starting its own online game store, Origin.

Valve can do without many formalities of a traditional company because it’s privately held and controlled by Mr. Newell. He and Mike Harrington, who is no longer with the company, founded Valve in 1996 with the wealth they accumulated in Microsoft’s early days. The company has never raised money from outside investors, so it is under no external pressure to sell itself or go public.

Not that Mr. Newell hasn’t had opportunities to sell out. Valve has been pursued over the years by Electronic Arts, which would very likely have valued Valve at well over $1 billion had the talks progressed that far, said two people with knowledge of the discussion who spoke on condition of anonymity because the talks were private.

Although Valve’s finances are private, Michael Pachter, an analyst at Wedbush Securities, estimates that the company could be worth around $2.5 billion today.

Mr. Newell said that there was a better chance that Valve would “disintegrate,” its independent-minded workers scattering, than that it would ever be sold.

“It’s way more likely we would head in that direction than say, ‘Let’s find some giant company that wants to cash us out and wait two or three years to have our employment agreements terminate,’ ” he says.

 

[Multi-headed Cow]

A few years ago, a Valve hire who had worked in special effects in Hollywood balked at wheeling his desk. The news reached Mr. Newell, who promptly picked up the desk himself and carried it to the new location, to the new employee’s embarrassment.

The man, whom Valve declined to name, is no longer with the company.

 

[Metro]

All that creativity and innovation yet they don't produce anything creative or innovative. Why the fuck would you waste time redesigning mouse and keyboard? The reason it hasn't changed over the years is because it works.

 

[Infinitron]

All that creativity and innovation yet they don't produce anything creative or innovative. Why the fuck would you waste time redesigning mouse and keyboard? The reason it hasn't changed over the years is because it works.

Well, define "creative".

Let's face it, first person shooters are the defining game genre of our era. Maybe producing interesting and fun twists on the FPS genre IS the best definition of creativity and innovation for a commercially successful company.

 

[Icewater]

Anyone else get that sort of cult-ish vibe from Valve?

 

[Gragt]

Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Gaben Valve wgah-nagl ftaghn.

 

[IDtenT]

Valve has been a personality cult for over a decade.

Anyhow, expect PC games to be designed for 1080p and gamepads now. Keyboards, what's that?

 

[Menckenstein]

Half-Life 3 steamcube exclusive.

 

[Multi-headed Cow]

Played with the consoletard interface a bit. It's tolerable if for whatever reason you want your PC to be more like a console. Since it's optional I'm not getting out my pitchfork but it's not really something I'll ever use beyond just messing with it for shits and giggles.

Still, even with a weak TV PC you could just load up all those crappy indie games you've got cluttering your Steam game list and use it for those. I guess. Assuming indies support controller use which they probably don't because they can't afford $100 for Greenlight. Eh.