When I ask you to name the technology world’s most secretive company, you’d most likely respond with ‘Apple’. However, there’s one other technology company that, while substantially smaller than the Cupertino giant, is quite possibly even more secretive: Valve.
Valve is a strange company. So technically, they’re a game maker, having created some of the gaming world’s most beloved franchises: Half-Life, Team Fortress, Counter-Strike, Portal, and my personal favourite, Left 4 Dead. Their unprecedented support for the modding community as well as their traditional PC-first focus ensures an almost undying devotion from fans.
So, despite no Half-Life 3, the silly TF hats, and a by now 12-month delay in the Cold Stream DLC (for us Xbox peasants, at least), we never really take it out on the company. Heck, we give cutesy nicknames to Valve’s infamous delays: Valve Time.
However, despite being a game maker, Valve has made its biggest impact on the industry not with a game, but with a service: Steam. I would call Steam the iTunes for PC games, but that would be unfair to Valve’s service (because unlike iTunes, Steam doesn’t suck). Through Steam, you can buy loads of games, both new and old, and it provides features for multiplayer. Add to all this the regular special deals, and Steam turns into the poster child for digital content distribution. People love Steam.
As great as all of the above is, it’s not the reason for this item. No, I’m talking about Valve because the company is on the threshold of becoming a whole lot more than a ‘mere’ games and services company. In a long blog post, Micheal Abrash, Valve employee (and Microsoft, Intel, and id vet; he has worked on everything from firmware to drivers to processor design to more), revealed the company is working on wearable computing – more specifically, on augmented reality glasses. Yup, like Project Glass.
Before we get to that, though, Abrash offers an intriguing glimpse into Valve’s unique company structure – namely, there isn’t one. This has been known for some time now, but Abrash confirms it: there are no job titles at Valve, no managers, nobody telling you what you’re supposed to do. The desks have wheels, so you can run them around the building to join the project you wish to join. There is no formal management or hierarchy at Valve. At all.
“My observation is that it takes new hires about six months before they fully accept that no one is going to tell them what to do, that no manager is going to give them a review, that there is no such thing as a promotion or a job title or even a fixed role,” Abrash details, “That it is their responsibility, and theirs alone, to allocate the most valuable resource in the company – their time – by figuring out what it is that they can do that is most valuable for the company, and then to go do it. That if they decide that they should be doing something different, there’s no manager to convince to let them go; they just move their desk to the new group (the desks are on wheels, with computers attached) and start in on the new thing.”
The amount of trust the company places in its employees is quite extraordinary. Each and every employee has access to all the company’s source code, and can perform changes if he or she so desires. “Any employee can know almost anything about how the company works and what it’s doing; the company is transparent to its employees,” Abrash adds, “Unlike many organizations, Valve doesn’t build organizational barriers to its employees by default; it just trusts them and gets out of their way so they can create value.”
“Valve’s long string of successes, many of them genuinely groundbreaking, is strong evidence that the hypothesis that creative people are the key to success is in fact correct, and that the structuring of Valve around those people has been successful,” Brash concludes, “And, almost by definition, it’s a great place for the right sort of creative people to work.”
This is actually the entire purpose of the blog post: painting Valve in a very, very good light for prospecting employees. Why? Well, as it turns out, Valve is working on augmented reality glasses, and considering Google announced a similar project last week, the traditionally secretive Valve needed to open up to ensure that the kind of people interested in working on augmented reality glasses come to Valve instead of Google.
“By ‘wearable computing’ I mean mobile computing where both computer-generated graphics and the real world are seamlessly overlaid in your view; there is no separate display that you hold in your hands (think Terminator vision),” Abrash details. It’s mostly research and development now, but the team is growing.
How does this all tie into the rumour that Apple CEO Tim Cook visited Valve’s offices? It doesn’t. I think Tim Cook’s visit, if it took place at all, relates to a different project inside Valve: a PC console (by lack of a better term). Persistent rumours claim that Valve is working on a set of specifications a “console” has to adhere to to be labelled a Steambox (or whatever catchy term you can think of), complete with a bunch of controllers. Stick in a keyboard and mouse, and you have a PC gaming experience.
Anybody would be able to build one, and OEMs would be able to sell them pre-made for less technically inclined people. I’m fairly sure Cook was visiting to see if Macs, too, can implement these specifications. I wouldn’t be surprised if Linux support, too, is on Valve’s list. And all this – the specifications, Linux, Cook – for a very simple reason: Windows 8.
Windows 8 is the entire reason for this project to exist. With Windows 8, Microsoft is slowly but surely moving towards a completely closed-off iOS-like operating system, which has no place for Steam. Sure, Windows 8 has a desktop mode now, but it’s legacy, and will eventually go the way of the dodo. Valve doesn’t like the idea of being dependent on Microsoft’s rules, so they had to think of a way to circumvent the inevitable.
Abrash’ project fits into all this as well. Sure, such a PC console would extend Steam’s raison d’être for another, say, 4-7 years, but what’s going to happen after that? Valve’s already missed the smartphone gaming market, and I’m getting the idea Gabe Newell, Valve’s CEO and founder, isn’t too keen on missing the next big thing.
