Valve is bringing Steam to your television with the launch of Big Picture mode arriving today.

Big Picture brings the Steam client you know and love, including the store and community, to your living room with optimization for televisions and controller inputs. Also added are a web browser and improved text input system for controllers.

The entire store is navigable with controllers, though mouse and keyboard is still supported, and multitasking between the browser and games is possible. You can even sort your library by which titles offer controller support.

The head of the small Big Picture development team at Valve, Greg Coomer, told Kotaku that while Big Picture allows gamers to play in the living room and use a controller, it is not necessarily the first step toward the mythical Steam Box and that the company doesn’t have a “road map.”

“What we really want is to ship [Big Picture mode] and then learn,” Coomer said. “So we want to find out what people value about that. How they make use of it. When they make use of it. Whether it’s even a good idea for the broadest set of customers or not. And then decide what to do next.”

The controller text input replaces the typically clunky options of the past. Users tilt the analog stick to highlight one of eight cluster of letters, then hit the corresponding button for each letter. While this may seem clunky, staff at Valve told Kotaku those who use it are “almost instantly faster than [when using] QWERTY.”

You can get a look at the innovative set-up in the trailer for Big Picture above.

Big Picture mode’s beta is PC-only for now, but a Mac version is promised to be on the way.

Will the option to play in the living room on your television convince you to dump your monitor for good, or will you continue to use Steam the old-fashioned way?