Valve will give away Steam Link tech to manufacturers

As well as its Steam Machines, Valve is also releasing the Steam Link. The tech enables users to stream their PC or Steam Machine session to any television screen or monitor in the home.

It’s a cheap alternative to get your games in the living room if you don’t want to fork out for another expensive machine, but already own a PC. Valve boss Gabe Newell also has a longer-term view for the hardware, however.

“What I think is probably the logical result is, that Link gets built into monitors and TVs,” he told Develop in an interview earlier this year. “It’s just a really general purpose interface that [manufacturers] could use for anything that requires high performance, low latency, interactive connections. 

“They’ve been really good at adding a couple of hundred milliseconds latency, so you could do visual processing, and we’re kind of saying that’s great if you want to make my television show look like a movie, but it does horrible things to my gaming experience. This is something that you can support. We’ll just give that away.”

You can read more from our analysis on Steam Machines, featuring interviews with Gabe Newell and other top PC game developers, here.