All this shows that Valve is a company to keep an eye on, even if you’re not a gamer. They’re the kind of company which rewards creativity and allows it to blossom, and those are, by definition, the kind of places where the next big thing comes from. It reminds me a lot of PARC – and we all know just how much we owe to PARC.
Still – in between those glasses and the Steambox, could you guys and girls at Valve please finish the Cold Stream DLC?
Thanks.
A console from Valve seems a smart move, but I don’t think that’s their way (they lack resources for this). A more appropriate way for them is to certify certain Hardware/OS combos, even licensing a system design to interested ODMs is a viable option, and then selling the service (in its current form). Going that way, for example any Apple hardware can be certified for running Steam apps.
In fact, the Steam IS the granddaddy of all App*.* Stores and Markets and Google Plays around.
Edited 2012-04-14 21:00 UTC
I’m not so sure about that. Since they’ve got their customers trained to accept the idea of ‘buying’ games they don’t own (which is actually more like renting), I would assume that any console they released would be built around this model. That being the case, why not team up with OnLive and build that streaming service around steam? Broadband is getting to be so ubiquitous that there’s almost no need to have anything but a thin client on the customers’ end.
Of course, purists would say that consoles are useful for having physical media, but again… Steam doesn’t work around this model anyway. So as long as you’re going to ‘buy’ games from an online store, might as well just have them stream it.
Actually, broadband is not as ubiquitous as you would think. Even in rich countries like the US, you still find such things as people using 56K modems because nothing else is available and 5 GB monthly download caps on ADSL connections.
I love to live in a country where such problems have been tackled for a long time, but we also have to remember that we are just lucky on that front.
Edited 2012-04-15 08:37 UTC
Is that really still true? I mean, I’m in a 3rd world country but I don’t think you can get POTS dialup here anymore. It seems to be all broadband, either wired or wireless.
I can only back it up with anecdotal evidence (people on Kroc’s forum), but it didn’t surprise me so much at the time : covering a very large country with a highly spread population like the US with ADSL or optical fibers is quite a huge undertaking.
As for wireless broadband, let’s not forget that the OP was talking about “streaming” gaming services like OnLive, which have pretty stringent requirements in terms of network connectivity. The latency, random bitrates, and small download caps of most mobile networks may not be a very good fit for that.
I agree that it may be a good solution in developing countries, though, because it’s much cheaper to install a good 3G/4G mobile network than a good wired Internet network when you don’t have a reliable landline phone infrastructure already in place.
Edited 2012-04-15 09:04 UTC
Actually theres absolutely no reason why we can’t run fiber to every home in America, we’ve done it twice before with federal mandates to bring electricity and phone lines to every home in the country, the companies won’t expand or upgrade their networks unless forced.
If done they’d have to force a minimum speed of 100Mbit symmetrical for residential lines and business class lines at 1Gbit symmetrical.
I mean come on, you can order 10Gbit gear off Newegg…
This is true, but as far as I know, the modern-day policy of the US is to mandate little from big companies and instead give them everything they want, going as far as to financially rescue the biggest ones with public funds when they have messed up.
There are too many countries out there do this…
I can’t speak for the US or if it’s specifically 56K, but in Germany there are still a lot of people who either get very, very slow DSL connections or no DSL connections at all. The problem is that the big service providers won’t invest the money that is needed to create the necessary infrastructure (cables in the ground) if it’s only for a few dozen or even a few hundred people (like it often is if you’re not living close to a big city). The other option (wireless) may be a bit cheaper, but has other problems. One of the biggest is the growing opposition against wireless due to possible health problems caused by radiation (mainly in the brain).
Luckily, The Netherlands was already entirely covered with fibre/coax cable (by government mandate) in the ’80s, making broadband available to all.
+1 for us.
Sorry? Dutch telecom only rolled out ADSL after the cable company started with broadband. Before 1996? Dialup was the only choice. Friend who lived nearby got Dsl years? later because his cable co wasn’t up to speed.
You misunderstood me – I meant mandated fibre/coax cable coverage for cable TV – which would later prove useful in rolling out broadband.
Yes it’s true. There are plenty of areas in the US where the phone service providers and cable providers won’t build infrastructure to support broadband internet services or even cable tv services to rural areas. Instead they want locals to put up money to pay for the build-out and most people refuse to do so (which is good, in my opinion). So in the end they have 2 choices: dialup internet and satellite internet. Satellite internet is pretty expensive for what you get so you see people sticking to their < $10/m dialup connections. I supposed they could opt for mobile broadband but the pricing and usage terms on it are a big fat joke and the consumers aren’t the ones laughing. My in-laws just recently got satellite internet after being fed up waiting on AT&T to offer them a DSL option which stopped right up the street from their house and yes, AT&T insisted they put up the money to build it out further so they could in turn pay them a monthly fee to use it. Again, a big joke and the consumers aren’t the ones laughing.
Yeah, if you happen to live in a rural area with allot of hills and tall forests you’re SOL on anything but dialup, WISPs and Satellite aren’t an option for them.
