Microsoft talks about Valve's move into the console market

Valve is set to light the entire gaming market on fire next year with the company firing on all cylinders with SteamOS, Steam Box, Steam Machines, Steam Controllers, and hopefully a slew of new games like Half-Life 3, Team Fortress 3, Left 4 Dead 3, and more.

Well, Microsoft has now chimed in with some 'advice' from Phil Spencer, Microsoft Studios' VP. He said: "Valve is right down the street from us. They've done a great job of keeping the PC ecosystem strong at a time where I don't mind saying that we could have been more focused on what was going on in PC gaming. We were probably too focused purely on console. With Steam, [Valve has] done an amazing job of building this thing that, in a lot of ways, we should have been building as well at Microsoft."

Spencer thinks that the Linux-based SteamOS will be a hard sell on consumers, and some hard times for Valve moving from developer and distributor to platform holder. He added: "That's an evolutionary jump. They made the jump from building Half-Life to having a set of franchises to running Steam. They did a good job of learning through that. Now they're taking the next job to become a platform company - in some sense a hardware company, but in the truest sense more of an OS company. That's not an easy transition."