Valve's Interest In Hardware Explained

Also Gabe Newell and Erik Johnson discuss the future of Valve.

Valve co-founder and managing director Gabe Newell and business development lead Erik Johnson during a GameSlice Podcast with Geoff Keighley discussed Valve's current state, Source 2, virtual reality, and the future of the company.

Newell described how Valve's approach to branching out the experience of PC gaming led to the company looking to hardware.

"When you go back to the original Half-Life, we were all playing first-person action games… and it seemed like people were being kind of disrespectful toward gamers, that the attitude was that you could kind of trivialise what gamers would want in terms of how many barrels you put on a shotgun," he said. "And we were like, well, that is fun, but it kind of misses the opportunity to think about the broader kinds of experiences that people could have. So we were gamers, we wanted more, the story, the narrative, and having the sense of it being part of the world. That's what we were thinking about at the beginning of the company."

The desire to create more for gamers led to the creation of digital distribution service Steam, Newell explained. "When we started working on Steam, it was kind of the same thing. Are there opportunities for us to provide, in that case services more than experiences, but can't we be doing more that's really trying to address what customers want," he said. "We thought there were ways we could make the experience of being a PC gamer better by tackling those problems."

"So in a sense, what we're doing now with hardware really to us feels like an extension of that. Pick the problems that are of greatest significance to our customers in terms of continuing to improve that overall experience. We'd be happy to still be focused more narrowly just because it is a lot easier to continue to do the things you've done well, but we just reached a point where we thought we need to tackle some of these issues on the hardware side if we're going to be able to continue to keep the PC gaming experience moving forward."

Valve has been busy working on its own virtual reality headset, it's Steam Controller, and its Steam Machines.