From the iconography on the main page I'd guess the second announcement will be Steam hardware and the third one will be Half Life 3 (second circle indicates software product again?). Pure speculation on my side here.
We now know that the circle is SteamOS. Then, the second announcement would be "SteamOS in a box", and the iconography of the third announcement is "two SteamOS". This probably has something to do either with playing or sharing with friends, or more details on streaming games from another machine on the network.
Come to think of it, Dota2 just mentioned recently an update that either just came out or is coming out in a few days that would allow you to play a Dota2 LAN game. Perhaps the third announcement will be more along the lines of sharing a game only you own with friends on your LAN, for that sort of purpose?
Back to the halcyon days of yore, when a single copy of Starcraft was all you needed for a great night of LAN gaming for a number of people. Allowing 'spawned' copies for friends to share for gaming would make co-op games so much more fiscally bearable.
Steam doesn't properly support sharing games still. You can share your entire library and if you aren't playing anything at all, your friend can play a game from your library. Which you could do already, you just had to give your friend your password. Currently me and my brother share a library just fine by having one of us set steam to offline mode and then we can all play at the same time. It's less useful than the old behaviour, but without sharing your password. Oh and you can save in the cloud and earn achievements personally for yourself. Excuse me while I vomit.
> iconography of the third announcement is "two SteamOS".
Two Steam OS added together. I think it means if you get two devices running steam you can combine them to increase the available resources for playing a game. Possibly some kind of build in clustering API that steam games can use.
We know that the circle represents the SteamOS. The brackets int the second announcement must represent SteamBox. The third announcement has two circles with a plus sign in between which has to do something with connectivity to other players. Probably an equivalent of Xbox Live. ( My bet for the name is SteamPipe :) )
If Half-Life 3 was represented it would have to be a sign inside the circle as it is mainly a singleplayer experience. Also a single game as a third announcement is way too narrow-minded as Valve already has the one of the most popular games (Dota 2).
Steam already has most of the xbox live functionality. Friends list, messaging, voice chat, online store. I think the only major missing piece is probably 'parties' though maybe that's in there (I've never had much of a need for it personally).
I will be so Goddamn happy if they're actually making that thing. I love modularity, and a trackball gamepad would flawlessly combine the convenience of a gamepad with the precision of a mouse. Several groups have tried to bring one to market, and studies have shown their superiority, but apparently they were too weird to get enough preorders. Hope hope hope...
That could be interesting... but I must say, the Xbox360 controller is fantastic, inexpensive, and easily integrates with a PC. Sort of a solved problem, if you will, so unless they have significant value to add, I'd hope they'd focus elsewhere.
but microsoft can simply make the xbox360 controller difficult to implement in other games (tho i don't know how they'd do that…), and would effectively stop indies from supporting it. Having a proprietary controller, but coded using an open library (akin to what the steam workshop does), might mean that it's easier to have games implement controller support that's not fragmented.
It's a standard USB HI device, you don't need any kind of MS code to use it. Changing it would make it incompatible with their existing xbox360 install base and games for windows. I guess they could stop selling the xbox360 controller, but why would they when it's making them money?
As this is as good a place as any to record my guess, I'd go for some sort of virtualization.
O = SteamOS
[O] = Hardware partners Steam box (in tiers inc. an inexpensive stream target box for $99)
[O O] = Being able to run a SteamOS game on your Windows system. Think DOSBox or HyperV.
If they could do this then really it's a case of convenience vs performance, and a few exclusives or two would push people to dual boot rather than VM it.
It could also be the way they plan to stream, i.e. a self-contained mini-OS that runs under Windows but streams out/in visual and inputs. The 'local' version fits ok with that, in that you can run a SteamOS title in Windows by localhost'ing it really.
Just speculating, but it's interesting to think about.
I was just thinking a dedicated OnLive / ChromeCast like wee box for the LAN, perhaps with a Valve designed controller (i.e. an analog something). All real processing would be on the host SteamOS PC really, with dedicated hardware to help reduce lag on the stream.
I think you didn't read the announcement correctly. Sure the box can do streaming but it is also expected to run "native games". So, for streaming maybe a cheap box is OK, but for actual gaming on the box, you'll need something way more powerful than what you can get for 99 dollars.
That's why I used the word 'tiers' if you read more carefully. The bottom tier may be an inexpensive streaming box, the highest tier may be a high performance dedicated gaming PC running SteamOS.
http://store.steampowered.com/livingroom/