Monday, September 23rd 2013
Valve Announces Steam OS
People looking forward to the big "Steambox" announcement were met by an anticlimax. Valve announced its own operating system for PC gamers, which turns any PC into a "Steambox." Simply named Steam OS, the operating system is a highly modified Debian Linux stripped to bare, with all its non-essentials tossed out, and proprietary multimedia CODECs added, along with fonts, runtime environments, and in-built drivers for popular GPU, sound card, and gaming-peripheral brands. In essence, there's everything in the operating system for PC gamers, and then some.
Steam diversified from distributing PC games to non-gaming PC software, and Valve plans to take that further by doing groundwork for its very own living room content-delivery platform to compete with the likes of Xbox One. Since Steam OS can be deployed onto x86-based PCs as tiny as an Intel NUC, it stands more than a half chance. Its baby-steps are taken with In-home Streaming, a feature that lets you stream content off a PC or Mac in your house. You can share games in your account with others in your family, and close friends, using the recently-announced Family Sharing feature. You get content-blocking features and restricted-accounts. You also get media-player software that lets you organize and play back music and videos in most open- and proprietary formats. You should be able to install popular web-browsers like Google Chrome. Steam OS is competitively priced against Windows 8.1 and OS X 10.9, at $0. Did we tell you that some of its icons look like companion cubes? Just kidding.
Steam diversified from distributing PC games to non-gaming PC software, and Valve plans to take that further by doing groundwork for its very own living room content-delivery platform to compete with the likes of Xbox One. Since Steam OS can be deployed onto x86-based PCs as tiny as an Intel NUC, it stands more than a half chance. Its baby-steps are taken with In-home Streaming, a feature that lets you stream content off a PC or Mac in your house. You can share games in your account with others in your family, and close friends, using the recently-announced Family Sharing feature. You get content-blocking features and restricted-accounts. You also get media-player software that lets you organize and play back music and videos in most open- and proprietary formats. You should be able to install popular web-browsers like Google Chrome. Steam OS is competitively priced against Windows 8.1 and OS X 10.9, at $0. Did we tell you that some of its icons look like companion cubes? Just kidding.
88 Comments on Valve Announces Steam OS
Also giving game devs a free OS to work with should help a lot of smaller companies. Good move by Mr. Newell
While it sounds great, being based on Linux and all, I hope people wont forget this is essentially an attempt to wall off all competition.
Edit: ofc this post is mostly a rant, but I felt some counterbalance was needed:p
In my initial post I assumed the SteamOS financially works just like steam on the PC at this moment. If not please correct me!
As far as making a little money off of it. I have no problem with it. Valve is a business, they're in business to make money. The O/S is free...
There's plenty of versions of free Linux out there.
"SteamOS will be available soon as a free download for users and as a freely licensable operating system for manufacturers. Stay tuned in the coming days for more information."
I just find it notable that gabe himself expressed such negative feelings towards things like the windows 8 marketplace, while now having made an OS that also works on the same basis.
But indeed you are right, we're not sure about that yet, although I find it hard to believe that valve would allow a company like EA to also let origin function on SteamOS.
Ohwell! atleast we'll have another competitor in the console-ish market.
Edit:This is exactly what I was also thinking and trying to convey. Perhaps the usability of the SteamOS is a bit better behind a TV compared to windows, but you wont have any choices left apart from what you can do on SteamOS, where every payment presumably goes through valve.
And the second part is even worse. This stuff will only stream. Did i get it right? Why would i need to install new distro just for streaming?
What i get from the news. You have SteamOS that streams your game from another PC that has installed Windows/Mac. Thats not really helpful or game changing. I thought they'll make some SDK or some special offering to lure out big companies for making native Linux games.