Valve has taken another step in its quest to conquer the living room gamers. The company has announced that the prototypes of the Valve Steam Machine including SteamOS and the associated Steam controller will be shipped on 13 December to 300 beta testers. The supporter of Linux operating system first showcased the machine last month.

Valve started notifying those who had been selected to receive the hardware at 5 p.m. ET Wednesday. The SteamOS will be activated and available for download only in the US by individual users and commercial OEMs.

The news was given by Greg Coomer of Valve on Steam Community, who has admitted it was a difficult decision as to limit the beta program a few U.S. residents’ participants. The 300 beta testers selected through a special program will also be awarded with a special badge to show their Steam Community profile indicating that they are participants in the beta. In addition, a number of games running natively with SteamOS will be added to the user library for each participant.

“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,” he said.

Greg, however, adds that it was the correct choice, because otherwise Valve would have been forced to postpone the beta, which would have slowed the market debut of the first Steam Machines in 2014. Valve emphasizes that similar limitations apply only to the tests and do not embrace the finished devices, which will be sold around the world early next year. Steam Machines and Steam Controllers will be for sale in 2014 to the public and Valve will announce more information about them at CES on January 6th.

The SteamOS operating system is available for anyone to download starting tomorrow. However, it requires extensive knowledge of Linux. Valve advises users who are not well versed with the open-source operating system to wait for later versions and try it out until next year. Extending the Linux reach, Valve reached a new milestone by officially joining the Linux Foundation. As for other features, such as Steam in-home streaming, Valve says the beta for this draw will begin soon.

The prototype units will come equipped with either an Intel Core i7-4770, Core i5-4570 or Core i3 processor, 16 GB of RAM, and with a powerful Nvidia graphics card.