

Valve Software recruits hardware experts - shortlived
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-19475312

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samd
In Valve's New Employee Handbook released a few months ago there was a quip
about how Valve struggled to hire disciplines well outside of its typical
expertise. They specifically mentioned industrial designers as one of those
disciplines. I guess people didn't pick up on it at the time.

Link: <http://newcdn.flamehaus.com/Valve_Handbook_LowRes.pdf>

*Economist was the other job they mentioned, which they filled with the famous Yanis Varoufakis.

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jentulman
A linux based Steam box of some sort seems like a fairly obvious guess.

With the recent interest in wearable computing I wouldn't be surprised if this
is more about peripherals than gaming rigs. Working on additional HID's (heads
up displays, kinect-a-likes, voice) might well be a more valuable addition to
their software platform than getting into the console wars.

Or possibly a handheld. They seem to have 2 ends of the gaming market, high
end FPS graphics fests which sell to people willing to build console smashing
gaming rigs, and casual gamers who like the Bejewlled type games. It would be
very hard to create a console that taps their existing muscle gamers, but
capturing the gameboy, iphone casuals might be possible.

If they did go towards console territory what I'd love to see rather than a
closed box console would be a line of Steam certified hardware so you could
build a PC that matched your pocket, upgrade in future, and be guaranteed
compatibility with the Steam linux distro it runs.

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misnome
I love the caption under that image:

"Hardware, in the form of a crowbar, plays a part in Valve's Half-Life games"

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TimGremalm
Hear Jeri Ellsworth talk more about Valve and Hardware:
[http://hackaday.com/2012/08/17/an-in-depth-interview-with-
je...](http://hackaday.com/2012/08/17/an-in-depth-interview-with-jeri-
ellsworth-about-everything/)

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qwertzlcoatl
Well, they hired a Hardware Engineer (or something of the sort), and if you
bother to read the article, it seems more to me like they may start designing
peripherals for the PC. Which still is something to be excited about! Valve
could really make some great ways to interact with their upcoming "Steam Full
Screen Mode" or whatever it's called. Plus, We PC gamers are in dire need of
our own controller. I'm tired of using my 60 controller.

~~~
apendleton
That this person is going to design peripherals is pure speculation on the
part of the article's author, and it seems to stem exclusively (looking at the
original ad) from this sentence: "Even basic input, the keyboard and mouse,
haven’t really changed in any meaningful way over the years." In context,
though, that sentence could just as easily be just an example of one way in
which innovation in the Mac/PC space has stagnated.

The alternate interpretation that this person will be designing whole systems
is equally plausible to me, especially given their investment into the Linux
space. Initially, that move didn't make a whole lot of sense because the Linux
desktop space is so small and (particularly where issues around graphics
drivers and the like are concerned) requires a fair bit of technical acumen. A
ChromeOS-like strategy makes much more sense, though: heavily tailor the OS
user experience to fit your specific target audience, and vertically integrate
so you control the hardware, and the user never has to touch drivers or
configs. Then it's not "Linux," anymore, it's "SteamOS" or whatever.

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mkl
_That this person is going to design peripherals is pure speculation on the
part of the article's author, and it seems to stem exclusively (looking at the
original ad) from this sentence: "Even basic input, the keyboard and mouse,
haven’t really changed in any meaningful way over the years."_

Actually it seems as much to do with the more solid "Valve has a patent on a
controller with swappable parts". Said patent is here:
<http://www.faqs.org/patents/app/20110105231>

But yes, there is a lot of speculation, of course.

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jiggy2011
Didn't Valve previously say something about wristbands and how they would be
the future of computer interaction?

That seems very vague to me and I'm having difficulty visualising exactly what
that might mean.

Perhaps an accelerometer attached to your wrist would essentially allow you to
use any object as a makeshift mouse/keyboard?

~~~
shardling
I'd guess that a sufficiently accurate sensor on your wrist could track the
motion of your hand and fingers just via muscle/tendon/etc movement, for one
thing. (Place a finger on your wrist, and move your fingers around!) Combined
with an accelerometer to track the overall motion, and you have a pretty
versatile system.

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primitur
Valve should get involved with the guys behind the Open Pandora console:

<http://openpandora.org/>

<http://icontrolpad.com/>

There is a next-gen design in the works, Valve getting involved with it would
be a _serious_ wake up call ..

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aw3c2
It is am ambigious project but not very good in any way. I owned one and it
was awkward and annoying even for me as hacky linux distro user. They have my
utmost respect for the idea and persistence, but the execution is nothing to
glorify.

