Valve Officially Launches TV-Friendly Steam Big Picture Mode 140
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."
About .. eh.... time? (Score:0, Insightful)
Surely I'm missing something. Since I can play my steam games in 1080 over HDMI to my TV already this "new" feature intrigues me. Is this merely a front end with fonts and proportions better suited to a TV? No sorry I did RTFA as I sense it's merely a press release and not actually something news worthy. Please Internet, correct me if I am mistaken.
Single-screen multiplayer (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.
Re:About .. eh.... time? (Score:1, Insightful)