Valve Announces Steam Machines

Monday it was SteamOS. Today, it’s the long rumored, long desired Steam boxes.

The second timer ran down on the Steam Living Room site, revealing the next step in Valve’s attempt to take over your living room: The Steam Machines. Valve is going to be working with various hardware manufacturers to deliver a bunch of different machines in 2014, all designed around gaming and the SteamOS. There will also be models optimized for other factors like size, specs, price, quietness, and many more.

But Valve is saying that machines are very open. In the Questions section of the page, one asked if you can hack the machine to running a different OS or change the hardware around inside. To this, Valve said the following…

Sure.

Valve doesn’t just want to release this thing out into the world and hope for the best, though. They’re going to be beta testing the hardware, and they want your help…

While these products are still in development, we need your help. As always, we believe the best way to ensure that the right products are getting made is to let people try them out and then make changes as we go. We have designed a high-performance prototype that’s optimized for gaming, for the living room, and for Steam. Of course, it’s also completely upgradable and open.

300 beta units are being made and are going to be shipping to 300 beta testers this year, free of charge. If you want to possibly be chosen as a beta tester, you only need to complete the following 5 steps by October 25th:

1. Create a public Steam Community profile (if you don’t have one already)
2. Make 10 friends (if you don’t have them already)
3. Join the Steam Universe community group
4. Launch and play a game using a gamepad in Big Picture mode
5. Agree to the Steam Hardware Beta Terms and Conditions

You do all of that before October 25th and you will be awarded a special badge that puts in the pool of potentials. Around 30 will be chosen based on their past beta participation and community contributions, while the remainder will be picked at random.

The Steam Machines will be coming in 2014.

Source: Steam