Valve have today announced their plans to release their very own operating system, cunningly titled SteamOS, and better yet it’s going to be absolutely free.

“As we’ve been working on bringing Steam to the living room, we’ve come to the conclusion that the environment best suited to delivering value to customers is an operating system built around Steam itself. SteamOS combines the rock-solid architecture of Linux with a gaming experience built for the big screen. It will be available soon as a free stand-alone operating system for living room machines.”

Specifically Valve are intent on aiming the SteamOS at gamers, claiming that they’ve achieved a significant increase in graphics processing and more:  “In SteamOS, we have achieved significant performance increases in graphics processing, and we’re now targeting audio performance and reductions in input latency at the operating system level. Game developers are already taking advantage of these gains as they target SteamOS for their new releases.”

Should this indeed be true then it’s not hard to imagine SteamOS becoming the choice of gamers around the world looking for that extra performance. According to the company hundreds of games are already running on SteamOS, and plenty of Triple A titles currently in development are being designed to run natively with the operating system.

Valve also announced that they’ve got another two big reveals coming this week, with the first coming on September, 25th. Having announced their very own operating system, and the fact that they keep referring to  “living room machines” it seems likely that they’re building up to the much talked about SteamBox.