First Steam Machines, Steam Link, Controller hit stores November 10

After years of announcements, Valve's line of Steam Machine hardware finally seems well on its way to becoming a real thing this holiday season. Today, the company announced a November 10 launch date for the $50 Steam Link in-home streaming box and the $50 Steam Controller. Steam Machine boxes from Alienware and Cyberpower (starting at $450) will also be available on November 10. Those who pre-order any of those items "while supplies last" will get access a few weeks earlier on October 16.

Pre-orders for the Steam Link and Controller are available today from Gamestop or from Valve itself in the US. GameStop, EB Games, Micromania, and GAME UK will be offering the same pre-order program in Europe and Canada. Cyberpower's machine will only be available from its own website, while Alienware will sell through its website and Gamestop.

Alienware's Steam Machine is highly similar to the Alienware Alpha, a Windows-based living room "console" launched last year. The low-end configuration for Alienware's box starts at $450 (with a controller) and comes with an Intel Core i3 processor, 4GB of RAM, a 500GB hard drive. Going up to $750 nets a Intel Core i7 processor, 8GB of RAM, and a 1TB hard drive. All Alienware's configurations come with GTX 860M+ graphics cards.

Cyberpower was also one of Valve's first announced Steam Machine partners, but it ended up releasing its box as a Windows-based living room console last year as well. The company is offering its entry level Steam Machine at $500, with an Intel i3 processor chip and Nvidia Geforce GTX 750 GPU. That baseline machine is customizable into much more serious gaming configurations through the company's website. Other Steam Machine partners will be releasing their own launch plans "in the coming weeks," Valve said in a statement.

Valve also premiered a new promotional video (below) for the final design of its Steam Controller, which aims to make general PC games easy to play from the couch without a mouse or keyboard. Most of the features in the video are familiar from earlier demos, but one new tidbit shows a user "effortlessly typ[ing] from the couch," using the dual touchpads to quickly navigate an on-screen keyboard. "We've tossed out hunting letters with a cursor and made surfing the web as easy as testing your friends," Valve claims.