Steam steaming into retail stores soon

Valve have announced that Steam will be getting its own sections in GameStop, GAME, and EB Games stores in the USA, UK, and Canada respectively.

As you might expect, this is down to the forthcoming release of the various bits of Steam hardware. 10 November marks the launch of the Steam Controller, the Steam Link, and the Steam Machine, and all three of these will be appearing in the aforementioned retail stores alongside pre-paid Steam cards.

In case you’ve missed all the hubbub, the owl-shaped Steam Controller (retailing for $49.99 USD/£39.99 GBP) is a wireless gamepad that promises configurable controls as well as the ability to play games that usually require a mouse and keyboard. The Steam Link is an equally-priced device that lets you hook up your TV to either a PC or a Steam Machine, and stream gameplay to the TV at 60FPS 1080p

Aaaand then there’s the Steam Machine, a sort of mini-PC you can hook up to your TV so that even those without PCs can play Steam games there. There’ll be various different versions of these (offering different sizes of hard drive, different levels of graphical performance, etc) but the estimated retail price starts at $449.99. No mention of a UK price there, because they’re currently unavailable for pre-order over here.

I suppose when you’ve conquered the digital world, you might as well start looking at the physical one. Which may or may not mean that Steam is the closest thing we have to Skynet. Hmm. I’ll leave any Valve/Cyberdyne Systems comparisons to you, I think, but I for one fear our forthcoming owl-headed Terminator overlords.