The New Steam Deck E-Book: A Comprehensive Look at Valve’s Long-Term Vision
With over 40,000 gamers on its Steam Deck E-Book platform, Valve has been able to grow into one of the most popular game companies in the world, with its Steam client being downloaded by gamers over 12 billion times since its release in 2003 (as of 2015). In 2016, Valve released The Steam Deck E-Book, an ebook providing insight into the company’s plans for the near and long-term future. If you’re looking to learn more about Valve’s plans, read on!
Core Principles
Valve’s ultimate goal is to bring everything you love about Steam to all your devices and build a stronger connection between players, content creators, and our universe of games. Toward this end, the company is focusing on three core principles:
A unified account system with trade offers, better discoverability through personalized recommendations, and continuous updates. The new Steam Deck e-book lays out Valve’s long-term vision for these principles in-depth.
The first principle focuses on account unification and trade offers, which allows users to send a trade offer to any user who has their account linked.
This will give players a chance to easily exchange their games with friends, either by messaging them or through an auto-matching process that handles most of it automatically. Users can also set up rules for trading as they see fit, so people can work out trades amongst themselves even if nobody else is online. The new e-book lays out Valve’s long-term plans for trade offers in detail.
Why an E-book?
Compiled from a series of emails between Valve founder Gabe Newell and James D. Miller, author of the popular book Future Business’, this ebook features more than 300 pages that explore Valve’s 10-year vision for software development, hardware design, game distribution, and operation, VR/AR interaction design and much more.
This document is one of the most comprehensive explorations of Valve’s intentions for Steam and its surrounding ecosystem that exists publicly – making it an invaluable resource for anyone interested in what we can expect from games as they evolve into something we haven’t yet seen.
Going Forward
According to Valve’s long-term roadmap, Steam Deck E-Book is the name for its new low-latency VR streaming service. And like other Valve products, it comes with a free seven-day trial as well as advanced visuals and support for multiple input methods. In case you missed the announcement at GDC 2019, this page will give you an overview of what’s available to current Valve users.
At GDC 2019, Intel revealed that it has added a dedicated button to help activate its low-latency VR streaming service. The built-in assistive button will allow users to instantly switch to Steam Deck E-Book when they need higher performance and lower latency, which is ideal for developers who want to use it as a debugging tool while polishing their games.
Experimenting with new technologies is part of how Valve creates its best work; however, because many of them aren’t compatible with third-party hardware (such as low-latency VR streaming),
they don’t usually release tools beyond what’s necessary for software developers who are interested in adding support. Because of how powerful it is, Steam Deck E-Book makes an exception since it uses advanced compression techniques and utilizes multiple wireless transmission channels.
Appendix 1 – Future Updates
Throughout the coming years, Valve plans to keep updating the Steam Deck E-Book with new thoughts and strategies. Our objective is to provide you with a roadmap of how our philosophy and thinking are evolving and give you access to Valve’s thoughts on topics like usability, gameplay development, and more.
We want to leave you with an optimistic view of where your favorite games are headed, and to thank you for your support of our work. The document is also meant as a way to give back and contribute to a gaming industry we believe will be better if Deck E-Book developers and players can come together on common platforms like Steam.
We hope that it will help you in your journey as game developers, whether building new ideas or refining your existing ones. We hope it will be a useful resource for years to come. Thanks again for all of your support, Deck E-Book and please don’t hesitate to get in touch. – From The Team @ Valve Software
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