Valve will give away Steam Link tech to manufacturers

Valve will give away Steam Link tech to manufacturers

 

Gabe Newell says that Valve will give away Steam Link tech to manufacturers to built it onto future monitors and smart TVs or simply to use as a basis for other future low latency interactive connection technology.

With PC gamers already owning a premium PC, many PC gamers do not want to purchase an expensive console or another PC just to game in the living room. Here is where the highly affordable (£40) Steam Link comes in, allowing PC gamers to steam their PC content to the living room without much latency and with high stream quality. 

In the long term Valve’s Boss, Gabe Newell says that they do not want to hold onto as a proprietary technology, saying that they will “just give it away” so that it can be built into other future devices. Imagine a future Smart TV with a built in Steam Link. 

 

      “What I think is probably the logical result is, that Link gets built into monitors and TVs,” “It’s just a really general purpose interface that [manufacturers] could use for anything that requires high performance, low latency, interactive connections. “

“They’ve been really good at adding a couple of hundred milliseconds latency, so you could do visual processing, and we’re kind of saying that’s great if you want to make my television show look like a movie, but it does horrible things to my gaming experience. This is something that you can support. We’ll just give that away.”

    

It is great to see Valve taking such a open approach to their technology, allowing other developers to benefit from their work and not just build a wall of proprietary technology to lock gamers into the Valve ecosystem. 

Hopefully Valve’s Steam link tech will get integrated into a lot of future devices, or improved upon by external developers, but right now it is hard to know exactly how popular Valve’s Steam link tech will be with other companies. 

 

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