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Everything Valve does is because of Steam
Why is Valve getting into virtual reality? Why is Valve making Steam Machines and the Steam Controller? Why did Valve make its own Linux-based operating system? Why did Valve make the Steam Controller? Why is Valve releasing its game engine, Source, for free? It's the Steam economy, stupid! Valve's game store boasts "over 125 million active accounts worldwide." How does Valve keep growing that store? By literally everything else it does. Here's Valve president Gabe Newell explaining it to us last week at GDC 2015: "We're trying to build standard interfaces and standard implementations that other people can use. Because, to be honest, we're going to make our money on the back end, when people buy games from Steam. Right? So we're trying to be forward-thinking and make those longer-term investments for PC gaming that are going to come back a couple years down the road."
How Valve's secret meeting got devs on board with Steam VR
Alex Schwartz expected robes. His development studio, Owlchemy Labs, received a cryptic email from Valve, one of the largest and most mysterious companies in the gaming industry, on an otherwise normal day in October. The message contained a secrecy agreement, plane tickets and the vague assertion that this was all about something related to virtual reality. Owlchemy responded with suspicion and intrigue. "What the hell is this? Who's coming? What is this all about?" Valve responded, "We can't say anything more. Just come."So, Owlchemy did.
What makes Samsung's mobile VR consumer-ready? Marketing
A consumer release is en route for Gear VR. Hey, alright! If you've been paying attention, you might realize the problem with that first sentence, though. Think for a few minutes, I'll be here. Give up? Well, here's the answer: Unlike Oculus' still-in-prototype Rift headset, you can go to Best Buy's website today, throw down $200 and, boom, you'll have a head-mounted virtual reality display. Just like that. Okay, you'll need a Galaxy Note 4 too. But still, it already exists.
Xbox One surprises GDC 2015 with new indie games
Not to be outdone by Nintendo's upcoming lineup of digital indie games, Microsoft has a bevy of new titles on their way to Xbox One via the ID@Xbox developer outreach program. Standouts include Shovel Knight, a retro platformer that was one of the absolute best games of 2014; The Flame in the Flood, a stylish survival game from BioShock's art director and other ex-AAA developers; and Wasteland 2, a successfully Kickstarted post-apocalyptic RPG. These are some of the surprise announcements Microsoft made this week, but there are plenty of other games on their way to Xbox One in the coming months.
The gizmo recreating smells in VR looks like a nightmare
Modern virtual reality is pretty adept at tricking your brain into thinking what you're seeing is real, so it seems natural that someone'd try to further that by adding your schnoz to the mix. The guilty party is Feelreal, and it's developed a battery-powered Bluetooth add-on for the Oculus Rift that'll pump seven scents and heated or cooled air into your face, according to The Verge. What do those smells entail? Ocean, jungle, fire, grass, powder, flowers and metal. Only a few of those sound pleasant, if I'm being honest. And based on what The Verge says, my guess is right: the GDC demo went from a soothing rainforest scene replete with a waterfall and actual mist-on-face, to a hellish nightmare that felt like a blow-dryer on the reporter's cheeks at a moment's notice. When it comes to tech and smells, I'll stick to bacon-scented push notifications thank you very much.
Better than 'Destiny': Studios now make massive games in just months
It usually takes millions of dollars, a decade and hundreds of developers to create a single massively multiplayer online (MMO) game. This is the standard in the gaming industry. Smaller studios generally don't have the resources to create huge, persistent games, and larger ones have shut down and bankrupted entire states while trying to craft MMO worlds. A lot of the hurdles in building MMOs lie within the supporting tech -- running servers that handle complex mechanics 24/7/365, maxing those out and buying more, all while solving problems of latency and persistence. Making the worlds feel real for all players, at all times.
Nintendo Wii U lineup stars fan favorites from PS4, Xbox One, PC
Nintendo's digital store is beefing up with some top-notch independent titles in the coming months, and the company showed off a few familiar games during a presentation at GDC 2015. We're talking games headed to the Wii U eShop that have already launched on other platforms, including Klei Entertainment's Tim Burton-esque survival game, Don't Starve: Reign of Giants, Young Horses' PS4 launch title Octodad: Dadliest Catch and the beautiful, educational platformer Never Alone from Upper One Games. Our list below includes the freshly announced Wii U games and a bit of information about each one, so you can make platform decisions in peace.
