Valve announces SteamOS, a living room operating system for games

[Matsuda]

Valve is done teasing. Today, Valve has revealed SteamOS, its own operating system based on Linux, designed for living room gaming PCs. It's the first step towards Valve's Steam Box, its vision for an open video game console. It combines Steam's preeminent video game digital distribution platform with a user interface designed for televisions and the Linux platform. It will also be free.

Valve says "It will be available soon as a free stand-alone operating system for living room machines."

According to the company, major game devleopers are already on board with Linux, and will be building triple-A game titles that will run natively on SteamOS in 2014. However, SteamOS boxes will also have a workaround for Windows and Mac OS X games: in-home streaming. Not unlike the Nvidia Shield, it will include a method for streaming games from your existing gaming computer to your TV.

Why an operating system? "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," the company's announcement reads. Valve says that by working at the operating system level, they've managed to improve graphics performance, and can also improve audio and reduce controller latency.

We've been following the Steam Box saga for well over a year now, watching Valve as it experimented with game controllers, denounced Windows 8 in favor of Linux, and called out Apple as a threat. We theorized about what the Steam Box could be. In January, we spoke to Valve co-founder Gabe Newell himself about his plans for the project, but it's only now that we're seeing the fruition of those dreams.

SteamOS is only the first of three announcements that Valve is expected to issue this week. Valve's countdown clock is ticking down again to Wednesday, Sepember 25th at 10AM PT / 1PM ET, when the company will likely unveil its own Steam Box hardware based on the SteamOS operating system.

In January, Newell told us that Valve was planning to create three tiers of the Steam Box, "good", "better", and "best", with "good" likely a $99 box that would stream games from other more powerful computers, and "better" being a $300 box that Valve would build itself, and also allow partners to build so long as they adhered to a certain hardware spec.


More on this article in The Verge page

Edited September 23, 2013 by Matsuda-NSANE

[DKT27]

Here's a logo from the official page:

As for this announcement:

[insanedown58]

Hmm.. it'd be cool to hear more about it like Code base and such. I'd install it in a heart beat (of course when it comes out as Stable) if its based on Ubuntu and has a good-looking UI.