This entire week, Valve and company have announced plans for expanding the PC gaming experience beyond the traditional mouse and keyboard configuration by bringing the PC into the living room.
The series of announcements have come in three stages, no two were released on the same day and there were 48 hours separating each release. The first came in the form of the new SteamOS, which will be a Linux powered operating system designed specifically for the Steam platform. However, Valve did announce that the operating system was designed with hackers in mind and they encourage the community to tear it apart and make it better. Since this is an OS pointed directly at gaming, Valve engineers have been able to make great strides in graphic processing with the help of AMD and Nvidia while also focusing on audio performance to reduce input latency at the operating system level.
The second announcement was one that has been long anticipated by the Steam community, Steam Machines. These will be computers with a consistent set of hardware that will run SteamOS and provide one of the best PC gaming experiences. There will be many different machines to choose from, and while no official specs have been released as of yet, we can only assume that means there will be everything from ultra portable boxes to top tier gaming rigs.
The third and final announcement came in the form of the Steam Controller. The controller is like nothing that anyone has ever seen before and has some pretty interesting features associated with it. The thumb sticks are not physical buttons, but rather trackpads that can act as a single button. As a PC gamer, it is hard to imagine that a trackpad could ever replace the precision of a tradition mouse. Valve has promised, however, that each trackpad has a very high fidelity which almost matches the resolution precision of a mouse. There is also a large touch screen right in the middle of the controller that can be programmed by game developers to do, well, just about anything. The whole controller can be reprogrammed at a game-by-game basis which will allow for some very interesting new gaming experiences.
With these three new announcements, it seems that Valve is pushing for a more direct competition against living room consoles. While some will argue that PC gaming has always been a direct competitor with the likes of Microsoft's Xbox and Sony's PlayStation, others will say that PC gamers are in a league of their own. The push for a more affordable and compact gaming computer will definitely narrow the gap in that debate, and with the backing of the largest PC gaming community there is literally no end to the development process. The one thing that Valve will always have over the big companies is that while the others stay in their traditional ways with simple hardware improvements, Valve is innovating and pushing the boundaries of traditional thinking.
Steam Living Room
Saturday, September 28, 2013
Welcome to the new Landmark Tech News blog! On this blog I will be covering all of the new tech releases, speculation, and rumors as provided by companies and you, the reader! I hope that we can have a great time together and I look forward to making this blog your go-to place for all things tech related. Let's have some fun!
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