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Valve Officially Launches TV-Friendly Steam Big Picture Mode

Posted by samzenpus on from the as-seen-on-tv dept.

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."

6 of 140 comments (clear)

  1. Re:What prevented doing this? by decipher_saint · · Score: 4, Informative

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

    --
    crazy dynamite monkey
  2. Re:About .. eh.... time? by Pathogen+David · · Score: 5, Informative

    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

  3. Valve has a winner by Suiggy · · Score: 4, Informative

    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.

    1. Re:Valve has a winner by BradleyUffner · · Score: 5, Funny

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

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

  4. LAN Streaming by Githaron · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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). :)

  5. Single-screen multiplayer by tepples · · Score: 5, Insightful

    [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.