Gabe Newell Considers Hardware Sales - 'If We Have to We Will'

[News Portal]

Valve may have made a name for itself as the king of the digital domain, but that doesn't mean the company is afraid of branching out. Weighing in on emerging technologies, Valve's head honcho Gabe Newell has gone on record to state that, when push comes to shove, the company isn't afraid of entering the hardware market.

Read full article by Matt Williams

[shlaimon]

I love valve. They not fraid of nuffin

[Baskerville]

Big bad Gabe isn't afraid of muscling in on the hardware front.

[caitsith01]

Hardware requires very rapid, iterative innovation. I.e. the opposite of Valve's "when it's ready" approach to games.

[Matty]

I wonder how bad it has to get before they will sell hardware.

[exe3]

Why would they even need to sell hardware? Their games are based on a 7 year old engine and as such always run super smooth.

[PalZer0]

I think this is a sly plan to launch a new hardware platform to coincide with HL3.

[cmanson17]

Hardware requires very rapid, iterative innovation. I.e. the opposite of Valve's "when it's ready" approach to games.

I thought that was Blizzards approach.

[TheOriginalDaniel]

Aperture branded GPUs etc ... Hells Yeah!

[Ooshp]

So... motion control only became viable because Nintendo tried to sell it to the world and succeeded. Microsoft and Sony followed suit.

My understanding of what Gabe is saying is that if hardware manufactuerers are not going to collaborate with developers to push the PC hardware market to where he thinks it should be, Valve will step in to the market and do what needs to be done. Maybe?

It certainly doesn't sound like he wants to compete with the hardware industry - rather he wants to make important technologies commercially viable if he feels the market isn't doing the job.

Will HL3 require a wearable computer and 4 dimensional controller, powered by smell?

[Yurtles]

I like reading interviews done with Gabe because he always seems to be musing about something and his ideas are usually pretty interesting.

[sPOiDar]

Hardware requires very rapid, iterative innovation. I.e. the opposite of Valve's "when it's ready" approach to games.

I think you're missing the point, Gabe's talking about real innovation - new ideas and concepts, whereas I think you really just mean 'iterative improvement'.

[TRB]

It was announced today that scientists have created atom-sized transistors using a reproducible method.

Moore forecast we wouldn't see those until 2020, so we're 8 years ahead of Moore's law as far as transistors go now, if only we had software pushing as hard to make use of new tech.

[sPOiDar]

It was announced today that scientists have created atom-sized transistors using a reproducible method.

Moore forecast we wouldn't see those until 2020, so we're 8 years ahead of Moore's law as far as transistors go now, if only we had software pushing as hard to make use of new tech.

Moore was talking about economical circuit density - we probably won't actually see economical implementations of single-atom transistors until roughly that time-frame. The experiment you refer to requires the transistor to be cooled to 20 millikelven to function, for the atom to be painstakingly placed, and there's still a problem of density - I assume that channels have to be sufficiently sparce to avoid electron bleed.

[InAUGral]

This is likely related to his frustrations with Xbox LIVE and how it updates thus meaning Valve cant pump out lots of free content in updates to users of various valve games.