Resumen de la entrevista:
For the lazy, here are some highlights that I thought were the most interesting parts of the article. You can really see how Valve is trying to solve a lot of problems in gaming from a lot of different angles.
3 Types of Steam Boxes:
The way we sort of think of it is sort of "Good, Better," or "Best." So, Good are like these very low-cost streaming solutions that you’re going to see that are using Miracast or Grid. [...]
"Better" is to have a dedicated CPU and GPU and that’s the one that’s going to be controlled [by Valve]. [...]
You can always sell the Best box, and those are just whatever those guys want to manufacture. [Valve position is]: let's build a thing that’s quiet and focuses on high performance and quiet and appropriate form factors.
It sounds like they want many different companies with many different boxes out there that support Steam, while also releasing one themselves.
Linux:
We’ll come out with our own and we’ll sell it to consumers by ourselves. That’ll be a Linux box, [and] if you want to install Windows you can. We’re not going to make it hard.
Controller:
We also think that a controller that has higher precision and lower latency is another interesting thing to have. [...]
I think you’ll see controllers coming from us that use a lot of biometric data. Maybe the motion stuff is just failure of imagination on our part, but we’re a lot more excited about biometrics as an input method. Motion just seems to be a way of [thinking] of your body as a set of communication channels. Your hands, and your wrist muscles, and your fingers are actually your highest bandwidth -- so to try and talk to a game with your arms is essentially saying "oh we’re gonna stop using ethernet and go back to 300 baud dial-up." [...]
Also, gaze tracking. we think gaze tracking is gonna turn out to be super important.
Future of Steam Store:
Right now there’s one Steam store. We think that the store should actually be more like user generated content. So, anybody should be able to create a store, and it should be about extra entertainment value. [...]
Some people will create team stores, some people will creates Sony stores, some people will create stores with only games that they think meet their quality bar. Somebody is going to create a store that says "these are the worst games on Steam."
Steam Box as a Server:
The Steam Box will also be a server. Any PC can serve multiple monitors, so over time, the next-generation (post-Kepler) you can have one GPU that’s serving up eight simulateneous game calls. So you could have one PC and eight televisions and eight controllers and everybody getting great performance out of it.
Mobile Gaming:
So this [Steam Box] is called "Bigfoot" internally, and we also have "Littlefoot." [Littlefoot] says "what do we need to do to extend this to the mobile space?" [...] We also think there’s a lot that needs to be done in the tablet and mobile space to improve input for games. [...] Once we understand what the role is of multitouch in these kind of applications then it’s easy to say you can use your phone for it.
Pro Gaming:
We’re writing a platform, so you’ll hear us talk about "how do we make the pro players more valuable?" For us thats a real issue, we actually have to go off and solve engineering problems, because rather than just thinking of them as a pro player, we think of them as a user-generated content person with a particular kind of content that they’re generating. How do we help them reach an audience?
Can Valve compete?:
The internet is super smart. If you do something that is cool, that's actually worth people's time, then they'll adopt it. If you do something that's not cool and sucks, you can spend as many marketing dollars as you want, [they] just won't.
Más o menos viene a decir que ninguno ha acertado con sus bolas de cristal.
