We are used to seeing new consoles released with games that you cannot get on other consoles. For instance there was Mario with Nintendo, Sega and Sonic the Hedgehog and Halo and Microsoft. However Valve, who are behind Half Life, Portal, Team Fortress and Left 3 Dead, has said that they are not going to play a trump card. Valve will be revealing a line-up of Steam Machines next year, but they said that they are not going to make any of their games an exclusive.
The PR for Valve, Doug Lomabrdi said that this wasn’t the style of the company. “It’s against our philosophy to put a game in jail and say it only works on Steam Machines,” he told The Verge.
Steam did get a huge wave of adoption when Half Life 2 was locked to the digital distribution, but Lombardi said that Valve could end up regretting this. “That may or may not have been a good idea given the condition that Steam was in at the moment,” he says.
If Valve wanted to promote a platform that was open the decision may limit early momentum for Steam OS. Most of the games at the moment are made for the PC running Windows. Anna Sweet of Valve said that they had been having talks with partners for the past three years about gaming on Linux and some companies are planning on announcing support. But whether games will be exclusive remains to be seen.
Valve said that every Steam Machine would be shipped with the Steam OS, which means that even if those buying choose a predominately Windows box, they would still be supporting the initiative.
