Valve announces SteamOS – a living room operating system

Steam OS has been revealed as the first of three announcements Valve has planned for this week. What many were expecting to be the ‘Steambox' console turned out to be a whole new stand alone operating system, based on Linux architecture, designed for the living room.

Valve has already improved graphical processing and the next step is bringing up audio performance and reducing input latency. Developers are also on the ball, creating games for the OS as we speak, with natively compatible titles to be announced soon, including a few AAA games coming in 2014.

The aim here is to bring Steam to the living room, with four new features set to be rolled out over time. For incompatible games you can stream your library from a Windows PC straight to your Steam PC. Deals with streaming services to bring content like Netflix over are currently being worked out. Family sharing is also going to be included allowing anybody in the house to access a Steam library with their cloud saves. The account owner can control what each member of the family can see and play within the account too.

There is no release date set yet but it will be a free download available soon. The next announcement will be made when the countdown ends on Wednesday at 6PM.

KitGuru Says: Gabe Newell has mentioned on several occasions how dissatisfied he is with Windows in its current state, so now he is finally doing something about it with this new operating system. Compatible games are quite limited for now but over time this could become the new standard for gaming PC's. Would you consider ditching Windows for a purely Steam powered machine?

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