Even in rural areas where you have the option of Satellite or a WISP you may still go with a dialup line due to caps and latency.
In the US there is absolutely no competition and the ISPs fight vehemently to keep it that way. Most areas are only legally allowed to be served by 1 cable company and 1 phone company, who work in collusion to keep rates high, service crappy and competition out via exclusive municipal contracts for the lines and poles…
Well, I doubt these people are going to be buying/downloading games on Steam anyway, so they’re probably not the target audience for this console.
Thats part of the larger problem though, they should be part of the market, but the “free market” refuses to bring them in.
The only reason these people even have electricity let alone phone service is because of federally mandated public works projects, we need to update the infrastructure to above the current “industry standard”. FTTH 100Mbit+ bandwidth will allow for whole new industries as well as allow for future updates to happen much more smoothly.
I mean come on, 100Mbit network adapters have been standard equipment for what, at least 15 years now?
Well, for small games (not more than a few MB, a criteria which some indie games out there fit), it’s possible to bear with the low speed of dialup as long as you only have to do it once. Also, some Steam games are already sold on physical media and Valve could probably expand that if they thought it is worth it.
The current Steam service is indeed currently favoring broadband, but unlike streaming services they can also provide something to dialup users when there is a need to.
Edited 2012-04-16 07:00 UTC
buy games they don’t own?
If you mean, buy games that do not have physical media so the media can not get scratched thus causing the loss of the game….then you are correct.
No, I don’t mean physical media. I mean buying games that have to authenticate with an online server that may or may not exist a year from now, and who’s real owner can revoke your right to play the games you own just by flipping a switch.
And I’m not saying I am completely against this model either. When these online stores have sales with games going for $5 a piece, that’s cheaper than renting
A console would be silly, and a huge money pit. A target platform to compete with DirectX leveraging more open tech… now that could be interesting. Valve’s one of the few players in the industry who have the pull to make it happen.
I could see Valve developing an OS based on Embedded Windows and then having a custom UI that looks like a steam interface.
If they can get a replaceable GFX card in there, then you have the needed upgradability and low maintenance for a box that can sit in the entertainment center and be hooked up to the TV.
Well, I was about to rant about previous post about Cook visiting Valve’s HQ and I’m still up to it.
Valve may just be an IT company, but they are concentrated on the gaming industry. I don’t care for games. Heck, I don’t care for augmented reality, stupid little gadgets that cripples you down by giving you even more useless info [like we just not have enough of this crap!].
I’m really tired with this weird shift that IT industry took. It almost become “fashion IT”. I don’t care about fashion, trends and other crap. I care for functionality, usefulness and good reason.
And no – iPad is not usefull. People use it mainly for gaming and trivial tasks like socializing and posting the same old crap they post using regular PC’s.
And yes – tablet is a PC, just like goddamn console, and even your unhandy smartphone which makes you looking so freaking hilarious and stupid at the same time.
D’oh!
Well, I agree with everything you said, except for tablets. I have an iPad myself, but don’t have a single game loaded on it. Just because YOU don’t find it useful doesn’t mean anybody else wouldn’t. The most useful thing I find is to use it as a MIDI control surface for software/hardware synths, esp since they released a port of Lemur for it. I also take it with me when I go on trips, because I find it more comfortable to use than a phone for long periods of time, and I don’t have a specific need for a laptop that a tablet doesn’t handle sufficiently. Plus, it’s nice for reading/surfing while in bed, or on the crapper
BRA-VO!
Perhaps if you fear change so much, you should not be so emotionally vested with a field like IT, which advances at an exponential rate…
Nah, I don’t get why everything should be dumbed down so the stupidest people on earth can use it instead of focusing on making better, faster, more feature complete and more secure products.
Instead get the same or less functionality with a halfassed touch interface on hardware that can’t do what we want to do because of the legal lobotomizing of the tech industry or because some douche executive is pinching pennies using outdated crap hardware with horribly broken drivers and some useless, no longer supported proprietary software…
If you fear change you shouldn’t be in IT in the first place.
I do not fear change in an IT. I love IT to change, but not in this particular direction, which is something I call “fashion IT”. This is NOT a real change. Besides, it’s based on emotions and aesthetics mainly.
My personal expectations are rather different,
iPad become more useful than PC for me at home =)
And I play games on “goddamn” console.
Yeah I can’t still do serious programming on tablet, but that will be possible at one point: Tablet + PC/Cloud combination. Touch interface has big potential not utilized in today’s IDE.
If you want to build the world’s most ugliest monster PC, you can easily do it. But industry is not to blame for your problems.
I am certainly NOT against tablets as computers. I am against dumbing it down, making it just twitter/fb/whatever clients [apps], or just gaming platforms.
I believe there is potential in tablets, but not in their present shape.
I also have nothing against simplicity of use. It just all boils down to usability and support for not only games, but – mainly – work.
I would like to work, not only play on a tablet.
This is such a narrow-minded post, I don’t know where to begin.
