Valve Announces SteamOS

http://store.steampowered.com/livingroom/SteamOS/

Next gen consoles are about to get some linux competition backed by a large player. This can only mean good things for gamers. Pretty awesome.

 

"You can play all your Windows and Mac games on your SteamOS machine, too."

sweet, that will be cool.

 

Just waiting for them to announce SteamBox. And then maybe HL3 for Steam box. The internet might die when they do.

 

Looks really interesting. I wouldn't mind streaming to my TV for cheap.

 

This looks truly amazing, a free operating system built for gamers. I'll be the first to try it out for sure.

"TWO MORE ANNOUNCEMENTS THIS WEEK

Today, Valve's given us plenty of promises without many details, but SteamOS is only the first of three announcements that Valve is expected to issue this week. Valve's countdown clock is ticking down again to Wednesday, Sepember 25th at 10AM PT / 1PM ET, when the company will likely unveil its own Steam Box hardware based on the SteamOS operating system.

GOOD, BETTER, BEST

In January, Newell told us that Valve was planning to create three tiers of the Steam Box, "good," "better," and "best," with "good" likely a $99 box that would stream games from other more powerful computers, and "better" being a $300 box that Valve would both build itself and allow partners to build so long as they adhered to a certain hardware spec. On Wednesday, we'll likely hear about that "better" tier, and all the ready-made hardware you can buy to get started with SteamOS. At CES, the company told us it already had 15-20 hardware partners lined up."

 

That's really cool. Giving people some choice. Most console tards will not be used to that choice so it might not penetrate that crowd as much I fear.

 

Yay for linux. I am actually taking a UNIX class this semester

 

Yea. It will give people a lot of control and will encourage people to innovate and make it do what they want.

 

And how many game developers are going to be happy about being expected to port to Linux? Windows is pretty much the dominant gaming OS platform for the PC. Yeah Linux has it pros over Windows, but I don't think many game developers are going to port to Linux too. Activision for example, none of the Call of Duty games are on Linux, and they're very slowly coming to Mac.

 

Steam will probably make it pretty idiot proof, I wouldn't be surprised if it was easier than windows to install and stat using. Also I'm sure the fact that its free will attract lots of people.

That's because right now it would be bad business/charity work to port to linux considering less than 1% of users are running it. Now that its being backed by steam a larger percentage of gamers will be using the steam os (especially if they can make it better for gaming than windows and free) and it will be become more profitable to do linux releases. Who knows how much that percent will increase but if anyone can pull something like this off its steam.

 

That's because there isn't a large amount of linux users. When Valve starts selling their steam box running SteamOS, there will be a lot of them.

Yea. They are just using Linux to create a great user experience and encourage development.