CES 2014: Gabe Newell Isn’t Worried About Xbox One

We’ve already brought you an extensive and detailed list of the Steam Machines that Valve’s 12 partners have cooked up to challenge PS4 and Xbox One for your living room. During the company’s CES presentation one inquisitive audience member asked CEO Gabe Newell if he was worried about keeping up with Microsoft’s momentum. The company recently broke 3 million Xbox One units sold.

Newell was pretty candid in his answer though not very direct and in truth there are probably too many moving parts and parties involved to estimate sales figures at this stage.

Question from the audience at a Valve CES presentation: Microsoft just announced 3 million units of xbox one were sold at launch for the last three months, can you hit that target by the end of the year? Can you do 3 million units?

Newell: Well, it’d take a while for them to catch up. I mean, we’re at 65 million.

(Huge laugh from the crowd)

Part of why we think that this is the right direction to go in is that we can benefit from everything that people have already done. If I buy a game on Steam and am running it on Windows, I can go to one of the Steam Machines and I already have the game. So the benefit as a developer, you benefit as a consumer, having that PC experience extended into the living room.

Whether this is enough to get people out there buying one of the myriad Steam machines that will be on offer remains to be seen. Especially considering that by the end of the year a great many people will have already dropped $399 or $499 (more if you live in South Africa where import taxes kill us) on PS4 or Xbox One units.

Name: A-G Sonday
Location: Cape Town
Position: Editor, Reviews

A-G has published 3673 posts. Read all of A-G's posts.

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