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."

Comments

Re:About .. eh.... time?

[vlm]

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"

Re:What prevented doing this?

[decipher_saint]

Nothing at all, except now you can do it with a gamepad-friendly interface.

Re:What prevented doing this?

[Colonel Korn]

"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.

Re:About .. eh.... time?

[Pathogen David]

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

Re:About .. eh.... time?

[Anonymous Coward]

Text entry via game pad sounds hideous

It is.

Co-Signed the XBox and PS3

Valve has a winner

[Suiggy]

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.

Re:Valve has a winner

[BradleyUffner]

...it's up there with the XBox 360...

It's jam-packed full of advertising, leaving 1/10th of the screen for actual content?

Re:Valve has a winner

[Suiggy]

Minus the advertising. I was referring more to the aesthetics and design choices.

Re:Valve has a winner

[Qzukk]

It's jam-packed full of advertising, leaving 1/10th of the screen for actual content?

I opened up Steam and got that before I even hit the big picture button!

Re:Valve has a winner

[BradleyUffner]

You do realize that Steam is little more than an advertising platform for games, right?

Hell, I count 60 advertisements when I visit the steam store, between the games, Valve Store, Steam Mobile, Gifting on Steam, and, of course, Big Picture.

Hmm.. I shut down Steam and then opened it up fresh. This is the first screen that came up http://i.imgur.com/wviMA.jpg
Not a single advertisement to be seen.

Re:PC required?

[Suiggy]

Beefy PC? There are guides coming out on how to build a $300 DIY Steambox, minus the cost of OS and the cost of an optional XBox 360 controller which you can use on Windows or Linux. It'll be competitive against Microsoft and Sony's next consoles.

http://www.theverge.com/2012/11/30/3706718/forget-the-ps4-and-the-xbox-720-build-your-own-steambox-on-the-cheap

LAN Streaming

[Githaron]

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). :)

Re:LAN Streaming

[ledow]

OnLive for local LAN, run from your own PC, you mean?

It would suffer the same problems as OnLive, plus others.

You would get more lag, especially with screen compression / decompression (which you would still need because otherwise people would moan that it's jerky on their 56Mbps wireless, etc.). Your CPU use on the machine playing the game would rise, cutting FPS (it would be similar to running FRAPS saving onto a remote network share, for instance). Your machine doing the receiving would need to be quite meaty to do the decompression, display etc. in real time (and thus, why not just upgrade it to play games direct). Your inputs and video responses would lag - not as much as on OnLive, but it would happen. Your local net traffic would be huge, which would add to your ping.

Remember, Steam is aimed at gamers and the kind of gamer that has a powerful gaming PC that they want to use to do the backend of playing on their TV-with-client-machine downstairs is not going to be happy with the sacrifices. And more casual players won't be interested in doing it at all, even if they *do* have the equipment just lying around.

Then, there would be patent costs too. What you're describing hits not only OnLive's patent portfolio but that of just about every network display company in the world (e.g. Citrix, NetOp, maybe even some VNC extensions etc.) and even things like network audio, codecs and all sorts of other problems tha t would need to be licensed or otherwise resolved globally, not just in the US.

Basically, it's a mess in technical and legal terms for something that few people would use and, like most "thin-clients", would actually die a death quite quickly as CPU/GPU/RAM increase along their natural rates as normal. Hell, it's hard to justify even a desktop thin-client on technical or cost terms, and they only really win on management / security.

Re:About .. eh.... time?

[sortius_nod]

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".

Re:About .. eh.... time?

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Single-screen multiplayer

[tepples]

[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.

Actually use the controller

[tepples]

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.

Re:More bloat

[Anonymous Coward]

Steam for Mac has a memory leak relating to the way it handles windows (insert joke here). Instead of closing windows it just hides them. This can cause memory to skyrocket.

Re:About .. eh.... time?

[damnbunni]

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.

What the flower looks like

[tepples]

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 media capabilities

[modmans2ndcoming]

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.

Re:They need to add media capabilities

[spire3661]

We might just see XBMC integration.

Re:More bloat

[OhPlz]

So it's kind of like running iTunes on Windows?

Re:About .. eh.... time?

[damien_kane]

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)