It's Happening.
 

51 hours? I can't wait that long!

Shame. They couldn't even afford a real cat and choose a cardboard imitation instead

Is there going to be a presentation of some sort? Or just a website release?

Placing all bets on Steam Box.

Placing optimistic side bets on Half-Life 3 and Left 4 Dead 3 as the launch titles.

Man this is going to be one huge cash blast for Valve. I mean, to get a list going of things going on whats coming up:

-Dota update tomorrow (new items and such from valve)
-1st announcement to gain hype tomorrow
-Halloween event for Team Fortress 2 (new items again, crates, keys etc)
-Counter strike has its new colorful weapon skins.
-More announcements.. I mean, damn, thats a lot of micro transactions.

Now i hate putting on the tin foil, but the center of the flaming sun. The shape is there. Get any shape you like and put an effect of fire or water over it and it wont lose its structure. Its either a huge ass tease and it will dissipate into something else or its showing the HL3 logo.

I dunno about the Half-Life logo. But I'm certainly seeing a 3 in that sun thing.

That could mean anything though. Fuck, it could even be a Portal 3. OMFG PORTAL 3 BECAUSE MOON. Sad face because that's sooo not happening.
I doubt there'll be a L4D3, there's no need, unless there's a completely new build of the engine or something.

I'm with Crashpunk on the Steam Box announcement.

E: It's not even a moon, I don't know why I thought it was.

Yeah, there’s been nothing to suggest Valve have been working on L4D3, and while HL3 is out there somewhere I highly doubt they’d announce it alongside something like Steam Box.

This is very obviously a Steam Box (or whatever they decide to name it) announcement. My guess is the three separate sections on that page are all related, probably along the lines of:

1. Steam Box hardware


2. Dev tools for third-party Boxes


3. Streaming service that works with Steam Box

I doubt there’ll be any new games announced. At best, maybe they’ll announce existing games that will be running on Steam Box.

Source 2 and L4d3 have already been unofficially confirmed to be in development.

http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/images/13/jul/l4d3.jpg

Oh yeah, I actually forgot about that.

Coincidence? Probably!

It's probably not dota, it wouldn't have the circle in the middle. It's funny though.

Seeing as my username is slightly relevant, I doubt GLaDOS and Chell will be making a return. However, if Source Engine 2 comes out isn't there more likely to be a third Half Life? Cos, I'm pretty sure one of the main reasons behind development of Half Life was to show off the physics. Left 4 Dead 3 would hopefully have a chance of coming out though in my opinion it seems like it could be an update for either of the games, as it does mention DLC. Anyway, I don't have a clue just like anyone so don't start saying shit about how I'm fucking wrong cos I probably am.

Alright, calm down.
For the record I have no idea what's coincidental about that overlay, Nate. I've not played Dota or anything. What is it?

Isn't it like an overhead battle game? Valve didn't even work on the first one, as far as I'm aware.

DOTA 2 is one of the most popular games Valve have ever produced.

SteamOS is the first announcement. An OS for games, based off Linux.

I feel justified in saying I wasn’t too far off-base with “Dev tools for third-party Boxes”, even if I didn’t call it exactly. And it has streaming from Mac and PC, so that’s basically “Streaming service that works with Steam Box”.

Further predictions:

• One of the subsequent announcements will be a hardware box made by Valve.


• The other will be a cloud service of some sort. Stream your Steam games over the internet to your Steam device, or something.

Interesting. I wonder if later versions of this will also one day eventually evolve to replace Windows on PCs for PC-based gaming, judging by how Microsoft is getting everything wrong these days?

Still, we'll see how this goes. It's nice to see stuff like this appearing, in case the next-gen consoles fall short of people's expectations.

Like with On-Live, internet infrastructure has a long way to go before services like that become a viable thing for most people. Valve and Sony (with their back-catalogue on PS4, if that's how they intend to do 'backwards compatibility') may get away with it though 'cause that's not the only thing their hardware will be able to do.

