Valve Announces SteamOS

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Valve has just announced SteamOS, a free operating system "designed for the TV and the living room."

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.
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Will you guys be testing this out and running some benchmarks?
 
Regardless of the outcome more competitors in the market will be a good thing. I'd love to get this up and running in a VM and do the software equivalent of a teardown.
 
"SteamOS will be available soon as a free download for users and as a freely licensable operating system for manufacturers," Valve says. We can expect more details from the company in the coming days as it has two more announcements slated for this week.
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Half Life 3 confir......

oh forget it...
 
It's good to have options, but for myself, I don't see much use for this. Shooters are still best played with k+m, which in turn is best on a proper desk, same goes for RTSs. But for PC games well suited for controllers...why not. General media content can be streamed through almost anything now, you get a good receiver with wi-fi and you're set on that front.

Now lets see what the other 2 announcements are.
 
I mean it makes sense. A linux distro with one software package in mind. That makes compatibility testing and updates easier. I think everyone saw this coming - but I'm still glad to hear it, and I hope it takes off. (both for us and them).
 
M'ichal said:
It's good to have options, but for myself, I don't see much use for this. Shooters are still best played with k+m, which in turn is best on a proper desk, same goes for RTSs. But for PC games well suited for controllers...why not. General media content can be streamed through almost anything now, you get a good receiver with wi-fi and you're set on that front.

Now lets see what the other 2 announcements are.
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But why couldn't this be both? A distro that they manage that installs on either your own PC, or a cost effective little box they produce with a controller?
 
im excited for the optimization piece and squeezing every last frame per second you can out of your hardware.

maybe:

1) steam box
2) orange box 2 :D
 
Will defineatly be using this. Since I got my GoogleTV's devices my HTPC's just serve as Steam Big Picture boxes.
 
I'm really on the fence about this.

SteamOS, Steam Box, Steam Controller...a company that has long existed to help keep PC gaming alive is now shifting focus into, and hoping to score big from, the gaming console segment? No. Just no.
 
This announcement is useless without more details. Annoying that we have to wait until later this week.
 
i'm not too familiar with linux. does this steamOS distro mean it will be usable as regular linux but optimized for steam, or will it basically boot right into their custom UI?
 
Kongar said:
But why couldn't this be both? A distro that they manage that installs on either your own PC, or a cost effective little box they produce with a controller?
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Oh, it can and it WILL. I was more speaking from the living-room experience point of view. FPS and RTS gaming just doesn't work for me without a proper desk+k+m setup, so this (like consoles) doesn't appeal to me. It would be cool for controller-based games like Tomb Raider though, so you can buy the game on Steam and decide how you want to play it, without the need of owning two versions, like with consoles. I definitely like the idea of this more than owning separate platforms (e.g. PC + PS4) and buying separate games for each.
 
DejaWiz said:
I'm really on the fence about this.

SteamOS, Steam Box, Steam Controller...a company that has long existed to help keep PC gaming alive is now shifting focus into, and hoping to score big from, the gaming console segment? No. Just no.
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Not a console.
 
DejaWiz said:
I'm really on the fence about this.

SteamOS, Steam Box, Steam Controller...a company that has long existed to help keep PC gaming alive is now shifting focus into, and hoping to score big from, the gaming console segment? No. Just no.
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Valve do not make all the games, they rely on the gaming industry to supply the games, to make the product useful. No one is going to buy a Steambox just to play DOTA2 or CSGO, they would buy it with the expectation to play mainstream PC games.

And when you look at the mainstream PC games today, almost all (if not all) of them are cross-platform games, games that will support controller. That is the way it will always be.

If you look at PC exclusive titles, most of them are simulation titles which are not mainstream, even future MMOs are going cross platform.

PC gaming has to co-exist with console gaming, otherwise it will become a niche that big publishers will not invest in.
 
ekuest said:
i'm not too familiar with linux. does this steamOS distro mean it will be usable as regular linux but optimized for steam, or will it basically boot right into their custom UI?
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I would think it would be the latter, especially on their custom box but then they say you can install it on a PC which, without it acting like an actual full OS, would be a pretty pointless use of PC hardware unless you just want to game.
 
ekuest said:
i'm not too familiar with linux. does this steamOS distro mean it will be usable as regular linux but optimized for steam, or will it basically boot right into their custom UI?
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I imagine it will be both. There are plenty of Linux distros that boot straight in to a UI but you can always change that behavior if desired.
 
If they are looking into Netflix and stuff the OS is probably gonna be locked down for DRM reasons (hell, even the gaming functions might require this). It might be open - but people shouldn't assume so on any front yet - there's plenty of reasons for both sides and we'll just have to wait and see.
 
