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Valve Officially Launches TV-Friendly Steam Big Picture Mode
An anonymous reader writes "Valve on Monday announced the public release of Big Picture, Steam's new mode that lets gamers access their games on a TV, in over 20 languages. Big Picture lets you use a traditional gamepad (as well as a keyboard and mouse) to access the complete Steam store and Steam Community from the comfort of the couch in your living room."
Surely I'm missing something. Since I can play my steam games in 1080 over HDMI to my TV already this "new" feature intrigues me. Is this merely a front end with fonts and proportions better suited to a TV? No sorry I did RTFA as I sense it's merely a press release and not actually something news worthy. Please Internet, correct me if I am mistaken.
"If you're a Steam user, you can set up Big Picture by simply by connecting your PC or Mac to your TV via a single HDMI cable."
So what kept you from doing that last month, or last year?
Great, new features added to Steam. But their OS X client is still the slowest and most bloated software I've ever used.
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I've been using this mode in the Linux beta of Steam. It's pretty nice, it's up there with the XBox 360 and PS3 media interfaces.
From what I understand, I still need a beefy PC to make this work. So, how's this any different than hooking up my video card's HDMI output straight into my TV set?
The gamepad-friendly interface is the news here. It was an annoyance to have to grab a keyboard and mouse just to switch between games.
Now that TV is 1080P, all computers have a TV friendly interface.
They should consider creating making a LAN version of game streaming, you have a small thin client hooked up to your TV but all all the work is done by your beast desktop in the next room. The biggest hindrance to their current setup is that most people don't have their computer hooked up to their TV because they use it for other things than just gaming. They could call it Steaming (Steam + Streaming). :)
[Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3] are for ppl too stupid to game on the PC so who cares?
Online play with strangers isn't enough for everyoen. Sometimes you want a game that supports single-screen multiplayer in case you have kids or in case your real-life friends are visiting your home but didn't happen to bring gaming laptops for a LAN party. Those are historically much more common on Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 than on PC, despite that HDTVs can display PC video and PCs can use Xbox 360 controllers. Part of the goal of Big Picture is to encourage these kinds of games to be developed for PC, which would encourage people to buy a second living room PC that can play games from the Steam store (where Valve gets a cut) instead of a console that can play games from the console maker's store.
What? you can plug a xbox360 controller in a pc's usb port. that is old news.
I'm guessing the news is that 1. the launcher will actually use the Xbox 360 Controller that you plugged in, and 2. the fonts are bigger so you can sit farther back, such as on the couch.
why just a HDMI and USB over TCP/IP box.
Almost all of them require internet multiplayer
True, online multiplayer is more convenient for people who prefer to game in pick-up groups with strangers, and some publishers have been known to move multiplayer online to sell more copies to each household. But Call of Duty series still allows two players per Xbox 360 console.
except for some pretty specific party games.
I think the point is to encourage PC ports of these party games. Right now, for example, fighting games that aren't Street Fighter 4 tend not to get ported to the PC. Where's the PC counterpart to platform fighters like Power Stone, Super Smash Bros., or PlayStation All-Stars?
Great. So how do you perform the typing to name that character in the first place?
Using the flower. It shows eight groups of four letters and other punctuation. To enter each letter, you hold one of the eight directions and press a button. To see an example, look at this. I'd add a diagram directly in this post, but Slashdot has a "lameness filter" against ASCII art.
Will this be available ONLY through an HDMI cable?
I'm at work, so I can't quite fire it up to check yet. I play games on a 32" LCDTV, but its connected via DVI, since I prefer my PC speakers over the TV's. I know that HDMI has more technology than a simple DVI (HDCP or something?) so Steam could easily tell if it was HDMI or DVI.
I know I can just maximize Steam, but basically if I want the new interface, will I have to do the tiresome, horrible work of switching out a single cable? That is a travesty.
Hopefully its better than the PS3's interface, that thing is a 6 year old, slow as hell abomination that wastes space. Sony is probably afraid to touch it though and blow up their precious memory balance they currently have going.
It's good marketing, but the thing is that anyone could already connect their computer to their TV and there are already ways to make a controller act like a keyboard. The youtube video for Big Picture received way too much attention for what amounts to a patch to allow controllers to be used without a third party app. Props to Valve for slightly improving their product and some how getting news websites everywhere to recognize this as revolutionary.
They need to add the ability to browse my media library and access internet media content since gaming on a console is becoming secondary to media.
It would be even more awesome if you could use a beefy machine as a server of sorts by allowing multiple instances running at once so at multiple people can game at once with one computer.
So something like NComputing thin clients? They had those at the last place I worked, and they were slow to respond to keypresses and mouse movements. We replaced them with cheap Ubuntu boxes for accessing our internal web applications, which freed up the Windows boxes for people who really needed access to Access. I'd rather buy or build a second PC, put it in my living room, connect its HDMI out to the HDTV's HDMI in, plug three Xbox 360 Controllers into the PC, and start Trine.
The biggest hindrance to their current setup is that most people don't have their computer hooked up to their TV because they use it for other things than just gaming.
I'd have to disagree: the biggest hindrance is that "computer" is singular. Instead of buying a PC for the computer desk and an Xbox 360 for the TV, why not buy a PC for the computer desk and a PC for the TV?
What about Valve in Tuesday?
Typing on a gamepad sucks. Period. That said, the typing mechanism in Steam for the gamepad sucks considerably less than anything else I've tried (post learning curve).
The big picture mode is definitely a welcome addition. Now that this has officially been released, if you're looking for PC games that have a local coop or local multiplayer mode, here's about 150 of them: http://pccouchcoop.com
I dunno, cost?
When the PlayStation 3 came out, it cost five hundred ninety-nine U.S. dollars. Nowadays, the PlayStation 3 is much cheaper, but so is a $300 PC.
Big Picture is pretty, controller-friendly and, imo, a great user experience... or, it would be if:
a) it didn't flatline one of my cores whilst it's active
b) every single trailer on it didn't crash within a few seconds of starting. I'm not alone on this -- there's a (small) thread on the steam forums.
These problems have been here during the beta and persist now that it's live.
Besides what's the point of using an HTPC steambox if you're just going to play the same stuff that you can play on the PS3/360.
Three reasons. First, not everyone's "just going to play the same stuff that you can play on the PS3/360". If you believe hairyfeet, there are plenty of games on Steam that are optimized for HTPCs and unavailable on PS3 or 360. Second, even cross-platform games tend to be cheaper on Steam. Third, in countries that have Hulu or foreign counterparts, I'm told a lot of videos are still licensed for playback only on PCs, not "devices". Has this changed?
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