Playing PC games on TV is The New Gaming Technology

The world's largest video-game distribution platform for PCs is at this time available on televisions, bringing a brand new community of gamers into the living room. Last 2 weeks, Valve, the US company behind the acclaimed Half-Life and Portal games, launched Big Picture, a tv interface for Steam, the company's PC-only video-game distribution and social-media platform.The move aims to change the gaming landscape. It will also accelerate a move towards intelligent TVs equipped using the energy of modern PCs.

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The downside is that you have to run an HDMI cable from your PC to the tv. That's superior for laptops, nonetheless it's usually impractical if the PC and TV are not in the same room. But TVs with built-in PCs are a future inevitability, says John Walker, co-director of cult PC-gaming website Rock, Paper, Shotgun. Such a combo would also develop on-demand for streaming of films via the Internet far extra painless. Another possibility would be for Valve to present its own Steam set-perfect box - a small, dedicated games PC running the Linux operating system. Valve is already adapting its games to run on a Linux version of Steam, Walker notes, producing this much less of a technological leap.

Both Steam and consoles face competition from cloud-based gaming services including OnLive and Gaikai, which Sony lately purchased for $380 million. Because the computing for these games is performed on servers in the cloud, a TV having a small set-top box is all the computing power which is needed to play. But internet bandwidth limitations mean that cloud-based gaming can't yet compete with the console or PC experience.

Valve's move will have a massive effect on independent game developers, as getting approval to publish a game and charge for it through Steam is far much easier than on consoles. And you can find particularly couple of restrictions to distributing games on PCs.