Valve’s ‘no press allowed’ dev conference, Steam Dev Days, is seeing the ax this year, and it seems next year doesn’t look any better.
According to a tweet by Valve Marketing and Business Development team member Tom Giardino, Steam Dev Days is definitely not happening this year.
This isn’t the first Steam Dev Days Valve has decided to skip though, so we’re hoping this isn’t the end of the conference as we know it. Valve famously skipped 2015’s Dev Days, which was one year after the conference’s inauguration and first showing of Valve’s VR headset prototype. Had Dev Days 2015 taken place, it would have come only a few months after Valve unveiled its first version of the HTC Vive.
Last year’s Steam Dev Days saw a new controller prototype, Knuckles, that has since shipped out to select VR developers, but still isn’t in the hands of consumers.
A second-generation Lighthouse basestation was also teased last year, which is planned to work with newer devices VR headsets. Valve has said the hardware will be lighter, quieter, cheaper, more reliable, and require less power, but won’t work with current HTC Vive headsets on the market now. The improved 2.0 basestations are said to ship in “production quantities” in November 2017.
Valve is typically low-key when it comes to announcing these sorts of hardware updates, and very rarely uses Dev Days like it might with consumer-driven conferences. The lack of a Dev Days doesn’t mean the company isn’t interested in engaging the dev community, it just may mean they don’t have any substantial updates, VR or otherwise, to show developers at this time.