Steam announced the first of 3 new changes to their “Living Room.” This expansion to the Steam universe begins with SteamOS. This free operating system based on Linux with be “available soon.” The OS will do a few key things for gaming.
The first key feature is you can stream games from your current Steam enabled PC to the device running Steam OS. This isntantly solves my mac gaming problem I use a Macbook for my many BSR related tasks including recording and editing our podcast, the tools for that are absolutely necessary. Therefore I have a gaming PC in my office, and a Macbook with me as I head around. With SteamOS I can dual boot my Macbook and play any game configured for streaming from my PC on my laptop provided I’m on the same network. The same ability applies to people with PC’s in their living room attached to a television, making the creation of micro-consoles and the like a swift reality.
The second chunk is the SteamOS all around media integration. Described as a “collaborative many-to-many platform”, SteamOS and Steam is working on partnerships with large amounts of popular media services, so that it may be in one place.
The final zone is SteamOS’s significant improements in input delay and processing speed that developers will be enabled to use. Graphics and Audio processing have also been improved so this OS is aimed to be more efficient for gaming on all counts.
Valve will be announcing to more innovations that we can be a part of in 2014. If I had to guess a cloud-based subscription service is enroute along with their own hardware to run this beautiful OS, whether it be a full-fledged SteamBox or simply a controller that will integrate with the OS fully, I think Steam is on the verge of crashing the console market in a way we haven’t yet imagined. The next announcement is just 27 hours away, dropping at 11 am Mountain Time. The counter could simply be counting down to the OS launch, or maybe it’s the time before Valve rains money onto its customers, or it could be one of the items mentioned previously. What do you think is coming next? What do you want to come next?