Valve plays it pretty close to the chest when it comes to upcoming projects, but for the Game Developers Conference taking place in San Francisco in March, they’re putting down a lot of stuff on the table.
The more expected development is a range of different Steam Machines to be debuted, which more or less amounts to PCs built specifically around playing games, particularly off the Steam platform. The concept is that these gaming PCs will be tiered with different graphic/processing levels to cater to the budget gamer, or the hardcore early adopter for whom price is not an object. Also set to be revealed is the final form of the Steam controller, which initially showed off prototypes with a dubious “disc” pad similar to the concept of the old Mattel Intellivision control disc for handling movement.
The big surprise for most however, is that Valve will also be revealing their own virtual reality hardware. Many industry pundits suspected that Valve might be taking matters into its own hands after it broke off collaborating with Oculus Rift on the development of their Rift unit. This is the first official confirmation from Valve itself that they’ve thrown their own hat into the ring, so we can probably expect it to be compatible—if not outright bundled—with certain models of the Steam Machine.
