Valve has finally announced the date for the very first 300 Steam Machines to be shipped to lucky users, process which will be starting this Friday, December 13.
The Steam Machines will be shipped along with the Steam Controllers so users will be able to start playing their favorite games right after they get it at home with Valve’s brand new operating system the SteamOS.
If you’re part of the “lucky 300″ then you’ll be notified by Valve today, at around 2:00pm Pacific Time. At the same time, these users will be awarded with an exclusive badge that shows how they are the very first users to experience how it is to play in Valve’s very first hardware piece, the Steam Machines.
In these consoles, Valve is also loading “a number of games that run natively on SteamOS”, meaning that, even if the lucky users didn’t have these games in their Steam libraries, they’ll be able to play/test these games in this brand new gaming-dedicated operating system.
When it comes to the bad news on this launch, it is quite unfortunate for us non-US citizens that Valve had to limit the beta testing of these machines to the US only.
“We’ve had to make the difficult decision to limit our beta to the U.S. only, because of regulatory hurdles. This was not our original plan, and it means we can’t collect beta feedback from Steam customers world-wide, which is pretty unfortunate”
– Statement from Valve
It has also been stated that more information about the commercial stage of the Steam Machines will be given at CES, on January 6, 2014.
Were you selected between the lucky 300 users? If you did, please let us know in the comments below as we’d love to hear your feedback on the Steam Machines.
