Windows 8 a 'giant sadness' says gaming boss
Microsoft's Windows 8 was like a "giant sadness", Gabe Newell, chief executive of gaming company Valve, has said.
Newell, whose company is known for the Half-Life game series and runs the
Steam games store, said Windows 8, the new Microsoft operating system, was
"unusable".
"Windows 8 was like this giant sadness. It just hurts everybody in the PC
business," Newell told
The Verge. "Rather than everybody being all excited to go buy a new PC,
buying new software to run on it, we’ve had a 20-plus per cent decline in PC
sales."
Before founding Valve, in 1996, Newell spent 13 years working on Windows for
Microsoft.
Last year, Microsoft announced that it had sold 40 million Windows 8 licenses
in the first month after launch, an improvement on Windows 7, which sold 60
million licenses in its first two months. Earlier this week, Microsoft said
sales of Windows 8 had reached 60 million.
Valve is working on a Steam Box games console that will bring its games into
the living room but also act as a networked games device for the whole home.
The Steam Box will run on Linux but Newell says it will be possible to install
Windows on it. "We're not going to make it hard," he said.
Newell said the company was not planning to release a motion controller for the Steam Box but was interested in the possibilties of controllers that utilise biometric data.
He said: "Biometrics on the other hand is essentially adding more communication bandwidth between the game and the person playing it, especially in ways the player isn’t necessarily conscious of. Biometrics gives us more visibility."
Newell added: "Also, gaze tracking. We think gaze tracking is going to turn out to be super important."
Valve has not yet revealed a release date for the Steam Box or how much it would cost but Ben Krasnow, an engineer at Valve, said the company had no plans to announce anything this year.
source : http://www.telegraph.co.uk
Newell said the company was not planning to release a motion controller for the Steam Box but was interested in the possibilties of controllers that utilise biometric data.
He said: "Biometrics on the other hand is essentially adding more communication bandwidth between the game and the person playing it, especially in ways the player isn’t necessarily conscious of. Biometrics gives us more visibility."
Newell added: "Also, gaze tracking. We think gaze tracking is going to turn out to be super important."
Valve has not yet revealed a release date for the Steam Box or how much it would cost but Ben Krasnow, an engineer at Valve, said the company had no plans to announce anything this year.
source : http://www.telegraph.co.uk