This Move By Steam Would Change Gaming Forever
Gabe Newell, Valve's president and extremely meme-able person, hinted at the possibility of Steam games coming to consoles this year in a recent public school interview. IGN reported that Newell revealed this game-changing information at Santa Monica College in Auckland, New Zealand earlier this week.
Tyler McVicker, founder of Valve News Network, uploaded the interview clip on social media following Newell's stunning response. The clip features a question from one student, who asks, "Will Steam be porting any games to consoles or will it just stay on PC?"
Newell hesitated before deciding to actually answer. "You will have a better idea of that by the end of this year," he eventually replied, much to the excitement of the audience present.
While Newell's response was neither a "yes" or "no," that non-answer says something in and of itself. Some like McVicker concluded that Valve games, which have mostly stayed Steam exclusives, could be coming to consoles. That means opening the market to interested fans who might not have a PC. Finally, console gamers could participate in the worldwide hype for titles like "Half-Life: Alyx," as well as other exclusive Valve hits.
Other theories about Valve's plans
Another possibility, as pointed out by IGN, is that the digital storefront itself could be coming to consoles instead of any particular game. Steam is one of, if not the, place to go for PC games. In its 2020 year in review, Steam boasted over 120 million monthly active players and over 2 million new purchasers per month on average. Steam's library also currently holds over 50,000 titles, which would be an impressive bartering chip for any business partner.
Steam has successfully ported games like "Portal" to console before, but only on occasion. Newell hasn't elaborated on Valve's plans to port more games to console since the most recent interview, so it looks like fans really will need to wait until the "end of this year" before they have more of an idea of what Valve has in store. It's unclear where the move to port games to console lies in Valve's priority list, considering Newell also told New Zealand-based 1 News that it has multiple new games in development.
In recent months, Newell has granted interviews with multiple local news stations since arriving in Oceania. He apparently moved to New Zealand last year during the pandemic and has stayed there ever since. Though Newell hasn't announced any plans to move back to the US, he did tell ANZ New Zealand's Luke Appleby that reports of moving Valve's offices to New Zealand are false.