In the same SteamDevDays event where Valve revealed Steam’s 75 million active userbase, they outlined their plans for Steam Machines, as well as Valve’s business, for the coming months.
Steam Machines will be launching in September, starting with Alienware’s Machine, using Intel Haswell and Nvidia hardware. The Steam controllers will be sold on Steam, as well as at retail, so people who installed SteamOS on their own are covered.
Interestingly, Valve has changed their messaging again, stating that they want to focus on all the things people would want to do on a Steam Machine in the living room. Perhaps due to feedback, and perhaps to keep pace with competitors, Valve is basically saying Steam Machines will also be the entertainment hub the 8th generation consoles currently are.
Valve wants to add these countries, via adding their currencies ,to Steam this year: Australia, Thailand, Canada, Norway, Mexico, New Zealand, Philippines, Malaysia, Indonesia, Singapore, Ukraine, and Japan. Turkey was highlighted on the map, but that’s unclear. Valve also wants to allow money transfers between Steam Wallets, which sounds unlikely given the possibility people will use it for some small time trading schemes.
Let’s add more stats on top of that 75 million user base nugget. Of that group, 7 million users are using Steam for Mobile. That 75 million user base actually reflects exponential growth for the past few years, and the number of games being released for the system has also been increasing. Out of those games, 10 % were released via Early Access. Holidays sales are also becoming important for Steam, as the sale for 2013 saw 2 million transactions, 1.7 million in-game items traded, and 2 million Snow Globes traded. Eventually, Steam wants to get rid of the Greenlight process, and be taken out of the approval process altogether, to have devs interact closer to the community.
Finally, a few technical odds and ends. Source 2 was brought up in a talk about OpenGL, so it’s highly likely it will support the standard at a low level. Steam hopes to add hardware encoding and decoding to In-Home Streaming in the future, perhaps to enable media playback, among other things?
Lastly, Valve’s VR prototype demo is making waves among devs who have tried it out. We’re sure to learn more about it tomorrow, but it was described as being a few levels above Oculus Rift tech (higher resolution, lets you walk around), and how it felt like being in a lucid dream, playing in the holodeck.
We’ll make sure to share more details on Valve’s VR prototype, as well as other tidbits, from Steam Dev Days in the coming days.
