Valve president Gabe Newell isn't willing to just sit back and watch the industry pass him by. As the big man behind Steam, as well as highly regarded games like Half-Life and Team Fortress, Newell plans on continuing to push PC gaming to new heights through the reveal of the much rumored “Steambox.” It’s been teased and teased over the past few years, and while we’re expected to get a first glimpse next week, one of the most interesting tidbits from Newell’s speech at Linuxcon (via Game Industry International) involved his view on how goods and services will be handled in the future.
The openness of Linux is one of the biggest selling points for Newell, but it’s not just about low barriers to entry on platforms. This mindset will spread to content, giving the community much more control over what it’s playing.
"Games are essentially going to be nodes in a connected economy, where the vast majority of goods and services are going to be user-created, rather than created by companies," he said. "Connected groups of users are going to be way more successful, if they're properly enabled and supported, than any of the individual game developers are going to be."
Titles like LittleBigPlanet and Project Spark live and die by the community that supports it, and Newell seems to foresee a future where plenty more games start giving players the option of creating their own content. We’ll have to wait until next week to see if the Steambox is going to incorporate this type of user-created mayhem.
