Valve’s Second Big Announcement This Week: Steam Machines
On Monday Valve announced that in their bid to bring PC gaming into the living room they were going to be releasing a new Linux-based OS, simply called SteamOS. While a new OS is great, fact is a lot of folks aren’t going to be going out of their way to install a new OS just for their games. So what’s the best way to get your OS into people’s homes? Simple: sell a computer with the OS installed onto it already.
That’s exactly what Valve is doing, as they made their second big announcement this week that they will be working with “multiple partners” to bring about Steam Machines. These machines will be able to play the 3000 games on Steam. Some will be running natively on SteamOS, while others will work via in-home streaming from another computer.
Valve also announced yesterday that they are running a beta of their own Steam Machines for free. There are only 300 machines available for the beta, however, so chances are you might not end up getting one. Still, it’s some pretty exciting stuff to say the least! To make yourself eligible to participate in the beta, you have to join the Steam Universe community group, agree to their Steam Hardware Beta terms and conditions, have at least 10 Steam friends, make a public Steam Community profile if you haven’t already, and play a game using a gamepad in Big Picture mode. You can check your progress here.
With two announcements down, now there’s only one big one left for Valve this week. No one knows exactly what they’ll announce on Friday, but based off of the last FAQ question in the big Steam Machine announcement, I’d have to guess that Valve will be announcing a new controller that will undoubtedly be designed to work splendidly with Big Picture, SteamOS, and the Steam Machines. We’ll just have to wait and see!
