2013 is turning to be an important year for the gaming industry with every big name chipping in with a new release in the form of a console or a new title. Now, Valve is also looking to fit in to that list of big releases with the introduction of its own operating system, SteamOS.
Valve’s announcement of the SteamOS is just the beginning of its living room strategy after the company recently revealed that the ‘Steam Universe’ will expand in 2014, and was setting up to make similar related announcements regarding Steam-based TV features that would offer more content straight from the user’s living room.
The SteamOS is a free Linux-based operating system that is basically a step up to the popular ‘Big Picture’ feature. Apart from playing games, the SteamOS also enables users to listen to music or watch movies.
“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 official description for the same states.
“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.”
While the company is yet to announce a hardware partner for SteamOS, it is likely that this will be the OS of choice for Valve whenever it decides to officially unveil its rumored Steam Box – a hybrid between a PC and a console that the company has been hinting at for years, but is still awaiting an official announcement.
Valve claims that it has “achieved significant performance increases in graphics processing” with the release of the SteamOS. Apart from this, the company is also aiming at “audio performance and reductions in input latency at the operating system level.” However, only Linux-based games will run on the new operating system.
There are as many as four new Steam features that are focused on the living room – In-home Streaming; Music, TV, Movies; Family sharing and Family Options. The company states that with In-home Streaming, users can play all their Windows and Mac games on the SteamOS machine, and this could be done by turning on the existing computer and run Steam normally.
However, the most important among them is the new Family Sharing feature. The company states: “In the past, sharing Steam games with your family members was hard. Now you can share the games you love with the people you love.”
“Family Sharing allows 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 is yet to announce an official release date or the list of supported devices for SteamOS.