My company uses iPads. They all have no games. They have the apps we need to do business. They’re inexpensive and easy to deploy and support.
I can name at least 10 businesses within 10 miles of where I’m sitting that only use iPads – no computers, no cash registers.
I can tell you that as a video chat device, it’s been a godsend for me, since I live far from my family.
The fact that you dismiss the entire family of devices because you’re too simple to use it for anything other than games says much more about you that it does about iPads.
But maybe it’s a console without vendor specific gatekeeper.
Think of it like like a 3DO where the gaming specs can be built by any company. Or like Microsoft tried to in the early 80ies with the MSX home computer.
3DO concept was ahead of its time, unfortunately. $599 US$? Check
Digital optical media capable of playing modern content? check.
It was essentially the PS3 of it’s day. They even had plans to add tv tuner capability. The biggest problem was the 3DO had very few good games (mainly EAs) it was too expensive (VCDs noone would justify but they could justify Blurays on PS3).
I think an “open” gaming platform will eventually happen. The arms race for the living room is already a self defeating race. No one is supporting what the pirates want, and that’s why it fails to take off. Make a device, (or better a TV) that does MKVs, h.264 in all forms/resolutions, DTS/AC3/mp3/ogg audio formats, divx/mpeg/subtitles etc and you’ll win the market for the living room. Instead we have this crappy war between Xbox 360 which streams well but has no Bluray support. PS3 which has Bluray, but sucks at streaming, and Apple TV which locks you to Apple’s crap video store. Apple TV cannot win in this space, unlike iPod which plays the most pirated music around (mp3) in addition to the Apple store format. The Apple TV cannot play most of the pirate videos around (too many formats/codecs used)
I find Samsung the most interesting one. I think they are missing a huge opportunity to sweep the market from under Apple/Sony etc, by just implementing all the formats correctly into their ARM based TVs. The media streaming built into your TV is a real game changer. Bypass all your crap set top devices and run your digital collection directly to your TV. Then just keep a Bluray player/game console around for optical media.
I’m sure Valve is concerned about Steam being pushed out of the market by a more locked down Windows. But since they’re a PC games company they’ll have a hard time escaping that inevitability.
Steam isn’t a platform but a store. If Microsoft suddenly decides to block third party stores from their platform then there’s nothing Valve can do about it.
Sure it’s possible they could come out with a Steam certification suite but all that would be pretty meaningless to hardware companies because Steam is a store not a platform.
Maybe Valve can create a platform for Steam games but that’s a whole new business they don’t have any experience in. And it would be an uphill battle because their competition already has about 95%+ of the market.
Well, they can do like Google : fork Linux technology, replace what they don’t like, and provide it in a more stable package than most community Linux distros.
Looking at Android’s market share, it doesn’t sound like such a bad idea, if they can hire the kind of people it takes to make it work.
They would have to offer something substantially better than DX to both GFX and Game companies.
It is possible and the time is right. GFX companies market has never been as consolidated as it is now making MS unification under common api less critical, while the companies are honestly expressing their concern with DX overhead. Their steam platform could be dualbooted with windows for the time being, supporting number of dedicated HW configurations. This way they could disrupt console market the same way Android disrupted incumbent smartphone companies.
As cool as that would be they aren’t Google, and unlike with phones, PC manufacturers are 100% tied to Windows/Microsoft. Currently no manufacturer is looking for a new software platform to help them compete against Mac. Also, since only about 15% of Steam’s catalog is available to non-Windows machines a Stream branded Linux based platform would likely fall very short of user expectations.
Basically Valve has nothing PC manufacturers want.
I’m sure Microsoft sees a lock-down as a long-term plan (or option), seeing how lucrative iOS is for Apple, when they can bleed their customers at every point. However, Microsoft’s greatest current asset is their installed base, selling upgrades of their OS and applications while keeping compatibility with the huge library of Windows applications out there. If they were to lock out all third party applications, their customers would lose the ability to run their old applications, and would need to buy the few they can once more through Microsoft’s online store. Suddenly, it would seem cheaper to just buy a Mac (at least for Steam customers: Windows games with a Mac port are buy once play anywhere), or less cumbersome to switch to Linux.
In short, Microsoft can’t lock down Windows until the majority of the applications are Windows Marketplace only. Which means the industry has then switched to ARM.
Tim Cook would not go to Valve HQ to see if Macs can meet a specification. Tim Cook would go to Valve to make a deal with Valve’s CEO that is of strategic importance to Apple.
The reason Tim Cook went to Valve is because Apple is building an Apple TV (both of the current variety and an actual TV) where gaming will feature prominently. Apple want’s Valve’s games on that device but they want their 30%, they want Gamecenter, they want the use the App Store – in other words they don’t want Steam.
…and that’s another three months.
PC hardware changes too fast, it’s too expensive for people to keep up; it’s not the future.
Perhaps Valve are looking at a streaming game service for Apple TV. £100 for the Apple TV plus some kind of subscription to Valve to play all the games you want would be a killer proposition.
You know, I’ve been thinking about that actually.
