Valve have released details of an upcoming SteamOS based around both Steam and Linux aimed specifically at getting into peoples living rooms.
The preamble to the release is:
As we’ve been working on bringing Steam to the living room, we’ve come to the conclusion that the
environment best suited to delivering value to customers is an operating system built around Steam itself.
SteamOS combines the rock-solid architecture of Linux with a gaming experience built for the big screen.
It will be available soon as a free stand-alone operating system for living room machines.
The OS is apparently meant to compliment the Big Picture mode that was released last year and shows Valve making a definite effort to muscle into the living rooms of gamers, in direct competition to the console makers. That links to a short Forbes article which makes some interesting points about Valve and hardware if they want to mount a real challenge to Sony and Microsoft.
The Steam OS isn’t going to solely focus on games, it’s going to include support for music, tv & movies, streaming from a gaming pc to a TV via a Steam OS machine and more. For the full announcement click here.
There will be some more announcements from Lord Gabe of Newell and the noble knights of the Steam table coming over the rest of this week. It’s almost pointless searching for what these announcements could be because speculation and Valve go together like two things that go really well together. But I’ve seen rumours about Left 4 Dead 3, Half Life 3 (duh), the steam box being fully announced and so much more. We’ll just have to wait and see.
Though if anyone could launch a challenge to the console big boys Valve might have a shot. Not at taking them out of the game, but definitely becoming a third player. Their reputation amongst the gaming community normally ranges from “I think they’re cool guys” to “I have Gabe Newells face tattooed on my face” and Steam has gone from a pain in the backside to an almost welcome necessity. Good luck to ‘em.
