Indie developers Tiny Build Games recently attended Steam Dev Days and shared their experience on reddit. They say that attending the Dev Days has made it clear to them that they'll be going all in with Steam Machines and they went on to explain why.
Tiny Build say that "Valve's approach to living room gaming will shift the industry in the same way Steam did with game distribution." They elaborate citing Steam's including more and more opportunities for users to not only create but also sell their own content through their games. Tiny Build add "After seeing DOTA2/TF2 numbers, it's clear users love both spending and making money while playing their favorite [sic] games." They further cited the fact that "Over $10m was made by 600+ people creating content for TF2" and they, understandably, expressed excitement at the prospect of letting users create and sell content in their own games through Steam.
Tiny Build brought up Valve's willingness to listen to their consumer base as another contributing factor towards the success of the Steam Machines. For instance, "in the robot arm example of The Engineer update, they just put a bunch of stuff into a trailer, and looked at what users speculated. Users made up most of the stories, and loved the idea of the Engineer having a robot arm, because he never took off his glove. So Valve just put that into the game." Valve apparently iterated "Happy users will keep on returning and spending money" and Tiny Build feel that this philosophy together with an "iterative approach are key factors in why Steam Machines will dominate living rooms." And it's not just the gamers Valve wants to keep happy, it's the developers too.
Tiny Build expressed excitement over Steam Machine's dev tools, first citing that it was "super easy to port" their games onto SteamOS. They added "No other robust platform allows you to push out live updates in a matter of seconds. The community features are miles ahead of competition. And the multiplayer/matchmaking support is fantastic. I'm not even mentioning all the constantly evolving features like user reviews, guides, Early Access, etc."
The developer concluded the post by saying that they are "super excited to show off some games running on it during GDC" followed by a brief PS:
"Also the Steam Machine will likely be the only living-room based hardware capable of running VR. The VR part of Steam Dev Days was — to say the least — mind-blowing."
That sounds freakin' awesome to me. But what do you think? Let us know in the comments below.
