LAS VEGAS — At the DICE Summit on Thursday, Valve CEO Gabe Newell laid out his vision for how the PC, as a gaming platform, can move into the living room.
“Traditionally, people say nobody wants a PC in the living room,” Newell said. But he sees that changing soon, and pointed to a “good/better/best” scenario in which different users will have different solutions for playing PC games on their television.
“Good,” he said, is “home streaming” — devices like Nvidia’s Shield that stream games from your PC to a mobile screen. “Think of it as, your PC now has an extra monitor and an extra set of inputs,” Newell said. “The price point is going to be much, much lower than what we’ve traditionally seen in living-room devices.”
Streaming setups like this, he said, “do require [game creators] to do some work to ensure the customer experience is seamless.”
“Better” is a “PC in a console form factor at a console price point,” or what has become colloquially known as a Steam box. “Nowadays, making small quiet cool PCs is a well-solved problem by multiple vendors,” Newell said.
“We’re developing console form factor PCs, and working with partners on that as well,” he said, devices that have “all the characteristics of a great console device while taking advantage of the price performance of a PC.”
“Best,” Newell said, is “pretty straightforward.” If you want a $4,000 living room PC with all the bells and whistles, he said, there are plenty of vendors who will provide that.
Newell stressed the need for free and open platforms like Linux. “Our company wouldn’t exist if it weren’t for the openness of the PC. Steam wouldn’t exist if not for the openness of the Internet,” Newell said, noting that he sees Linux as a “get out of jail free pass for our industry, if we need it.”
He also restated his previous assertion that Apple is “more threatening to the PC in the living room than anything that would be happening on the console side,” noting that the company has a “natural progression into the living room.”
Newell said he sees PCs in the living room as a way of ending “disruptive console transitions.”
“You don’t have to say, oh my god, how are we going to get that application running on our dedicated hardware in the living room?” he said.
Valve's Newell: How PCs Will Take Over the Living Room
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Valve's Newell: How PCs Will Take Over the Living Room
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Valve's Newell: How PCs Will Take Over the Living Room
