Gaming: Here Come the Steam Machines

  It finally appears that momentum for Valve’s plans to take over gamers’ living rooms appears to be picking up, ahem, steam.

For two years now, gamers have been teased with promises of Steam Machines, dedicated gaming consoles for Valve’s Steam online gaming services. The strategy involves partnering with hardware companies to offer a range of Steam boxes that deliver high-powered PC gaming specifications with a simple, game console experience.

Now, at the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco last week Valve, who was keen to note that the 2015 Game Developers Conference marked the 13th anniversary of Valve’s first public announcement of Steam, which has since become hugely popular, claiming over 125 million active accounts worldwide, has put the kettle on the boil, unveiling the roadmap for their launch.

Posted to Steam’s online store are a range of models of Steam Machines from their hardware partners, most with an ETA of this November.

Base models begin at $459.99 to $499.99 from iBuyPower SBX (no, I’ve never heard of them either), Syber and Alienware. Steam machines go up from there, many in a median price band from $699.99 to $999.99 with a surprising number reaching for the stars (or users’ wallets, as the case may be) between $1,599.99 up to $4,999.99.

More surprising than the fact that gamers can pay five thousand dollars for a Steam box is that there’s more than one option — at least three at this point.

What about avid gamers who already have a killer gaming PC and don’t feel driven to buy another one for their TV room? Valve has announced plan for that too.

A small, unobtrusive, flat, black box, the Steam Link is an interface that sports HDMI, USB and Ethernet connections as well as 802.11ac wireless networking.

With a planned MSRP of $49.99 its function will be to stream Valve’s Steam services from a PC elsewhere on the home network to the big TV.

According to the press release, Steam Link will “bring your existing collection of PC games with you to the living room. Simply connect Steam Link to your TV and home network and access your full library of games and the complete Steam catalog, all from the best seat in the house.” Plug-and-play, it will automatically discover any computer running Steam on the same network, along with supporting 1080p 60Hz video.

Steam Link’s functionality also circles back to the expanded services Valve has been working on. Last Fall Valve took their Steam Music out of beta and made it available to all users.

You don’t have to be especially prescient to foresee that it’s only a matter of time before Valve might leverage their position in living rooms to offer non-gaming entertainment content. But that’s a topic for another day.

With these announcements gaming promises to make even bigger strides into becoming as important to AV as movies and music have been. Gaming in HD on a really big screen? Full steam ahead.