As some of you will be aware from our recent news, Valve is set to launch the beta of Big Picture mode which will bring a specially designed version of Steam on to your television. While some of you might already be using a HDTV as a monitor of sorts, this version of Steam will be optimized for this specific task of enabling controller navigation with the intention to bring PC games to your living room.

At a simple push of a button, Big Picture will spring to life and transform the Steam you know in to a more ‘consoleified’ interface. It will remind some of you of the Xbox 360, although Valve has done way with the garbage that usually clutters your screen. Instead, you will be presented with a sleek looking interface that is comfortable to access from a big-screen. Using a game controller, the options at your disposal will be similar to that of the Steam you are used to. You will be able to purchase and play games, chat with your friends and access the internet all the while you sit on your favorite couch.

To do so, Valve has come up with a flowery way to make writing text with a controller easy. While today’s consoles make you search for each letter in turn, which results in the feeling that writing a sentences makes you put down a novel, the keyboard of Big Picture will be set up in the form of a flower. Moving from one leaf to the other with your thumbstick, the four buttons will then give you access to four different letters. While still slow compared to Pixel Judge’s weapon of choice, the standard keyboard MK IV, with a little practice things will speed up drastically compared to a standard console. How nobody else has come up with this goes to show how stagnant the console development has become.

Valve has made no secret of their disdain of today’s consoles. An Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 might provide gamers with a cheaper alternative to PC gaming that require periodic upgrading of equipment but the downsides are immense, not just for the individual, but also for the industry as a whole. A console simply isn’t as powerful as a PC - if you think that they are, than you are either misinformed or deaf to hard facts -and this hurts game development. An average PC is more often than not superior to a console in basically every damn way imaginable. It is no surprise that developers are reluctant to take their games to the next level visually, as well as gameplay wise, or tune down things such as FOV, if they fear that their product will be closed off the console market. As well as that, releasing updates or patches on consoles is a nightmare at best.

Yet, Consoles have their upsides. As previously said, they are cheap. They are easy to set up. You can plug them into your TV and play comfortably snuggled up between cushions and teddy bears. They are more socially interactive as friends will join in and play right next to you. Doing that with a PC isn’t impossible. Yet, it is tedious and thus not very common.

Big Picture attempts to bridge the valley that has thus far prevented PC gaming to gain a foothold in our living rooms. Drawing upon both consoles and PC’s, Valve is confident that their newest creation will open up the PC gaming market to more social interaction, provide us with comfortable and casual fun and new gaming experiences.

That being said, we can literally hear the rumor kitchen starting to boil once more. Might Big Picture be the forerunner of that widely whispered ‘Steam Box’? Didn’t Valve put out a hiring notice for an industrial designer?

Valve, once again, shrouds itself in silence. Officially, Big Picture is the attempt to see how the PC community reacts to such a feature. With it, Valve wants to see whether PC gamers will make use of Big Picture and if they are willing to leave their damp and scarcely lit dungeons for the more enticing surrounding of the brightly coloured living room.

But while Valve might argue that they have not drawn up any plans as of yet, let’s be honest – a company would not just launch such a feature for nothing. What Valve is doing is intelligence gathering on the spot. They want to know how we would use Big Picture. Is it worth to us gamers so much that we would gladly carry our computer towers up the stairs, down the stairs, into that room, out of this room, every time we want to play on our couch? Or maybe we will give our computer the honor of residing permanently in our living room? How fast will people make the transition? How many hours will we spend with Big Picture instead of the vanilla Steam? It is such questions that Valve want to have answered before they set themselves upon the quest to produce the next ‘revolution’ of the gaming market. At the moment, there are no hard facts on either the existence of a Steam Box or an actual development into that direction but we will watch this development closely and get back to you all as soon as we know something concrete. Surveillance mode: ON.

Now, Big Picture will not yet break the console market. Nor will it shatter our perception of the universe. However, it is the first major step in making PC gaming more accessible and suitable for living room entertainment. It’s true potential lies in its ability to give a feasible console alternative to PC gamers and to breathe, with its sheer presence, new life into a part of the gaming industry that has seen little innovation over the past years.