Sure, PC hardware changes fast if you want to keep running games at max graphics settings. But if you do not care about that stuff and just use whatever settings work best (preferably those that are set up automatically when it works), a gaming PC can live a pretty long time.
My parents changed their last PC because they couldn’t play games on it anymore when it was 8 years old, which is pretty close to the lifespan of a video game console. Given a RAM and HDD upgrade, it could likely have lasted a bit more, since its 7800GT was still not overwhelmed, but my brother and I decided that considering how pricey these were getting, it was best to just keep the PSU and case and change the rest.
In the end, what makes PC gaming so expensive is the temptation to max everything out, which you do not have on a console since game editors have chosen the visual settings for you. Otherwise, it is a bit more expensive than a console at purchase time, but you get that money back on game price later. Plus, you’ll need a PC for work anyway.
Edited 2012-04-15 08:51 UTC
All true, but an aspect I didn’t highlight is that a gamepad and a TV screen hooked up to an TV is a competitive prospect compared to the current crop of the XBOX360 and PS3. It might not be “PC” gaming per-se, but it is a nice spot that caters for those who can neither afford (or want the technical headache) of a gaming PC, but also see the XBOX/PS3 (and the cost of their games) as too expensive too.
So you would think of it as a competitor to the Wii in the low-price region then ?
Clearly retail has a very short future. Nintendo have no clue about digital distribution; the Nintendo Store is like something from 1999, it’s so clunky and the games are simply too expensive. The iPhone/iPod Touch has destroyed the consumer’s notion that £40 for a handheld game is acceptable.
Handheld gaming is indeed a whole different can of worms.
And not necessarily for the better, considering that the most of the iOS catalog is more like J2ME games than like DS or PSP games :/
But hey, I agree with you that as long as it’s cheaper, people will buy it anyway. After all, Acer sell a lot of laptops.
Edited 2012-04-15 11:23 UTC
Buying a new console every few years because the previous model has been obsoleted isn’t really cheaper. Not to mention that you might have to buy a console from more than one manufacturer.
At least on a PC you can play today’s games on the previous generations of hardware. Perhaps not on the highest detail but that’s not something that bother the causal gamer much.
Yes, but what I’m talking about is the spec of the latest game no longer being relevant to the consumer; it takes little hardware to stream a game. There’s no longer the worry that “will my PC play this game”, and getting a sub-par experience because your PC is not as powerful as somebody else’s.
My laptop is five years old now, and I’m excluded from many games now and am becoming more limited as time passes; but the machine is perfectly capable of streaming the latest, highest spec game. Why should a consumer go through so much complexity of changing and upgrading a machine for the benefit of what? Being smarter / better / more well off than somebody else?
I’m not saying there _isn’t_ a place for PC gaming as it is right now—of course!—what I’m saying is that I can easily see that a majority don’t want to deal with the complexity of a PC for the reward of the latest game, they just want to hand over their money for the game and play it without hassle. I think few technically skilled people can see how much of a challenge and a chore PC gaming is right now.
Sorry, I missed the bit about streaming.
As I am discussing elsewhere in this thread, streaming has its own issues, such as the following :
-You may not need much local resources, but you need a very high-end network connection (unlimited monthly cap, stable and reasonably high throughput, good ping…). Not everyone has, or can afford, that.
-When your internet connection goes down, everything is dead in the house.
-It remains to be seen whether the current Internet infrastructure is able to withstand millions of people exchanging video frames with few centralized servers. Youtube videos and e-mail traffic are already enough to slow it down.
What you are picturing as an example of the issues of local gaming is a laptop, so a portable device that you can carry around, whereas what you are proposing is a box hooked to a TV, so a fixed installation that you cannot carry around.
Portability has a cost, so you cannot compare a portable machine with one that stays where it is.
Unless you want to argue that Apple can make a $100 tablet that is hooked to your TV and, without the help of any wire but the power wire, provides a good video game streaming experience ? Now that would be a bit more challenging technically, isn’t it ?
I also would like to challenge the “chore” that PC gaming supposedly is.
My parents are not computer genius or anything, but given initial help for building a reliable gaming PC and installing Steam on it, there really is nothing that prevents them from playing with it daily. And also checking their mail, editing photos, browsing the web, and all the other stuff that you can do with a PC. The main challenge is with initial configuration, but after that modern computers and OSs tend to withstand the test of time reasonably well.
So, if Valve manage to release a pre-built “Steambox” gaming computer that is not overpriced and comes with Steam pre-installed and working, I really don’t see what would be the problem with PC gaming in particular.
As time passes, video game editors start to get that people do not upgrade their computer every month, and test their titles on lower-end machines. Indie games, which have flourished recently, also tend to have reasonably light requirements. There are only few game editors which still don’t get it, like Crytek and Bethesda, and you can well vote with your wallet against those. So, what’s the deal ?
Edited 2012-04-15 09:41 UTC
You appear to be misreading that I am opposed to PC gaming as it stands, I am not
It’s simply that if I were in the position and I wanted to make money then it would make sense to me that a £100 streaming console with a subscription to play any game you want would sell.
