Topic: Valve announces SteamOS

Half Life
Postal
Portal
Counter-Strike
Left 4 Dead
Day of Defeat
These are all Valve games. Steam and Valve are one entity. Soon these will all be exclusive to consoles or streaming units using their OS.

That really doesn't prove any point since most of those franchises barring Dota II are on other platforms. Even pondering the fact that these series go steam exclusives as someone with a PC where's the incentive to buy a Steam based Console. Even in the site it says all of these new features are coming to Steam OS and the Steam Client. I mean there are just as many Nintendo games on that list and look at the Wii U.

Valve is a game developer primarily and objectively has a pretty good track record in terms of quality content. Looking at that list the only other developers in the same league are Rockstar and Nintendo. There are many reasons this idea could fail but lack of quality first party content wouldn't be one of them. As for the content also being available on PC well I really don't think Valve cares as long as they're selling their product. Remember that all of this hardware is just a means to an end, they really just want to sell you their software because that's where the margin is. Making a console is just a way to control the process better.

Plus there's the fact that the XBox has done fine despite all of its best selling content being available on the PC at one point or another. They moved away from that later in the life of the console but at the start all of their most popular content was on both PC and XBox. Valve's whole idea is to make the platform as open as possible, that means it'll end up being all of the things at once. A service, an OS and a console. If anything that variation is a strength not a weakness even if it's probably impossible to know which variation will stick the best.

Are they really a primary game developer at this point. I mean there release catalog is pretty damn sparse and is probably one of the reasons their games are so good. I'm mostly worried about they actually have to show games wise. But I guess were going to found out soon.

My over-all feelings on the SteamOS and the Steam Box are pretty positive.
It all depends on the support! In the current state I wouldn't be bothered to move completely to the SteamOS, since it supports natively only a few games in my 200 titles strong library. I will most likely install it, but still continue to mostly use Windows 7.
It's interesting to see what kind of hardware will be offered, and at what price. Again, I wouldn't be bothered, unless there's good support coming in the coming years and at a reasonable price.
One thing I just think is stupid is the in-home streaming feature. It just seems convoluted and unintuitive to have two devices on to play my Windows Steam games when I can do with just the PC. In other words, I will still need my Windows PC no matter how ingenious the SteamOS is.
If the focus is just Big Screen gaming with a gamepad, and if SteamOS is not useful as a desktop computer, then it's not for me.
Well, the future shows us if it's going to be a viable console or Windows gaming substitute, or a confused Linux multimedia machine low on gaming content and high on cost.

@Moshugan
I think you're confused about what it is and what it isn't. It's all of those things but not necessarily all at once. It can be a full gaming PC as a full console replacement in which case it would be expensive and have to rely on the library of Linux titles which you would expect to expand as it gained traction. It can be a low-to-mid range gaming PC in a small little box in which case it would probably be about the same price as the next-gen consoles but with a library linked to your PC.

However it can also be a game streaming box, like a Project Shield for your TV. A device that demands you to have a gaming PC somewhere in the house to play high end stuffs but is more than happy to play a few small indie games without it. Sony is selling one of those for its PS4 and this can be one of those if someone wanted to make it. Something like a $150 box that's really just HDMI and Ethernet....

Hmm.. Well. Today's Steam news were a bit boring.
Nothing concrete out of the chance to participate in the beta for SteamOS machines.
I want tangible info on the OS and when we can download it!

Pretty sure that the download will be the third circle that updates on Friday. Sounds like a good idea to spread the word but nothing is stoping the console train.

john steamOS? JKJK
cool... steam is awsome...

I still hope it is good enough to substitute windows... I'm tired of my old windows 7 starter..... but I won't buy a new windows knowing I'll change computers soon(in a few months)

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

It's the freakin' Steambox everyone's been talking about, how is that boring news?!

Pretty damn sure that the third circle will be a controller. Firstly there's the fact that the symbol kinda looks like a controller. That was always one of the two things it could be, the second being a streaming service of some kind.

Secondly there's this last bit in their recent announcement:

Am I going to be using a mouse and a keyboard in the living-room?
If you want. But Steam and SteamOS work well with gamepads, too. Stay tuned, though - we have some more to say very soon on the topic of input.

Lastly there's the fact that the imagery on the site suggests that's what it is. The top page has three things: a cat, an exploding sun and what looks like a SNES controller minus one face button. First announcement graphics has the exploding sun and the cat sitting next to a fan inside a computer case. Second announcement graphics has the exploding sun with the cat in a living room....... where's the controller? My guess is the third graphic will be something like this.

Technically steamboxes since they are not the only one building them. It is more like android in a sense.

I am guessing one of their partners is ASUS. And I really like their hardware in other areas (gaming laptop, routers, tablets etc).

There was very little detail in the announcement, and nothing that we didn't already know in some form (apart from the chance to be a part of the beta). We already knew they were moving towards Linux, and that the Steam Box was going to be an open, customizable, Linux-based living room gaming PC.

Monday was fine, since it is an exciting prospect to finally learn more about the whole thing, and we got to hear that you could freely install the new OS on any computer soon. Wednesday was simply boring because there was so little actual details that they couldn't have revealed on monday. Sure, I understand that they wanted to give people a moment to talk about the implications of the free new Operating System - and of Linux.

I'm hoping for something tangible for today (dates, pics, vids, download links, game announcements, whatevs), so I'll get excited once there's some new information to talk about.

Steam Controller announced

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

My first thoughts where it looks different, alien even might take a bit of getting used to, but if it delivers and I can play non gamepad orientated steam games without a keyboard and mouse on the TV then awesome, seems like a big if at this stage though can't wait to hear impressions on it.

That's a good one, Sony, now what does it really look like?

...what's that? That's the actual controller design right there?

...oh dear...

How do you play a game like Darksiders on that thing? Well Valve gave us honestly nothing at all but with till the beta hardware comes. This thing will probably fail because you can't have that approach when it comes to new Consumer Tech reveals. I was at least hoping for a Video of how SteamOS worked.

I don't think they really needed a traditional controller when you think about it, the 360 controller has that covered already they needed something like a controller for everything else on steam that wouldn't fit the traditional controller scheme, whether what they have shown actually works well enough to cover that though I hope so anyway but we wont really know until we get feedback from people that have tried it.

Uhhhh, I think my calendar is off or something, it says April Fools Day was almost 6 months ago...

How would one play anything but a FPS on something like that? (And even that sounds perplexing)