Valve co-founder Gabe Newell is hinting that Steam is preparing to expand to video game consoles in some mysterious capacity.
On Monday, Newell was a guest speaker at a college in New Zealand, where he currently lives. During the event, he was asked if Valve’s Steam would ever bring "many games" to console, or if those games would remain on the PC.
In response, Newell said, “You will get a better idea of that by the end of this year,” which sparked the audience to “ohhh” in fascination.
The comment naturally got us wondering if Valve is planning to bring a Half-Life game to consoles. Last year, the company released Half-Life: Alyx, a PC-VR game, to rave reviews. Sony, meanwhile, is preparing a new virtual reality system for the PlayStation 5.
In addition to Half-Life, Valve is the developer behind Portal, Counter-Strike, and Team Fortress. However, during the same talk, Newell was quick to add: “It won’t be the answer you expect.” So Half-Life fans should probably keep their expectations low.
Another possibility is that Valve is preparing to bring the Steam Link app to consoles. The service lets you stream Steam games from a PC to a phone, tablet, or Android-based TVs, using your home’s Wi-Fi network. The other speculative idea is that Valve has worked out a deal with Microsoft to bring the Steam store itself to Xbox consoles.
We’ll have to wait and see. In January, Newell also teased that more games from Valve were coming, but it remains unclear if they''ll be for PC, console, or both. At the time, he simply told a local New Zealand media outlet: “We definitely have games in development that we're going to be announcing—it's fun to ship games."