During the past forty-some years video games yielded gigantic 3D virtual worlds, entire universes if you will. Video gaming and the concept of “gamification” (i.e. making everything more playful to do, especially in training and education) held great promise but in some ways they have failed to deliver a real change.
Now video games – as much as some can truly be considered works of art just like great movies and great books – have somewhat “stalled”. The latest consoles were commercial successes but did not really introduce anything new other than better looking games. Instruments such as Oculus Rift may bring about a real revolution here directly tied to 3D, and this, in a way, shows that video games may live through a new age of renovation by entering the physical reality realm.
Company’s such as Fabzat have channeled this into offering the possibility of 3D printing in-game characters and communities were spawned by 3D printing of Minecraft virtual items. However the big game publishers, so far, have shown no direct interest for this technology.
Now something has begun to move, with Valve, one of the largest and most innovative companies in the world of video games (perhaps the names Half Life, Portal Team Fortress and Steam ring a bell?) has openly spoken about the benefits of 3D printing during the latest Games Developer Conference (GDC), held from March 17th to the 21st in San Francisco.
The shift has come about as Valve is readying itself to enter the hardware manufacturing market, with a new video game console. While the machine itself needs less prototyping activity and more development on the OS front (it will use its own proprietary SteamOS), controllers are probably one of the items that can most benefit from rapid prototyping in the development phase and personalization in the consumer retail phase.
At GDC 2014, Valve showed a 3D printed version of its controller (which is being referred to as “Dog”), in which the company “dropped” the touchscreen of the original design and added touch sensitive buttons instead. Development of a gaming controller is absolutely critical: it is not sufficient that the controller is functional as gamers will quickly drop it if they cannot get an immediate feel for it.
What is surprising, though is still how slowly video game companies, which were at the forefront of software development, are embracing 3D printing technologies. For many software developers who, in a way, “have been living in a virtual reality”, it may be difficult to “return” to the material world. For online 3D printing marketplaces start-ups this is probably a good thing as Valve’s Steam is currently the biggest computer software marketplace in the world and it really would not take them much to start selling digital models, once they start seeing it as a compatible and viable business.
