A few days ago Valve announced SteamOS, and now the company has announced new hardware that will be powered by the operating system known as Steam Machines. They are basically modified PCs that allow players to play on their TV. Steam Machines will enter beta testing this year, and Valve has announced plans to distribute about 300 of these machines to players who sign up and are selected by Valve to participate in the beta test.

According to Valve, players can play hundreds of games natively during the beta. For 2014, Valve expects a multitude of different Steam Machines to choose, which are manufactured by different manufacturers, presumably with different hardware specs and prices.

The first impression

Sites like Engadget, The Verge and The Seattle Times have played a bit with the Steam Box, and it is an extremely minimalist but pretty big box. The first prototype is expected to be not much larger than a current Xbox 360 and looks more reminiscent of a HDD recorder, amplifier or receiver.

The Verge reports that the prototype of the Steam Engine has an aluminum and steel, and measuring 30.5 inches wide and 7.4 cm high. The console has been a design where the CPU and GPU have gotten to dissipate the heat. The test system has Intel Core i7 processor placed along with an Nvidia GTX 780 graphics card. The amount of memory is not clear.

The Verge highlighted design decisions of the gaming machine and it is basically a PC with a powerful machine that fits best in your living room. The secret is simple; Valve developed the case for the parties manage to breathe individually. The CPU releases the air from the top, the source from the sides and rear of the graphics card, and none of them share any space inside the case.

The control has been widely discussed – it simply goes against the standard control consoles. The buttons positioned on the right side, which is quite contradictory to other gaming consoles. It is a drastic change in design, it is true, but the focus is to give the same accuracy achieved with keyboard and mouse into a control. Will the end result pleased? The Seattle Times highlighted the learning curve for those changes of a standard control Xbox 360 or PlayStation 3 to the new design of the Valve.

The controller

The control offers all the flexibility required to work with new and old games, but there is a learning curve for those who are familiar with Xbox controls. As for the command on the Steam Machines, it has 16 buttons, a touch screen and two circular touchpads, which offer, according to Valve, a unique experience of having a mouse and keyboard directly in your hands.

The Verge’s Sean Hollister tested Portal 2, Trine 2 and Metro: Last Light using the control and admitted that “the controls weren’t immediately intuitive. Pressing buttons on the back of the controller to jump, for instance, felt pretty unnatural after spending decades using my thumbs. It was also rather disorienting to have my character move as soon as I moved my left thumb the slightest amount, since I’ve become accustomed to resting them on an analog stick or the WASD keys of a keyboard. It also felt pretty weird to have my thumbs pulsate with haptic feedback as they moved around.”

But it’s all a matter of custom – probably a few hours of play and you’re ready to play anything. Gamers have faced some radical changes to the design of controls in recent years – the inclusion of motion control on the Wii which has expanded to the Xbox 360 and PlayStation, the Nintendo DS’s touchscreen, smartphones and then tablets. None of this has replaced the standard control with analog sticks, triggers on the top and the four action buttons on the right, but have gotten used to these different forms of game play.

Valve designer Greg Coomer says the company is designing different prototypes gamepad starting with a crazy magnetic break-apart Xbox 360 controller with Wii-like motion controls for both hands, buttons behind each finger, and an embedded trackball, of all things.

The Verge also saw its dual-trackpad-based controller, which contained a trackball at one point. Valve will be crowdsourcing controller profiles for every game on Steam, so the default control setup will be whatever people tend to use the most. Valve co-founder Gabe Newell told The Verge that the company initially considered using biometric sensors on the controller, but realized that hands weren’t a good source for this and Valve staff hinted that they were working of a VR headset that would gather such biometric feedback from one’s earlobes to deduce players’ responses to stimuli.

Games

There will be a number of different Steam Machine boxes on sale in 2014 but none of the games will be exclusive to the Steam Machine. The company will be shipping an API for games that uses the controller’s touchpads and touchscreen natively and Valve’s own game development teams are already integrating support into their games.

“It’s against our philosophy to put a game in jail and say it only works on Steam Machines,” says Valve’s Doug Lombardi. “That may or may not have been a good idea given the condition Steam was in at the moment.”

Even without exclusive Valve games, Valve’s Anna Sweet says to The Verge that the company started talking to partners about Linux three years ago and more games will come to the platform. Valve also plans to add other services for video and music playback.

Without even support for media playback, streaming options and limited games, it’s very clearly early days for Steam Machine and SteamOS.

“We’ve been speaking as if it’s a foregone conclusion that everyone wants to be in the living room. That’s not true, and it’s great that that’s not true,” says Coomer. “There’s a little bit of consternation around our most dedicated customers that we might try to shuttle them into a different room in the house. That’s not what we’re trying to do at all.”

The Verge indicates the company together with its partners, will reveal the final models of these platforms at the International Consumer Electronics Show (CES) 2014, which will take place in Las Vegas, Nevada in the month of January.