Original Xbox designer and co-creator Seamus Blackley is looking forward to whatever Valve and Nintendo are cooking up, much more than Microsoft's next-gen console hybrid, Project Helix, in fact.
Microsoft has yet to properly spill the beans on its upcoming console, simply codenamed Project Helix for now, but Microsoft Gaming CEO Asha Sharma did soft-confirm rumors that the hardware would straddle the line between traditional console and gaming PC.
"I don't know as a developer what I'm excited about, and I don't know as a gamer what I'm excited about," Blackley says of the console's starting pitch, per an interview with Expansion Pass. "I am vastly more excited about Steam than about [Project Helix] as a gamer from a content standpoint as, I think, everybody would be or, you know, what's Switch 3 going to be?"
With Valve, Blackley has confidence in the company's plans because "those guys are relentlessly focused on cool games and, you know, they f*** up business and they do weird stuff and Gabe's crazy - I love Gabe," but "fundamentally, they have put games first and they've funded people and funded games."
Steam, in general, is admittedly a very no-nonsense, games-first platform between Steam Next Fest events that platforms countless under-the-radar indies and the never-ending sales focused on specific genres, subgenres, and barely even genres. Valve's also preparing to release the Steam Machine, another mini PC that seemingly caters to console likers, too.
When it comes to a hypothetical Switch 3 or whatever name Nintendo's next console generation ends up with, Blackley explains that "everything that comes out of Nintendo's design department is, at least, really interesting and cool, even when it fails." He then points to the "mess" that was the Wii U, which was still "really cool" even in its failure. But Nintendo only released the Switch 2 last summer, so we won't be hearing about their next next-gen machine until Project Helix has been in the wild for years already.
