Steam Machines
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Valve wants SteamOS to feature music and video services
Valve wants to offer digital music, video, and television episodes via SteamOS prior to the launch of its Steam Machines hardware, general business developer Anna Sweet revealed during the company's Steam Dev Days event in Seattle this week. Steam Dev Days attendees Becky Taylor and Jose Ilitzky relayed SteamOS's upcoming expansion via Twitter, though Valve has yet to issue an official statement. Developers continue to weigh in on the announcement via the #steamdevdays hashtag. Valve's proposed digital entertainment expansion would put SteamOS in direct competition with Xbox Live and the PlayStation Network, which currently offer music, movies, and TV episodes on the Xbox 360, Xbox One, PlayStation 3, and PS4 platforms. Valve previously announced plans to tackle the console gaming market with Steam Machines, a lineup of SteamOS-powered computers specifically suited for living room gameplay.
Invites issued to testers as Steam in-home streaming enters beta
Though Valve Software missed its initial 2013 estimate, the company has now begun beta testing its in-home game streaming service. As its name suggests, this initiative will allow users to stream and play any game from one PC to another as long as both are on the same network. Valve hopes that this will speed adoption of Steam Machines by alleviating the hassle of moving your current favorite games from your PC to the new device. If nothing else, being able to stream games from an extant computer to another gadget will save users the hassle of having to re-download hundreds of gigabytes of video game data. Invites to the beta test have been issued at random to members of the Steam Homestream community. If you have yet to receive an invitation, don't fret: Valve will be adding more participants to the test as time rolls on. For more details on Steam in-home streaming, have a look at Valve's official FAQ.
Alienware Steam Machine makes contact in September
Alienware's Steam Machine will launch in September, the company announced today at the Steam Dev Days conference. Alienware didn't provide any specs or pricing, but did say it's using a Haswell chip and it will "constantly update" the box, Hot Blooded Games CFO Dave Oshry tweeted. Take a closer look at Alienware's Steam Machine, along with 12 other boxes from different manufacturers, in our galleries from CES. During Steam Dev Days, which is open to developers and publishers only, Valve's Steam Machines team stressed that it accounts for the entire living room experience, not only gaming, with the new hardware initiative. Consoles and PCs have to only ship with a Steam Controller and SteamOS, Valve's Linux-based operating system, to be considered Steam Machines, Valve spokesperson Anna Sweet told us at CES. "Our goal with Steam Machines has never been to force customers into the living room if they don't want to go," the Steam Machines team said at Dev Days.
Steam has 75 million active users, Valve announces at Dev Days
Steam has 75 million active users, Valve announced at the Steam Dev Days conference. The previous Steam user count, shared in October, was 65 million. Thanks, Steam users, for making the math on this one easy: 10 million users in three months. Wowza. Check out the regional breakdown below. Steam Dev Days is a chance for developers and publishers – only, with no press around to cramp their style – to learn more about Steam Machines and developing for Valve platforms. Each attendee has already received a Steam Controller and is going home with a Gigabyte Steam Machine "for development and not Ebay," Tinybuild Games tweets. Check out the Gigabyte box here. Valve founder Gabe Newell took the stage at Steam Dev Days and proposed the potential eradication of Greenlight, Steam's community-voted indie game approval system. "Our goal is to make Greenlight go away," Newell said, transcribed by Hot Blooded Games CFO Dave Oshry. "Not because it's not useful, but because we're evolving." The talks from Steam Dev Days should be available online later on, though the free Steam Machines are only for those actually at the conference. We know – that's nonsense. Image credit: @AntonWestbergh
CES 2014: Gaming roundup
Gaming is once again a thing at CES! Since splitting from the Consumer Electronics Show in 1995 and creating E3, the game industry has sat out much of the past 20 years. Between last year's big news from Valve and this year's reappearance of Sony's PlayStation, it's never been a better time to be a journalist covering gaming at CES. In case the resurgence of gaming news wasn't enough to solidify our belief, the first ever Engadget-hosted Official CES Awards Best of Show trophy went to Oculus VR's Crystal Cove Rift prototype. Gaming, as it turns out, is more innovative and exciting than the curved TVs and psuedo-fashionable vitality monitors of the world -- not exactly a surprise, but validating our years-long assertion feels so, so right. CES 2014 saw Steam Machines third-party support go official -- we even told you about all 14 partners a full 24 hours before Valve loosed the info -- a new, crazy/ambitious project from Razer and Oculus VR's latest prototype. And that's to say nothing of Sony's PlayStation Now and Huawei's China-exclusive Android game console, or the dozens of interviews we did.
