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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."
it is exactly that.
Did someone ask the internet for corrections? Here I am!
I read about it on the steam website. On the output side it has a "web browser for TVs" which is hardly a new idea and they never work. Just pump Chrome over that baby and it'll be fine.
The big deal on the steam website itself seems to be the input side... using a gamepad instead of a mouse and keyboard. Text entry via game pad sounds hideous.
Sincerely, "The Internet"
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
Nothing at all, except now you can do it with a gamepad-friendly interface.
crazy dynamite monkey
"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?
Big Picture didn't exist last year, and last month you could do it but it was still in beta.
"I zero-index my hamsters" - Willtor (147206)
It is basically a 10 foot UI for Steam that is Xbox controller friendly. It's been in beta for a while, you can activate it by clicking the shiny button at the top of your Steam window. (If you have a custom Steam theme, you may have to disable it to see the button. If you don't have access to Steam right now and just want to know what it looks like here are screenshots of the start menu and the games library
Text entry via game pad sounds hideous
It is.
Co-Signed the XBox and PS3
Feels a lot like a beta for how the steam box is going to act. That is why this is cool, not because it magically enables you to connect to a TV.
Exactly my thoughts when trying the beta out myself.
If I didn't already have a pretty beastly HTPC setup, I might just be tempted to build a custom 'Steam Console' just for shits n' giggles.
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
So it can still be used with a keyboard and mouse if you choose to use the new GUI? Choice is good, and those console folks might like it, but I'll stick with PC style controls. - HEX
Horror & SciFi Erotic Nudes
Great, new features added to Steam. But their OS X client is still the slowest and most bloated software I've ever used.
Get free satoshi (Bitcoin) and Dogecoins
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?
They actually have a fairly good text entry method for gamepads called a flower. You point your analog stick in the direction of a leaf and press one of 4 gamepad buttons to select your character. This let's you quickly get to any character without scrolling.
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). :)
Heaven forbid a company designing a UI that you might find useful, or, SHOCK HORROR, make your life easier. I mean, who wants things to be easier? In fact, Valve should force TV users to load all games via an 8pt comic sans font console that has pink writing on a white background, & ensure that the only input device allowed is a hacked Wii-mote.
The amount of bullshit wank you faux-geeks go on with is ridiculous. Any positive change to a device/piece of software & it's all "I could do that x years ago by gluing a piece of string to a tin can".
have you tried smartglass for the xbox? i have it on my nexus 7, you can control the menu and type using the keyboard on the tablet.
damn i sound like a shill, maybe i should check my mailbox for a check when i get home. Im sure the app isnt perfect but it beats the heck out of the gamepad text entry.
Are you really a complete moron or do you just play one on the internet? He's describing a text entry method. You know, with characters like A, B, C and so forth.
[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.
It's a controller friendly ui for steam presented in a tv friendly format.
The chat ui is especially creative. It's a flower.
They're using their grammar skills there.
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.
And how, exactly, do you navigate a PC interface with menus and text entry using a gamepad? I mean, I suppose you could map one of the sticks to virtual mouse, but that type of system sucks (I've done it before), and is a tad bit more work than most people are willing to put forward. The interface is the key: being able to navigate through menus and text entry (yes, Valve has apparently devised a text entry scheme that doesn't totally suck) using the controller.
"None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license." --John Milton
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?
Mod parent up. The "flower" input method is great! I haven't used it on Steam, but I used it ages ago in a web browser on my XBox 1. It's easy and intuitive to learn and once you get good you can type fairly fast.
...Had this been an actual emergency, we would have fled in terror, and you would not have been informed.
Or you can just plug a freakin' keyboard into the Xbox 360. Or PS3. They both support them.
I used to leave one hooked up when playing one particular game that has you name each custom car you create. Heck of a lot easier that way.
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.
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?
It makes you think they'll be bringing out more in this general direction, right? Like setting up for a console?
http://soylentnews.org/~tibman
Can't wait to destroy some idiot trying to play CS with a pad.
They already have a symbol system denoting if a game has partial or full gamepad support. L4D2 has full game support for its entire interface, TF2 has partial.
Good-bye
it's sad that legitimate pro-Microsoft posts have to be AC and include a 'shill' presumption.
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).
YAY! Now our big fat asses can get even BIGGER!
Existential issues.
Of course there are ways to do it.
Now go try it. Squinting to read tiny text on your hi-res screen on the other side of the room. Sure, you can increase the font sizes etc. Now you have to window-manage, too. And you find that a lot of apps haven't thought about what happens when you increase the font size and the top menu of their menu can take up 10% of the screen (or 20+% if it wraps because the font is large enough).
And, sure, a keyboard would work. Until you realise that the programmers forgot to put in a menu shortcut for that vital function or the error dialog that pops up needs a different shortcut key to close it (and just Enter does nothing, etc.). Sure, they can fix it but would they bother?
The point of "big-picture" mode is that someone sat down, with a big screen and just a controller, and made Steam and an awful lot of Steam games work with it. It's nothing miraculous, but it's not something you can just fake, emulate or expect every application to do. It's been that way since I was using VGA->Composite convertors on 800x600 resolution. Hell, a lot of the time you could move windows off the screen and not get them back and things like that.
