Steam Machines will be powerful, upgradable and open – the potential is remarkable

http://media.edge-online.com/wp-cont...amMachines.jpgA beta! Of course it’s a beta. It’s Valve, after all.The next part of Valve’s Steam in the living room announcement campaign has been revealed: a forthcoming restricted beta of Valve-designed living room computer hardware. The Steam Box is coming – but what shape it will take (and what’s in it) is still a way from being shown off.The result has been thousands of PC gamers hurriedly booting up a game in Big Picture mode in order to push themselves forward into a list of eligible beta participants. As I write this, 24 minutes after the announcement, there are 10,000 in the list already, and the Steam website’s timing out on legal disclaimer submissions. Valve will be picking just 300 for trips into Gabe Wonka’s magical hardware factory.Mania aside, Valve hasn’t pulled the curtain back on an awful lot of extra hard information on what form the Steam Box will take, but we now know for sure that it will actually comprise a variety of “powerful new category of living-room hardware”, made by a wide group of manufacturers and with different hardware configurations.So why would Valve run its own hardware beta? “As always, we believe the best way to ensure that the right products are getting made is to let people try them out and then make changes as we go,” reads the FAQ, along with the line that its machine is a “high-performance prototype that’s optimized for gaming, for the living room, and for Steam”.There’s therefore the sense that Valve’s own take on the Steam Box is the gamer’s machine, aimed at the core PC user who wants “the most control possible over their hardware” – “completely upgradable and open”. Thirdparty hardware will therefore focus on other attributes, including size, price, quietness, or other factors.

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