Valve has made clear that it has no interest in creating games that are exclusive to the Steam Machine. Bloomberg quotes Valve engineer Pierre-Loup Griffais as saying the company considers “having the whole PC catalog as our ‘launch exclusive.’” Although how exactly you’d create a game that’s exclusive to a Linux-driven open system is perhaps more the point.
The question had been: Would Valve attempt to push the recently released Steam Machine with a tie-in game to encourage interest? Did it intend to use one of its huge properties to help sell the Steam Machine, in a similar way to how it had created Half-Life: Alyx with the intention of helping sell its second attempt at VR, the Valve Index?
“Restricting where people can play a game I don’t think is a great model, at least for us,” Griffais told Bloomberg. “We’re much more interested in having the whole PC catalog as our ‘launch exclusive.’”
Exclusively non-exclusive
Of course, it’s worth pointing out that Valve has never created anything as an exclusive, given the megacorp’s lifelong support of open systems and third-party access. Valve’s push for Linux as its core operating system has also been a huge part of its history, and even Half-Life: Alyx was launched working on almost every rival VR headset.
Further, it’s hard to imagine exactly how a game could be exclusive to the Steam Machine. Short of being pre-installed onto its internal hardware, there’s no way it could be done given how the Steam Machine is designed. The whole ethos of the Linux-driven box is that owners can do whatever they want with it, including just installing Windows instead if they fancy, and in its most basic form it simply runs games available on Steam, and Steam can be installed on any PC. Of course, if you sell a PC game, you’re going to be selling it on Steam or you’re missing at least 90 percent of the market. Valve launching a game “exclusively” on Steam is…well, it’s what they do with all their games. If Valve were to ever release Half-Life 3, it’s astronomically unlikely they’d be selling it on GOG or the Epic Games Store. So in that sense, yeah, Griffais is right to consider the whole catalog exclusive!