<span class="bold"><continued from above></span> Valve as a company clearly sees the potential risks involved in sinking all of their eggs into the Wintel PC platform basket, and they want to ensure that they always have a platform that they can rely upon for PC style gaming, but also to expand their reach to try to appeal to gamers that have left the PC for consoles or other platforms.
Now, one thing they've done already some time ago of course was to add Mac platform support. That is a good move to add some diversity but the number of Macs out there to PCs as well as the availability of games on Mac is quite a wide difference between the platforms. So it does help to diversify a bit and expand revenue streams, but they could not survive on Mac sales alone with current market dynamics. The PC platform is still their single largest source of revenue, and they have more or less no control over where it might go in the future. Microsoft has the largest determining factor of where that will go over time than any other factor so that's a pure unknown for Valve.
So Valve is simply trying to ensure that no matter what happens in the marketplace with respect to Windows or the PC, that they will always have a platform on which to sell the type of games they wish to sell, and at the same time trying to rely on the least number of external companies as possible. Every game platform has "controlling interests". With consoles it is very simple, the company who makes the console completely dominates and controls almost every aspect of it and a company like Valve has very little control or say in the matter. The PC platform itself is generic enough, but the Windows OS is much like a console in that they have no control over what Microsoft does to it in the future.
So I can see the executives at Valve thinking "what if we had our own system that is not controlled by some other corporation that we have no real say over" and then exploring the viability of that. Then you look at the various existing options that exist out there right now and you see Linux in all its incarnations, the BSDs and various other lesser known platforms etc. and of the entire mix of things out there - Linux is the most mature and viable platform all things considered (including device drivers) in terms of running on the widest amount of hardware people using PC as well as other platforms (including Mactels) already have.
So they wanted to try their hand at producing their own solution using existing technology rather than creating their own from scratch, and harnessing Linux to build their base of operations on top of. All things considered, this is a very smart idea to pursue. It has no success guarantees either of course, but considering the various options that they could seek out to provide themselves with future alternatives and greater control over where their business goes in the future, Linux is the shining star possibility above and beyond any other possibility out there. So it makes a lot of sense if they're going to sink R&D into anything to base it on the Linux platform.
That covers the software side of things but doesn't cover the hardware side. The truth is that it is Windows usage currently that overwhelming drives the majority of PC desktop and laptop sales, and as a result of that the success of PC hardware sales are most likely going to be tied to some high degree to the success of the Windows platform running on it. In the future however if Windows usage starts to wane for any reason, PC sales are likely to suffer also and as PC sales suffer, Valve's gaming business will suffer too. Again, Valve's success is currently not only tied to the success of Windows, but also the success of the PC itself which in turn is tightly tied to the success of Windows. Ultimately Valve wants to break this hardware and software dependency chain by having "Another Option(TM)", and that is why they're developed the concept of Steam Machines and seeked out hardware vendors to bring on board. Valve themselves do not want to
produce their own hardware and have exclusivity over it such as a gaming console - no, they make money selling games and the more companies out there that produce compatible hardware that runs their games they recognize means the lower the price the hardware will be and the more attractive to potential customers buying that hardware will be. Valve's Steam Machines is thus a way to stimulate hardware manufacturers to create a PC based platform that is sold as a gaming machine running Linux and not as a machine that is tied to Windows and it's success on the PC desktop.
That's why they've developed Steam Machines - to have an alternative to the PC+Windows monopoly which is NOT dominated by any one single company out there with hardware nor software. They chose Linux because it is the best existing tech to base what they're doing upon, plus it is open not only for them to use but for any other vendor to use further breaking the idea of any type of monopoly being possible on the hardware or software side. The end result is a platform that essentially any hardware company can produce and try to make money from, and stimulate competition and drive prices down. It's about breaking IHV and ISV vendor monopoly lockin and ensuring a multitude of options for the future - to focus on what they do best - selling video games.
So - why the Steam controller? Because they want to not only do the above, but they want this system to be seen as "the way to do gaming right", and they want it to appeal to a much wider array of gamers out there, not just PC type gamers, but all types of gamers including those who have ditched the PC for the console because they find console gaming easier/better in some way, or because they prefer gaming with a game controller instead of a keyboard+mouse combo. The problem is though that the majority of PC games out there were never designed to be played with a gamepad type controller but rather with a mouse and keyboard or similar - and many games are either extremely awkward with a traditional Xbox 360 type controller or they're flat out impossible to play with one.
Steam controller is an attempt to solve that problem. It is an attempt to give a completely new type of controller that has a lot more dynamics to it to do things in the context of a controller that you could never do before, to give a greater level of control to the player that you could really only get from a keyboard+mouse before. They set out to create a controller that is sort of a "best of both worlds" type of device - but not to appeal to every human being that is a gamer out there, but rather to both show people who don't care for game controllers that something better can exist than what has before and possibly it's good enough for some people to like it who would never otherwise like a controller before, and at the same time to allow people who prefer a controller to be able to play what are ultimately PC games that would otherwise not work very well at all with an Xbox type controller. The Steam controller can work as a gamepad but it also can work as a simulated mouse/keyboard as well giving a whole new type of input dynamic that is like a combination between a mouse, a gamepad and a touchpad all in one.
Whether or not that type of controller is awesome, or even is usable to an individual player really depends on the player and what they want - but it's important to realize too that this isn't something people will be forced to buy or forced to use with a particular game, so anyone who doesn't like it or doesn't want to even consider it for any reason doesn't even need to care it exists. The reason it exists is NOT FOR THOSE PEOPLE. It is designed to be something new that might make people who otherwise might not bother with the PC or Steam machines potentially likely to reconsider it and to be able to enjoy even older titles with a game controller who WANT to use a game controller but for which existing controllers suck horribly (in the eye of the beholder).
It's yet another case where a product is being designed not in an everyone will want this or nobody will want it case, but in a "here's another option that might encourage you to use our platform and buy games from us where you otherwise might just say fuckit and buy an Xbox".
<continued in part 3 below>
