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http://www.ign.com/articles/2012/09/03/valve-confirms-hardware-development

Sighting a lack of PC hardware development, they're apparently grabbing the bull by the horns...

Don't hold your breath. This sort of development has a 3+ year cycle minimum if they intend to develop something good. If they want to just standardize on a specific PC platform hardware assembly they might knock it out in a year or two, but given they are specifically stating that existing PC hardware is inadequate that seems unlikely.

It will be very interesting to see if they can pull it off. As a video game company used to relatively short product cycles, it's going to take some serious buy in and corporate patience to develop hardware.

If they succeed, the pay off would be huge.

Microsoft used to only make software until they came out with the Xbox, so it's not exactly unprecedented. Though admittedly Microsoft has gallons more resources than Valve probably has.

Some of Valve's reasoning sounds iffy to me though. Mouse and keyboard input has remained unchanged for a long time because it works well. There's no need to fix something that's not broken.

bhamv3 said:

Mouse and keyboard input has remained unchanged for a long time because it works well. There's no need to fix something that's not broken.

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For some tasks, yes, but as Nintendo has shown with the wiimote, and many have shown with the multitouch screen, the mouse and keyboard are not universally perfect, and in fact I'd say that while gamers have adapted to them, they really are far from ideal for most PC games,

stienman said:

For some tasks, yes, but as Nintendo has shown with the wiimote, and many have shown with the multitouch screen, the mouse and keyboard are not universally perfect, and in fact I'd say that while gamers have adapted to them, they really are far from ideal for most PC games,

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I'm not sure about most. FPS games are well suited to mouse and keyboard inputs, though it may feel that way because the alternative is a console controller, which sucks for FPS games. RTS games generally fit mouse and keyboard quite well too.

One of the advantages keyboards have over consoles is simply having more options. PC and console versions of RPGs often differ in their control schemes (and here I'm thinking of stuff like Mass Effect, Dragon Age, and Fallout 3) because the keyboard gives you more configurability. I quite like the mouse and keyboard setup myself.

Yeah, I'm not sure exactly what kind of innovation they're looking for here that they see as being non-existent in the PC market. I suppose that it's true that, even though they're constantly improving the technologies that already exist in gaming computing, they're not really innovating new technologies, but what are we really missing aside from full-on VR? We have ever-increasing monitor size and resolution, better and better GPUs and Video-RAM, more and more system RAM, faster and more robust CPUs, solid state hard drives, magnetic hard drives in the multiple terabyte range, 3D monitors, regular mice, gaming mice, gaming mice with an absurd amount of buttons, the option to use console controllers; what more do we really need for gaming? Unless they're going to give us gloves, goggles, and headsets that all tie in to the same internal network and can be picked up by a wireless controller like wireless keyboards and mice are now and can give us full immersion VR as well as motion control through the gloves and voice control through the headset; I don't really see what they have to bring us that Logitech, nVidia, and Thermaltake can't already give us.

Gared said:

I don't really see what they have to bring us that Logitech, nVidia, and Thermaltake can't already give us.

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Half-Life 3.

Steam on a console.


Mmmmm...

stienman said:

As a video game company used to relatively short product cycles...

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Do you know what Valve Time is? We'll be lucky to see this in a decade.

stienman said:

For some tasks, yes, but as Nintendo has shown with the wiimote, and many have shown with the multitouch screen, the mouse and keyboard are not universally perfect, and in fact I'd say that while gamers have adapted to them, they really are far from ideal for most PC games,

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Honestly, I think the most apt way to handle controls is to just use a tablet and have all your necessary controls pop up on the screen. You need to remap them? Drag the buttons somewhere else. Need a command to appear on the fly? You can do that on a tablet. Need a map? Boom. Right there on your tablet.

Of course, Nintendo is already doing this.

What if...

The Steam Console comes with the consumer Version of the Oculus Rift?

Just saying...

Andi said:

What if...

The Steam Console comes with the consumer Version of the Oculus Rift?

Just saying...

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And its launch title would be half-life 3...

Ravenpoe said:

And its launch title would be half-life 3...

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Seems to me, it'd just be easiest to start selling steam-branded all-in-one PCs with modular replacable video cards that attached onto the side or something, like the modem did on the dreamcast.



Have a stripped down windows OS that basically just went directly into steam, and voila. The "Valve PC/Console."