PS4, Xbox One, Wii U, blah blah. Sure Valve probably doesn’t have any particular beef with next generation consoles but their home has primarily been on the PC platform. In their trials of shaping the future for PC gaming Valve has announced SteamOS, an operating system based on Linux designed strictly for gaming. SteamOS feels like something special in the making, not because it’s Valve but because it is the first time someone has ever created a gaming operating system that isn’t dedicated to a specific platform, it’s essentially turning every PC into a console with all the bells and whistles of a PC.
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.
Bringing the PC to the living room is their way of calling your PC a console without actually saying it; we wouldn’t want to hurt some egos.
Already, Valve is citing significant performance increases with PC hardware running on SteamOS for gaming. Windows operating systems have been notoriously bloated with unnecessary content that is either meaningless to gamers, or to most common users. One of the core benefits of developing on a gaming console is the fact that every operating system is the same; SteamOS pierces through a variety of efficiency problems with its presence alone. It is interesting to see how the development community responds to the new operating system. Probably more interesting than developer enthusiasm is whether or not competing publishers such as EA and Ubisoft, who have their own PC gaming sub-platforms (Origin, UPlay), will support SteamOS’s new home for gamers.
Check it out in full here.