Valve is attempting to make playing PC games on your living room TV easier with a new low-cost streaming box called the Steam Link. The $50 device was just one of the announcements Valve made at this week's Game Developers Conference (GDC), also showing off a virtual reality headset and a next-generation games engine.
The Steam Link is Valve's latest attempt to encourage gamers to stream games around their home network. Last year Valve introduced streaming into the Steam PC client, so that you could stream games running on the powerful desktop in a back bedroom to a tablet or lightweight PC connected to the living room television, for example.
Now it's helping out those who don't have a secondary PC to hand with the $50 Steam Link, a small device capable of streaming games from Windows or Linux PCs, Macs, or even the forthcoming Steam Machines - dedicated gaming hardware running on Valve's Steam OS. The Steam Link can support 1080p streams at 60Hz with "low latency", and is also available with an optional Steam Controller that costs the same amount as the Steam Link itself.
UK pricing and availability for the Stream Link has yet to be announced, but Valve has promised to furnish us with those details closer to launch in November.
Steam VR
Earlier in the week, HTC shocked attendees at Mobile World Congress when it unveiled the Vive virtual reality headset, which it had built in association with Valve. It seems Valve's VR ambitions don't end there, however. The company will shortly launch a developer version of its own VR headset, to showcase two new technologies which it will make available to hardware manufacturers.
The first of these is Lighthouse, a "room-scale tracking system" that allows the headset to monitor the precise movements of the wearer. "In order to have a high quality VR experience, you need high resolution, high speed tracking," said Valve's hardware engineer, Alan Yates. "Lighthouse gives us the ability to do this for an arbitrary number of targets at a low enough BOM [bill of materials] cost that it can be incorporated into TVs, monitors, headsets, input devices or mobile devices."
The second new technology is a revamped controller, which incorporates Lighthouse to bring "touch and motion as integrated parts of the PC gaming experience," according to Valve programmer Joe Ludwig.
Source 2 engine
Finally, Valve also released a successor to the Source engine that has long been used to power games such as Counter-Strike and Half-Life 2. Valve says Source 2 will allow amateur programmers to contribute code along with the professionals, boosting the potential for user-generated content in games.
"The value of a platform like the PC is how much it increases the productivity of those who use the platform," said Valve's senior software engineer, Jay Stelly. "With Source 2, our focus is increasing creator productivity. Given how important user-generated content is becoming, Source 2 is designed not for just the professional developer, but enabling gamers themselves to participate in the creation and development of their favourite games."
Valve says the new engine will be made available for free to "content developers". The company said it will also be releasing a version of the Source 2 engine that is compatible with Vulkan, a cross-platform 3D graphics API that could be used on anything from phones to PCs, and on Valve's own Steam Machines.
The release of the Source 2 engine has triggered hope that it could be a precursor to the launch of Half-Life 3, although Valve is keeping schtum on that... for now.