Valve Steam Dev Days brings developers to Seattle in January

This January we'll be seeing another major gaming event the likes of which will be a lot closer to what we've seen in Apple's WWDC and Google I/O in years past. What we've got here is Steam Dev Days, a two-day event to be held in 2014 in Seattle Washington. This series of talks will center around the Steam gaming universe, likely hinging on the new SteamOS and Steam Machine hard and software most of all.

Gaming is at an important point in our collective history here with SteamOS, with the game hosting company Valve becoming a full-fledged operating system and aiming to converge the two universes – PC gaming and console gaming. With the Steam Machine preparing to be the fully upgradable console for your living room of the future, Steam Dev Days will be the conduit through which developers will be able to speak directly with the people behind the scenes making the operating system a reality.

As we learned from NVIDIA, it's more than just Valve personnel working in the Valve labs to create a successfully optimized Linux build on which Steam OS can flourish. Here with Steam Dev Days, speakers and developers will be part of a "relaxed, off the record environment."

In other words – it's quite likely the press won't be invited.

Which might be all well and good, as CES 2014 takes place January 7th through the 10th (available for you through SlashGear's giant CES portal, as always). Steam Dev Days will be a non-traditional meeting environment at the same time as it is a reflection of developer conferences of old.

"Steam Dev Days is a two-day game developer's conference where professionals can meet in a relaxed, off the record environment. Developers will share their design and industry expertise, participate in roundtable discussions and attend lectures by industry veterans on topics ranging from game economies to VR, Linux/OpenGL, user-generated content and more." – Valve

Registration for developers will be available through the Steam Dev Days webpage and includes a $95 USD registration fee. This fee is required "to confirm your reservations", which suggests this wont be the same sort of situation as with Google I/O or Microsoft's BUILD where massive amounts of developer-friendly devices are handed out. But you never know!

"Developers will also have direct access to Valve's Steam Team, and will be given a chance to test-drive and provide feedback on SteamOS, prototype Steam Machines and Steam Controllers." – Valve

Have a peek at the timeline below to see other recent Valve and Steam goings-on to track this SteamOS train straight through to release at the start of 2014!