Steam Machines set to launch January 2014, prototype gets pictured

After much teasing ever since the so-called “Steam Box” was demonstrated at CES 2013, Valve has finally announced it will reveal its PC, console hybrid Steam Machines as well as its official hardware partners at CES 2014. Hopefully it will finally launch soon after that.

According to The Verge on 7- 10 January we will see a bunch of unique Steam Machines revealed with different specs to cater the broad range of different gamers. As Valve’s Anna Sweet notes:

“We have 65 million Steam users. They’re a broad range of gamers. They all have different priorities when it comes to buying a Steam Machine. All our partners we’re working with are optimizing differently for size, for price, for performance, for all those things you would expect.”

The Steam Controller looks very innovative and impressive to say the least, and is said to be capable of suiting a great variety of different gamers’ needs.

In this video below both so-called Steam “legacy” games and the traditionally mouse-oriented games are demonstrated. The latter type, usually strategy or RPG, has been uniquely modified to suit the Steam controller’s buttons and touch UI:

There are about 104 keys on a keyboard that Valve’s trying to replace with a single controller with only 16 buttons. This is mainly done by using the trackpad as well as gesture-based technology.

Some prototype images of the Steam Machine as well as Valve’s future plans are also discussed. Valve hints at a future Virtual Reality headset, talks with Oculus Rift, and mentions that there’ll be no exclusive titles for the Steam Machines or the Steam OS. So Half Life 3 for instance won’t need to run a Steam OS on a Steam Machine.

There are currently over 65-million Steam gamers of which most are Windows users. Valve’s boldly trying to change this. Come next year, we’ll be eagerly waiting to see if they do.

Images via The Verge