Gabe Newell: Steam Box's Biggest Threat Isn't Consoles, It's Apple

silentbrad sends word of a recent lecture given by Valve's Gabe Newell to a college class. He had some interesting remarks about the future of games in the living room: "The threat right now is that Apple has gained a huge amount of market share, and has a relatively obvious pathway towards entering the living room with their platform," Newell said. "I think that there's a scenario where we see sort of a dumbed down living room platform emerging — I think Apple rolls the console guys really easily. The question is can we make enough progress in the PC space to establish ourselves there, and also figure out better ways of addressing mobile before Apple takes over the living room? ... We're happy to do it if nobody else will do it, mainly because everybody else will pile on, and people will have a lot of choices, but they'll have those characteristics. They'll say, 'Well, I could buy a console, which assumes I'll re-buy all my content, have a completely different video system, and, oh, I have a completely different group of friends, apparently. Or I can just extend everything I love about the PC and the internet into the living room.' ... I think the biggest challenge is that Apple moves on the living room before the PC industry sort of gets its act together." There's another hour-long lecture from Newell posted on YouTube talking about productivity, economics, and the future of corporations. Speaking of Steam, reader skade88 points out an article at Linux.com about the current state of the Steam for Linux beta.

Comments

Re:How could you "dumb down" the living room?

[MacGyver2210]

Adding Apple tech to anything makes it that much dumber. The whole PURPOSE of Apple is to dumb-down the computing experience to where Grandma and Aunt Judy don't have to know anything about computers to use it, aside from "If I click this envelope, I see the email." I have used more complicated vending machines.

Careful, if they get into console hardware they might patent "attaching something to your television" and make a proprietary, $99, single-button remote for it with a custom 128-pin charging cable coded to your specific remote(which also costs $99, and is only available from the Apple store).

Re:Too price-sensitive

[drinkypoo]

The TV market is too price-conscious for Apple. They can enter that market, but it will drag down their margins.

You mean like the razor-thin profit margin PC industry?

The industry in which Apple has never managed to top 11% even when they have had technological superiority? Oh, OK.