“We believe that, in maybe five years from now, folks will find it a quite antiquated notion that you should assume that when you change devices or platforms, that you lose all of your other games and friends. We’re hoping to unify, to get Steam to be as platform and context agnostic as possible. You shouldn’t have to shed that every generation, or even slightly shed it.”

Coomer also thinks “It would be pretty silly” if a third party developer had “to limit their game to a certain platform”. According to Anna Sweet, working on Valve’s business development, third party developers should release their games to as many platforms as possible.

“Whenever we talk to third-party partners, we encourage them to put their games in as many places as possible, including not on our platforms. Because we think that customers are everywhere, and they want to put their games wherever customers are. That would go against our whole philosophy, to launch something that’s exclusive to SteamOS or Steam machines.”

Steam Machines will start arriving early next year, which will signal the true start of the Linux-based SteamOS’s run. Will you be picking one up, even now that hopes of Half Life 3 ever being released have been dashed further?

“As you stated, it is a fact that some software development companies assume that Wii U is not powerful enough. On the contrary, some developers say in interviews that Wii U has a different architecture from other consoles and that, when utilised in the right way, it can perform well.

“At the moment, there is a great deal of contradictory information. Nintendo is required to make more efforts to dispel such a misconception.”

Iwata also understands third party developer concerns about wanting their games to sell well on the Wii U. “Some software companies are actively supporting Wii U and others are not. It is important to have supportive companies enjoy successful sales of a game and feel that their decision to develop something for Wii U was correct.

“We understand that this cannot possibly be achieved overnight and it may sound unconvincing under the current slow sales of Wii U.

“We would like to work to revitalize the Wii U market and show you favorable results for third-party software from this summer.”