Earlier today, Valve's Gabe Newell gave his one man keynote at DICE 2013. No, there were no huge announcements, there were no reveals of anything with a "3" in the title. Nothing like that.
Instead, Newell talked a bit about the Steam Box, saying that he would like to see it be a cheap, affordable compliment to any television. He says that the "price point that's going to be hit is going to be much, much lower than things we've traditionally seen in living room devices. Better, it's basically a PC in the console form factor and at the console price point. There's nothing really magical about the hardware. This is the great thing about PC, is that it's been evolving so quickly."
Newell is placing his bets on in-home streaming above that of cloud gaming, claiming that he's still a skeptic of cloud gaming in general. How any success of the system would cannibalize itself due to the costs of having to maintain a growing system like that to keep latency as low as possible.
He also mentions how the community has had such a huge role in their games. He says that "in TF2, just to be really clear, the community itself makes 10 times as much content as we do," Newell said. "We can't compete with our own customers. Our customers have defeated us. Like, not by a little; by a lot."
So what happens if Steam Box ends up being a huge failure?
Instead, Newell talked a bit about the Steam Box, saying that he would like to see it be a cheap, affordable compliment to any television. He says that the "price point that's going to be hit is going to be much, much lower than things we've traditionally seen in living room devices. Better, it's basically a PC in the console form factor and at the console price point. There's nothing really magical about the hardware. This is the great thing about PC, is that it's been evolving so quickly."
Newell is placing his bets on in-home streaming above that of cloud gaming, claiming that he's still a skeptic of cloud gaming in general. How any success of the system would cannibalize itself due to the costs of having to maintain a growing system like that to keep latency as low as possible.
He also mentions how the community has had such a huge role in their games. He says that "in TF2, just to be really clear, the community itself makes 10 times as much content as we do," Newell said. "We can't compete with our own customers. Our customers have defeated us. Like, not by a little; by a lot."
So what happens if Steam Box ends up being a huge failure?
"If we're wrong, at least it will be spectacularly entertaining as a failure."
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