Gabe Newell, head of Portal developer and Steam owner Valve, has warned consumers to the possibility that Apple will launch a set-top box that completely disrupts gaming consoles such as the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3.
Newell, speaking at the WTIA TechNW conference in Seattle, said that he suspects that Apple will launch a “living room product” that changes people’s expectations, leading to the disappearance of a separate gaming console.
Hypothetically, the product Newell mentions could be a future revision of the Apple TV utilizing the A5 processor and faster GPU as seen in the iPad 2 and iPhone 4S.
The Valve leader, speaking broadly, put the living room as a fourth platform for products aside the Web, mobile, and desktop apps. Traditionally, the living room was the sole territory of the console, but that exclusivity is gone.
He added that “it’s sort of ominous” that there is a trend away from open platforms and toward closed ones with walled gardens. Apple’s iOS is perhaps the best example of such a walled garden that Newell finds ominous, and many of his comments at the conference appeared to allude to Apple’s strategies and successes.
He elaborated that a business will simply decide “I’m tired of competing with Google [or Facebook]” and will then choose a “console model” to exclude dangerous competitors. Businesses that choose this strategy “build a shiny sparkling thing” that becomes popular and then controls access to the same products.
Challenged about the open status of Valve’s highly successful Steam platform, which is essentially an iTunes for games, Newell countered that developers can use the Steamworks toolset for free (regardless of selling on Steam or not) and that publishers are allowed to sell the same games on other platforms in parallel to Steam.