The community, content and convenience of Steam are en route to a living room near you. And best of all, it’s free.

Valve is one of the most innovative forces in the gaming industry, and that sentiment is amplified by Monday’s announcement of SteamOS. As a long-time PC gamer, no conversation about the pillars of the game industry would be complete without mention of Valve Software.

From their award-winning and innovative games to the leading PC game distribution and community platform Steam, Valve is synonymous with PC gaming, and the ability to innovate.

Now Valve is at it again. The concept of SteamOS from Valve really hits home with me because there are three things I’m very fond of: big screens, PC games and customer choice. SteamOS is an elegant way to get your PC games into your living room and onto your biggest screen.

SteamOS is built around the already familiar Steam and is a version of Linux. But it’s enhanced for gaming — and for gaming on the big screen in particular. Combined with the fact they’re giving it away to users, and hardware providers, for free, SteamOS has the potential to usher in a new era for gaming in the living room.

This means that anyone can build hardware and software for use in the living room, on an operating system designed to be lightweight, extensible and optimized for gaming. Suffice to say, we here at NVIDIA are very excited.

Engineers from Valve and NVIDIA have spent a lot of time collaborating on a common goal for SteamOS: to deliver an open-platform gaming experience with superior performance and uncompromising visuals directly on the big screen.

NVIDIA engineers embedded at Valve collaborated on improving driver performance for OpenGL; optimizing performance on NVIDIA GPUs; and helping to port Valve’s award-winning content library to SteamOS; and tuning SteamOS to lower latency, or lag, between the controller and onscreen action.

The collaboration makes sense as both companies strongly believe in the importance of open-platform innovation, and both companies are committed to providing gamers with a cutting-edge visual experience.

Valve will deliver a great, open-platform gaming experience, and NVIDIA will continue to be the best choice for gaming on any open platform or operating system, including SteamOS.