This is the week of Steam! With the announcement of Valves dedicated OS on Monday, gamers and journalists alike started speculating right away what the next two would be. Well speculate no further! Valve has officially announced dedicated hardware, lets take a look at Steam Machines!

Valve is finally getting into the home “console” market. They are going to be partnering with hardware manufacturers (who those are have yet to be released) to create dedicated Steam Machines that will run Steam OS. There will be multiple devices available come 2014, but they have created a Beta device as a proof of concept. No pictures of the Beta, but they have listed instructions so that you could be one out of 300 people lucky enough to test the hardware. Instructions are as followed:

THE HARDWARE BETA ELIGIBILITY QUEST:

Before October 25, log in to Steam and then visit your quest page to track your current status towards beta test eligibility

1. Join the Steam Universe community group

2. Agree to the Steam Hardware Beta Terms and Conditions

3. Make 10 Steam friends (if you haven’t already)

4. Create a public Steam Community profile (if you haven’t already)

5. Play a game using a gamepad in Big Picture mode

No pictures of the Steam Machine has been released yet, but Valve is saying that it will be open and upgradeable (want to tear it apart and put a different OS on it? Sure go ahead!), and that there will be several options to choose from. They also state that this will NOT interfere with their PC market and you will not be forced to purchase additional hardware to continue using Steam.

This is a HUGE step in the direction for Valve. They’ve been a huge thorn in the side of home consoles for almost a decade now, and with Gabe Newells public disdain for companies like Microsoft, it’s obvious he wants to create a truly open platform.

Thoughts? Well, I am of course excited being a Steam/Valve fanboy, but at the same time I have to step back and look at this objectively. The concept of open gaming, much like Communism, sounds great on paper but in practice is hasn’t done so well. The Ouya is a perfect example of the “Open Gaming” platform and that hasn’t done to well. I believe Valve has the foresight to not fall into the same hole that Ouya did. A Steam Machine will of course lock you into Valves ecosystem, so those giant AAA titles like Battlefield and Need For Speed will still require you to saunter into the computer room and fire up Origin.

As more information is released we will be sure to keep you updated. Be sure to come back FRIDAY for the final bit of news from the company. What do you think it will be? Lets hope Half-Life 3, but with our luck it will be Ricochet 2.

UPDATE:

After some exploration I found THIS patent from valve. It depicts a controller/gamepad with user swappable components.  It looks a LOT like the third picture, don’t you agree?

Still we can only speculate as to what will be presented Friday, but this looks like a pretty serious contender.