Xbox's Marc Whitten 'not sweating' Steam Machines
Xbox Chief Product Officer Marc Whitten isn't worried about Steam Machines taking up precious Xbox real estate in the living room. During an interview with Engadget at CES, Whitten said he's "not sweating" Valve's new initiative. He thinks "there's space for both." Whitten admitted, "I personally don't know how to think about Steam Machines yet," which is becoming an increasingly more popular sentiment. "I'm not knocking it or whatever. I continue to think that PC gaming – the sort of uber configuration and I can change everything and I can mod – that's an important thing and there's a lot of people that wanna do that." Whitten elaborated when a product is in the living room, however, players want to be instantly entertained – they don't want to spend time doing anything else. "When you get into that living room environment, you don't want to spend any of your brain cells doing anything but being entertained. I don't want to work on it; I don't want to feel like I have to know how it works. I would like to be blowing things up now, or watching a thing now. That's the fundamental thing that you want to do." A total of 13 Steam Machines, from various manufacturers, have been revealed so far. The cheapest machines come in at $500, while the more expensive configurations can top out at $6,000. Each Steam Machine ships with SteamOS and Valve's new Steam Controller.
Valve wants Dota 2 playable on Steam Controller
Valve Software readily admits its unconventional Steam Controller isn't likely to replace the keyboard and mouse PC gamers are familiar with, but the company still aims for a future in which the new controller can be used with such complex games as strategy hit Dota 2. "[Dota 2] is a really complex game that uses a good half of the keyboard," Valve engineer Jeff Bellinghausen told Polygon at CES. "And it's a real challenge, but would also be really exciting. To be able to play Dota from the couch is a really neat opportunity." Crucial to this plan is the upcoming debut of Steam Controller API support in Steamworks, which should make it easier for developers to tap the full functionality of the Steam Controller in their games. Even with the new API support, Bellinghausen believes it will be impossible to perfectly replicate the experience of using a keyboard and mouse with the Steam Controller. "We're thinking we'll get 90 percent of the way there," Bellinghausen told Polygon. "Team Fortress 2 players who are really happy with their mouse and keyboard, we're in no way saying that's changing or going away," Bellinghausen added."What we're trying to do is find a way to get close to that performance, but [from] your couch. That's the goal, to get close to that performance level."
Editorial: Steam Machines are nonsense and Valve is cool with that
At 9:30 on the first morning of CES in Las Vegas, Tuan Nguyen walked into the Engadget media trailer carrying two cardboard boxes, each large enough to hold an adult cat. He placed the boxes on a table in a back room and asked me for something to cut through the tape holding them closed. He eventually used his keys. Nguyen unloaded one package, pulling grey foam from the edges of a white rectangle with the Steam logo imprinted on its top, a console just smaller than an Xbox One. Nguyen started talking about the box – iBuyPower's SBX, a Steam Machine slated to hit retail this year for $500. He told stories about designing the box as a console, working with Valve and how hard it was to keep the budget down. He said iBuyPower was planning to announce a second Steam Machine paired with Oculus Rift that night, but to be honest, the Oculus team was a little behind schedule and the VR headset wasn't ready for console integration. He probably said too much. At 11 that morning, I had an appointment to see Digital Storm's Steam Machine, the Bolt 2, a Windows-SteamOS hybrid that started at $1,900. The meeting was in Trump Tower, in a room on the 48th floor. The Trump lobby shone gold and dripped fake diamonds from the ceiling, and the doors leading into Digital Storm's room were French – behind them, a trio of spokesmen welcomed me, leading us past a table of branded swag to the ottoman by the window that held the Bolt 2. That spot provided the best possible lighting for photos, Chief Brand Officer Harjit Chana said. The Digital Storm team was friendly and hit their talking points well, describing the Bolt 2 as a high-end PC and its customers as high-end people. This wasn't a Steam Machine for a wide market – it had a specific, dedicated audience. They knew that, I knew I wasn't in that audience (or that tax bracket), and that was all right. It was an impressive piece of hardware. Both of the scenarios that I encountered were valid, and each carried their own charm, but they were undeniably the efforts of two disparate companies with vastly different business senses, branded together under one name: Steam Machines. What I learned that day wasn't how Valve would change living room gaming forever – I learned that the term "Steam Machines" was straight-up nonsense.
CES 2014, Day 1: You won't believe what happens next
The sun may be setting on the Las Vegas Convention Center, but that doesn't mean Engadget's gone dark. CES 2014's first day was loaded with new TV announcements, celebrity walk-offs, convertible devices and so, so much more. It's almost too much to handle, but don't fret, we've got you covered. We're going to filter out the buzz at the end of each day and leave you with five things you won't want to go to bed without reading. This is CES, day one.
