Valve president Gabe Newell spoke at the University of Texas’ LBJ School of Public Affairs and stated that the biggest threat to any Valve hardware is something that Apple will do in the living room. He expects that vendors will find a way to leverage PCs for the living room, though he doesn’t know exactly what that solution will be.
“The biggest challenge, I don’t think is from the consoles. I think the biggest challenge is that Apple moves on the living room before the PC industry sort of gets its act together,” Newell said. “The threat right now is that Apple has gained a huge amount of market share, and has a relatively obvious pathway towards entering the living room with their platform. I think that there’s a scenario where we see sort of a dumbed down living room platform emerging – I think Apple rolls the console guys really easily. The question is can we make enough progress in the PC space to establish ourselves there, and also figure out better ways of addressing mobile before Apple takes over the living room ”
“I think a whole bunch of hardware companies are going to be releasing products in the next 12 months – you’ll hear it referred to as Miracast, Shield from Nvidia, or lots of other people,” Newell said. “There are going to be a huge set of products that say, ‘If you want something that’s incredibly cheap, at a price point well below anything that consoles will be able to reach, you’re going to take advantage of the PC that’s running somewhere in your house. It’s like one of those things where afterwards it will seem like it was very simple, when beforehand, everyone sort of denied that it was possible.”
Source: Polygon