State of VR: Sony's Project Morpheus in 2015
I did not get motion sickness when I demoed Sony's new and improved Project Morpheus VR headset at GDC this week in San Francisco. And that's saying a lot considering my sweaty outcome at a private E3 demo last year. But I did get somewhat hurt while using it. Blame it on the shark. I banged my head into a wall while whimpering and trying to avoid the jaws of a menacing virtual version of, well, Jaws. It's proof that compelling VR is powerful; powerful enough to send you slamming into nearby walls with a smile plastered on your face.
Catching up with BioWare cofounder Greg Zeschuk
Greg Zeschuk, the man that co-founded BioWare and shepherded the development of now classic franchises like Mass Effect and Dragon Age, left the gaming industry for good more than two years ago. Yet, despite that apparent retirement, he was back on the show floor at GDC in San Francisco to show off Biba, one of his many part-time side projects. Don't worry. Zeschuk's main passion remains beer, beer and more beer. But he's also committed to using his influence and financial resources for more altruistic endeavors.
'Rock Band' is back with 'Rock Band 4': headed to Xbox One and PS4 in 2015
Remember way back in 2009? Times were simpler then: Pittsburgh's Steelers were Super Bowl champions; Tiger Woods was caught having an affair; and I was playing a lot of Rock Band. You probably were too. Many millions of you were, anyway, and the plastic peripheral market was booming. In a few short years, the world went from zero to dozens of plastic guitars, keyboards, mics and drums per household, all in the name of games like Rock Band and Guitar Hero. House parties quickly turned into Rock Band parties with surprising frequency. It was only another few short years before those games, and the peripherals they required, fell off a cliff. That was 2010, when Rock Band 3 launched. It's been five years, and the world is apparently ready for more Rock Band. The folks behind the original Guitar Hero and Rock Band franchises are back in the development seat and bringing Rock Band 4 to Xbox One and PlayStation 4 later this year.
A visual history of Valve's work in VR
It's been a long road from where Valve started with VR. It was only a few shorts years ago that the company was letting select industry folk demo prototype VR hardware in its QR code-laden "Room." And now, Valve has its own consumer-facing VR headset, the HTC Vive; its own controller that looks like the space opera version of Sony's Move wand; and a positional-based tracking solution in Lighthouse VR. None of this has exactly caught us off guard -- Valve was always cagey when it came to questions of commercial hardware. But we weren't prepared for just how impressive the combination of all the VR tech truly is. In fact, our own Ben Gilbert called it the "best VR" he's experienced to date. It's only fair, then, that Valve would want to look back on its own journey pioneering VR. And look back it did with a timeline of prototypes and R&D breakthroughs it had on display here at GDC. Care to take that walk down Valve's memory lane? Then treat yourself to the gallery below and be sure to head past the break for a video tour.
Valve's push into VR will span many headsets from many companies
Currently, the HTC Vive is the only virtual reality headset that's part of Valve's Steam VR push. That's not because it's the only one, but because it's the only one we know about thus far. "You should think of the Vive as the first in the same way there are multiple Steam Machines," Valve president Gabe Newell told me this morning. In other words, Steam VR is an open platform supported by Valve. "We're building tools and hopefully they're valuable to hardware partners who want to do it. In some cases, we'll take the leadership role in shipping stuff. But we're really just building tools for other people to continue. So you'll see more headsets."
EA shuts down the studio behind 'SimCity'
The studio that created SimCity and The Sims is no more. Today, EA confirmed that it will shut down Maxis Emeryville, displacing the folks primarily responsible for the aforementioned titles. In a statement, EA said that it'll relocate Maxis' development to its other offices in Redwood Shores, California; Salt Lake City; Helsinki; and Melbourne, Australia. The company plans to move forward with projects already in the works, including an expansion pack for The Sims 4 and ongoing support for the existing The Sims and SimCity faithful. Those two are massively popular PC titles, and the latter finally arrived on Mac in 2013 with players everywhere encountering a truckload of launch issues.
