The First Steambox Announcement SteamOS

[famousringo]

BasilZero said:

pezus said:
Really exciting. They basically confirm a SteamBox with this. This could make me buy a SteamBox even though I already have a gaming PC, since it allows for streaming.

A noob question incoming.

 

If you are streaming from within home, there wont be any lag issues right?

That depends very much on the quality of your home network.

Wired connections to Steambox and PC? Should be pretty snappy. Though probably not as snappy as a Wii U streaming to tablet controller. It's also going to add overhead to your PC to compress and transmit each frame on top of rendering it in the first place, so even with a perfect network, you'll probably see a framerate drop as opposed to actually playing at your PC.

Wireless connection to both SteamBox and PC? You're gonna see some lag as the strain of sending and recieving HD video saturates your wireless bandwidth. Having only one device on WiFI would probably be pretty performant, I would guess.

This is a defensive move to decouple Steam from dependance on Microsoft. This will help protect the value of the Steam ecosystem as tablets and smartphones erode PC marketshare.  People who find that gaming is the only reason they keep a PC around will have a new option: Get themselves a SteamBox and do the rest of their computing on iOS and Android devices.