Yes, there are downsides, but I believe consumers would choose those over having to build a gaming PC and compare specifications.
“My parents are not computer genius or anything, but given initial help for building a reliable gaming PC and installing Steam on it, there really is nothing that prevents them from playing with it daily.”
That kind of says it all to me. What good is trying to market and sell a product to non-technical audiences that they can’t reasonably set up themselves.
This is not an negative-sum argument! PC gaming doesn’t have to go away for streaming to be popular and profitable (some appear _very_ defensive even at the merest suggestion that something should even _replace_ PC gaming).
I think the reason OnLive hasn’t quite totally taken off yet is that the value proposition isn’t quite sweet enough yet (“yet another box” syndrome); I’m sure that Valve and Apple would appreciate that the Apple TV presents itself as an all-your-services-in-one box and that the product and platform as a whole would only be sweetened by the addition of Valve’s catalogue.
That’s the whole point of the Steambox idea: Valve creates a set of minimum specifications, using regular x86 hardware. People and OEMs are then free to build machines that implement these specifications, giving regular, non-technical users the ability to buy a console-like experience (but running Steam on PC hardware), while experienced users can still build their own uber-gaming rigs.
Linux support is a dead give-away, since unlike what many seem to think, DirectX isn’t that big of a deal anymore. The PS3 uses OpenGL, meaning most cross-platform games are already compatible with BOTH DX and OpenGL. Only strictly Xbox-specific titles are DX-only – but hey, those games wouldn’t become available for Steam *anyway*.
If this is indeed what Valve is going for, then it’s easy to see what Cook was doing at Valve: making sure this new Steam experience will support the Mac, and making sure Macs implement these minimum specifications. I could easily see Steam being given a special, exemption by Apple, considering how huge this could be.
Wait a minute, there’s something wrong here…
You seem assume that people should necessarily build and set up their gaming PC themselves if they don’t have a spare liver around, which is indeed the way it’s done today, and conveniently ignored the latter half of my comment.
We geeks build gaming PCs because it’s cheaper, easier, and safer for people who know what they are doing. But for people who don’t, it is clear that the machine has to be built and partially set up by the manufacturer. As is the case with cellphones, video game consoles, etc…
Would gamers have to build and set up this $100 streaming box that you are talking about ? Well, no, of course, especially if Apple is involved. So what I propose is that hardware companies build and set up gaming PCs that cost a reasonable price and don’t suck. This is pretty much the idea of a video game console, except that this “Steambox” wouldn’t attempt to hide its PC nature. It would be useful for work, would have partially upgradeable hardware, and so on.
If any computer geek can do it for a relative in an afternoon, a hardware company can do it faster and for a cheaper price. So there’s no reason why commercial gaming rigs should be so much more expensive than hand-built ones.
Edited 2012-04-15 11:40 UTC
Isn’t this what Alienware is all about? Well, except the reasonable price.
I think there are already other companies doing this too. I seem to remember seeing pre-built “gaming PC’s” for sale in malls here.
The problem with the gaming PCs that you find in malls is that they often focus on the specs that people know well about (CPU frequency, amount of RAM, HDD capacity) and save money on the specs that people don’t know well about (RAM latency, GPU, HDD speed, power supply, cooling…)
Alienware is indeed pretty much what I would have in mind, except with more reasonable prices. One can build a good mid-range gaming PC for around €600-700 and an afternoon worth of work (well, a day if you count the time it takes to pick the components). Alienware get wholesale pricing and automated building, yet their basic config is at €900… That just sounds a bit excessive, even if you take labor price into account.
Edited 2012-04-15 13:30 UTC
A few things that Alienware has to deal with that you missed on your post:
Labor costs, stocking and warehousing, facility management, customer support, marketing, taxes, legal expenses, warranty costs, etc.
People that do the kind of cost addition that you do have never tried to run a sustainable business that pays people a living wage and health insurance.
Just because you can build 1 cheaper PC in an afternoon than a company, it does not mean that you can build a sustainable business that way.
So you are telling me that it costs more money per unit to produce a large amount of a given product than a small amount ? (Most mid-sized online and offline computer shops around here seem to agree on a price of ~750€ for a basic gaming PC)
That is certainly a surprising statement. I am not saying that it is false, because as you say I know less about the realm than you, but I have always been told that the reverse was true (thanks to economies of scale), and was actually a strength of big industrial groups with respect to small artisanal shops.
Edited 2012-04-15 18:39 UTC
But if things like phones and tablets aren’t headed in the direction of streaming games why would laptops or media center machines need to bother with it? Remember the big hoopla over iPhone 4S having up to “7x faster graphics” than iPhone 4?
Apple only cares what people will be standing in line to spend their money on 6 months from now. They don’t care about your 5 year old laptop.
I get grief the other way around.. some old and beloved games that won’t run on modern hardware.
Processor clock time based games are a no go.. everything runs to quickly because it’s expecting to be on an old pent/486 processor clock.
