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Lucky 13.
That’s the number of Steam Machines Valve showed off last night at its press conference at CES, giving the world its first glimpse at the types of PC gaming rigs they might see in their living rooms later this year.
Gamers have been anxiously awaiting the reveal since the company announced its SteamOS initiative back in September. The company has initially partnered with 14 hardware manufacturers, including Alienware, Falcon Northwest, Origin and Gigabyte, to build the devices, which will run on Valve’s Linux-based SteamOS platform and work with the company’s Steam Controller. (Maingear was a late addition, which is why there were only 13 machines at the event.)
The machines range from the low end to the high end, with the cheapest system starting at $500 and the most expensive coming in at a little over $2,500. You can check out the full lineup in the photo gallery below.
Valve noted that they’re really happy with the results of its partnerships, but remained vague about its plans to make hardware in the future. (Valve built the first 300 Steam Machines to deliver to beta testers.)
“We’re going to continue to make that decision as we go along,” said Valve CEO and co-founder Gabe Newell. “We really view our role in this as being enabling, so [we’ll do] whatever we can do that’s going to be helpful to other hardware manufacturers, whether that’s with controller design or with building specific kinds of boxes.”
Newell said the company came up with the idea of SteamOS and Steam Machines a couple of years ago after realizing the potential threat posed by closed platforms (i.e., Microsoft’s Xbox and Sony’s PlayStation). With the Xbox and PlayStation, Microsoft and Sony control what kinds of games can be played on their consoles, whereas anyone can develop for a PC.
“We started to get pretty worried that maybe that openness was going to be challenged, that there was success in proprietary platforms in the living room and in mobile, and that was going to pause our entire industry and sort of step away from the opportunity of openness. So we started to think, ‘What could we do?’”
Despite the worries, Newell said with the last holiday season, Valve has seen 62 percent year-over-year revenue growth and its Steam game-distribution service now has 65 million customers.
And when asked about Microsoft’s announcement yesterday that it sold more than three million Xbox Ones from the time of its launch to the end of 2013 and whether Valve could sell as many Steam Machines in the same time frame, Newell said, “Well, I mean, it would take a while for them to catch up. I mean, we’re at 65 million.”
Game on.
This article originally appeared on Recode.net.
