September 23, 2013 by Paul Curtin
For years there have been rumors of Valve working on their own gaming console, but like Half Life 3, they were never willing to give up the goods on what they’ve been working on in their top secret labs. But with next-gen only a month away, it looks like Sony and Microsoft won’t be the only big gaming companies throwing their hats into the race.
Today, Valve officially announced SteamOS as one of their three big announcements that they’ve been teasing and are revealing over the next few days. Simply described by Valve on their official reveal website, SteamOS is “Everything you love about Steam. Available soon as a free operating system designed for the TV and the living room.”
As we’ve been working on bringing Steam to the living room, we’ve come to the conclusion that the environment best suited to delivering value to customers is an operating system built around Steam itself. 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.
But while SteamOS is official, exactly what it is, is still not 100% clear. From the sounds of it, Valve will be manufacturing their own brand new Linux-based operating system that can be installed on computers, essentially transforming any computer into a dedicated gaming system with its own easy-to-use interface like you would find on an Xbox or PlayStation that can be viewed on a computer screen or a much larger TV.
This is obviously huge news in the PC gaming world for many reasons, mainly because it means that gamers will no longer be forced to use Windows and will be able to have gaming rigs that are fully dedicated to gaming without any programs running in the background. Best of all, SteamOS will be completely free, forever, or so Valve is claiming at the moment.
What’s most interesting is that Valve still has two big announcements left… leading many to believe that the Steam Box is going to happen in 2014 with this being its operating system. Who knows, maybe even Half Life 3 might be a launch title on the system! Just kidding, we all know cancer will be cured before HL3, but it does seem more likely than ever that the Steam Box is happening and soon. Guess we’ll need to wait and see what Valve announces in the next 48 hours.
