Hey, were you planning on buying a next generation console? You might want to hold off until next week, when Valve will finally reveal the Steam Box, as well as its plan for console dominance.
This comes from none other than Gabe Newell, who apparently likes to bury marketing about massive product announcements safely in the middle of massive presentations about Linux. The whole presentation is really only interesting if you’re a total nerd. So here’s all twenty three minutes of it!
Gabe gets into building games, shipping them, and why, precisely, he feels Linux is the future. But there’s a lot more to his statement than just “We’re making a console, guys!”
“Next week we’re going to be rolling out more information about how we get there and what are the hardware opportunities that we see for bringing Linux into the living room and potentially pointing further down the road to how we can get it even more unified with mobile.”
I’ve been pounding this drum for a while. A company as forward thinking as Valve has to be wondering what the future is for a PC gaming developer and distributor when increasingly it’s tablets built on Android that are selling the most. Developing for Linux is the first step for that.
Steam For Android is probably not arriving tomorrow. But make no mistake, it’s definitely in the works. And one hopes that Google is paying attention; being able to put Steam Powered on the side of most Android boxes would go a long way towards giving Google the market share, and eyeballs, it wants so much.
(Image courtesy of Official GDC on Flickr.)