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programminggeek
Well, the PC biz has not been great to gaming for a long time, if ever. Most
PC's don't come with quality GFX cards, so PC games have to be least common
denominator, which is basically to port from the XBox360/PS3.

From what I can tell the average selling price of PC's has dropped in the last
10 years from $1,000 to $500 or less. At a $400-500 laptop, you just don't get
good GFX, so PC gaming kind of sucks.

Steam helped a ton on the software side, but if the average gamer is going to
have to swap out a graphics card to be able to play Skyrim well on their PC,
they'll probably just buy an Xbox instead.

The PC market needs some kind of "standard" box configurations with sane
pricing and non-crappy software installs. Like, a $500, $750, and $1,000
machines loaded with stock Windows 8, no crapware, good gfx, SSD's, etc.

If Valve did the same thing with their own version of Ubuntu running Steam,
they could lower machine prices and also really reshape the PC gaming
landscape over the next 10 years, esp. for indie developers who are already
porting to Linux.

Valve could even do something awesome with Steam where if you buy a "Steam
box" it comes with your Steam account and games preloaded and ready to go when
you start it up, sort of like what Amazon does when you buy a Kindle.

If Valve goes down that road and tries to truly innovate, there is some real
potential.

~~~
tomrod
> If Valve did the same thing with their own version of Ubuntu running Steam,
> they could lower machine prices and also really reshape the PC gaming
> landscape over the next 10 years, esp. for indie developers who are already
> porting to Linux.

At that point, why not just release their own console?

~~~
flatline3
Nowadays, what's the difference between a standardized PC running a
custom/customized OS and your hypothetical console?

Now, if Valve actually moved backwards to a day when consoles were simple
devices that didn't require OS updates, installation of the games, game
updates, and a whole slew of other crap from the PC industry that makes it
easier for vendors and harder for users, then they'd have a real 'console'
that wasn't a PC.

Otherwise, modern consoles are just PCs.

~~~
tomrod
> what's the difference between a standardized PC running a custom/customized
> OS and your hypothetical console?

Typically software repository choice, versatility, and upgradability of
components.

~~~
jiggy2011
Interestingly these are all things that you won't have if you buy a Windows 8
RT device.

As consoles become more like PCs , PCs become more like consoles.

~~~
tomrod
Thank goodness I'm more intelligent than to use Windows 8!

/end country bumpkin

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chrischen
I'm guessing a VR headset.

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cpeterso
John Carmack has been prototyping VR games and, in his QuakeCon 2012 keynote,
he said he knew ex-Id Software people are Valve were too.

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eckyptang
Incoming: another walled garden.

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yawgmoth
It isn't fair to discredit what Valve is building on the principle that it
isn't free and open. Steam is a walled garden and is adored, for the most part
anyway, by its users.

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phn
Yup. My only concern is more in the lines of "what if they close?". I hope
they have great success so I can keep my games forever :P

~~~
jiggy2011
I believe Valve promised that they would just unlock and unDRM all of their
games in such an event so that you can just install all of your Steam games
straight on your PC without going through Steam.

How that would work if you were running actual Steam hardware on the other
hand.

~~~
ANTSANTS
> How that would work if you were running actual Steam hardware on the other
> hand.

1\. A hypothetical Steam Box or Valve-branded computer is extremely likely to
be based off of COTS PC hardware, so there would not be a significant
technical barrier to running games purchased on those platforms on a regular
PC.

2\. Steam already lets you buy a game once on Windows and play it on any Mac
you own -- ie, they're not considered separate versions -- and Valve, at
least, is extremely unlikely to stop developing for regular PCs, so you'd
probably be easily able to load up any PC you have lying around with your
Steam Box games in a worst case scenario.

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jiggy2011
Yes, you could probably run the games on your PC. What I mean though , is if
you bought a Steam branded console and ran all your games through that.

A Steam console if likely to be much more tightly integrated with their cloud
stuff than a regular PC would and be reliant on valve for software updates so
there might be more implications if they switched the cloud services off.

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Toshio
Off-topic, a little detail caught my attention: that guy with a crowbar has a
lambda symbol on his chest. Coincidence or a hidden reference to functional
programming?

~~~
jiggy2011
The character is Gordon Freeman, the protagonist for the game series Half Life
which is the game Valve is best known for.

The Lambda here represents the radioactive decay constant and is used as part
of the measure for the "half life" of any radioactive material.

The Gordon character is a scientist, much of the game is set in a science lab
and Valve are known for making games with many scientific references (see
also: Portal).

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MojoJolo
I thought Valve will sell valves.

