Steam OS
In the first of three announcements this week, Valve announced Steam OS, a new Linux-based operating system. In a move that is viewed as another step in challenging consoles in the area of “living room gaming,” Valve is seeking to optimize the use of computer hardware by releasing a free OS that is specifically designed for gaming. And with it Valve stated they’ve achieved “significant performance increases in graphics processing,” since Windows or Mac OS is designed to perform multiple functions at a time. It will be capable of running on any living room machine, and whether the second announcement this week from Valve will be concerning manufacturers of hardware specifically designed to utilize Steam OS remains to be seen. However it will be possible to change the hardware however you see fit and I don’t see any reason why you wouldn’t even be able to build your own machine and solely use Steam OS. And of course you’ll still have access to your current Steam account(s) including all the new upcoming features, and you’ll be able to stream your current games to your new Steam OS machine so you can play those games as well on the big screen TV (backwards compatibility FTW?)
I currently use Steam for the majority of my PC gaming and I’m definitely intrigued by this. Of course Valve is promising seamless integration with all current machines that you have, and as a result, all the current and future games you will own. The challenge for Valve is to make machines solely running Steam OS to be more than a streaming device for a PC or Mac, and in order to do that they have to get developers to develop games that will run natively on Steam OS. I think there’s a lot of potential here. It allows people who love PC gaming to be able to enjoy that without having to sacrifice what type of home computer they want for productivity because they’re trying to factor in the ability to game on it. I’ll be keeping my eye on this for further developments.
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