What an awkward thing to say in this space but Steam is for curating quality products whereas mobile gaming on google play/app store is mostly about selling absolute garbage to punters. When Steam eventually does mobile their own way they'll blow them charlatans out of the water.
I firmly believe that Valve is in a great position to be a hardware company. All they have to do is realize that hardware is the only thing that matters, and get their properties on as much hardware as possible.<p>Imagine, if indeed Valve brought Steam to nothing but the OpenPandora/Pyra game consoles:<p><a href="http://openpandora.org/" rel="nofollow">http://openpandora.org/</a><p>In fact it could be a momentous thing for Valve to get behind this effort and add Steam to the open repo. It'd blow open the doors on Android and iOS and move Linux - as an embedded operating system platform - into the stratosphere.<p>Valve+Pyra (or something similar) = new masters to follow.<p>Just my opinion. Before all the 'hardware nay-sayers' get started, think about this: the Pandora happened, without Valve. Irrespective of commercial success (yet), the Pandora/Pyra community is positively <i>thriving</i> as an emergent platform. Linux, and a very open atmosphere, is at the core of why this works, at small scales; and also why it can scale, too.<p>What would the Pyra be like if gaben gave, like, a million bucks to people like EvilDragon and notaz and the rest of the Pyra team, and said: "kids, gimme 100,000 Pyra devices, and we'll put Steam on them for our customers" ..<p>Frankly, it could happen. I wish it would! Frankly it'd be the kind of bold move that would make sense to me, were I in a position to direct a few bucks. The thing is, whether Valve arrives on Steam or not, things like the culture which produced <a href="http://repo.openpandora.org/" rel="nofollow">http://repo.openpandora.org/</a> are going to happen, regardless. May as well be a player, homie ..
Don't Apple and Google have clauses in the developer contracts that prevent distributing a store from within their stores? It'd have to be Humble-Bundle style side-loading on Android, which is not ideal, or simply "unpossible" on iOS.
Well, this is obvious for Valve.
They created the first successful online store and they want it everywhere, but Apple and Google do not.<p>You are competing against Apple and Google Play online Stores.<p>If they support Steam they would be making the platform a commodity(as Steam does not care about the platform), this is something Apple can't let happen, or just replace Google Play as the gatekeeper for Android(as steam already knows how to sell commercial titles).<p>Steam's response to online stores have been to create the Steam machine, that probably will extend over mobile devices in the future(using wifi playing first, creating devices on their own later).<p>Remember that real Linux needs to get to tablet-phone space, with efforts like Ubuntu's Unity it will soon. Valve will be the first to benefit from it(as steam machine is very similar to ubuntu).
It's very apparent that XCOM (the game referenced in the article), even in the Steam version was very much designed for touch screen use. The game requires no continuous input or precise input that a keyboard + mouse would provide, and as such is ideal for tablet devices.<p>The same can't be said for most games. It's not really a case of steam directly making their library available to mobile audiences, it's the lack of appropriately designed content.<p>IMO most virtual joypad style games on mobile devices offer a terrible user experience, and the majority of touch input focussed games wouldn't be as successful for a PC gamer audience.
What could really knock this one out of the park is In-Home Streaming. Why buy an nVidia Shield and a high-end GTX graphics card when you can stream to the iPad you already have?
Apple would never allow this, it competes against their App Store, their Game Center, and would probably also fall under the rule against "app curation / collections" apps.
maybe this article should be: what if apple and google weren't draconian dicks with their app stores?<p>maybe valve and apple could reach some kind of agreement anyway, but the real blocker there i see is that steam fundamentally violates the app store requirements because apple don't want anyone to sell anything unless its through their app store.<p>google i'm less sure about, i'm not up to date with the latest dev requirements, but i suspect they have introduced similar things recently.<p>however... cross platform integration is something that developers can do anyway i don't see any reason why savegames can't be shared if the api is based on normal current network technology and is platform agnostic. an obvious example would be a rest api interface to a server for save games - such an api can be used identically across all platforms, although gamedevs might want something lower level and less filled with cruft than a TCP/IP connection with HTTP over the top, even those constraints aren't very prohibitive... UDP communications work fine across everything, and the good ol' BSD sockets/Winsock are easy to work with cross platform so long as you respect things like using network byte ordering and don't rely on exotic socket options.
I think this has always been part of the plan. When encouraging people to port to Linux/Mac OS X they made reference to the fact that the work would translate to mobile too.
So would that let Steam compete against Game Center only or the whole App Store? Not that we couldn't use competition there, but Apple won't let that happen voluntarily.