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Valve Software recruits hardware experts
- TimGremalm 14y agoHear Jeri Ellsworth talk more about Valve and Hardware: http://hackaday.com/2012/08/17/an-in-depth-interview-with-jeri-ellsworth-about-everything/ http://hackaday.com/2012/08/17/an-in-depth-interview-with-je...
- MojoJolo 14y agoI thought Valve will sell valves.
- eckyptang 14y agoIncoming: another walled garden.
- xlevus 14y agoOr, Another range of "gaming" accessories.
- seabee 14y agoConsoles have been walled gardens since the 80s video game crash. It would be notable if Valve broke from this model.
- yawgmoth 14y agoIt isn't fair to discredit what Valve is building on the principle that it isn't free and open. Steam is a walled garden and is adored, for the most part anyway, by its users.
- vacri 14y agoSteam isn't really a walled garden. Most of the titles on steam are things you can quite happily buy independently and install yourself. Steam won't stop you. Hell, I sometimes buy cheaper games on a competing service (like GMG) and Steam will still quite happily take on the license key from that purchase when I ask it to.
- sliverstorm 14y agoSteam is more like a picket-fenced garden.
- phn 14y agoYup. My only concern is more in the lines of "what if they close?". I hope they have great success so I can keep my games forever :P
- jiggy2011 14y agoI believe Valve promised that they would just unlock and unDRM all of their games in such an event so that you can just install all of your Steam games straight on your PC without going through Steam. How that would work if you were running actual Steam hardware on the other hand.
- stcredzero 14y agoEmulators?
- ANTSANTS 14y ago> How that would work if you were running actual Steam hardware on the other hand. 1. A hypothetical Steam Box or Valve-branded computer is extremely likely to be based off of COTS PC hardware, so there would not be a significant technical barrier to running games purchased on those platforms on a regular PC. 2. Steam already lets you buy a game once on Windows and play it on any Mac you own -- ie, they're not considered separate versions -- and Valve, at least, is extremely unlikely to stop developing for regular PCs, so you'd probably be easily able to load up any PC you have lying around with your Steam Box games in a worst case scenario.
- jiggy2011 14y agoYes, you could probably run the games on your PC. What I mean though , is if you bought a Steam branded console and ran all your games through that. A Steam console if likely to be much more tightly integrated with their cloud stuff than a regular PC would and be reliant on valve for software updates so there might be more implications if they switched the cloud services off.
- eckyptang 14y agoPeople adore McDonalds. It doesn't necessarily means it is good for the people or the world.
- bonch 14y agoRather than an open sewer?
- Toshio 14y agoOff-topic, a little detail caught my attention: that guy with a crowbar has a lambda symbol on his chest. Coincidence or a hidden reference to functional programming?
- pharno 14y agoneither. its gordon freeman(1) from half life(2) 1: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gordon_Freeman http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gordon_Freeman 2: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Half-Life_(series) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Half-Life_(series)
- danbee 14y agoIt's Gordon Freeman, the main protagonist from the Half Life series.
- jiggy2011 14y agoThe character is Gordon Freeman, the protagonist for the game series Half Life which is the game Valve is best known for. The Lambda here represents the radioactive decay constant and is used as part of the measure for the "half life" of any radioactive material. The Gordon character is a scientist, much of the game is set in a science lab and Valve are known for making games with many scientific references (see also: Portal).
- zimbatm 14y agoI can't really tell you. That guy is "Gordon Freeman", the main character in the Half-Life game serie. According to the following article, it comes from the "Lambda complex" where he's working on in the first serie, which is in also made-up for the game: http://half-life.wikia.com/wiki/Lambda_logo http://half-life.wikia.com/wiki/Lambda_logo
- corford 14y agoI suddenly feel very old :( Edit: unless you're not a gamer (yes, I'm clutching at straws!)
- misnome 14y agoI love the caption under that image: "Hardware, in the form of a crowbar, plays a part in Valve's Half-Life games"
- samd 14y agoIn Valve's New Employee Handbook released a few months ago there was a quip about how Valve struggled to hire disciplines well outside of its typical expertise. They specifically mentioned industrial designers as one of those disciplines. I guess people didn't pick up on it at the time. Link: http://newcdn.flamehaus.com/Valve_Handbook_LowRes.pdf http://newcdn.flamehaus.com/Valve_Handbook_LowRes.pdf *Economist was the other job they mentioned, which they filled with the famous Yanis Varoufakis.
- programminggeek 14y agoWell, the PC biz has not been great to gaming for a long time, if ever. Most PC's don't come with quality GFX cards, so PC games have to be least common denominator, which is basically to port from the XBox360/PS3. From what I can tell the average selling price of PC's has dropped in the last 10 years from $1,000 to $500 or less. At a $400-500 laptop, you just don't get good GFX, so PC gaming kind of sucks. Steam helped a ton on the software side, but if the average gamer is going to have to swap out a graphics card to be able to play Skyrim well on their PC, they'll probably just buy an Xbox instead. The PC market needs some kind of "standard" box configurations with sane pricing and non-crappy software installs. Like, a $500, $750, and $1,000 machines loaded with stock Windows 8, no crapware, good gfx, SSD's, etc. If Valve did the same thing with their own version of Ubuntu running Steam, they could lower machine prices and also really reshape the PC gaming landscape over the next 10 years, esp. for indie developers who are already porting to Linux. Valve could even do something awesome with Steam where if you buy a "Steam box" it comes with your Steam account and games preloaded and ready to go when you start it up, sort of like what Amazon does when you buy a Kindle. If Valve goes down that road and tries to truly innovate, there is some real potential.
