Valve has finally set a date for the general availability of its Steam Machines and vital hardware accessories. The living room targeting linux gaming PC and unique controller will hit retail on 10th November this year. The Steam Link streaming box will also be made available at that time.
For those of you prepared to stick your necks out, it is possible to get your hands on Steam Machines hardware quite a bit earlier than 10th November. Valve says that a "limited quantity" of machines and accessories can be had from 16th October, as long as you commit to a pre-order.
The first two Steam Machine partners that have thrown their hats in the ring include Alienware and Syber. The Alienware design is said to be powerful enough to run Steam's 'massive library' of over 1000 games at 1080p on your HDTV, thanks to its Intel Core processor and Nvidia GeForce GTX GPU with 2GB of GDDR5 memory. It starts at $449. Taking a slightly different tack, Syber offers three different base machines ranging from $499 to $1419 taking you from 1080p gaming to 4K gaming. Syber's offerings are also fully upgradable using standard off-the shelf PC parts including hardware such as the Nvidia GTX 980 graphics card.
Valve says that more Steam Machines are on their way and perhaps all those companies that got ready for the previous false start(s) will wade in again. Elsewhere on the Steam site it was evident that there were a few more Steam Machines waiting in the wings. See the screen grab above.
The Steam Controller is featured as being available at the same time(s) as the Linux based PC itself. This is a vital part of Valve's vision of living room gaming. It is up for pre-order at £39.99. Have a look at Valve's new Steam Controller introductory video below and see what you think.
Valve's Steam Link box is also coming in the same timescale as the above mentioned hardware. This box allows you to play your Steam games on any TV in the house when connected to your home network. It will automatically discover any computer running Steam in your house and then you can grab a controller and play your library from your sofa. The Steam Link is available on its own for £39.99 or bundled with a Steam Controller for £79.98 – saving you nothing but a few seconds of ordering time.
Currently there is no pre-order or pricing information concerning consumer edition availability of the SteamVR headset, made by HTC. On the product page Valve simply states that the consumer edition headset will become available "later in 2015".
