PC gaming mega-brand Valve surprised us all this afternoon with a trio of hardware announcements, including the return of its once-abandoned Steam Machine mini PC concept, alongside a revival of its similarly ill-fated Steam Controller and, finally, the Steam Frame headset, a sequel to the much more successful (and still marketed) Valve Index for virtual reality PC gaming. For me, the first is arguably the most interesting.
You'd have to survey an astronomical number of PC gamers before you found one who didn't know about Valve and, in turn, its software platform Steam. Industrial naming trend aside, the dominant figures at Valve are responsible for some of the nerdiest and most influential software in prominent gaming categories, such as the paradigmatic Half-Life and its contributions to the first-person shooter genre.
