By Kevin Kelly
You know it’s a treat when you get to hear the somewhat reclusive Gabe Newell talk two days in a row, and while he was J.J. Abrams-less for his second D.I.C.E. keynote, Newell decided not to focus on talking about sales-oriented things, or announcing new products (damn!). Instead, he talked about two tenets:
• The PC ecosystem is going to expand into the living room. Obviously this is what Valve has been moving towards with their Steam Box system that will attach a gaming PC to your television.
• He thinks there is going to be a fairly significant sea change in what we think a game is. This will expand throughout the video game ecosystem, and will wind up in your living room, and will incorporate people who don’t tend to think of themselves as “gamers.”
“A lot of people have an outdated notion about what is possible with a PC,” Newell said about bringing computing power into the living room. With the movement towards mobility, PC manufacturers have gone way beyond what would be required for a similar experience in the living room, where you don’t have to worry about things like thermal envelopes and power consumption.
Some issues are left to be filled, with audio synchronization and controller input, but he thinks that the price points for these solutions will be far below what is typically involved in a console gaming setup. But it’s not open transition to get in there. “It’s actually scary to think what Apple is going to do,” going on to explain that he thinks that Apple has a more natural progression into the living room, which is a large threat to moving PC gaming into the same space.
What he thinks will lend credibility to the experience itself is the fact that PC gaming systems are easily adaptable, and that the sheer horsepower you can get out of them will dwarf what you can get out of a console. This is already the case, obviously, with PC gaming, but for the millions of potential future consumers, it’s a fact that needs to be illustrated and grasped.
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