Valve Corporation took to Game Developers Conference (GDC 2015) like a fish to water and has announced a whole slew of new products and services. Amidst them the Source 2 engine, successor to the Source engine used in Valve games such as Half-Life 2, Steam Link, a small device for in-home game streaming, and SteamVR, which will provide for the recently unveiled the HTC Vive virtual reality headset.

Valve has been best known for the Steam digital distribution service for games, which hit a record breaking 8.3 million concurrent users in December. However, Valve is also a video game developer, has made forays into gaming hardware (the Steam Controller and Steam Machines), and video game streaming.

Steam Link

First up is Steam Link, which is what appears to be a set-top-box designed primarily for streaming from a PC in the house to the TV using Ethernet and an HDMI cable. The Steam Link box includes three USB ports to plug in peripherals and stream inputs back to the PC running the game. In a way Steam Link would create a sort of sense-of-console in enabling the use of a TV for PC gaming.

Steam Link will be available in November for $49.99 and available with a Steam Controller for an additional $49.99 in the U.S.

The Steam Link, PC game streaming box from Valve.

The Steam Link briefly appeared in the Steam Store but was quickly removed.

SteamVR

Earlier this week HTC announced a partnership with Valve to develop a virtual reality headset called Vive to compete with the likes of Facebook’s Oculus Rift and Sony’s Project Morpheus. Today Valve announced hardware codenamed “Lighthouse,” an addition to the SteamVR interface that provides a room tracking system for use with the HTC Vive via two base stations (also mentioned in the Vive announcement.)

Lighthouse is also cheap enough that it can be integrated into TVs, monitors, headsets, input devices, or mobile devices. Valve believes this factor could make Lighthouse the go-to for virtual reality tracking of a user moving around a room and it can be used to integrate well with Steam Controllers and other devices for virtual reality input.

Valve also announced that demos at GDC would include work from Bossa Studios, Cloudhead Games, Dovetail Games, Fireproof Studios, Google, Owlchemylabs, Skillman & Hackett, Steel Wool Games, Vertigo Games, and Wevr.

The Source 2 engine

Last is the Source 2 engine announcement, which affects developers more than consumers, although it does shine a light on the future of Valve games. Already Valve provides a powerful graphics engine well known from its games.

The Source 2 engine will also be available for free to content developers, according to Valve’s Jay Stelly.

“Given how important user generated content is becoming, Source 2 is designed not for just the professional developer,” says Stelly, “but enabling gamers themselves to participate in the creation and development of their favorite games.”

Valve also announced a Vulkan-compatible version of the Source 2 engine. Vulkan is a cross-platform successor to the popular open source graphics library OpenGL, which was recently announced by The Khronos Group. Its development will unify the codebase for OpenGL between platforms including PC and mobile as well as provide the next generation of the open source graphics library.