The first 13 Steam Machines
At CES, Valve premiered its third-party Steam Machines from 13 ground-floor manufacturers: Alienware, Alternate, Cyberpower PC, Digital Storm, Falcon Northwest, Gigabyte, iBuyPower, Materiel.net, Next Spa, Origin PC, Scan, Webhallen and Zotac. The cheapest Steam Machine clocks in at $500, Valve said, and already Digital Storm unveiled its hybrid PC model that starts at $1,900. The Falcon Northwest Tiki costs up to $6,000. The size, shape and capability of each Steam Machine varies as much as the price. Find your favorite (or the one you can afford) below.
Take a look at the first generation of Steam Machines
Our own Jess Conditt is on-hand at CES to check out Valve's Steam Machines – custom Linux-driven computers aimed at bringing Steam into the living room. While Gabe Newell's keynote this evening failed to provide any substantial news, we were at least able to check out some of the preliminary hardware afterward. Our pals from Engadget were also there, expensive cameras in tow – so you know they took a lot of photos. Feel free to embark on a visual tour of the first batch of Steam Machines through the gallery below.
Origin PC's Chronos Steam Machine dual boots Windows and SteamOS, comes in standard and SLI-Editions
Want to get the most out of your living room PC gaming experience? Origin PC wants to help. Today the company announced its official Steam Machine, dubbed Origin Chronos, in two distinct flavors: standard and SLI-edition. As the name implies, the two boxes are separated by GPU support, the latter being capable of running up to two NVIDIA GeForce GTX Titans under the hood. Each machine can be outfitted with up to six or 14 terabytes of storage space, respectively, and can be professionally overclocked by Origin PC's in-house team of system builders. As an official Steam Machine, the Chronos naturally runs Valve's SteamOS and supports the company's quirky controller, but gamers unwilling to go all-in on Steam's Linux support can dual-boot their rigs to Windows 7 or Windows 8, too. Origin hasn't specified how much each unit will cost, but considering both are customizable, we imagine the Chronos will range from relatively affordable to ludicrously expensive. The release date is just as nebulous so far, though the company has said it will be out later this year. One thing's for sure: It'll have plenty of competition.
Alienware announces Valve partnership, Steam Machines
Alienware will beam a Steam Machine down to Earth in late 2014, the Dell subsidiary announced today. No spec details or price was given, but the Alienware Steam Machine will, according to a statement by Gabe Newell given in a press release, encapsulate "the full potential of what a Steam Machine should be." If by "full potential" Newell means that it looks pretty, well, we can't argue there. Sleek! "We have been working with Alienware since we began defining our vision of the Steam Machine," Newell said. "Alienware's historic commitment to gaming, their design and engineering capabilities and their global reach made them an ideal partner for us on our Steam Machine project." Alienware will also be offering a Steam Machine version of their X51 desktop PC in late 2014.
Digital Storm's $2,000 Steam Machine is a PC for the high-end market
The Bolt 2, revealed today as a hybrid PC and Steam Machine, is not for the everyday market, Digital Storm Chief Brand Officer Harjit Chana told Joystiq at CES. The Bolt 2 will cost $1,900 when it launches later this month, and the system ranges in price from $1,500 to $2,800. "Our brand itself is more about high-end systems," Chana said. "We're not really a more mainstream type of brand; we're focused on higher-tier. So that's where the Bolt 2 came in. We wanted to create a product that appeals to this type of market as a Steam Machine. Because obviously, when someone thinks of a Steam Machine, they think of something compact, hybrid – something they can place in their home theater environment as well." The Bolt 2 is designed ideally for 4K gaming, with an eye on the future, Chana said. "A $500 Steam Box isn't going to run a 4K TV," he said.
The $500 Steam Machine from iBuyPower is 'not a PC'
IBuyPower built its Steam Machine, the SBX, to compete in the console market. It looks like a console – a rectangle smaller than the Xbox One with the Steam logo pressed into the top – and it's priced to compete with new systems at $500. A few details make it a Steam Machine rather than another new console: It has no disc drive, it runs SteamOS only, and it will ship with the Steam Controller and in-home streaming capabilities. "We're telling all of our vendors that this is not a PC," Tuan Nguyen, iBuyPower director of product and marketing, said during a demo at CES. "Valve doesn't like to admit that they're really competing with the consoles, but they are." The retail SBX should include built-in wi-fi, Bluetooth, an internal power supply, a 500GB HDD, 4GB RAM, quad-core Athlon X4 740 CPU, and a Radeon R7 260X graphics card supporting AMD's Mantle API, iBuyPower's Brad Soken said. Those specs aren't expected to change too drastically leading up to launch. "With Mantle and everything, and the whole GCN up and running, you're very much on par at least with the current generation of consoles, if not even better," Nguyen said.
