SteamOS might feature 1000 games by March

Jan 8, 2015 08:00 GMT  ·  By

Valve has been working on its Steam Machines console for more than a year, but things have been very silent in the past few months. Rumors are now saying that in fact the Steam Machines will launch in 2015, but is SteamOS ready?

Steam Machines can be described as a console / PC hybrid running a Linux-based operating system called SteamOS. This is actually a Linux distro based on Debian, but it normally boots directly into Steam Big Picture mode. You can imagine Steam as some sort of "desktop environment" for the OS. In any case, this distro has been in the works for quite some time, but it's unclear whether it's ready or not.

A report that surfaced yesterday that says Steam Machines will be ready to show up at Game Developers Conference 2015 (GDC), which is scheduled for March. This is still pretty much a rumor from unconfirmed sources, but it fits into the time frame originally put forward by Valve. It remains to be seen if the operating system will be ready as well.

Is SteamOS ready for the challenge?

Since the launch of SteamOS, which is still practically under development, hundreds of games have been ported and made to work with Linux, not to mention the titles that have been launched with Linux support directly. As it stands right now, there are 874 confirmed titles, without counting the DLCs. That is quite a collection, for any kind of console.

It's also true that only a few of those games are actually triple A title, but a newly launched platform doesn't really need more than a few very good ones. The good news is that new consoles usually launch with one or two exclusive titles and this is Valve we're talking about, so those games could be Portal 3, Left 4 Dead 3, or Half-Life 3, although the last one is improbable.

To make things clear, Valve won't actually build the consoles. It releases specifications and a new controller, but the building process will be taken care of by third-party companies like Alienware, for example.

It remains to be seen if Steam Machines will show up at GDC 2015, but you can build one right now. Get together a good PC, install SteamOS on it, connect it to a TV, and you're done.

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SteamOS to run on Steam Machines
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