Steam Big Picture Mode to start public beta today

by John Keefer, Sep 10, 2012 6:55am PDT
Related Topics – Steam, Valve, PC, Mac, Linux

Valve had told us it was coming in early September, but now we supposedly have a date for the public beta of Steam's Big Picture Mode, where players will be able to click a button to have Steam reformatted for the big screen in their living room. Watch for it sometime this afternoon.

Over the weekend, the New York Times revealed the beta launch in a behind closed doors report on Valve, saying the testing on the new mode would begin "on Monday."

Kotaku, however, offered a more in-depth report, saying that all of Steam's fonts, icons and menus are designed to be viewed comfortably in the living room. Greg Coomer, who headed the team at Valve that developed the new mode, said "We're confident in some things that customers want. They want a full-screen experience. They want to be in the living room. They want to use a game controller. They wanna have a social gaming experience. And we have this platform that lets us ship a significant portion of that experience."

Valve is already looking at future upgrades for Big Picture, including auto-correct and context awareness, such as recognizing someone typing a web address in a browser might need '.com', Coomer said.

Everything is larger in Big Picture mode for easier viewing on a large screen

(images courtesy of Kotaku)


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