Games that crap out due to too many resources.. LB2 will not start if it sees more than 256 meg of ram available.. no idea why it doesn’t just ignore the ram it doesn’t use but such is the case. Not to mention that it’s 3D graphics mode is only compatible with GL of the Voodoo2 daughter board generation. (tried avery forum post and utility I can find including WINE.. no joy).
And, Longbow2 remains irreplaceable.. I’ve not yet found a combat chopper technical sim remotely close to it. (Comanche3 is an arcade sim not technical sim.. for clarity).
Granted, the push for prettier games is alive and well. We can thank the games market for pretty much every advance in local computer technology. Processing power, graphics power, large hard drives… games pushed us here and everything else benefited. (network related “ecommerce” being primarily driven by porn.. to the benefit of all other media categories.)
Subscription gaming? Ewww. Steam for Apple TV would maybe be OK if you got to own the games you buy.
I am having a hard time trying to guess what they would be collaborating on since steam already has clients for OSX and iOS.
It could be something simple like trying to nudge Valve into helping build an Apple gaming community since that could potentially benefit both companies.
Or just “Hi, I’m Tim Cook and here’s 200 Mac Pro’s, 500 iPhones, and a bunch of software licenses for your employees. Now help make people stop laughing when someone says “Apple Gaming”.
Edit: To add to this, Apple won the hearts and minds of many nerd core when they added some unix tools and a proper command line shell to their OS. Gamers are a HUGE potential growth market for them and valve would be a useful company to have on their side.
Microsoft is potentially shitting on Valve with the future path of windows so it is a perfect time for Apple to welcome them with open arms.
Edited 2012-04-15 09:14 UTC
I don’t think there’s really all that much point in Apple doing that.
Every game that Valve have developed since 2007, with the single exception of Alien Swarm, has a Mac version. That includes Half-Life 2, Portal, and Left4Dead series. Mac versions have been getting simultaneous releases from Valve for at least the last year. They couldn’t really do all that much more…
OK, sure, they could port their games from before 2007, but that’s likely not really worth the effort and those games are looking dated.
They could also port some games to iOS, but they’d all be essentially rewrite jobs since game interaction on a touch-screen require a fundamentally different approach. A hypothetical “Portal Touch” would need to work pretty differently from the desktop/console version.
I did some more thinking about this in this post: http://www.osnews.com/permalink?514252
My conclusion was that people are buying movies online and they are doing it through Xbox and PS3 because MS/Sony are positioning their gaming devices as media center devices.
Apple sells loads of music, but they want to sell loads of video too and it hasn’t been as successful because game systems are ironically the best positioned to meet that demand.
So adding game support to Apple TV might give it that extra feature people need to justify installing one. If the new generation of tablets can run games with impressive enough graphics then certainly so could the next Apple TV.
Both of these things (gaming, internet TV) are huge potential growth markets.
I’ve been saying since the Apple TV came out that they should have just merged it with the Mini and sold it as a full HTPC. But no, as usual, Apple has to be moronic about filling in the massive holes in their market…
What? That used to be true, but now PC games tend to follow their console counterparts. Any decent gaming PC from the last few years is still a decent gaming PC next year. In fact, my old single core AGP system from 2005 could play pretty much anything except GTA 4, and “upgrading” it (keeping only the disk drives and the PSU) to a then mid-range gaming computer in 2009 cost pretty much exactly the same as a 32 GB iPad costs now. Currently, there’s no need to upgrade. Then consider a 2010 iPad vs the 2012 iPad. Which one is most expensive to keep up with? (I’ll give you a hint: it’s the iPad.)
Or maybe they have just figured out that a smartphone, as far as gaming platforms are concerned, is like a Nintendo DS, but crappier on the controller and battery life fronts and better on the screen and connectivity fronts, and thus not much of a threat for them.
I can see why the actors of portable gaming would be afraid of smartphones. But even though some games (e.g. racing games) translate well to both, people generally do not play quite the same games on a bigger screen. When you look at Mass Effect, Deus Ex : Human Revolution, or Valve’s titles, I do not see their cellphone versions becoming anything more than laughable toys anytime soon. Conversely, portable games like Phoenix Wright or Pokemon would likely feel repetitive and annoying if they were ported to a PC or a console, even though they are very fun to play on smaller screens.
Is there steam for ios or Android?
Oh, right, sorry, I thought he was talking about Valve as a game development studio.
Still, my remark remains valid in a way : was there a Steam for Nintendo DS before ? Video game consoles have always had relatively closed distribution channels, and it’s already a miracle that they managed to get Steamworks (not even the full Steam store) on the PS3.
Edited 2012-04-15 08:25 UTC
I hope Valve doesn’t put all its resources in augmented reality, to be honest. Not that I’m against innovation and creativity – I’d love to have such glasses – but remembering Nintendo’s Virtualboy I fear that apart from geeks, there’s just not a market for it ( granted, the Virtualboy was not exactly fashionable, but still … ).
