Valve’s official statement is “Although the graphics hardware that we've selected for the first wave of prototypes is a variety of Nvidia cards, that is not an indication that Steam Machines are Nvidia-only. In 2014, there will be Steam Machines commercially available with graphics hardware made by AMD, Nvidia, and Intel. Valve has worked closely together with all three of these companies on optimizing their hardware for SteamOS, and will continue to do so into the foreseeable future”

Now we do expect to see the Steam Boxes become a good seller for Valve we think that they will be much more interested in getting their SteamOS out to the masses. Doing this will give them a significantly larger foot print in the market as they can grab up the DIY market for “PC” Gamers, console gamers, HTPC users. Speaking of these three groups we can see a niche for each of the GPU makers Valve is working with to optimize performance on their Steam Boxes.

In a way the announcements and the moves that Valve I making are nothing more than the follow through of the claims that Valve made when Microsoft first started releasing information about Windows 8. Back then the comments did not seem so serious, now that Valve has their own gaming OS and devices poised to hit the market these comments look a little more ominous. Perhaps Microsoft should have listened back then and moved away from the proprietary cloud ecosystem they want to use. If they had, maybe things would have turned out different. As it stands now Microsoft could end up losing to both Sony and Valve simply because they really wanted to be just like Apple.

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