More than
half of all PC games sold via download are bought on Steam, and most online
multiplayer gaming takes place there too. But can Valve, the company behind
Steam (and Half-Life and Portal, to name but a few), square up to the Xbox and
PlayStation? And why would they take such a huge gamble? We visited them to
find out…
A
powerful new category of living-room hardware is on the horizon.
Because 75
Million Gamers Want Them To
In terms of
active users, Steam is already one of the biggest gaming platforms in the
world. While Xbox Live has around 48 million user accounts, Steam has 75
million active users. If it were a country, it’d be on a par with Turkey and
Iran, and over twice the size of Canada (even counting the moose).
Greg Coomer
was one of the original Valve employees. It was his idea to call the company
Valve, and he served as one of the head models for Gordon Freeman, the
protagonist of the Half-Life series and arguably the most iconic character in PC
games. According to Greg, Steam’s vast population of dedicated gamers wants to
play PC games the way they play traditional consoles – on the sofa, in front of
the TV, rather than sitting at a desk in front of a monitor.
Steam
has 75 million active users which is over twice the size of Canada
“For a few
years now,” says Greg, “our customers have been asking us to solve a problem,
which was that they have to give up all their PC games when they go into the
living room. To change that, we need three things: hardware, like a console;
input – a controller; and an operating system. If other people had been making
the hardware, like companies manufacturing PCs and peripherals, then we
wouldn’t have felt like we needed to do it. But that wasn’t the case, so we knew
we needed to directly attack that problem.”
How To
Build A Gaming Revolution
Valve is to
gamers what Apple is to tech fiends. New episodes of Half-Life and Portal are
greeted with as much excitement as a new iThing and, like Apple, Valve is more
secretive than MI6’s notoriously tight-lipped Surprise Birthday Party
Committee. But even Valve couldn’t just stick a new box under your telly and
expect you to bin your PS4, so they developed the Steam Machine project piece
by piece, and in full view of the public.
“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”
They begin
with Big Picture, a piece of software that allowed people to move their regular
gaming PC into the living room (with a keyboard and mouse) and play Steam games
on their TVs. It might not have been a console or an operating system, but it
let people know Valve was serious about the sofa.
“We carved
Big Picture off as something we knew how to build, that we could get done
fairly quickly, and as a signpost that would show people we think the living
room is really important,” explains Greg. From there, it was a simple matter of
building a new, world-beating games machine.
“As soon as
Big Picture existed, our idea was to put together a PC, a console-like PC. We
could have tried to save as much money as possible, cutting out every piece
that didn’t need to be there and custom-crafting a motherboard [as most console
makers do]. We decided to make something with off-the-shelf parts that people
can upgrade themselves, like a current gaming PC except quieter, and smaller,
so it can fit under your TV.”
