John Carmack Is Doubtful Of Steam OS And Steam Machines

Id Software co-founder John Carmack isn’t convinced that Valve’s Steam OS and Steam Machines will be a success. On the other hand, the famous graphics engines developer admits that his past predictions regarding Valve’s capabilities have been especially wrong.

“There’s an interesting kind of retrospective on it,” he said during NVidia’s Montreal conference.

For example, when Valve approached Id Software in 2004 to have Doom 3 as one of Steam’s launch titles, “[Carmack] basically said, ‘Are you crazy? This would be nuts to try to kind of tie yourselves to this little, notional digital distribution platform.’ But clearly, Valve has played a good, strong, long game.”

Nonetheless, Carmack still believes that Valve has bit more than it can chew with Steam OS and Steam Machines.

“I’m afraid that I may be at that same point right now where I’m like, ‘Making your own sort of little console OS? Are you crazy?’ And, you know, maybe 10 years from now, they’re going to look like brilliant prophets again with it,” a-t-il déclaré.

“It still seems a little bit dicey to me, getting everything moved over to Linux, pushing from that side of things. Still, Valve’s track record is evidence that the company may just be able to pull it off. If it was some other random company, I would be pseudo-scornful, but it’s Valve, so I’m not.”