I think it will be fully opened ecosystem, with choice of buying Steambox or creating your own configuration at will.
Ummm, Valve creates just as many games as other developers over a similar time period. While the Half-life series has stalled they have done Left 4 Dead (first party studio bought during development of the first game) and the Portal series. As well as the 100% F2P (no in app purchases) game Alien Swarm. Not to mention Team Fortress and Counterstrike. Sure those may have been developers that were hired and/or purchased by Valve, but they remain internal development teams funded internally by Valve.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Valve_Corporation
Shows that they release internally developed games on a yearly basis for the most part.
Regards,
SB
which originated from a Half-Life modification by Minh "Gooseman" Le and Jess "Cliffe" Cliffe. By the fourth beta version, Valve Software, the developer who created Half-Life, began assisting in the development of Counter-Strike.[1] In 2000, Valve bought the rights to Counter-Strike
Portal is Valve's spiritual successor to the freeware game Narbacular Drop, the 2005 independent game released by students of the DigiPen Institute of Technology; the original Narbacular Drop team is now employed at Valve.[34][35] Valve became interested in Narbacular Drop after seeing the game at DigiPen's annual career fair; Robin Walker, one of Valve's developers, saw the game at the fair and later contacted the team providing them with advice and offering to show their game at Valve's offices. After their presentation, Valve's president Gabe Newell quickly offered the entire team jobs at Valve to develop the game further.
Left 4 Dead (abbreviated as L4D) is a cooperative first-person shooter arcade-style video game. It was developed by Turtle Rock Studios, which was purchased by Valve Corporation during development.
Alien Swarm is a freeware top-down shoot-em-up video game by Valve Corporation. It is a remake of the Alien Swarm mod for Unreal Tournament 2004, and it was developed by the original team, who were hired by Valve during the course of the development process.
Team Fortress is a team- and class-based online multiplayer video game mod originally based on the first person shooter Quake, made by id Software. Team Fortress was designed and written by Robin Walker, John Cook and Ian Caughley in 1996. The mod's gameplay has caught on with a large following of fans, which has spurred many developers to create similar gamemodes on other engines. In August 1999, after the development team was hired by Valve, Team Fortress was ported to Valve's GoldSrc engine in the form of Team Fortress Classic.
Yap, it looks like the team that made HL2 has just been sitting on their ass for 6 years, since Ep.2 and TF2.
That or they all changed division to the Money Counting Department.
I love Valve, but honestly my PC gets around the house just fine via HDMI and USB in the attic. So a Steambox really means nothing for me sadly, I want HL2ep3 or HL3 over anything else.
If they do announce it for a SBox or erm Linux only, then I will see I guess. Unless they are years away from both! lol
SteamBox alone wont be enough to motivate a lot of people to get it [especially with small pool of games running on Linux]. There needs to be some new game present, something that will drive sales. Left4Dead 3 is a goid start, but more is needed.
As for new type of controllers or valve-branded VR.... possible, but IMO unlikely.