It's interesting when you look at how Valve's idea of entertainment in the living room has evolved over the years. It really is yet another testament to the fact that this company continues to practice the art of iterative design - a cyclical process of prototyping, testing, analyzing, and refining a product.
Early Beginnings
It was in 2011 when we got our first glimpse of Steam in the living room.
Valve announced Big Picture Mode, which was touted as merely an interface upgrade for Steam that offered "controller support and navigation designed for television interaction." It wasn't clear at this point what direction Valve was going in the living room or how far they were willing to go.
Later that year, Greg Coomer, a veteran Valve employee and Steam engineer, quietly
tweeted this photograph of a high-end, Xbox-sized gaming PC that he had built. At the time, nobody had predicted that this was in fact a prototype for what we now call Steam Machines.
In September 2012, almost a year after Greg Coomer's tweet, Valve officially
released Big Picture Mode into the wild. It was also around this time that they began to make it clear that they were looking into producing gaming hardware because they were "
frustrated by the lack of innovation in the computer hardware space," so Valve began hiring hardware & electrical engineers like Ben Krasnow and Jeff Keyzer, to name a few. Gabe Newell also publicly came out and said that Valve was definitely
planning to release living room hardware in 2013.
Today
It was this time last year when a lot of the pieces began to fall in place. Valve ran an advertisement campaign to announce the
Steam Universe, a set of platforms specifically designed for video games in the living room - SteamOS, Steam Machines, and the Steam Controller. A few months later, Valve unveiled the
first generation of 3rd-party manufactured Steam Machines.
And only months ago, Valve released features for Steam that would greatly enhance both the desktop and living room experience. They introduced
Steam Family Sharing, a service that allows you to share your Steam library with friends and family. Another new feature included
In-Home Streaming, giving you the ability to stream games from your high-end gaming rig to a media PC or laptop.
The Future
Now we come to today's news.
Still missing are a lot of other features that platforms like the Xbox has that the Steam Universe lacks (natively). Where is Netflix, Spotify, Hulu, HBO Go, or other media streaming services that also make up the backbone of entertainment in the living room? Well, according to the folks at SteamDB, a lot of these services, or ones like them, could be making their way into Steam and the Steam Universe soon.
SteamDB said that Valve updated their Steam binaries in a beta update today, and they found that a few new application-type IDs were added. Films, TV Series, Videos, Plugins, and Music are all coming to Steam. We were kind of given a hint that Valve was moving towards these services in another beta update a few weeks ago. In the update were references to the popular
Spotify music player.
So, after almost four years of iterative design, the big picture of Steam and Valve in your living room is clear. They want to directly compete with the big dogs like Microsoft and Sony, and Valve certainly has the capability to succeed. Their iterative design process has provided them with a stable footing to launch off of.
The entire Steam Universe platform is still in beta, but because most of the pieces of the puzzle have been filled by Valve, we expect 2015 is the year they will begin to invade our living rooms. So stay tuned as we bring you more news in the coming weeks and months.
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