Valve reveals first of three announcements with SteamOS

Written by Brandon Hofer on September 23, 2013

SteamOS News: SteamOS was revealed by Valve earlier today and will be a free download for users and will run Linux, Mac and Windows games.

Valve has promised three announcements this week and the first one was revealed earlier today. The announcement today is that there will soon be a SteamOS. SteamOS will run on any living room machine, will provide access to the best games and user-generated content available. Valve had this to say,

“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.”

Valve claims that they have achieved “significant” performance increases in graphics processing, and they are now targeting audio performance and reductions in input latency at the OS level. Valve has said that Steam OS is a “collaborative many-to-many entertainment platform” where each person is a multiplier of the experience for everyone else. With SteamOS, its “openness” means that the hardware industry in iterate in living room at a faster pace than is available now. Content creators can be in direct contact with their customers and users may alter or replace any part of the software or hardware they feel is necessary.

SteamOS and the Steam client will have four new features that are focused on the living room. The first one is In-home streaming. It should be stated up front that Valve says all your Windows and Mac games will run on your SteamOS machine too. Just turn on your computer and run Steam as you always have. Once you do that your SteamOS machine can stream those games over your home network to your tv.

Valve has also stated that they are working with many “media services” that we all know. They will be brought online soon and will allow you to access your favorite music and video with Steam and SteamOS. You will also be given options as you will have control over what titles get seen by what profiles. If you have Grand Theft Auto IV on your profile but you have a young child who isn’t old enough to play it then you can make it so their profile won’t have GTA IV and they can’t play it.

Then there is the family sharing aspect that gamers on the internet should be very familiar with. The Family Sharing option will allow you to take turns playing one another’s games while earning your own Steam achievements and saving your individual game progress to the Steam cloud.

Valve has said that hundreds of games are already running natively on SteamOS. There will be an announcement soon about AAA titles coming natively to SteamOS in 2014. You will be able to access the full Steam catalog of nearly 3,000 games and desktop software titles via in-home streaming. The Workshop will still be there as well as the cross platform cloud. You will be able to switch machines and pick up your game where you left off, and not have to worry about saving your preferences because that will be in the Steam cloud as well.

SteamOS will be available “soon” as a free download for users and as a freely licensable operating system for manufacturers. More information to come. What do you think about this announcement? Do you have the announcement of the rumored Steam box is far behind?