Steam Big Picture mode beta starts next month

GamesCom 2012: Valve has announced that it will launch a beta of Steam's Big Picture Mode next month. The Mode is designed to make accessing and using the digital distribution platform from TVs as easy as possible.

"In September you'll be able to hop into a beta, click a button, and see Steam reformatted for your TV and usable with a PC game controller, or a mouse and keyboard if you want to play that way," said Valve's Greg Coomer in an interview with GameTrailers.

Despite the focus on design for a gamepad however, Valve says it has no plans for a console implementation yet.

"We show it hardware guys and say, 'Look, if this is a useful tool for you to deliver your hardware into living rooms, that's great," said Gabe Newell. "If you want to run it on top of Windows, that's fine; if you wanna run it on top of Linux, that's fine.'"

"We should have the Linux and 10-foot betas out there fairly quickly and I think customers will say 'this is really great' or they'll say 'this is another interesting but not valuable contribution' fairly quickly."

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