JoltVib

What's next

After a short demo, I got an opportunity to ask my burning questions about where all of this is going.

First, circle January on your calendar. That's when the other shoe will drop; Valve's hardware and software partners will reveal the actual Steam Machines that will ship to consumers, and the games that will come to the Linux platform, at the 2014 Consumer Electronics Show.

There will be a number of different Steam Machine boxes on sale in 2014, and Valve expects them to arrive mid-year. Some of those boxes will be far smaller and / or cheaper than Valve's own prototype unit. "You can get far smaller, and that's what many OEMs are doing… I think it's safe to say less than a quarter of the size," the team told me.

Of course, when they get to that size, they won’t be using full-size graphics cards any more. Intel's integrated graphics are a possibility there: "We're super interested in Iris Pro." When I ask whether Intel or AMD might make special chips to bring down the price of truly powerful integrated graphics, the room goes quiet for a moment. "We don’t have an answer that we can give you before January," the team answers.

The Steam Controller has a gyroscope, it turns out, one which Valve plans to enable in a software update to add motion control. The company will be shipping an API for games that uses the controller's touchpads and touchscreen natively when it rolls out the prototype units, and all of Valve's own game development teams are already integrating support into their games.

But don't expect Valve to make Half-Life 3 exclusive to SteamOS to help lift the Linux-based operating system off the ground. "It's against our philosophy to put a game in jail and say it only works on Steam Machines," says Valve's Doug Lombardi. Even though the company locked Half-Life 2 to Steam years ago, the team appears to have thought better of that decision. "That may or may not have been a good idea given the condition Steam was in at the moment."

Even without exclusive Valve games, though, SteamOS might have more support than you'd expect. Valve's Anna Sweet says she started talking to partners about Linux three years ago, and games will be surprisingly easy to build. "If you're using the Unity engine, you're already done… if you've done a Mac game, you're most of the way there."

When I ask whether Steam Machines will have a dedicated hardware specification, the team reveals that they're working on something a little more elegant: a system built into Steam that shows you which games your hardware configuration can actually run, and conversely, what hardware you'd need to buy to play a given game well — based on the real-world data about computer configurations that Valve already collects with its Steam Hardware Survey.

"It's one of these places where Steam is particularly and perhaps uniquely positioned to be able to actually help customers… we're sitting at the nexus of these hardware specs, so we can harvest data about what's going on, and repeat it back in a digestible form to every Steam user who cares," Coomer explains. Valve says it hasn't hammered out all the details yet, but it plans to launch such a feature next year.

Valve might be building its own VR headset, but it's also thinking of leveraging Steam to help the lauded Oculus Rift virtual reality headgear get the software traction it needs. "We've been talking to Oculus pretty extensively… about how we can help them with Steam."

Last but not least, SteamOS won't just be about games: the company plans to add other services for video and music playback. "However, we are not planning support for spreadsheets," quips Lombardi.

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