Valve Tackles Living Room Gaming With SteamOS

• By Stephanie Mlot
• September 23, 2013 02:40pm EST

In the first of three announcements expected this week, Valve today revealed SteamOS, available soon as a free gaming OS for your living room.

"SteamOS combines the rock-solid architecture of Linux with a gaming experience built for the big screen," Valve said.

"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 Valve website said.

SteamOS will be "available soon" as a free download, Valve said. The openness of the Linux platform will allow content creators to directly connect with consumers, and let users alter or replace any part of the software or hardware, it said.

Valve said a number of unnamed Linux-friendly game developers are already turning their attention to SteamOS, building new titles to run on the system.

Valve also revealed new living-room-optimized features that will soon reach SteamOS and the Steam client, including in-home streaming. Just turn on an existing computer and run Steam as usual, and the SteamOS machine will automatically stream Windows- and Mac-based games over your home network.

Once connected, users can share their favorite titles with family, each taking turns playing one another's games, while still saving individual game progress to the Steam cloud. But don't want Mom interfering with your first-person-shooter progress? Families will soon have more control over who has access to which titles in the Steam library.

"SteamOS will continue to evolve," Valve said, "but will remain an environment designed to foster these kinds of innovation."

The company has been working to bring the PC to the living room for a year; Valve got a head start with the December release of Big Picture Mode for Steam, which utilizes a traditional video game controller instead of a keyboard and mouse.

When Valve chief Gabe Newell tipped a big announcement for this week, many thought it was going to be the much-discussed Steam Box, an open source challenger to consoles like the Xbox and PlayStation. Discussions about a Steam Box emerged last year, and made headlines again at this year's CES, but Valve has yet to make any hardware announcements.

That could change soon: two more announcements are on tap this week. With its next reveal, scheduled for 1 p.m. ET Wednesday, Valve said it will "be adding you to our design process, so that you can help us shape the future of Steam." Keep an eye on Valve's websitefor more details.