The Steam Machine’s controller – and that’s a prototype shot of its new design up top – isn’t designed to be a loner. Indeed, if developers want to push the limits, it’ll be part of a multiplayer experience not seen in almost a decade.
Flying in the face of a rush towards online multiplayer, people are reporting from Valve’s developer get-together this week (and we’ve heard the same thing from attendees) that Steam Machines will also support up to 16 controllers on the one device. That’s… insane.
Think Bomberman. Or FIFA. Or some nightmarishly modded version of Smash Bros. Or a 4×4 game of Halo.
Or… some new kind of amazing local multiplayer experience so cool we don’t even know about it yet.
Now all you’ll need is to find a room big enough to actually hold 16 people…
4×4 split screen on 2x HD for 16 players would still be more pixels per player than the N64 launch titles #steamdevdays
— zero and one inc (@zer0andone) January 15, 2014
Steam Controllers support 16 simultaneous connections for multiplayer gaming [Gamesbeat]
Picture: Sergey Galyonkin
Comments
14 responses to “Steam Machines Can Support Up To 16 Players In The Same Room”
Many PCs can support up to 4 monitors on a single graphics card now, so those 16 players could be four screens of 2X2.
Are the Steam controllers wireless? If not, the biggest issue might be finding enough USB ports to plug those suckers into.
A 4×4 game of halo on one screen, how is that supposed to work.
On a 4K screen? That could be pretty amazing 😛
Whoa! Looks like good old LAN party games might make a return. Albeit in a somewhat abstract way. But at it’s core, this could be interesting.
Only if they actually make the games to support this…
*comes out from under rock*
They left?
True they still float about. Where I live we used to have 3 or 4 LAN groups with about 50+ at each LAN. Sadly this died off a few years after ADSL.
Lucky to get even one off these days with more than 10 people.
Ah fair enough, sorry, i never really attended any of the big LAN groups like all the coolkids 😛
i did however (and still do) throw frequent LAN party at home with 4 – 6 people 😛
The small ones are the fun ones. Though I did attend a 1000 person LAN many many years ago at the then dubbed Telstra Dome. Was mental.
Won’t be viable in the anywhere near future. You kinda need screen space to play split-screen. Also anything more than 6 people on the one big screen is just getting too hard to follow.
Just a gimmick. There us a reason the consoles stopped at four. It’s the ideal number for couch multiplayer, displays break into four easy, four people can fit easily into most lounges and you only need 4 controllers
how many 40-50″ hdtvs can you fit in one room? I can’t think of many recent games, especially on PC, that support more than 2 player split-screen unfortunately. Yeah, team sports games like FIFA can be played on one screen and Borderlands or Call of Duty (sigh) can be played 2 player but Battlefield doesn’t even have that. That and I know about 2 or 3 people who are maybe considering buying a controller anyway
That said, I’m all for bringing multiplayer back into the living room. To find a decent range of multiplayer games you have to look back now two generations to the PS2 that you can play in the living room.
How times have changed 🙂 I can remember playing Goldeneye N64 with 4 players on a tiny 13 inch CRT tv back in my youth without many issues, now we think it’s impossible to play 4 players on a single 50″ HDTV?
I don’t even have a room that will support 16 people in it, so don’t have much use for a machine that will support 16 people in a room 😛