Valve have been in the spotlight a lot lately. We've had some controversy, a few juicy leaks and of course the hardware reveals from CES.
But wait, there's more! According to fellow master race worshipping website RPS, Valve was asked a silly question by a silly journalist about when Valve intend on releasing their own Steam Machine. You know, one not manufactured by Alienware or GigaByte or Origin. Beside the fact that asking Valve about even a year-based estimate is a stupid thing, it's also a fact to be considered that Valve quite frankly aren't interesting in making their very own Steam Machine available to the mass market at this time. They've shipped 300 prototype machines to beta testers around the US, but Valve seem content with that.
"We have plans to build more machines, but we also expect that users will be really happy with the range of offerings from these hardware manufacturers."
They're not completely disregarding a possibility to start manufacturing Steam Machines themselves sometime down the line, though. In an earlier interview with RPS, Steam Machine designed Kassidy Gerber said something similar, explaining the reasoning behind the decisions they've made.
"Right now we're really working with third-party hardware to build their own Steam Machines. We think they know their customers and they know hardware better than us right now."
Though many may worship Valve as a sort of deity, they're certainly not perfect and all-knowing. Games is clearly their primary focus, creating good games and other solutions that run well on most PC hardware is their passion. Making the hardware to run these, however, they have fairly little experience with. Best leave it to the pros. For now.
Oh, but we're not done yet! If you order right now, for a limited time only, we'll even include this extr... eh, sorry about that. But the fact is, we're not done with Valve just yet. You see, during the Steam Dev Days starting on Wednesday next week, Valve are apparently releasing a virtual reality SDK. Speaking to BBC, Valve's Brian Coomer revealed that they are in fact "days away" from releasing a VR SDK for game developers and modders to take advantage of. This is of course in addition to the multiple talks about the benefits, opportunities and challenges of virtual reality during the dev days.
Both Valve and the Oculus team were present at CES this year, two awesome companies making awesome things - sometimes even cooperating about it. Playing Half-Life 2 with the Rift devkit was like experiencing video games for the first time all over again, something I don't say very often. Having Valve look closer into VR will in the end only make everyone a winner.
Also, the reason Valve aren't making their own Steam Machines yet, is because they need to dedicate all their time and effort into making Half-Life 3, which is currently in development. Trust me, I've got my sources.