Origin PC launching two 'Chronos' Steam Machines this year
Origin PC, not to be confused with EA's Origin service, announced two of its own Steam Machines today. Dubbed the "Chronos" line, the Steam boxes will run Valve's SteamOS operating system, first announced in September 2013. Origin will launch both the normal and SLI-Edition versions of Chronos this year for an undetermined price. Both versions are customizable, though the noteworthy differences between the two is the 32 GB of memory, up to 14 TB of combined solid-state and hard drive space, as well as a 40-in-1 card reader in the SLI-Edition compared to the normal version's 16 GB of memory, and up to 6 TB of storage space. Both Chronos systems will include the ability to dual-boot a version of Windows 7 or Windows 8 in addition to SteamOS.
Maingear's Spark is a tiny Steam Machine with laptop internals
Traditionally, gaming PCs aren't built with size in mind, but Valve's Steam Machine initiative has changed the game -- now these rigs are taking up residence in the living room. In fact, that's exactly what Maingear's Spark was built for. This diminutive PC is built from notebook components: a 3.1GHz AMD A8-5575M processor with Radeon R9 M275X graphics, up to 16GB of DDR3L RAM and support for a 256GB SSD with a spare 2.5-inch HDD tray. All together, the Spark measures in at just over two inches tall and 4.5 inches wide in either direction. Tiny? You bet. Weighing less than a pound, Maingear says it's the smallest gaming PC they've ever offered. Despite its size, the company still had room to squeeze in four USB 3.0 ports, Ethernet and audio jacks and both HDMI and Mini DisplayPort output. Unfortunately, the Spark's final price point is up in the air, but the company promises it will be "an affordable PC solution." Spark is set to launch in the first quarter in Windows 7, Windows 8 and Steam OS configurations.
Hands-on with Valve's Steam Machine beta hardware
Valve wants a piece of your living room, and it's taking several approaches to make it happen, not the least of which are Steam Machines. Watching Valve's Steam Machines evolution from rumor to concept to hardware beta has been a fascinating process, and now that we've been allowed some hands-on time with one of these quasi-consoles, we're here to tell you what we think. Before we get started, first thing's first: the hardware beta Valve is currently running is just that, a beta. This means everything you're about to read is subject to change. Heck, we already know Valve is partnering with multiple manufacturers to produce various hardware configurations, so who can say what elements will stay the same and what will change? That being said, we're going to try and give you an idea of what to expect based on what we've experienced.
Steam Machine from Digital Storm launches in January for $1,900
Digital Storm's Bolt 2 is a small form factor PC and Steam Machine hybrid due out this month, starting at $1,900, the company announced at CES. The Bolt 2 launches with both SteamOS and Windows. "We (Digital Storm) are not looking to compete with console pricing," Digital Storm's Director of Product Development, Rajeev Kuruppu, says. "We're taking aim at the high end of the market, targeting consumers that demand the best possible gaming experience and who are looking for a PC capable of playing any title on their new 4K display." We learned of 12 Steam Machine manufacturers today, including Digital Storm, but have yet to hear price points or release dates (or much of anything) for the other consoles. Valve shipped beta Steam Machines to 300 participants in December. Expect more information about the Steam Machines at Valve's CES press conference tonight.
Valve's Steam Machine partners include Alienware, Gigabyte, more
Valve is working with partners to bring Steam Machines into living rooms this year, and our Engadget pals learned of some of those partners at this year's CES trade show in Vegas. Dell subsidiary Alienware and Taiwanese manufacturer Gigabyte are two of the stand-out names among the 12 third-parties in Engadget's list. The dozen comprises Alienware, Alternate, CyberPower PC, Digital Storm Falcon Northwest, Gigabyte, iBuyPower, Materiel.net, Next, Scan Computers, Webhallen, and Zotac, although Engadget notes Valve may unveil other partners at CES, particularly at its press conference later today. Valve revealed the Steam Machines program last year as part of a three-headed march on the living room, along with SteamOS, its customized Linux operating system, and its Steam-optimized controller. Valve's aim is to provide a variety of Steam-centric gaming machines to suit a variety of homes. So far the number of homes is restricted to 300, where the same number of first-party Steam Machines reside as part of beta testing.
