Today, Valve announced its SteamOS, which is built for computer gamers who want to bring their gaming experience into the living room. The free Linux-powered operating system will have a user interface that was built for use on a big screen HDTV and for viewing from the couch. Valve tells us to stay tuned for a release date, soon.
One of the highlighted features of SteamOS is its in-home streaming, which promises to be able to stream any of your games from any computer in your house to your HDTV over your home network. This means that you will not need to move your gaming PC into the living room. All of the nearly 3000 Steam games will be able to be streamed to your HDTV. Meanwhile, we are told to expect announcements in the coming weeks regarding AAA games coming natively to SteamOS in 2014. SteamOS will also be compatible with many of the popular music and video streaming services.
SteamOS appears to be a great solution to many PC gamers who have always wanted to scale their games up to a large format HDTV screen. Stay tuned for future SteamOS release date announcements and possible Steam hardware.
Find out more about SteamOS, here.
Since we can already simply attach our PCs via HDMI and play on our HDTV … I can’t wait to see how this is turned into a purpose-built set-top box!
Since it requires another PC I am not as jazzed as when I first heard about it. Why shouldn’t you just be able to download the games to it and play it right there?
I don’t know if it REQUIRES another PC or just that you may not want to have your big gaming PC in the living room. Living Room PCs tend to be smaller and less obtrusive, so I assume you can use your main gaming PC in the living room if you wish.
Well either way, this is still vapor as it’s not available for download. Even after it’s available and you install it (IF they let you) it’s still something someone will have to do that they may not like: installing an OS. It will only get real when it ships pre-installed as a SteamBox or in a TV.