Don't see how this is going to take off when most Game Devs don't use more open game engines such as OpenGL rather than DirectX. I'm not sure how the architecture of next gen consoles and PC's moving closer together will impact this in terms of portability. In order for this to be marketable to the average joe, I would think that Valve would essentially advertise this as a completely different platform that you can install yourself such as PS4, XB1, and PC are considered different platforms that you can buy off the shelf - the question is will the big distributors catch on?
 
ComputerBox34 said:
Don't see how this is going to take off when most Game Devs don't use more open game engines such as OpenGL rather than DirectX. I'm not sure how the architecture of next gen consoles and PC's moving closer together will impact this in terms of portability. In order for this to be marketable to the average joe, I would think that Valve would essentially advertise this as a completely different platform that you can install yourself such as PS4, XB1, and PC are considered different platforms that you can buy off the shelf - the question is will the big distributors catch on?
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They are relying on the game streaming functionality to overcome this I think.
 
M'ichal said:
I would think it would be the latter, especially on their custom box but then they say you can install it on a PC which, without it acting like an actual full OS, would be a pretty pointless use of PC hardware unless you just want to game.
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devman said:
I imagine it will be both. There are plenty of Linux distros that boot straight in to a UI but you can always change that behavior if desired.
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yeah i would like to put this on my htpc which i do use for steam right now, but i would need to be able to install utorrent and itunes and some other utility type programs in addition to just steam. hope that's the case.

staknhalo said:
If they are looking into Netflix and stuff the OS is probably gonna be locked down for DRM reasons (hell, even the gaming functions might require this). It might be open - but people shouldn't assume so on any front yet - there's plenty of reasons for both sides and we'll just have to wait and see.
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well they said repeatedly in the reveal how much they want to keep it open and let people alter it in whatever way they want. that leads me to think it wont be locked down. windows and linux arent locked down and you can watch netflix on those...
 
ekuest said:
well they said repeatedly in the reveal how much they want to keep it open and let people alter it in whatever way they want. that leads me to think it wont be locked down. windows and linux arent locked down and you can watch netflix on those...
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No I know, but consoles are - and they do all these things too and is what Valve is trying to emulate. Like I said - don't pick a side on this yet as there's too many arguments for both sides is all I'm getting at. Let's wait for clarification from them or hands on time before we get hopes up is all.
 
now we need an XMBC app for steam.
That'd be sweet to have a little steambox with full h264 support and xbmc.
 
staknhalo said:
They are relying on the game streaming functionality to overcome this I think.
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I still don't get why the industry (Nvidia and now Valve) is pushing home network Streaming Gaming as a viable feature. As attractive as it sounds, I don't want to play TF2 on 50" TV if controller fidelity isn't there and input lag is.

Besides, given the choice between putting a SteamOS box in the living room TV or buying an Oculus Rift next year...
 
Saturn_V said:
I still don't get why the industry (Nvidia and now Valve) is pushing home network Streaming Gaming as a viable feature. As attractive as it sounds, I don't want to play TF2 on 50" TV if controller fidelity isn't there and input lag is.

Besides, given the choice between putting a SteamOS box in the living room TV or buying an Oculus Rift next year...
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Input lag already exists for all modern consoles. I can't imagine it would be worse, as latency isn't really being introduced (unless you're streaming wireless).
 
Saturn_V said:
I still don't get why the industry (Nvidia and now Valve) is pushing home network Streaming Gaming as a viable feature. As attractive as it sounds, I don't want to play TF2 on 50" TV if controller fidelity isn't there and input lag is.

Besides, given the choice between putting a SteamOS box in the living room TV or buying an Oculus Rift next year...
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Probably because it's easier than getting all the games made in the past + all future games made for/ported to linux by every dev company - and those that don't exist anymore. That's my guess.
 
My prediction.

At some point Half-Life 3 is announced as a SteamOS exclusive. It is also free on SteamOS. This would be the push that would get many people to try SteamOS, and in the end, what Valve needs to do is convince people to try it.
 
The invasion begins.

This is going to be interesting, especially if it can run Windows based games natively.
 
Not really excited about it, just my opinion if valve wants to push linux gaming that steamos must have a pretty solid sdk as MS. Just saying..
 
I've been running Steam on my TV for years. Once you go that route, it's hard to go back to either a console or a desk. Assuming this works well, I'd love to see it succeed.
 
So the honest question... which just happens to be funny... is will it run Crysis? :D

Seriously, windows based games... needs what emulator to run? In which case won't all the performance tweaks essentially go away?
 
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