Valve’s Steam At 65 Million Users, Steam Machine Next

Valve’s Steam service for PC distribution and sales has over 65 million users playing its over 3,000 games. The up and coming PC gaming distributor has been saying for months now that they would be stepping into the living room. Now their usage backs up their talk.

The 65 million users marks a 30 percent increase (15 million accounts) over the last year putting the service’s user base well above that of Microsoft’s Xbox Live (which is at 48 million). Sony’s Playstation Network is destroying them both at 110 million users, but the growth from the Steam service is certainly noteworthy.

This is all good news for valve as they look to release their console, known as the Steam Box for now, in 2014. They are already identifying the beta testers, but only 300 users will get a look. The living room push for Valve’s Steam service will include three major components: SteamOS, Steam Controller, and Steam Machines. The Steam Machine that the beta users are getting a look at as of Monday is probably the last design that will be seen of this version of the console.

“We’re really building this as a test platform, and there are many machines that are gonna be made by third-parties. They’re the ones that will be available commercially in 2014,” Valve designer Greg Coomer told Engadget.

Valve’s plan is to unveil more specifics at next January’s CES, as well as partners and more information. Coomer expects a “good array of options, optimized for different features” in the Steam Machines lineup — everything from a low-end, inexpensive streaming box to an Intel i7/GeForce Titan GPU-powered supercomputer. The currently shipping machine is somewhere in between, with an Intel i7 CPU and a GTX 780 GPU. Of course the beta machine doesn’t have an optical drive, since the gaming for Steam is all digital.

The goal of the Steam Machine is to bring the feel of PC gaming to a console. For those 65 million users on the Steam service, it will feel a lot like the Big Picture mode that allows the user to play on their television. The console will just bring it to the next level. While some are saying that the Steam Machine will compete with industry standards PS4 and X-Box One, we will have to wait until 2014 to find out.