Earlier this week Valve announced the Steam OS. That however, was just the beginning. Today beta testing for Valve's ‘Steam Machines' was announced and you can be a part of it.

To become eligible for beta participation you must follow these steps:

• Join the Steam Universe community group
• Agree to the hardware testing terms and conditions
• Have at least ten friends on Steam
• Have or create a public community profile
• Play a game in big picture mode with a game-pad

Upon completion of these steps you will be in the running to get one of 300 hardware beta kits. You only have until 25th October to do this so get moving, Valve intends to get its hardware to testers before the end of the year.

This announcement confirmed that all Steam OS machines will be open source and fully upgradeable, in the Q&A they even mentioned that you can install a different operating system on it if you want.

“Entertainment is not a one-size-fits-all world,We want you to be able to choose the hardware that makes sense for you, so we are working with multiple partners to bring a variety of Steam gaming machines to market during 2014, all of them running SteamOS.”

Valve's specific prototype will not be the same as what other manufacturers are producing but it is said to be built for high performance and with hardware customisation in mind. More information on Gamepads was also promised to be coming soon, this is likely to be part of the Friday evening announcement.

KitGuru Says: The ‘Steambox' is now officially a thing and we are going to see it sooner than I expected. Once the beta hardware comes out we will finally be able to see exactly what these systems will be capable of. Have you registered for the beta test yet?

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