Valve co-founder and managing director, Gabe Newell has told Penny Arcade in an interview [as sited by GamesIndustryBiz] that Valve would be prepared to make innovative hardware if no one else will.
“If we have to sell hardware we will,” claims Newell.
Newell did also admit that Valve does not necessarily have reasoning to believe that they would be any good at it, but conclude that Valve need to “continue to have innovation” and if the only way to get these kind of projects started is by developing and selling the hardware directly, then that’s what the gaming giant will do.
He also admitted that Valve would prefer that the veteran gaming hardware manufacturers to do the producing, but Valve might need to step in just to insure that innovation kept striving forward.
“We’re thinking of trying to figure out how to do the equivalent of the [Team Fortress] incremental approach in software design and try to figure out how would you get something similar to that in the hardware space as well,” he continued.
“The sort of old method of, you know, let’s go make a giant pile of inventory and hope that some set of applications emerge to justify this giant hardware investment doesn’t seem to be the – very consistent with what we’ve seen to be the fastest ways to move stuff forward, so we’re trying to come up with an alternative to that that gives us the ability to iterate more rapidly.”
Valve are reportedly interested in ‘wearable computers’, and want to bring its own development style to the process.
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