Beta participants can now share their experiences with Steam Machines, Steam Controllers, and SteamOS on the Steam Hardware Hub. How-to guides, screenshots, videos, reviews, etc. can all be posted here. Thanks to Jimo for kicking things off with his Guide to Configuring the Steam Controller.

Beta testers: Have screenshots, walk-through guides and videos, or reviews of our work in progress to share with the Community? Please do!

Over One Dozen Designs Announced

January 6, 2014 – Valve, creators of best-selling game franchises (such as Counter-Strike, Dota 2, Half-Life, Left 4 Dead, Portal, and Team Fortress) and leading technologies (such as Steam and Source), today announced over one dozen Steam Machine designs now in production from leading manufacturers and targeted for release in 2014.

The lineup of Steam Machines announced today offers a wide variety of price and performance options made possible by the Steam Machine’s open design, with systems starting as low as $499 and top end systems rivaling today’s bleeding edge gaming PCs.

Every Steam Machine includes an innovative Steam Controller designed for use with a wide variety of game genres, and is powered by the SteamOS, a custom OS built atop Linux.

"The first generation Steam Machines offers something for every gamer, which is a critical part of extending Steam into the living room," said Gabe Newell of Valve. "With over 3,000 games and more than 65 million gamers on Steam, it’s important to offer gamers a variety of Steam Machines that allow them to select what makes the most sense for them."

Announced earlier this year, Steam Machines are new entertainment systems targeted for use in the living room and leveraging Steam, the popular online platform for gaming and software with over 65 million accounts worldwide.

The makers of first generation Steam Machines are:

• Alienware
  
• Alternate
  
• CyberPowerPC
  
• Digital Storm
  
• Falcon NW
  
• GigaByte
  
• iBuyPower
  
• Maingear
  
• Materiel.net
  
• Next Spa
  
• Origin PC
  
• Scan
  
• Webhallen
  
• Zotac

For more information, please visit our CES Press sheet.

It’s really exciting to see all the unboxings and we’re already learning a lot from your feedback.

Today we’re shipping the Steamworks API that allows developers to add direct support for the Steam Controller to their games. That means we’ll start seeing games with direct controller support soon. In the meantime, we need your help creating and testing more “Legacy Mode” controller mappings.



Here are a few things to try out:

• When you’re in-game, you can view or edit the current controller configuration by pressing the big middle “Steam” button on the controller, moving over to the “Controllers” section and then pressing the “A” button. You can then flip back and forth between the configuration and the game by pressing the big button on the controller.
  
  
• During our own testing we’ve been making and publishing some default binding sets for a bunch of games, but they’re just a starting point for the Steam testing community. So please try modifying and publishing your own binding sets for your favorite and recently played games.
  
  
• And don’t forget, when you’re done editing them, you can save as either Private or Public. Public configurations will be shared with the rest of the testing community, and like we always say, sharing is caring. Ok, we’ve never said that, but in this case sharing is actually kind of the whole point. So think of all those poor souls who don’t yet even have a Steam Controller and make some bindings so that later next year they can benefit from your good work. The more your tuned bindings get used the more their community ratings go up and eventually they’ll be used as the future defaults.
  

The prototype Steam Machines and Steam Controllers have officially left the factory and are on their way to beta testers.

Also, SteamOS is available for intrepid Linux hackers to try out. At this point the OS itself is not yet a finished product for a non-technical user, but if you’re interested you can read more about it at http://store.steampowered.com/steamos/.

Thanks in advance to the three hundred Steam users who are going to spend their time helping us shape the future of Steam in the living room. We will be posting updates here about the experiences that users are having once the Steam hardware devices arrive at homes. Here we go!

The time has come! We are ready to begin shipping Steam Machines and Steam Controllers to the 300 selected beta participants. The machines are due to leave the factory on Friday!

Here are some photos from the production line.



The 300 selected beta testers are being notified today (at about 2:00 p.m. Pacific Time) that they’ll soon receive Steam hardware and SteamOS for testing. Each selected user is also being awarded a special badge on their Steam Community profile, indicating that they’re a beta participant. In addition, a number of games that run natively on SteamOS are being added to each selected user’s library.

We’ve had to make the difficult decision to limit our beta to the U.S. only, because of regulatory hurdles. This was not our original plan, and it means we can’t collect beta feedback from Steam customers world-wide, which is pretty unfortunate. All things considered, we’re sure it was the right decision, because the alternative was to delay the whole beta beyond the point when we’d be able to incorporate any feedback into the 2014 products. This decision only affects Valve’s 300 prototype units; the commercial versions of Steam Machines that are for sale in 2014 won’t be affected by this. More information on those will be announced at CES on January 6.

SteamOS will be made available when the prototype hardware ships. It will be downloadable by individual users and commercial OEMs. (But unless you’re an intrepid Linux hacker already, we’re going to recommend that you wait until later in 2014 to try it out.) We’ll post info soon about that. Oh, and stay tuned for the in-home streaming beta to begin soon, too!

Happy holidays. And happy unboxing to our beta testers. See you on Steam.