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Virtuos GDC 2011

Virtuos GDC 2011

Virtuos is one of the world's largest providers of digital production services to the game and movie industries, specializing in 3D art and game co-development. Virtuos has over 600 staff across its production centers in Shanghai and Chengdu, and offices in Paris, Vancouver and Tokyo.

Serving 15 of the top 20 games publishers worldwide, as well as renowned developers, Virtuos has developed full games on PS3, Xbox 360, Wii, NDS and PSP for leading publishers.

Visit us today at virtuosgames.com

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  GDC 2011: Valve To Make Steam More TV-Friendly
by Kris Graft [Console/PC, GDC]
9 comments
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February 28, 2011
 
GDC 2011: Valve To Make Steam More TV-Friendly
Half-Life and Portal house Valve Software said Monday that it plans on making its popular PC gaming digital distribution platform Steam more TV-friendly.

An upcoming “big picture” mode for Steam will add features including controller support and navigation tailored for televisions in an effort to bring PC gaming outside of the office or den and into the living room. Steam currently has over 30 million accounts worldwide.

“Our partners and customers have asked us to make Steam available in more places. With the introduction of Steam on the Mac, and soon in Portal 2 on the PS3, we've done just that," said Valve marketing VP Doug Lombardi.

"With big picture mode, gaming opportunities for Steam partners and customers become possible via PCs and Macs on any TV or computer display in the house,” he added.

Valve is meeting with partners and developers at this week’s Game Developers Conference in San Francisco to discuss details of the new mode. The company has yet to publicly release details of the plan.

Separately, the company also said it is encouraging its business partners to set up and run their own in-game economies. Valve introduced a digital store last year for its internally-developed Team Fortress 2 where it sells virtual items such as weapons and accessories for characters.
 
   
 
Comments

Sean Currie
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Dedicated Steam console in 3....2....1....

Dan Robinson
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Not even a steam console. I bet we will see a Steam client that will allow you to play PC games on a PS3 by 2012.

Mike Smith
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Uh, no.

You would still need to port the game to the PS3 and porting a high end PC game to the PS3 is not easy. Just ask anyone at Valve how they liked doing the Portal PS3 port.

Samuel Batista
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Steam Runs on the Mac platform now, which is largely a Unix Kernel. Creating a sandbox environment based off a port of the Mac builds for Steam based games, and with Valves good piracy record, seems very likely that it could happen. It would be awesome, and the reason PS3 could yet destroy the 360 in this generation.

Jacek Wesolowski
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Valve seems to be slowly but steadily positioning Steam as *the* gaming platform, i.e. a universal, hardware-independent content delivery system. This could have interesting implications with regard to future business models. I can see how this could make traditional console business obsolete, for example. As far as gamers are concerned, there could be at least one major upside to it, i.e. no more "you need to use proprietary peripherals with this game" bullshit.

But it's also potentially dangerous to the market. Currently, a hardware manufacturer, such as Sony, Nintendo or Apple, holds a de-facto software monopoly over their platform, but there is still some competition between platforms (not as much as you would think, though, because e.g. Wii, PS3 and iPhone have different target groups). Now, imagine you buy all your games via Steam, regardless of what hardware you're using at the moment... That's a much stronger position than what big store chains had ten years ago. It's as if someone owned the entire Internet backbone, or all the world's highways.

Unlike Sony or Apple, Valve doesn't have a consistent record of abuse of power just yet. But it would be naive to hope that it will last.

I'm not convinced competition can stop Steam, unless Valve makes a major mistake, or some new tech makes them obsolete. Steam already has a foothold on PC, Mac and even PS3, and I guess non-Apple smartphones and the likes of OnLive are next. The more hardware platforms Steam supports, the less sense it makes for a hardware manufacturer to prevent its users from having access to Steam.

I think the time is coming for this to become a political issue. Digital content delivery systems are becoming crucial to modern society, and there are a number of issues with private-owned systems that a modern society should not accept (not least of those being what sometimes amounts to content censorship).

I guess there is a need for separation of content delivery system (we only need one) from content vendors (we need as many of those as possible, including non-profit ones). The former could be made public and operate under a national or international agenda (one common system being preferable to a multitude of separate systems for the EU, the US, China, India, Russia etc.). The latter should be private. Steam, MS, Sony, Apple, Impulse etc. would effectively become virtual storefronts operating within public "cloud".

Jakub Janovsky
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Public companies often sacrifice long term profit (and customers) in order to boost short term profit (to make current shareholders happy), so I dont mind that Valve (and some other such companies) are kept private.

Jacek Wesolowski
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I meant "public" as in "public school".

John Mickey
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Jacek, I have to respectfully disagree with your assertion. Steam is only a dominant market force because it is used by so many consumers, and only used by so many because it is good. They're only indomitable so long as they're good - the moment they falter, they can fall to competition.

Furthermore, you would solve this "issue" by creating a unified content delivery system. Yet by doing so you're ultimately taking choice away from creators and consumers. Currently anyone has the freedom to sell anything from a website, regardless of quality, message or merit. It's currently the most free system on Earth. Yet you would socialize that in the name of freedom, thereby eliminating choice, experimentation of method, and introduce an expensive bureaucracy, raising the barrier of entry? And how would that be managed?

Currently everything I buy is from a privately owned store. I fail to see how that is an issue - and they benefit me, by choosing worthwhile inventory, providing assistance and returns, etc. Your vendors would either be hamstringed to sell everything available, and therefore worthless, or able to choose, and therefore the same as present, but having to pass on extra tax to the consumer and introducing a draconian and backwards system that would absolutely stifle creativity and progress.

Your system would punish the truly successful (Valve), stifle innovation (by removing competition), and hamstring progress (by tying everything to a slow, impossible bureaucracy.)

Sting Newman
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Steam needs a clean interface like this - http://www.kali.net/

It's clean and it's simple.


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