Valve is bringing Steam to your TV Today
The most interesting part of that article for me is the "lotus" approach to using a controller to map to a full keyboard. Event at first glance is looks incredibly elegant and indicates that they have some serious thinking talent in there which bodes well for the bigger picture (if I can use such a pun).
I love this idea, and it is definitely the right way to go. Unlocking the TV-playing audience is something that made Microsoft and Sony a lot of money over the years. It will put Valve miles ahead of any other competitor out there (though, the competitors will just copy the idea -- which is fine). The next hurdle for Valve is how to get their Big Picture service to the customer on their TV.
One way to do that is a game streaming service, but OnLive is floundering and Ouya is too far away for that. If Valve goes the other way and ships a set-top computer, that might help but now they're in the same race that MS and Sony are in with their console lifecycle.
This looks good. So, what's the status quo on capable living room PCs? I have been using Macs and a PS3 for years now, but if there was a small and good looking box that could handle modern games this might be an option for me. Any recommendations?
Sounds interesting, I just wish I had an adapter for my 360 controller so I could test it out on my TV. I'll play with it on my PC for now.
I'd definitely be interested in building a PC that's small enough to fit under my TV, but powerful enough to run any of my steam games. I wonder if there might be a market in producing those for people. I assume that's what the steam-box is going to be, but apart from this I don't see any hints of that coming out soon.
Mobile. This is just screaming for mobile. Please let me dock my 2013 mobile phone with 4 GB RAM and 4 Kepler-PhysX cores with my HDTV and let me play Crysis on it.
You dont even need to port Crysis to be a "mobile" game (touchscreen, etc.). You just need to make it run on the hardware using Android/ios.
I'll bring the Dualshock.
> No, this new "Steam TV" isn't going to make our video game consoles go away. It's not going to turn your Xbox into a doorstop or obviate your PS3
Not by itself, but summed with mobile it will: http://www.slideshare.net/bcousins/when-the-consoles-die-wha...
This is something that Zynga should be concerned about. It could be very disruptive to their model. When I saw Gregoire's 'HDMI Dongle' [1] I thought, hmm, here is a way to add value to a TV in a way that doesn't require getting permission from TV makers first. All you need is a decent UI and a social network and all sorts of things are possible.
No idea how Valve is implementing their vision but the idea of having casual games be available like this on a subscription service can be really nice if done well.
Many people already have HTPC's with Steam to run games on their TV. The only thing this enables (or simplifies) is the use of a gamepad. It still requires an HTPC physically connected to your TV .
So I connect my PC to the TV to use a Steam UI, thereby limiting what I can do with the PC...okay
Basically it's just a UI for using a controller while lounging.
What I'd like to see now is an integrated XPadder-style system to allow for playing games.
XPadder works OK, but it's kind of a pain to use. It would be nice if you could set up a configuration for a game once, and Steam would remember it every time you played the game.
It would also be nice if people could share their configurations, and maybe when you buy a new game, it would default to the highest rated game-pad configuration.
Time to see how well this will work on my tiny diy Llano-based HTPC. I can play Portal smoothly via Steam on my 5-year old Opteron desktop running Ubuntu so I hope I will have no problems with the A6.
For those of us who don't want to give Kotaku pageviews.
After using Windows 8 for awhile, I wished there was a way to interact with it through a controller - I think it would work quite well.
I'm always confused about Steam news from Valve. In this case it seems to actually be what I expect when I read something about Steam: the clientside application of their game distribution tech.
So many times people talk about Steam when it seems they are really talking about the Source Engine. It's almost a shock to see an article about Steam that really is about the client app.
This looks like it might twist the arms (myself included) of the console generation back to the PC.
Is there any word on when the Mac beta will roll out?
they could release steam for xbox and ps3 which would stream steam from the pc to that console.
Big Picture + Raspberry Pi?
I personally envisioned this to come with hardware (wireless HDMI) [http://www.chrisnorstrom.com/2011/02/creation-the-steam-cons...] so that you wouldn't have to have another box next to the TV but instead could keep your PC in your room and just transmit it's audio/video/controller input over to your living room.
From what I've heard wireless HDMI is not at that level of stability and reliability yet.