Big Picture Mode is out. Just enable Beta Mode in Steam in the setting panels. I had a quick look/first impression, and all I can say, is that it's simply a media center like interface, with a very slow performing web browser to surf the web, but shows pages correctly. Menu navigation isn't all that intuitive when you try to switch between web browser and game list, but could be worse. And needs improving at several places. Could be worse. But a constant layout for all sections, would have been much nicer. Menu navigation sound is proudly super duper compressed, and that's annoying. My phone sounds better.
Because the Steam on Mac is full of DirectX titles too, right . They port their own games, plus some indies do it too and maybe in time others will join as well. If not, then at least for time being they can get some extra money from linux users hungry for some gaming .
It probably uses the same browser engine as the in-built overlay, and the last time I tried using that I nearly stabbed my keyboard in frustration. It was quicker to alt-tab out of the game and use a real web browser. Don't get me wrong, I'm all for it! If I could run all of my Steam games under Linux, I'd abandon Windows altogether - that really is the only thing holding me back now. I'm already considering moving to Linux pretty much natively and keeping a small Windows installation for games; I just need a few terabytes of spare disk space to back up, which I don't have at the mo! It just doesn't make that much sense for Valve to put all this effort into Linux and not take it any further than a custom distro or a Linux version of Steam. Like it or not, Linux is still a tiny tiny percentage of overall desktop OS's, so there really isn't that much of a market for it... Which is why I'm convinced that their plans are more than just a snazzy hardware controller and a Linux version of Steam.
Once again, they will port their own games, the Steam client, the Steamworks API library. The rest is up to others, to convert their games to Linux - indie developers will be pretty quick, the question is about the other big publishers. And OS X market share is only 6%, Linux is 1%, so in that way OS X is a marginal desktop OS as well.
I had a feeling the web browsing element would be slow. After all regular steam is just a big slow web browser.
Not impressed with the "big picture" at all, the game pictures are really low quality, surprised that B on the 360pad doesnt take you back as well. It really does need a lot of polishing off but its only in beta so it could improve a lot over the next few months
I really really really hope if they do make an official Steam console... they allow the OS or at least all the major components of it to be installed on a regular Linux distribution on any PC. People are moaning that the Windows Market place isn't open enough for gaming (RT especially)... I'd hate to see Valve be the contradiction.
