One of the main things that gamers look forward to with a new console (apart from the new machine, obvs!) is the games that aren’t available on other consoles. Sega has Sonic, Nintendo has Mario and Valve has Portal, Half Life, Left 4 Dead and Team Fortress. Valve has said it’s not after cornering any sort of market, and when it launches its Steam machines later this year, none of the games will be exclusive to it.
Doug Lombardi, Valve’s PR, talked to The Verge and said the company isn’t into exclusivity: “It’s against our philosophy to put a game in jail and say it only works on Steam Machines.”
When Half Life 2 turned out to be exclusive, lots of people chose Steam, but Lombardi thinks this could have been a bad move: . “That may or may not have been a good idea given the condition that Steam was in at the moment.”
If Valve wants to promote this open platform – as it should – this non-exclusive plan might place limitations on early pick-up rates for the Steam consoles. Most games right now are for PC and Windows.
The company’s Anna Sweet said there’d been some talks with partners for the past few years about games for the Linux platform, with some partners offering quite a bit of support.
We don’t know for sure, though, that any games are actually going to be exclusive.
Valve said that the Steam box will come with the Steam OS, so even if you choose a Windows console, you’ll still be giving Steam a bit of help.
