Session highlights
You can find a list of sessions here, and a schedule over here.
Videos of the sessions will be available to the public in "the coming weeks".
Welcome address by Gabe
- Gabe wants developers to take control of the Store and how they promote their games
- Gabe: "Our goal is to make Greenlight go away. Not because it's not useful, but because we're evolving."
Steam Machines in 2014
- Alienware's Steam Machine will be launching in September. Intel Haswell and NVIDIA hardware
- As of today, there are about 75 million active users on Steam
- "They said there will certainly be experiences on Steam Machines that won't be available anywhere else." (Source)
- Steam Controllers will be sold through Steam and retail
- Valve wants to focus not only on gaming, but all things people want to do on a Steam Machine in the living room (Music, TV etc)
- Every Steam Dev Days attendee gets a free Gigabyte Steam Machine (and a Steam Controller is in the goodie bag)
The Steam Controller
- The retail controller will no longer have a touchscreen. It'll have a DPAD and ABXY buttons for backwards compatiblity
Pictures of the new work in progress controller design: 3D render (source), 3D printed prototype (source). - The retail controller will use AA batteries, this means the user can also use rechargable batteries
- Biometrics are important, but the hands are not the best place to capture them
- The controllers have gyroscopes, but these are not implemented in the firmware yet
- Core implementation of Steam Controller API is already available in the current Steamworks SDK
- The Steam Controller API supports up to 16 controllers at once
- Valve is keeping VR in mind while developing the controller
- More changes to the controller are coming, they have just started processing beta feedback
Steam Business session
- Valve wants to add these new currencies to Steam in 2014
Currencies for: Australian, Thai, Canuck, Norwegian, Mexican, New Zealand, Philippines, Malaysian, Indonesian, Singapore, Ukraine, Japan and possibly Turkey which is only highlighted on the map. - Steam has been growing pretty rapidly (source)
- The number of game releases/year has also been growing steadily (source)
- Valve wants to remove itself from the process, and for devs to be closer to the community
- The Steam for Mobile apps have over 7 million users (source)
- Over 10% of games released to Steam in 2013 are Early Access titles (source)
- During the 2013 Holiday Sale, 1.7m in-game items were given out, 2m Snow Globe trades and 2m daily market transactions (source)
- Valve plans to allow money transfer between Steam wallets in 2014 (source)
Other highlights
- Ryan Gordon (Icculus) has posted the slides of his "Getting Started with Linux Game Development" session
- Mike Morasky (Composer at Valve) confirmed Kelly Bailey is back to doing work for Valve.
- Valve is showing off their take on what VR could be like in 2 years (Vortex?), there's a panel about it tomorrow but initial impressions are already coming in.
@TheDavidHensley's tweets on Valve's VR prototype:- (Source) "Valve’s VR demo felt like being in a lucid dream state and very much like a holodeck"
- (Source) The Valve's VR prototype felt like playing an XBOX compared to the Oculus's "8bit Nintendo".
- (Source) Resolution is higher compared to the Oculus Rift. Accurate positional/rotation tracking. Able to walk around.
- Steam millionaire Garry Newman wrote a blog post about Day 1 including a very interesting paragraph on the VR prototype.
- Source 2 was mentioned during the OpenGL talk. It's no surprise that Source 2 will support OpenGL at a low level.
- Steam In-Home Streaming currently does not utilize hardware encoding/decoding, but will in the future. (Source)
- Not so much SteamDevDays related, but Gabe decided to join Reddit today to raise funds for a charity Valve is involved in.
A lot of thanks to the many developers at the event that are live-tweeting what's going on, without you this post would not have existed.
Read about day 2 in our next post here.