Recap: Valve's trio of Steam Box announcements
Valve took its time delivering three announcements this week, each related to the long-rumored Steam Box. Since March 2012, Valve has seesawed on the existence of a Steam-based piece of hardware, but one thing has remained constant: If the Steam Box existed, it would run on Linux. Here we present a rundown of the week's major news, and some thoughts on Valve's living room strategy.
On Monday, Valve unveiled SteamOS, a Linux-based operating system designed to stream games, music, TV and movies from a PC and to a living room screen, with native Linux games.
On Wednesday, Steam Box was officially announced as Steam Machines, a series of different boxes for varying player needs, all running SteamOS.
On Friday, Valve revealed its Steam Controller, a gamepad with trackpads in the place of analog sticks, attempting to bring keyboard-and-mouse gaming to the couch
Valve is sending out 300 Steam Machines and controllers (sans a few features) to Steam users in a beta program.