I love the idea of a Steambox, though. I’m a geek and so are most of my friends. We all agree on one thing: the games are just too expensive for consoles nowadays ( I mean, €60 for one game, give us a break! ). Steam lets us fill both our hunger for food and our hunger for games. Seriously, prices on Steam are a dream come true! I’d buy a Steambox, and so would most of my friends. There is DEFINITELY a market for them. Granted, not a huge one, but people that want beautiful games where you feel that they have been made with love and want to support creativity instead of just shooting people with machine guns will certainly be queuing for them.
How can you compare virtualboy to augmented reality ? One is a toy, the other is a game changer. Augmented reallity is about integrating virtual elements to the real world. One of the most striking application is for visitors of an ancient monument in ruin (think romans ruins for instance), with augmented reality they could have live reconstruction of the building during their visit. More common life, you go to a shop and get review rating associated to objects, or for navigation, you get the path that you are supposed to follow shown directly to your eyes…
Humans are too uncoordinated to have altered reality overlaid onto actual reality, case in point cellphones and all the the accidents caused by them…
I don’t know that I’d compare a HUD user to a mobile device zombie so directly. The mobile device makes taking your focus off your surroundings a requirement. It’s fundamental design draws attention away from the physical world.
On the other hand, a HUD is intended to overlay your current field of view not direct you completely away from it. You don’t look down at the dash, you just keep looking at the road and there is your current speed and direction potentially with a overlayed route line to follow.
Granted, this does mean keeping the heads up display applicable and simple. Some idiot viewing a webpage or paragraphs of writing while driving isn’t going to be any better than an idiot looking at there phone or reading a book while clipping along the highway. Hopefully the fear of safety violations keeps vendors focused on clean UI displays not Windows glitz and glamour that has no place in a HUD.
Even those with hands free ear pieces have walked out into traffic without any obstruction to their field of view…
True.. people are stupid and you’ll never help all those that Darwinism is still weeding out. An earpiece is still an interface that draws focus away from the surroundings unlike a HUD which should highlight things around the user.
So are they gonna have to have radar then?
Microsoft is not oblivious to the fact that gamers and game companies choose Windows. As a company, they need to make a move to remain competitive. Mobile computing should be closely tied to desktop computing to make development easier. Microsoft knows this.
If anything, Microsoft will be making it easier for game makers to push content across more devices. The only problem is, they need to make sure they get the market share to make the whole thing pan out. They’re behind in the race, and they know it.
This is the “leap of faith” that Microsoft is making. I’m positive that this will pan out for Microsoft, even if people are too myopic to see it now.
gamers choose games.. the platform the game runs on is just the requirement to run the game.
game developers choose the largest market share.. it happens to be Windows at the moment but mobile devices demonstrate that they’ll follow the money into new market shares.
I don’t think the Windows brand is the key factor in either decision. It’s an imposed requirement for the game studios targeting the PC segment and gamers targeting the latest blockbuster title.
As somebody who runs a company, I would love to know how remuneration is given and structured if there are no pay-scales, no fixed positions, no accounting of hours worked.
Does everybody get paid the same amount irrespective of the work they put it?
I sincerely doubt that the organizational structure portrayed in the article is real. Anybody could shed more light on how this part of their business is run?
Edited 2012-04-15 17:45 UTC
I’m sure they do have some structure, such as HR and finance departments and senior management. However, for the development teams I don’t see why it can’t be so loose – without payscales people could be paid the same as everyone else in development. Maybe bonuses are paid on a project basis to the group as a whole, and that being the case, poor workers will quickly be weeded out by their peers if they’re holding back a project.
I work in instrumentation R&D for a pharmaceutical company, and while we have the more traditional team leads, project leads and so on, these relationships are quite loose in day-to-day working, and it’s quite normal to wander into my boss’ boss’ boss’ office for a chat about my current project, which would be unheard of in the normal manufacturing division. In my case anyway, I could see the department here working quite well if the managers and team leads were done away with.
And as regards remuneration – I’m a key engineer, central to the company’s most important project for a number of years now, yet I haven’t had a pay review in 6 years. It’s sort of an aside point, but if I didn’t like the project or the pay I’d just go and get a new job, and conversely, if I wasn’t good for the project I’d be quite quickly pushed out by my colleagues.
This is a small, pedantic, point, but Valve didn’t create Team Fortress. Team Fortress was a Quake mod developed by some hobbyists, then it went on to become Team Fortress Classic (Half-life based, I believe) and Team Fortress 2 (Half-life 2 based). The last two are Valve, but Team Fortress itself had no Valve involvement, AFAIK.
I must say that I found Micheal Abrash’s blog post very interesting.
The fundamental lack of any corporate structure at Valve is intriguing. As an employee to have that kind of creative freedom must be incredibly liberating.
I wonder though quite how well this approach really works for them in practice. It’s quite telling that Abrash says:
I can imagine what many of those things are, and quite how important they may be.
It seems to me that in such an environment there’s little incentive for people to stick on development teams for projects that have hit a road-block or gone down a blind alley, especially if the project isn’t “sexy”, “fun”, and/or is far from completion. Arguably there’s an incentive to jump ship to a project nearing completion in order to liberate developers to join your original “cause”. There’s no guarantees that will work though, and unless your original project makes progress in the interim it may well just whither and die.