Valve Announces Steam OS With Hopes Of Conquering Your Living Room

After a long countdown, Valve, a video game maker and digital distributor, has just made the first part of its three phase announcement which will explain how the company plans to expand from the computer to your living room. So here's the first announcement, Valve's coming out with a new operating system called Steam OS.

The OS is based on Linux and will focus on playing games via Steam, the company's wholesome digital distribution and gaming platform. Valve says that the OS will function on "any living room machine," apart from streaming games from your Mac and PC. It will even be able to playback media.

"Just turn on your existing computer and run Steam as you always have - then your SteamOS machine can stream those games over your home network straight to your TV," the announcement page says. The OS is free and built on Linux; it will be available "soon."

What we did like is that Steam OS might have multiple functions. Apart from simply streaming from computers outside the living room, it can even serve as an operating system for living room-based machines directly connected to televisions.

Now here comes the biggest challenge for Valve. SteamOS is based on Linux, meaning that game developers will have to design compatible versions of their games for the new OS. While game studios are already bringing out games for Windows, Mac, and a handful of gaming consoles, we're not sure if they'll really be interested in tweaking games to work on yet another platform.

Watch this space as we follow the new few announcements from the company.