Valve announced earlier today that SteamOS hardware is currently in development. According to the announcement page, there will be “a variety of Steam gaming machines” available in 2014.
“We want you to be able to choose the hardware that makes sense for you, so we are working with multiple partners to bring a variety of Steam gaming machines to market during 2014, all of them running SteamOS.”
Today at 1 PM (EST), Valve made its second announcement expected this week. Many speculated after the announcement of SteamOS, a Linux-based operating system aimed to bring Steam to the living room, would be followed by a hardware announcement. What is unexpected is Valve’s announcement that they plan to bring, not just one, but multiple Steam boxes to market next year. No details were given about individual specifications and the number of machines to choose from is yet to be known.
“This year we’re shipping just 300 of these boxes to Steam users, free of charge, for testing.”
In addition to this, Valve announced that 300 Steam users will be selected to receive and test a working prototype of one of their machines. In order to be selected you must complete “the hardware beta eligibility quest,” which consists of five steps. The quest must be completed before October 25th of this year, as it will be locked on that date. Approximately 30 steam users will be selected for the beta based on participation in the community, the rest of the beta participants will be chosen at random from the eligible pool of users.
Valve stated that the prototypes will ship this year and that “nearly 3,000” games on Steam will be available on the machines during the beta. Hundreds of the games will run natively on the SteamOS and the rest will be played through in-home streaming.
Many expected the SteamOS hardware would be Valve’s final announcement this week. It is likely that the next (and final) announcement will provide us with more details about these steam machines.
All the details can be found here.
– Game Blog Girl
What do you think of these Steam machines? Do you plan to complete the beta eligibility quest? Tell me in the comments or tweet @gamebloggirl!
