Steam Big Picture mode launches, wants to make you forget about your console
Yesterday, Valves launched Big Picture mode on Steam, which means if you’ve got a PC hooked up to your television, you can now play games through Steam in a way much better suited to a large screen, instead of having to squint to see text that was meant for a tiny 13" screen. If anyone here has tried it, let me know what you think.
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.
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