The mysterious countdown on Valve’s teaser site ended with the announcement that SteamOS is coming, “designed for the TV and the living room”.
SteamOS will work with your existing Steam account, meaning you’ll be able to use your games and friends lists using Steam OS running on “any living room machine”. Valve is boasting four new living-room focused features, including in-home streaming, which will allow you to stream games from your PC to your SteamOS machine over you home network.
Also, much to the delight of fans, SteamOS will make use of the Family Sharing feature, which will allow users to share games with each other by adding them to a list.
The notable features Steam mention are:
- In-Home Streaming: A machine running SteamOS will be able to stream games running on your existing computer to your TV
- Family Sharing: Multiple people will be able to take turns playing games within a single Steam account while earning their own achievements and saving their own progress to the cloud
- Media Services: Valve says it’s working with “many of the media services you know and love,” to allow “access your favorite music and video with Steam and SteamOS.”
- Family Options: Families will “have more control over what titles get seen by whom,” likely implying some sort of parental control system.
The SteamOS “will be available soon as a free download for users and as a freely licensable operating system for manufacturers”
Interestingly, the new announcement comes with a new countdown, ending in just under 48 hours. Could this be leading up to the reveal of the much-rumored steam box?
Let us know what you think in the comments below.