Is VALVe Gearing Up To Battle Nintendo, Sony And Microsoft’s Next-Gen Gaming Consoles?

WILL THE STEAM CONSOLE SELL?

Yes absolutely, without a doubt. As a person who owns multiple PCs with Steam on every single one, VALVe’s console will be a day-one buy. Simply chalk it up to fanboyism – well-deserved, logically thought-out fanboyism. I know for a fact I am not alone in this. Millions of Steam users will do the same based off VALVe’s reputation alone. They seemingly do no evil, do no wrong; to have saved PC gaming from taking a backseat to console gaming, and are perhaps the last great AAA company left that actually cares about its customers and puts the community first. Steam’s Greenlight initiative is example enough.

Oh, I forgot to mention: they make amazing games too (no, Ricochet does not count). Just a glance at Metacritic will show you that virtually every single one of their games has scored amazingly well, a vast majority of them critically-acclaimed. Heck, VALVe took a five-year old game in Team Fortress 2, a marvel to the Source Engine’s potential which debuted with 2004’s Half-Life 2 (named Game of the Decade), and turned it into a free-to-play success. The first-person class-based shooter even introduced unorthodox game modes, like MMO dungeon-style bosses during holiday events, and robot tower-defense in their newest Mann versus Machine (MvM) mode. Finally, they managed to make a thriving economy from pixels, effectively making Team Fortress 2 the best hat simulator of all-time:

The cost of all of this? Totally free. Even Counter-Strike 1.6 gets updated regularly which is over a decade old. All of this comes full-cricle back to the community. I can name three companies from my games list that provided free content, without all this DLC nonsense. VALVe certainly knows how to treat (and sometimes use as an experimental test) the PC gaming community. With games usually coming with day-one DLCs these days, effectively splitting their player base before it even gets started, VALVe understands the importance of communal value. When you can create and sell the idea of seemingly inanimate robots expressing human emotion so brilliantly as illustrated in Portal and Portal 2, you get something like this, and the community will love you for it:

Due to this, many people will feel an inclination to give something back; to actually give money and support to a beloved company that has supported and appreciate them. You can easily see this anticipation when consumers get their wallets ready for the various renowned mass Steam sales that occur every year. Honestly, the fact that they will sell a potential Steam console is a non-issue; it will certainly sell, and like hotcakes if it even remotely looks like the Portal Companion Cube: