Backstepper: Mikhail Popov wants to know: ‘Epic is really pushing its UA3 to mobile devices. Do you see Valve trying to make Android and iOS versions of Source? If not, how about Steam on mobile devices? Plans for the Zombies is already on iOS and would benefit greatly from Steam Play functionality.’
Newell: Yeah, there’s zero doubt that mobile clients are important. The first thing to do is to get Steam Community support up in a mobile space just because it’s easier not because it’s more valuable to customers. Like Erik said earlier, you’re always looking at how much work is it versus how many customers benefit? You have to look at both sides of that. And then getting the engine up and running and then getting games up and running. The thing that worries me a huge amount is to fully take advantage of the capabilities of those devices. Getting Source up and running on a mobile device is actually not that hard but creating a great experience that lives within the constraints of the device and takes advantages of its upside is a lot more work and I don’t think we’ve made any interesting strides in that direction at all. Not because we don’t think that there’s opportunity there but simply because we haven’t managed to get a critical mass of people at Valve to tackle the problem. I keep thinking that you should be using the camera. If you’re not using the camera on one of these devices you’re making a mistake. If you’re not using GPS you’re making a mistake. If you’re not taking advantage of the fact that a person always sort of being connected to that device or having a reasonable expectation that they’re connected to the device you’re probably making a mistake in terms of missing what will end up being the super valuable opportunities to do cool entertainment. So those are pretty nebulous ways of talking about the problem but that’s the kind of thing you have to wrestle with when you start saying, ‘so if we’re building something on an Ipad, why is it going to be worth our customers’ time?’ Simply taking one of our existing pieces of content and getting it to run on the Ipad is a small step. It’s a necessary step, but it’s not a sufficient step to doing useful work to take advantage of.
Johnson: It’s not a strategy.
Newell: It’s not a strategy, right. Getting stuff to run there is fine but…
Johnson: We wouldn’t do anything in the mobile space until the thing we were doing would teach us a bunch about the space. We recognize we’re behind on that.
