While no hardware has been announced by Valve, the company has unveiled ‘SteamOS’. It’s a totally free standalone operating system designed for ”living room machines.” Being ‘open’ is the key.
Gabe Newell has criticised Microsoft for turning Windows into a more ‘closed platform’, and vowed more support for Linux. Valve decided to go a step further.
Users are free to ”alter or replace any part of the software or hardware they want,” announced Valve. Streaming to the TV is a feature of SteamOS, much like Nvidia’s Shield.
It’s the perfect complement to Valve’s Big Picture which already converts the Steam platform into a more TV friendly setup that’s designed to fully support gamepads. The company also claims to have ”achieved significant performance increases in graphics processing” with SteamOS. They likely refer to a more ‘direct access’ approach to hardware.
They’re now focusing on ”audio performance and reductions in input latency at the operating system level.”
The big question for PC gamers with a bulging Steam Library is exactly how many titles will actually work with SteamOS? It is Linux based after all and the vast majority of all titles through Steam are Windows-based. The in-home streaming feature does let them get away with compatibility issues, in theory.
Valve does promise that SteamOS users will have the ”full Steam catalog” available to them.
It’s certainly a curious direction for Valve and if it works it means that PCs will do all the work while streaming the games to a SteamOS bit of hardware in the living room, letting us enjoy PC titles on a much bigger screen. It sounds like the equivalent of our own personal OnLive setup where the PC is the ‘server cloud’.
The next major announcement from Valve is tomorrow, Wednesday September 25th.
