Steam OS and Steam Box announced

Valve has made two of the three announcements they are going to make, and it seems that the rumours were true: there will be a Steam Box. Actually, there will be multiple Steam Boxes or as Valve calls them, Steam Machines. These boxes will be running on Valve’s own operating system, which they have crowned as SteamOS.

Valve's Steam boxes are made for the living room, so we are expecting boxes that won't be a lot bigger than your average console. Valve is working together with multiple partners so they can bring a variety of Steam boxes on the market in 2014. All these boxes will have different specifications, prices and of course a difference performance. Since Valve is embracing open-source you will also be able to build your own Steam box with SteamOS running on it. Valve also states that it’s up to you what you do with the Steam Box, so if you feel like running a different OS on it, that’s perfectly fine as well.

Linux based SteamOS is designed for the TV and the living room, and it’s likely it will work a bit like the Big Picture mode that has been introduced last year. Everything will run in the Steam ecosystem, so you will have all your games, friends and achievements in there. The OS will allow you to stream games over your home network from your gaming machine to your Steam box, this means that you won’t need a powerful Steam box in your living room if you already have a powerful PC somewhere else in your house. Steam praises the OS for it’s openness, and developers and users will be able to add and remove certain functions from the OS.

Valve is also working together with many of the big media services, and they will be available on both Steam and Steam. It will “allow you to access your favorite music and video”, so we might be seeing services such as Netflix and Spotify appear on the platform. Steam’s new function called Family Sharing will also be available on SteamOS.

Valve is also looking for 300 beta testers to get sent a Steam box prototype, so if you are feeling lucky you can try to participate. Read more on how to do so here.