- mtgx 14y agoI can't imagine the next-gen consoles selling that well in the future either. Most people would want them for the media access, but there are and will be much better and cheaper options for that.
- tomrod 14y ago> If Valve did the same thing with their own version of Ubuntu running Steam, they could lower machine prices and also really reshape the PC gaming landscape over the next 10 years, esp. for indie developers who are already porting to Linux. At that point, why not just release their own console?
- illuminate 14y ago"At that point, why not just release their own console?" People aren't going to buy it with enough of a scale to make the investment worthwhile.
- qwertzlcoatl 14y agoWell, they hired a Hardware Engineer (or something of the sort), and if you bother to read the article, it seems more to me like they may start designing peripherals for the PC. Which still is something to be excited about! Valve could really make some great ways to interact with their upcoming "Steam Full Screen Mode" or whatever it's called. Plus, We PC gamers are in dire need of our own controller. I'm tired of using my 60 controller.
- apendleton 14y agoThat this person is going to design peripherals is pure speculation on the part of the article's author, and it seems to stem exclusively (looking at the original ad) from this sentence: "Even basic input, the keyboard and mouse, haven’t really changed in any meaningful way over the years." In context, though, that sentence could just as easily be just an example of one way in which innovation in the Mac/PC space has stagnated. The alternate interpretation that this person will be designing whole systems is equally plausible to me, especially given their investment into the Linux space. Initially, that move didn't make a whole lot of sense because the Linux desktop space is so small and (particularly where issues around graphics drivers and the like are concerned) requires a fair bit of technical acumen. A ChromeOS-like strategy makes much more sense, though: heavily tailor the OS user experience to fit your specific target audience, and vertically integrate so you control the hardware, and the user never has to touch drivers or configs. Then it's not "Linux," anymore, it's "SteamOS" or whatever.
- mkl 14y agoThat this person is going to design peripherals is pure speculation on the part of the article's author, and it seems to stem exclusively (looking at the original ad) from this sentence: "Even basic input, the keyboard and mouse, haven’t really changed in any meaningful way over the years." Actually it seems as much to do with the more solid "Valve has a patent on a controller with swappable parts". Said patent is here: http://www.faqs.org/patents/app/20110105231 http://www.faqs.org/patents/app/20110105231 But yes, there is a lot of speculation, of course.
- benholmen 14y ago
- rhinosix 14y agoMy prediction: A full body haptic feedback suit/ exoskeleton to work with the Oculus Rift. It will give the player the sensation of running, jumping, flying, holding (crowbars) and being hit by objects etc. All in complete safety. The exterior design will be based on the HEV suit, and will be launched with Half Life 3 as a Steam for Linux exclusive. And in Half Life 3 the HEV suit will incorporate a short-range jetpack, allowing the player to leap between rooftops and fly for short distances.
- jentulman 14y agoA linux based Steam box of some sort seems like a fairly obvious guess. With the recent interest in wearable computing I wouldn't be surprised if this is more about peripherals than gaming rigs. Working on additional HID's (heads up displays, kinect-a-likes, voice) might well be a more valuable addition to their software platform than getting into the console wars. Or possibly a handheld. They seem to have 2 ends of the gaming market, high end FPS graphics fests which sell to people willing to build console smashing gaming rigs, and casual gamers who like the Bejewlled type games. It would be very hard to create a console that taps their existing muscle gamers, but capturing the gameboy, iphone casuals might be possible. If they did go towards console territory what I'd love to see rather than a closed box console would be a line of Steam certified hardware so you could build a PC that matched your pocket, upgrade in future, and be guaranteed compatibility with the Steam linux distro it runs.
- jiggy2011 14y agoDidn't Valve previously say something about wristbands and how they would be the future of computer interaction? That seems very vague to me and I'm having difficulty visualising exactly what that might mean. Perhaps an accelerometer attached to your wrist would essentially allow you to use any object as a makeshift mouse/keyboard?
- shardling 14y agoI'd guess that a sufficiently accurate sensor on your wrist could track the motion of your hand and fingers just via muscle/tendon/etc movement, for one thing. (Place a finger on your wrist, and move your fingers around!) Combined with an accelerometer to track the overall motion, and you have a pretty versatile system.
- simonb 14y agoI wonder if this has anything to do with CLANG [0] (the recently kickstarted sword-fighting simulator). In some of the videos they hinted that a custom controller is coming down the line. [0] http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/260688528/clang http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/260688528/clang
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- primitur 14y agoValve should get involved with the guys behind the Open Pandora console: http://openpandora.org/ http://openpandora.org/ http://icontrolpad.com/ http://icontrolpad.com/ There is a next-gen design in the works, Valve getting involved with it would be a serious wake up call ..
- aw3c2 14y agoIt is am ambigious project but not very good in any way. I owned one and it was awkward and annoying even for me as hacky linux distro user. They have my utmost respect for the idea and persistence, but the execution is nothing to glorify.
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- chrischen 14y agoI'm guessing a VR headset.
- cpeterso 14y agoJohn Carmack has been prototyping VR games and, in his QuakeCon 2012 keynote, he said he knew ex-Id Software people are Valve were too.