Exactly what I want.
I hope they allow streaming through Steam client - to - Steam client, without needing SteamOS. That way I could use my gaming rig to play games on my laptop.
Also the next announcement is lined up with ATI's GPU reveal on Wednesday. I'm guessing Valve will be releasing some hardware with ATI inside.
OK, so now that this announcement is out, we can do some better speculation about what the symbols mean for the other announcements. The 'O' for the first one is SteamOS. The second symbol (announcement coming in 2 days) is [O ]. That looks like "SteamOS in a box", so that one should be about some kind of hardware platform for SteamOS. The third one is [O+O], which is kind of interesting. If the second O represents another operating system, maybe they are going to offer SteamOS as a virtual machine so that you can run another OS alongside it on a SteamBox?
Exactly what I am curious about.
I cannot give up Windows on my living room PC. I just built that machine to not necessarily be a Windows box for gaming or anything else, but for Windows Media Center. WMC remains the best and most-supported HTPC DVR platform at this time... at least for those of us who use CableCARDs products for Live TV and DVR features, including the recording and playback of content set with the Copy Once flag (of which, even simple sport broadcasts I have seen marked as such - thus, I must rely upon this even if I wanted to move to a different platform).
Even something like a dual-boot really won't work, because I'd either have to be very careful about what times I played anything, or I'd have to forgo recording anything at the time I wanted to play games. Which... yeah, that's no solution.
I have been experimenting with Steam Big Picture Mode on the HTPC, and it's nice - but it doesn't complete the idea here.
My HTPC has an HD 7750 with some basic gaming in mind, and is mostly there in case of needed horsepower to drive GPU-powered transcoding if I go that route.
But if I could utilize my gaming PC (which is a beast for a single 1080p display), streaming from Steam to Steam could make for some epic 50" PC gaming action for games that are great or even best-played with a controller.
I wouldn't ever bother with keyboard and mouse gaming from the couch.
Best, if the OS and, at least the streaming component, can work beautifully within a VM, that's perfect. Then, the "localized" living room efforts of SteamOS, with hopefully forced and improved controller support and ease of configuration for games played on it, could hopefully be layered onto even the streamed games. And, since the streamed games are using the horsepower of the remote gaming rig, the restricted resources of the VM shouldn't introduce any issues. Actually playing native SteamOS games in the VM, on a lesser-spec machine, probably is not advisable, but if I can get lag-free gaming, using streaming, between my gaming rig and my living room - with excellent controller support, I want that!
Exactly....I don't get why all these articles are saying "now you can stream to your TV?"
Are all these people living in 1995 or what? The only thing you need to play PC games on your living-room TV is an HDMI cable.
Am I missing something here? You're still going to have to have a Windows box to run most games.
That's a terrible solution in practice.
You have to power down, disconnect, move, and get on your hands and knees and crawl behind entertainment centers and all that jazz... hell no - not just to play a game for a little while and then reverse that process to reassemble the full computer desk.
And then, that doesn't introduce any living-room specific improvements/optimizations. I'm sure SteamOS will have even better native support for gamepads/controllers of multiple types... through the native Windows, directly attached to a TV approach, you have to play with configuration settings quite a bit to get more optimized support for a specific gamepad. Rare is it configured best out of the box.
And the effort behind this will also not only be to stream the full catalog from a Windows PC, but to also get developers to dedicate time toward development for their Linux-based distro. They might have some funky things going on to make it a little easier for devs as opposed to simply "porting to or developing alongside on Linux" - but that's simply a guess on my part. They might not get the dev support they really desire - and this might all be for bust because of that. The streaming option will be great for many of us, but if they don't get much major dev support to code games to run optimally in their Linux environment, I don't see the OS remaining supported by Valve for long.
There's developing for Linux, and then there's optimal code that doesn't make it feel like you are making major sacrifices running a game in Linux as opposed to Windows.
Linux gaming has made strides, but my efforts, especially due to the drivers situation, were never that fruitful compared to what I had in Windows for gaming. Much has changed even in the past year, but... not enough for my tastes.
That said, Valve's efforts could be leaps and bounds ahead of the unorganized Linux community's efforts. Valve might have better abilities to strong-arm Nvidia and AMD, for instance, and/or will at least be able to better curate what code is presented as available in a walled-garden-style package store/automatic updating effort.
The mixed hardware/software nature, however, leads me to worry that they really aren't doing anything on that front.
But at the very least, give me the option to stream from my gaming rig, and have a local connection for a USB gamepad with minimal/zero lag... and I'll sign up. Some games I'd really love to play in my living room on my plasma... and many games, I'll keep playing at my computer desk.