Kotaku

Today, Valve will launch the beta of Big Picture mode, a version of Steam designed for your television. That's right. The de facto central hub of PC gaming is now designed to run while you're lounging in your living room—and with a controller, no less. I've tried out Big Picture. It's sleek, intuitive, and groundbreaking in several ways.

No, this new "Steam TV" isn't going to make our video game consoles go away. It's not going to turn your Xbox into a doorstop or obviate your PS3. But Big Picture could be a crucial first step toward making PC gaming more accessible, more convenient, and more suited for living rooms than ever before.

Here are the basics: this afternoon, when Big Picture goes live, you'll be able to push a button and turn Steam into an entirely new interface. It sort of looks like the dashboard on an Xbox 360, minus the advertisements and other clutter that can make that system so irritating to navigate. And it allows you to do almost everything you can do on vanilla Steam: you can buy games, browse the web, and even chat with your friends using the platform's standard in-game overlay.

The fonts, icons, and menus are all large enough to be comfortably viewed on a big-screen television, and the prompts are designed for a game controller. You can use Big Picture on your normal monitor with a mouse and keyboard, but that would defeat the purpose: this is an interface designed for your living room. Because the living room, Valve says, is where most people prefer playing video games.

And maybe, just maybe, if fans seem to want it, and if it makes financial sense, the people who make Half-Life will use Big Picture to create their own version of a video game console.

http://kotaku.com/5941793/valve-is-bringing-steam-to-your-tv-today-watch-out-consoles

Great news for branching out into new areas!

But.. From my standpoint:

Pros:
1) Bigger screen

Cons:
1) No PC control setup (mouse/keyboard)

Hm... I'll stick with my PC.

God Kotaku can be trash. Always Big headlines with little substance.

This will in no way affect consoles

nice, since i play my steam games on my tv with a controller if possible (not a game like total war obviously) it's nice for me to have a full controller interface for steam now and i don't have to use mouse and keyboard before i use my controller which always get me on my nerves to switch between controller and mouse/keyboard

This fits in line with my prediction that only people who already wire PCs to their TVs will care. Still, nice of Steam to throw that crowd a bone.

I wish Valve would consider updating the Steam interface for pointy-clicky. It's pretty bad, actually.

That's it, why not just update the whole interface so it can work on big screens and PC?

Meh.... This'll cater to a pretty small branch of gamers I would think; single men in their 20's.

Oh shit its an HDMI cord ready display. Stop the presses.

Hooking up my PC to my TV is something I could do already but choose not to. I suppose this idea makes the whole process slightly easier, and I would appreciate the controller support, so I'll definitely consider it. I've got a pretty sizeable Steam library but I do prefer gaming on my TV.

Will be interesting to follow how this turns out in any case.