ValveTime

In an interview with the BBC after collecting his prestigious academy fellowship award at tonight's BAFTA ceremony, Gabe has revealed a Steambox prototype is only 3-4 months away.

The hold up for the device? Well Gabe said: "The main thing that's holding us up... we have a couple of different controllers prototypes we're using". From the prototypes Valve send out, they will be monitoring gaming experiences relative to the controller variants being tested.

He also touched on potentially "dusting off" some other games, such as Ricochet & Day of Defeat to "give them a new spin" given the changing climate. You can watch the full interview on BBC News.

Gamasutra is reporting on a interview that Valve's economist-in-residence Yanis Varoufakis gave to EconTalk about Valve and how its management-less structure works. The article quotes Yanis in relation to Valve's practices with hiring, firing and pay levels. All of it works on a peer review process with no one in the company vetoing ideas having the final say.

Pay is a flat rate with the rest determined by bonuses, granted by peer review of performance and value to the company. Similarly if an employee is judged to be under-performing by their fellow employees they are eventually let go. Although Valve tries to only hire the best people Yanis explains that some people "just can't function very well in a boss-less environment."

It's an interesting summary of an interesting interview and I suggest you follow both of the above links to see it in full.

In our first ValveTime TalkTime Interview, resident presenter James interviews Davey Wreden, lead developer on the highly praised and successful source mod, "The Stanley Parable" and it's upcoming HD remix. James and Davey discuss the influences behind The Stanley Parable, the difficulties involved in developing the anticipated sequel and much more! Feel free to share your thoughts and join the discussion in the comments below!

Edge 250 has been released. You can subscribe and pick up the print edition, or you can purchase this issue via the iTunes and Play marketplaces for around $7. Below are some excerpts lifted from the Valve editorial inside:

"Newell replies to our question offhandedly, 'We think of ourselves as a game developer, sure.'"

"Valve comprises just 350 people, stretched over six floors... Valve also opened a new floor to house audio studios last month, which marketing director Doug Lombardi had managed to forget until reminded of it."

"Valve might seem to be straying into territory outside of games... The point, according to Newell... 'When you're off working on user interfaces for letting you friends sort groups of their friends by the games they have, certainly game developers think you're doing game development at that point,' he says. 'Or if you're making a TF2 short. It's just the definition of what gamers want continues to change all the time. And we just feel like we're following behind and trying to understand that better.'"

"Valve wanted [Icefrog's] talent rather than to specifically make Dota 2, and the eventual decision to work on the game is an example of Valve's pragmatism. In Johnson's words, Valve's goal in decision making is, 'What is the most efficient thing for us to work on to entertain the most people?' This is also an insight into why another sequel to Half-Life hasn't yet appeared - making a highly expensive, linear, story-driven singleplayer game just isn't efficient when stacked against the community payoffs of a top-class multiplayer game."

The Verge have posted a new interview with Valve CEO Gabe Newell. Mr Newell answers questions about Valve's Steam Box platform, input devises user generated content, reveals the names of Valve's hardware and mobile efforts before badmouthing Windows 8 again.

Valve seem to be taking a similar approach to their Steam Box platform as Google did with Android: They are encouraging various hardware manufacturers to create their own Steam Boxes while developing their own in-house device as a flagship. The Piston which we mistakenly called "the" Steam Box yesterday is just the first of many devices to come.

Here are some highlights of the interview:

On working with parter companies to develop hardware:
What we see is you've got this sort of struggle going on between closed proprietary systems and open systems. [...] We’re not imposing a lot of restrictions on people on how they’re getting involved.


On what we can expect from Steam Boxes:
The way we sort of think of it is sort of "Good, Better," or "Best." So, Good are like these very low-cost streaming solutions that you’re going to see that are using Miracast or Grid. I think we’re talking about in-home solutions where you’ve got low latency. "Better" is to have a dedicated CPU and GPU and that’s the one that’s going to be controlled. Not because our goal is to control it; it’s been surprisingly difficult when we say to people "don’t put an optical media drive in there" and they put an optical media drive in there and you’re like "that makes it hotter, that makes it more expensive, and it makes the box bigger." Go ahead. You can always sell the Best box, and those are just whatever those guys want to manufacture. [Valve's position is]: let's build a thing that’s quiet and focuses on high performance and quiet and appropriate form factors.

Note: Miracast and Grid are services for streaming a PC display wirelessly to another device like a TV, similar to Apple's Airplay.


On the openness of their own Steam Box:
That’ll be a Linux box, [and] if you want to install Windows you can. We’re not going to make it hard. This is not some locked box by any stretch of the imagination.