Nowadays, you're so used to consoles etc. that you don't think that there's any difference between PC gaming and console gaming. Well, there is. A huge one, that has nothing to do with the games. Console gamers don't want to faff managing windows, playing with bad tab-orders in programs, etc. PC gamers don't care and will never notice.
Big picture mode is Steam targeted at big screens. What sort of hyperbole do you think you can spin on that when that's ALL they've ever claimed?
The fuss is because it's *necessary* and *useful* and because now having a TV with HDTV resolution and a handful of Bluetooth / USB controllers around the house is so much more prevalent than it's ever been before that it's viable to just run your Steam account on the TV.
I don't think it will be long before you see Steam on smart-TV's and their own console. But if they *hadn't* done big-picture, it would always have been a second-class app like any number of Windows apps that just don't care about anything non-PC-desktop.
From my limited testing, it will just open on whatever display you have. What connector you use seems completly irrelevant (as it should be).
I was using dvi on my normal monitor just to test it.
So what kinds of problems were people having with Steam before? I have built several HTPCs and didn't hear a complaint one about Steam, it looked just fine, went to a customer's place the other day to do a few tweaks to his system and while there I watched him play TF 2 on his 55 inch TV and I have to say it looked fricking great, so I don't know what they would change.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
No problems, other than having to use a mouse to pick which game they wanted to play, and, potentially, having to sit closer to the screen to see the list (unless they upped their font-sizes).
This is a different UI for Steam
It's geared towards the 8' or 10' user (sitting on the couch), and accessible via Remote Control or Gamepad, instead of mouse.
It essentially cleans up your coffee table (removing the kb/mouse from being needed, unless the game you choose requires it)
I, as a person looking for a similar frontend to emulators (that is easy to use and will do the scraping of my collection for me, like Sick Beard and EmberMM did for TV/Movies), welcome this new UI, and might start using Steam more again (lately have not been playing too many PC games)
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.
Wow, this is just too funny. Especially the "take just a second to think about the obvious before posting" part.
Apparently wizard is not a legitimate career path, so I chose programmer instead.
Tell me about it. Even people using Steam on HTPCs can still stick with the classic keyboard + mouse interface if they choose. I wouldn't want to do any "hardcore PC gaming" in my living room anyway, but this sounds great for casual and indie games.
Apparently wizard is not a legitimate career path, so I chose programmer instead.
It's like a media center interface for Steam. It makes it more comfortable to use the software on an HTPC, where you might be sitting as far as 10 feet away from the display and probably not want to have a keyboard + mouse laying around.
Apparently wizard is not a legitimate career path, so I chose programmer instead.
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.
Props to Valve for slightly improving their product and some how getting news websites everywhere to recognize this as revolutionary.
Perhaps they took lessons from Apple.
1999 called, it wants it's argument back.
There are these things called USB ports, they let you plug keyboards into them The PS2, PS3, Xbox 360, Wii and Wii U all have them. There is also this thing called Bluetooth that also lets you connect keyboards wirelessly. There are also these things called "chatpads" which attach directly to the controller and are similar to keyboards on some cell phones.
Text entry on consoles hasn't been an issue in over 10 years.
Yeah but those are for ppl too stupid to game on the PC so who cares?
That seems a funny thing to say when PC and console gamers are playing the same games.
Sony's XrossMediaBar is actually 9 years old, it was first used in the PSX, SCEJ's Japan-only PS2/DVR combo device.
XMB won an Emmy in 2006 you know, and I don't think it wastes space at all, at least it doesn't on my TV. Are you using SDTV?
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?
But unless you are playing casual games only you are still gonna need the keyboard and mouse, right? Sure more games are getting controller friendly but when you look at the huge number of games on Steam one would have to be picky as hell about their purchases not to get any games that work better with KB and mouse.
As long as they don't get rid of the old UI to try to force us into "this new innovation!" ala Win 8 I say go for it, more choices is always good especially if it allows more to enjoy the service. After all more users mean better economies of sale and thus lower prices, it means better support from the ISPs, its a win/win as far as I'm concerned.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
Except that right now, in conjunction with the release of Big Picture, Steam has opted to put 30 games on sale that are fully playable with a controller, many of them were (at one time) major steam titles (L4D 1/2, Counterstrike, etc)
Further, Steam is starting to put in icons as to the control method used for games (i.e. multitouch-screen, controller, M/K).
Most major studios don't make PC games controller compatible because gamers don't have controllers for their PCs, having opted for the more "traditional" M/K UI years ago.
Until gamers start getting controllers for their PCs (e.g., if a major game provider starts serving a 10' UI that gains traction, wink-wink, nudge-nudge), games won't start being controller-compatible or playable.
The old UI is still there, but, personally, I dislike having my keyboard on a tray at my couch for my HTPC, and would prefer a few wireless gamepads, a la XBox/PS3
Your making it seem like games and menus are difficult to navigate. 95% of the time they only need arrows (dpad) and a mouse (thumbstick), with a few other buttons. Sure it's hard to play World of Warcraft on a controller, but I doubt big picture makes a game that gives the user 50 spells any easier to use them all. I won't be using big-picture and I play tons of steam games, it's over-hyped marketing for "games from your PC on your TV" which is already very easy to use, counter to what you have said. No one does it because it is simply impractical to hook your TV in your living room up to your PC in your office or bedroom.