The first Steam Machines will ship on December 13, Valve said this today. Three hundred beta testers will win their very own high-powered Steam Machines, complete with crazy trackpad controllers and free SteamOS games.
If you won, you’re getting one hell of a computer. Lucky bastard.
Winners will be notified at 2pm Pacific, so start crossing your fingers now. Sadly for our overseas friends, Valve said they had to limit the beta to US Steam users, “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.”
Valve says SteamOS will be downloadable for anyone when the Steam Machines ship, and the in-home streaming beta will also begin soon. We’ll find out more about retail Steam Machines at CES in January.
Comments
8 responses to “Steam Machine Prototypes Will Go Out On December 13”
Would have been nice of them to check their ambitions BEFORE letting everyone in the world enter rather than say “Oh you know that entry you put in for our contest? Yeah it’s not valid anymore, our bad”. Did it never occur to them to look into why so many competitions are america only?
I mean the odds of any of us winning was pretty damned low but it still feels like a dick move to be arbitrarily excluded at the last day.
Yeah, I mean…regulatory hurdles? I’m not sure what shipping a standard PC (and technically as a gift as well) would really come up against. Tariffs? Quarantine?
I do get that it’d be a bit more of a hassle, but for all we know it may well have been “eh, too much trouble. Just send them around Seattle”.
Cool story. Needs moar simultaneous login options.
And dragons. Always dragons.
Now i’ll just go cry in the corner that I let Valve data mine me for no reason.
Oh there’d be a reason, just not a reason you gave
What a bunch of jerks.
Time to pull out my I7 Shuttle PC and install SteamOS on it. Should make a good steam box… 🙂
I’ve heard that although SteamOS is going up for a general release, anyone who doesn’t have a good grasp of the “intricacies” (transl. You’re probably going to have to compile some stuff yourself) of Linux will probably want to wait until next year.