I went to bed last night thinking about what a new Valve game for the Steam deck would look like. That’s almost entirely because I’d just read a Gabe Newell interview in Edge magazine where they asked him if Valve was developing a first-party game to show off the wearable hardware, and he said Valve had it thought about it, but decided to put his resources elsewhere – like Dota do and counterstrike work better on the device.
So I was a bit surprised when Valve announced this this morning Aperture desk job
Go back a few decades and not having one was almost unthinkable. There isn’t a world where the Nintendo 64 hasn’t launched Super Mario 64or Saturn with Virtual Fighter. That changed with PlayStation and the move away from console mascots, but most consoles still typically emerged with a custom launch game that helped show off the hardware and justify the purchase.
In recent years, however, the idea of a console has changed — particularly with Microsoft, which is constantly talking about its strategy of turning consoles into access points rather than isolated boxes. If Microsoft delays Halo infinity
Ever since Valve announced the Steam Deck, I had put it in the same category in my head. This is hardware designed to play Steam games on portable hardware. It is a new access point to an existing library. So it didn’t even occur to me that studios would develop their own games for it. There’s nothing you can’t do with a standard controller, right?
Aperture desk job seems to be the game that will answer this question. The way Valve announced it – telling players to “lower their expectations” and giving it away for free – suggests this will be a small project, perhaps similar to its VR tech demo The laboratory. Compared to something like Halo infinityI would imagine the investment to be in the hundreds of millions of dollars less.
But there’s something nice and reassuring about the people who make hardware and ship custom software to show off.
