Valve Announces SteamOS

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Earlier today, Valve announced SteamOS, a Linux-based operating system that will provide the Steam gaming experience on your television.

“Finally, 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.”

This is the first of the three announcements expected from Valve this week (you can see the countdown for the next announcement here). SteamOS is a free operating system built around Steam that is specifically tailored for your living room.

“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.”

According to Valve, they have already attained greater graphics processing power through SteamOS and are currently seeking to achieve improvements in audio performance and input latency. At this time, no other improvements have been enumerated.

“Hundreds of great games are already running natively on SteamOS. Watch for announcements in the coming weeks about all the AAA titles coming natively to SteamOS in 2014.”

Four new Steam features were also briefly mentioned, all of which will be available for both the SteamOS and the Steam client: In-home Streaming, Entertainment (i.e. Music, TV, Movies), Family Sharing and Family Options. The In-home Streaming feature seems completely new, and according to Valve, it will allow you to play all the existing titles you own on separate OSes (e.g. Windows) on the SteamOS by streaming those games through your Steam client.

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Excerpt from SteamOS’s announcement page.

Valve will provide more details within “the coming days.” Undoubtedly, this SteamOS announcement will be connected to the next two that are planned for this week. It is likely there will be a hardware announcement that coincides with this software announcement.

See all the details here.

-Game Blog Girl

What are your thoughts about SteamOS? Tell me in the comments or tweet @gamebloggirl!

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