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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."
Nothing at all, except now you can do it with a gamepad-friendly interface.
crazy dynamite monkey
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
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.
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
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".
[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.
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)