I doubt they are introducing a cloud service since Steam already IS a cloud service. At least it has the functionality built into it.

If the second announcement is a hardware platform that's going to be taking on the Xbox One and the PS4 then the third announcement HAS to be game related. Either announcing the launch titles OR the Source 2 engine. I hope it's game titles. I think it's Source 2.

I think that’s exactly what they’re going for. Gabe Newell has been very vocal about his dislike for Windows 8, and with Windows becoming a more locked-down ecosystem how long is it before you can’t install a Steam client at all?

I think they’ll have to bring in a game streaming service at some point, and now is the perfect time. At the moment, there’s just under 200 Linux games on Steam, and those are the only games right now that will (probably) run natively on SteamOS.

Steam wants to remove its dependency on Windows. They have a feature to stream games from your Mac or PC, but that doesn’t really cut the cord. They need some way of getting all those Windows games onto SteamOS that doesn’t require a Windows desktop.

That’s where your streaming service comes in, and that’s why I think they’re going to announce it. It also ties up the three announcements into quite nicely:

• Software (SteamOS)
• Hardware (Steam Box)
• Services (Steam Cloud)

It’s exactly the same trio that Windows and Mac are now both built on. If you want to compete, you have to have feature parity, right?

That’s another possibility, but my money is on all of these announcements being tied to the Steam platform, rather than game-specific.

EDIT:
If it’s not a cloud streaming service, it probably has something to do with this:

It can go both ways I suppose. But if Valve wants to conquer a place in the living room they will have to take on Sony and Microsoft at some point. Since the consoles haven't hit the stores yet, now would be one of the last chances they have to squeeze themselves in. They would be better off announcing it now instead of announcing it in 5 months, after Christmas when everyone has already made up their mind about the console they want/have.

But I suppose it also depends on when the Steam Box is being released exactly.

The title of the announcement page is “The Steam Universe is Expanding in 2014”, so my guess is they won’t be making a move on the Christmas market.

The coincidence is that the three buttons appear to say DOTA when placed together. Nothing more.

Oh, I should've noticed that. I thouggt it was some sort of in-game thing.

I'm calling it; 2013 will be the year of the Linux desktop.

You know what would suck? Half Life 3 exclusively on Steam Box. There. I called it.

Let’s not say things we can’t take back.

Besides,

I doubt Valve would make that large of a fool out of themselves. Exclusive for the first week maybe.

I'm looking so hard at the sun trying to see any hidden imagery in it.

Oh god.

I'm blind.

Get your badge on Steam and you might win a beta version of the Steam box :O

OK, I think everyone knew there were hardware boxes coming. But that O + O is killing me and there doesn’t seem to be a clear answer to what it will be.

I still think they’re going to set up a system for streaming Steam games from cloud servers – it’s a good solution to their problem of the Steam library being dominated by Windows-only games. But I’m not so sure it’s going to be the next announcement, because of that last line:
Do you think the last announcement will be SteamOS-compatible peripherals? That seems a bit of an anticlimax, but that last line seems to strongly suggest it.

But then we already know gamepads will be supported, because that’s what their drive to add Big Picture support to games was all about. Plus, why announce the hardware box and the peripherals separately? Are the peripherals going to be that big of a deal?

I think it's steam sharing.

I want a Steam Machine beta. I know there's no way in hell I'd get one out of 300, but still. Sucks that I don't have a gamepad.

Wasn't that already officially announced though?

Announced and put in beta, right?

Remember: everything they’re announcing for this thing is based around 2014, not near-future stuff.

So if this steam box is released, does it mean that every game currently on the Steam market will be playable on my TV?

Cause that would be pretty damn rad.

Yes and no. You'll be able to stream games (think that has been confirmed, not sure) to SteamOS from any PC in your home network, essentially playing them on your TV. But there's no telling how good that's going to work. It's been tried in the past and failed miserably.