Valve’s co-founder Gabe Newell believes that PC companies will start selling living room friendly computer packages next year.
Speaking with Kotaku at the VGAs, Newell said, “Valve’s current goal was to figure out how to make PCs work better in the living room and the reaction to Steam’s TV-friendly Big Picture interface has been stronger than expected”.
He expects PC companies to sell computers packages designed for the living room to plug into users’ television sets which could ultimately run Steam out of the box, to compete with Microsoft and Sony’s next-gen consoles.
Living Room PCs
“I think in general that most customers and most developers are gonna find that [the PC is] a better environment for them,” he said. “Cause they won’t have to split the world into thinking about ‘why are my friends in the living room, why are my video sources in the living room different from everyone else?’ So in a sense we hopefully are gonna unify those environments.”
Newell said, ‘he’s expecting a lot of different companies to release these types of packages—”We’ll do it but we also think other people will as well.
He adds, “well certainly our hardware will be a very controlled environment, If you want more flexibility, you can always buy a more general purpose PC. For people who want a more turnkey solution, that’s what some people are really gonna want for their living room.”
“The nice thing about a PC is a lot of different people can try out different solutions, and customers can find the ones that work best for them.”
Newell concluded “Valve is currently working on its next-gen engine, which will provide the firm with ‘interesting opportunities’ for both PC and next-gen consoles.
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