Valve Steam Machine Prototype Photos Emerge As Valve Opens HQ to Reporters

Valve finally revealed its prototype of a Steam Machine to a select crowd of lucky journalists, showing off the finished Steam Controller and the cheap console that might make its way to your living room quite soon.

A few outfits got to look at (and play with) the new Steam Machine prototype, which Valve is expected to show off at the Consumer Electronics Show in January 2014, before beginning to ship them in the middle of next year.

Wired, The Verge, IGN, Engadget, and the Seattle Times all got a sneak peak at the upcoming console with Valve product designer Greg Coomer. Here's an overview of what they thought.

Steam Box

Unsurprisingly, for a company that's more interested in the OS and software delivery side of gaming, the Valve-made Steam Box is boxy. As The Verge described it, "the first Steam Machine is a computer that can fit bog standard parts just like a full-size gaming rig, and yet fit into your entertainment center." A total of 300 beta users selected by Valve will get to try out the console at first.

And according to Wired, it really is a console with a PC at heart: "It looks like a console, not a PC, about the shape and size of an Xbox One with a big glowing power button on the face." Engadget peaked inside and saw an Intel i7 processor with a powerful NVIDIA GPU, noting that, "the prototype we used operated without a hitch."

The most impressive thing on first review is that Valve managed to put PC components into the small boxy console without running into heat issues. Valve designed the case so that each part can get rid of heat separately. "The CPU blows air out the top, the power supply out the side, and the graphics card exhaust out back, and none share any airspace within the case," observed The Verge. Wired's Chris Kohler said he actually put his face next to the running Steam Machine prototype and found it "cool and quiet."

Controller

Probably the most sensational thing about the Steam Machine is the controller design that Valve eventually settled on.

The hitch with moving a PC gaming-centered Steam OS into the living room is to develop a controller that can take over the duties usually performed by a mouse and keyboard.

That means making a substitute for a mouse pointer (which, as console gamers know, thumbsticks are decidedly not), along with enough buttons to replace the keyboard. As Wired put it, "it needed lots and lots and lots of buttons."

It took a while to settle on the current Steam Controller, a render of which Valve released earlier in the fall. According to the Verge's Sean Hollister, Valve showed him "a succession of over a dozen different prototypes, starting with a crazy magnetic break-apart Xbox 360 controller with Wii-like motion controls for both hands, buttons behind each finger, and an embedded trackball, of all things."

Eventually Valve abandoned the trackball for a trackpad, and then added another, adding four pads in the center, but only after testing out other wild ideas like a touch-only interface, as IGN reports. Like any keyboard and mouse combination, Steam will let you bind controls for games, and Valve is even making it possible to share bindings on Steam with friends.

According to IGN Valve is experimenting with some wireless protocols with less latency than Bluetooth, and the Verge reports that Valve hinted "strongly" that a future virtual reality headset that could measure your body's proprioceptive feedback and feed that into the game's intensity level.

Production

Valve is making the first 300, and as we previously reported, encouraging other manufacturers to make their own Steam Machines. But as the Seattle Times noticed, Valve has also become its own kind of next-generation OEM, using 3D printers in its headquarters to make PC components and laser-cutting machines to design, build, and test the various prototypes.

But it's a limited operation. As the ST put it, "the landlord said no to a full-blown factory, so the game controllers that Valve is providing to 300 are being produced by employees at a shop" away from Valve HQ.

Experience

For reports of what it's like to play a Steam Machine game using Valve's revolutionary new controller, check out the full reports at The Verge, and Wired. Or check out Valve's own demonstration of the new controller in the video below.

Image via Controlled Obsession