Valve has given some confirmation about some of its major upcoming technologies, and it seems a lot is going to be happening in the next few months.
Just recently Valve announced that they are working on a Linux client for their popular game distribution service Steam. Steam hosts thousands of games for hundreds of developers, and happens to be the most popular digital distributor of Games, so this announcement carries a lot of weight.
Since then they have announced a number of other major features, such as Steam Greenlight, their new system for allowing the community to vote on which games should be released on the Steam platform next.
They also announced that they would soon be branching out from just games, and would start offering other kinds of software soon. Steam already hosts some non-gaming content, such as the recently-released film “Indie Game: The Movie”. This also has interesting implications, considering the fact that Steam will not be available on Windows, OS X and Linux. It might just be the only cross-platform digital store for all platforms. It will be interesting to see if Valve’s policy of buy once use anywhere will work with other software as well.
These is great news for developers as it adds Steam as a well known and popular choice for selling their software across platforms.
Valve also recently announced a revamp of their community features, which give each game a hub for sharing videos, screenshots and other content related to it.
Another feature long in work at Valve had been the Steam Big Picture Mode. For those wanting to experience PC games on a big television screen, this new mode makes the experience much better. For one it allows the Steam interface itself to be operated with a game controller instead of a mouse and keyboard, and optimises the display for a television screen a few feet away rather than a computer monitor. This makes it much easier to utilize Steam as the core for a console based on PC hardware; in fact Valve seems to be doing this in the hopes that such a thing will happen—there were rumours for a while that they would be making a console themselves. Such a console could be based on Linux as that will soon be supported as well.
Now they have publicly revealed that not only are these featured being actively worked on, but that they will be out very soon. The new community features are already available to a large number of Steam users (including myself); Steam Greenlight will be coming at the end of this month; Big Picture Mode will be coming some time in September; in September (5th) itself Steam will also be expanding to non-game software; and the Linux Steam client too will be out soon, or in the words of Gabe Newell (the founder of Valve Software) “fairly quickly”.
Of course some of these are going to be beta releases, but they are all rather major steps by Valve in new directions. It is important to remember that in this time Valve is also working on their upcoming major title Dota 2, releasing Counter-Strike: Global Offensive in August. Things are pretty busy at Valve it seems.
