Is SteamOS the Start of a Living Room Destabilization?

Steve Anderson : End Game
Steve Anderson
The Video Store Guy
| The video game industry has gone from a mole hill to a mountain in no time flat, Chris DiMarco is your Sherpa as you endeavor to scale Mount “Everquest”

Is SteamOS the Start of a Living Room Destabilization?

The idea of a PC in the living room is really nothing new. Why should it be? PCs these days connect to an HD television just as easily as a monitor thanks to included HDMI ports, and a computer can access Hulu Plus and Netflix as easy as anything else can. But the idea of a PC in the living room, while not necessarily novel, hasn't really caught on. That's a development Valve would likely like to change with the announcement of SteamOS.

SteamOS starts with a Linux base, and looks to make it easier to stream--music, television, movies, and Windows and Mac games based on the platform running SteamOS--from a computer to a larger screen. Valve notes that right now it's working on improving audio performance and reducing input latency, and several major game developers are already factoring SteamOS into various considerations.

The part that has a lot of gamers, meanwhile, on edge is the likely developing console known as the Steam Box, a device that's likely to use SteamOS to deliver what amounts to Steam service—and that's the combination that may make the upcoming console games season a lot more interesting.

What some have suggested that the Steam Box may end up doing is about like bringing PC gaming to the console. No need to noodle around with the internals, no need to fiddle around with files and storage and the like; an experience that offers the varied gaming of the PC—and the huge array of games already found therein on places like, you guessed it, Steam—and puts it right in the living room for easy access. There are, for many gamers (like myself, actually) two critical points when it comes to PC gaming: ease of use and access to titles. PC gaming offers a wide array of titles, but has not been the greatest when it comes to ease of use. Ask PC gamers about PC gaming in the mid-1990s sometime, an era of config.sys and autoexec.bat files, of scrutinizing the sides of boxes to see if that brand new game will even work on a current PC, and then trying to figure out the controls that spread across a keyboard and mouse. Then try moving all that to the living room, with a couch, and see why console gaming's caught on. But if the Steam Box can put all the fun of Steam into something as easy to use as a console system, then it may well have just the experience gamers have been craving for decades.

While the Steam Box hasn't been announced yet, there are two more announcements set to arrive this week. SteamOS may not be what gamers have been waiting for, but there's every likelihood that Steam will be a major part of the gaming experience in the not too distant future.
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