NVIDIA's got a new GPU monster, and it's called Titan X
NVIDIA just announced the Titan X, its latest powerhouse graphics card, at Epic Game's GDC session this morning. And boy, it sounds like a monster: According to NVIDIA CEO Jen-Hsun Huang, it's now the world's most powerful GPU with more than 8 billion transistors (a bit of a jump from the 7 billion in last year's Titan Z). Titan X is powered by the company's new Maxwell architecture, and it packs in 12 gigabytes of VRAM, just like the Titan Z. NVIDIA isn't revealing much else about the new GPU yet -- it has its own conference in a few weeks, after all -- but at this point it sounds like the video card we'll all be pining for this year.
Valve's final Steam Controller is still missing something
I spent roughly 10 minutes with the final Steam Controller at GDC 2015, playing snippets of Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor, The Talos Principle and Unreal Tournament on various Steam Machines. The body of the controller is wonderful to hold. Two long, clickable pads running along the backside of the handles, right where a player's middle and ring fingers lie, would be a welcome addition to any existing gamepad. Plus, the final controller adds a single analog stick on the left side. This makes the design more familiar overall, but with a trackpad replacing a second analog stick, the final Steam Controller remains what it always has been: awkward.
Steam Machines are coming this fall and this is what they look like
Steam Machines. Maybe you've heard of them. They're Valve's oft-talked about, rarely seen in the wild solution for streaming PC games to the fancy HDTV in your living room. And at GDC this week, the company brought us closer to the promise of that commercial reality with a display of all the various units you're likely to see hit retail by November of this year. As Gabe Newell told us, the variety of Steam Machines on offer, from the low-end $50 Link to the premium $5,000 Falcon NW Tiki, present a "good, better, best choice for consumers." But enough talk -- I know you just want to see the goods. So check out the gallery below for a trio of the Steam Machines Mr. Newell demoed for us, as well as a video just after the break showcasing an expanded selection coming later this year.
Valve is solving virtual reality's input problem
Among the handful of announcements Valve made at this year's Game Developers Conference was a subtle and hugely important one: Lighthouse. What in the world is Lighthouse? It's the "base stations" referenced in Valve's VR headset announcement, and it's even more important than the incredibly impressive headset. Valve president Gabe Newell compares it to USB and expects it to fundamentally change how people interact with virtual reality. "Now that we've got tracking, then you can do input," Newell said in an interview with Engadget this morning. "It's a tracking technology that allows you to track an arbitrary number of points, room-scale, at sub-millimeter accuracy 100 times a second." What that means for me and you is that Lighthouse puts your body into the virtual world with stunning precision. I tested it and can confirm: holy shit, yes, this really works. Want to reach out and touch something in VR? Lighthouse is how you'll do it.
Xbox games are coming to Microsoft's augmented reality headset
If you watched Microsoft's announcement of its Hololens augmented reality headset and wondered if you'd play Xbox games with it, well, wonder no longer. Today at its Game Developers Conference presentation, Redmond announced that games would be en route to the device and that the SDK should be available come its Build conference late April. Don't miss out on all the latest from GDC 2015! Follow along at our events page right here.
Epic Games partners with 'Hobbit' effects company Weta for VR tech
Last year, Epic Games Chief Technology Officer Kim Libreri and Unreal Engine 4 General Manager Ray Davis visited some friends at Lord of the Rings effects studio Weta Digital in Wellington, New Zealand. They only wanted a tour of the studio, but along the way they ran into Weta's head of R&D, Alasdair Coull. He mentioned that he was messing around with Unreal Engine 4, Epic's game development platform. Fast-forward to March 2015: Epic Games and Weta are showing off a virtual reality demo featuring the greedy dragon, Smaug, swimming through mountains of gold in the second Hobbit film, voiced in all his baritone glory by actor Benedict Cumberbatch. Smaug speaks directly to the person in the headset -- Oculus Rift's Crescent Bay model -- and his daunting size is on full display; 500 feet of red-scaled, deep-speaking Smaug.
HTC's Vive made me believe in VR
I am in the Matrix. Or rather, I am in that same expanse of infinite white space that was also Neo's training grounds in the movie. Hexagonal tiles appear underneath, randomly rising and falling around me. With trepidation, I step forward, slowly walking across the field of unstable tiles, trying to get a feel of this strange new land. Suddenly, I come up against a grid wall. It seems the space isn't so infinite after all. I was, of course, not in the Matrix. Instead, I was in a stark, windowless room inside the Fira Gran Via in Barcelona. On my head was the HTC Vive. And for the next 20 minutes, I was about to have a virtual reality experience unlike any I've ever had.
