Tech companies are waging “a war for the living room,” said Erik Kain in Forbes.com. What was once a battle limited to video game consoles has escalated to one in which “each player is attempting to create a living room ecosystem of connectivity.” The well-known contenders—Microsoft, Nintendo, and Sony—are still in the game, but now there are newcomers, like Nvidia, Samsung, Apple, and Valve. “These players want you to fashion your entire entertainment ecosystem out of their products, from phones to set-top boxes, to tablets, to who knows what else.” But they have different approaches. SteamOS, the new operating system from Valve, is “devoted almost solely to games,” and hard-core gamers are welcoming it as “a way to get away from Windows, build cheaper PCs, and have theoretically more game-optimized systems.”
With SteamOS, Valve is “spooling up a tactical nuke and painting a target on Microsoft’s, Sony’s, and Nintendo’s backs,” said Matt Peckham in Time.com. In a direct challenge to the -makers of traditional game consoles, SteamOS can run on different machines, much as Windows 7 runs on different PCs. The Steam gaming community, already 50 million users strong, can stock up on better storage, memory, video cards, and new peripherals instead of waiting for an established gaming company to launch a new console version. But that could have a downside, too. With consoles, “developers can predict exactly what sort of experience players are going to have.” Different users running SteamOS on different machines—with different configurations—could pose a challenge for game developers and for players confronting “a potentially confusing array of third-party” Steam machines. “Welcome back to the paralyzing world of choices.”
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