SteamOS

Posted by Astryl on Sept. 23, 2013, 12:50 p.m.

So, Valve dropped this today:

http://store.steampowered.com/livingroom/SteamOS/

I'm actually intrigued by the idea; if games are able to run as close to the metal as possible, with specifically designed drivers and interfaces, it could be interesting in terms of performance.

Also, of course, I'm going to see how to go about developing for this when it comes out; good excuse to replace my Ubuntu partition, since my new graphics card screwed it up.

Anyway, there's two more announcements coming up. I guess "Steam Box" and "Steam Pad".

Comments

death 11 years, 2 months ago

Jeez this is getting to be a little much. Steam wants to be the next Microsoft, own all corners of the electronic world. They are adventuring into the land of hardware and operating systems now? I guess they figure they can make more money if they manage to cut out the middle man, your PC which is running Windows, Linux or Mac. Now they'll have their own software running on their own hardware which runs their own OS.

There are a lot of little box consoles coming out and none have been successful yet but maybe with Steam's popularity the Steam Box might stand a chance. Also i'm not sure about this Steam OS either, this is going to require every single game to be ported to it, a very long and costly process that not too many publishers/devs are going to be willing to take for an os/console that is going to be starting with zero audience. Just take a look at how few want to developer for the Wii U and that's f***ing Nintendo we're talking about.

Astryl 11 years, 2 months ago

Not sure how much attention the Steam OS is going to get from developers, but the streaming feature has the potential to be very interesting.

JuurianChi 11 years, 2 months ago

What's the butthurt?

If they want to cut out middlemen, I say they are good for it.

twisterghost 11 years, 2 months ago

Quote:
Jeez this is getting to be a little much. Steam wants to be the next Microsoft, own all corners of the electronic world.

Wut.

Steam is a content delivery system. They're making this OS to get a bigger range of platforms to distribute content to, thus, making dosh like they always do.

Also, The OS is a linux distro, the kernel isn't proprietary.

Rumors are that they're going to drop a flagship box running this OS in the next day or so, which would be a great move for them. They could super-subsidize the hardware if it means getting more steam in more places.

@Mega: I would hold back on using it as a main distro - I don't think this is built for everyday use, I think it is specifically for turning a box into a console-like experience.

JuurianChi 11 years, 2 months ago

Quote:
I think it is specifically for turning a box into a console-like experience.

If someone can hack it to run emulators, I'm sold.

(Micro Edition) Ultimate Gaming Device GET

(I'm already sold, so really it would just be icing on the cake.)

twisterghost 11 years, 2 months ago

I don't think hacking it would be necessary - wouldn't it just run whatever emulators you can run on linux already? Might need a compatability port but shouldn't be difficult.

JuurianChi 11 years, 2 months ago

Yeah, but imagine having a Big Picture supported extension for the interface that let the user browse their installed emulators. Maybe even allow it to stream games from a Local or Internet archive (Local would be fine, you can keep the entire GameBoy Advance series on one hard drive nowadays)

Acid 11 years, 2 months ago

Yeah, they've been talking linux based for a while. I don't think modifying or running programs will have any problems as long as they work on other linux distros.

I'm super glad they aren't doing the annoying cloud OS thing. They only cloud OS I support at the moment is ChromeOS.

twisterghost 11 years, 2 months ago

iirc you can already do that with big picture - browse custom executable files, that is.

You can potentially just add a steam game entry and point it to whatever emulator you want to run it 'via steam'

LAR Games 11 years, 2 months ago

I feel that instead, Steam should have had a reboot. Started from scratch.