Valve Reveals Linux-Based SteamOS

As teased last week, Valve has revealed SteamOS, the operating system that will power its upcoming living room initiative.

According to Valve's site, "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."

"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 site continues.

SteamOS will tie in with Steam, and "you don’t have to give up your favorite games, your online friends, and all the Steam features you love just to play on the big screen. SteamOS, running on any living room machine, will provide access to the best games and user-generated content available."

Valve says Steam OS has "achieved significant performance increases in graphics processing, and we’re now targeting audio performance and reductions in input latency at the operating system level. Game developers are already taking advantage of these gains as they target SteamOS for their new releases."

"Steam is not a one-way content broadcast channel, it’s a collaborative many-to-many entertainment platform, in which each participant is a multiplier of the experience for everyone else," Valve writes. "With SteamOS, “openness” means that the hardware industry can iterate in the living room at a much faster pace than they’ve been able to. Content creators can connect directly to their customers. Users can alter or replace any part of the software or hardware they want. Gamers are empowered to join in the creation of the games they love. SteamOS will continue to evolve, but will remain an environment designed to foster these kinds of innovation."

Valve notes four new features that will be integrated into SteamOS:

• In-Home Streaming: A machine running SteamOS will be able to stream games running on your existing computer to your TV
• Family Sharing: As Valve previously teased, multiple people will be able to take turns playing games within a single Steam account while earning their own achievements and saving their own progress to the cloud
• Media Services: Valve says it's working with "many of the media services you know and love," to allow "access your favorite music and video with Steam and SteamOS."
• Family Options: Families will "have more control over what titles get seen by whom," likely implying some sort of parental control system.

According to Valve, "hundreds of great games are already running natively on SteamOS," and announcements "in the coming weeks" will show off "all the AAA titles coming natively to SteamOS in 2014." The full Steam catalog will be accessible for in-home streaming, as well as access to the Steam Cloud, Steam Workshop and all of the Friends features in Steam. SteamOS will also be "constantly evolving" and will "continue to deliver not only valuable game updates directly from content makers, but also regular additions and new features to the OS itself."

Valve says SteamOS "will be available soon as a free download for users and as a freely licensable operating system for manufacturers" and is teasing two more announcements this week, with the second to follow on Wednesday, September 26th.