Scotland's Steam-Powered Return to the Living Room

Well the hype of Grand Theft Auto V has started to settle down now, leaving me to return to my native habitat of PC gaming, or more accurately Steam PC Gaming…which soon may just be Steam Gaming.

Yes, for those of you who have been keeping ears to ground concerning developments on Valve’s past referenced Steam Box, first of all how you keep BOTH ears on the ground…are you a rabbit?

He looks cute, but when the Steam Sale comes around, Bambi starts to realise his hunter-skinned wallet is much lighter all of a sudden.

And second, Valve finally made three confirmed announcements concerning Steam and the living room: The SteamOS, a free linux-based operating system built to run on the big screen of the living room (or little screen if you’re a Norman Rockwell stylised family) that is to come with interesting features such as family library sharing and PC to TV streaming; Steam Machines, a collective term for “consoles” that run the SteamOS which can lead to a wide plethora of machines of varying cost and performance to help remedy the performance requirements varying nature of PC gaming without causing costs for either side to unnecessarily rocket; and finally the Steam Controller, a specimen that needs to be seen to be believed!

I cannot believe my eyes! It's a touchpad and trackpads, guys! And it seems to me, ideas inside of me are on the rise!
Yeah, I paraphrased a song from Dr Horrible's Sing-a-long Blog. Come at me!

Now understandably, some of you will be having a gut reaction as to what this has to do with Scottish game development? Simple, we just gained essentially a new console to develop for.

And not just any pseudo-console like the "Oft-ya" or however you say it, this one is bigger. Better still, this is accessible thanks to a certain green light.

No, not Green Lantern. Greenlight! As in Steam Greenlight...

That's it.

Yes, Steam Greenlight. The springboard that allows Steam Users to vote and post up games that they’ve developed that they would consider buying and presumably play (though let’s be honest, we ALL have a backlog of Steam games that we haven’t even started playing). Not only has Scotland touched the fertile greens of Steam before with games such as a past-referenced The Ship (Have I told you that you should buy and play The Ship today? You totally should buy and play The Ship!) but there are also Scottish games getting there way onto Greenlight to become the future “The Ships” (in terms of getting ON Steam, not so much on company status) such as 9.03m: a game developed by Karl Inglott (an Abertay University Graduate) as their Honours project. It is even published by a student team, Space Budgie.

I'm not going to lie: that is a pretty smart way to pay off student loans. Even if 50% of the proceeds go to Aid For Japan, a charity to help children who lost their parents in the tsunami that hit Japan in 2011.

So yes, Valve’s leap into living rooms has opened up a new avenue of development for Scotland’s game developers, allowing for more accessible development console-centric gaming whilst still incorporating touch-based technology and even trackpads. Combining this with the Oculus Rift just leaves one wondering: how long until I will have to lose weight and get fit to play Team Fortress 2?

A bit too soon?

Greg Baxter

Amber Glass Broadcast