Well Steam Dev Days has kicked off in style and we have a little bit of the lowdown here for you, keep an eye on this post as I will keep updating it to keep everyone in the loop as much as I can!



This information is gathered from many different developers at the event as they leak it out. Well, I say leak it's more like a flowing river!



DAY 1



Highlights

Every developer there got a Steam Controller and a Steam Machine for free! That's right, every single developer team now has a Linux SteamOS box, that's one way to win developers over.

Valve are hiring.

Valve want things like Music, TV and more on SteamOS.

Alienware's Steam Machine will launch in September.

Valve want to move away from Greenlight.

Source Engine 2 mentioned during OpenGL talk

Working on their own OpenGL debugger called VOGL developed natively on Linux, more info on it here. Looks like Valve will be making the most complete OpenGL debugger around for free, wouldn't make sense for them to charge for it.

Controller

No longer has a touchscreen (see this image), it will have a DPAD and ABXY buttons for backwards compatibility.

It will use AA batteries - that's a bit dissapointing, I hate fiddling with batteries. It does mean that you won't have to buy a whole new controller if the battery pack inside died though.

Has an API for developers to hook into.

The Steam Controller API supports up to 16 players. - So who will be first to come out with a controller-based 16 player game then on one screen for Steam?

- So who will be first to come out with a controller-based 16 player game then on one screen for Steam? Key-bindings will be crowd-sourced to find the best ones.

May still change more yet!

Business Highlights

Steam has grown rapidly in 2013 - Source

They will add more currency options - Source

There are plans to allow e-gifting of Steam wallet currency, finally. - Source

During 2013 holidays sale 1.7million in-game items given out, 2 million snow globe trading cards traded, 2 million daily community marketplace transactions - Source

VR

Valve have their own Virtual Reality devices, David Hensley of Tripwire stated "the valve demo really blew me away. VR is going to be amazing" and "It felt like an oculus but a generational leap forward", so Valve are ahead of the game in VR! - Source

Users

They had 1.2m reviews in under 60 days for games - Source

Steam now has 75 million active users.

Assault Android Cactus may add a 16 player mode for the controllers! - Source

This could be the latest version of the Steam Controller, they could go through more revisions of course:

Source



I sure do hope more developers bring their games to Linux after attending this event, no reason not to at least test now with a free Linux machine!



The developer of Democracy and Gratuitous Space battles said

Quote Linux looks more important to gaming than ever

Source



It certainly does look important to Valve, important enough for them to team up with Intel & Gigabyte to give away free machines and controllers!

You can see the information flow in from twitter here. Be sure to follow us @gamingonlinux to keep up even quicker with our retweets and to generally follow us!

This information comes from many different developers tweeting the info in public, thanks to them!