4D-Boxing wrote on Apr 13, 2012, 12:24:
Bill Gates realized 30 years ago that the money was in software and not in hardware. Valve would be better off striking a deal with Sony that would integrate steam to the PS4 and a similar deal with cable providers concerning set to boxes.
And then Apple later became the most profitable company in the entire friggin universe with a model based on hardware sales..
Funny how the answer wasn't just contained in one persons perception there. These are complicated matters and Valve has the talent pool to create and innovate, whether that means looking at the entire equation from the ground up, or just creating appealing hardware that reflects what their customers are looking for based on the data they collect from steam. (for which they have a upper hand on pretty much every other gaming software/hardware dev)
Does this mean new control interfaces? Likely.
A Steam console? Yes. They're not going to piggyback off someone else's set-top box/console. Perhaps the option will only be there for customers that do not have/wish their gaming PC hooked up to their large television. Streaming the data in the background at extremely high speeds from your home PC to the console is possible, but for truly massive, seamless worlds would probably take some amount of pre-loading.
Half Life 3 designed with not just software in mind, but with (optional) supporting hardware they have planned for around the corner? Possible. They've taken this long in planning, pre-production, etc.. I'm guessing they've brainstormed some pretty wild things by now.
The mouse is a very tried and true input mechanism that Xerox invented almost a half a century ago. It works wonderfully for many things, not so well for others. Thats not to say one control device should be perfect for everything, but there is much room for innovation in the interface design department, something I hope Valve will be keen to explore.