During Valve’s CES 2014 event this evening, the company released a brochure featuring images, prices, and specificiations for 13 third-party Steam Machines. Let’s take a look-see!

Aside from Alienware, the party pooper, each of the 13 machines at the very least comes with some basic specs, giving us an idea of what to expect from these Valve-approved gaming PCs. Some we’ve seen earlier today. Others we’ll be getting to know more about later this evening. According to Valve’s Gabe Newell, Maingear’s system was too late to make the brochure, but I’m sure there will be more about that down the line.

So, what do you guys think? That certainly a bunch of PC gaming machines, right?

Give that there are so many options, could it be that this will confuse consumers? After all, when you purchase a console you know that you are evenly matched with anyone else who buys it and developers know the specs everyone has under their TV.

With Steam Machine there seems to be so many options and some are so expensive that it seems it’d be more sensible to go out, buy a PC and hook that up to your TV. Can anyone actually see this venture being a success?

Check out the brochure here.

CES 2014 kicks off this week and you can expect to see a plethora of Steam Box related news.

Up until now we have received a good amount of information pertaining to Box’s specs but very little has been known as to whom would be selling the machines.

iBuyPower will be showing off their machine fitted with a multi-core AMD Cpu, 500GB hard drive (we are not sure if this is SSD), WiFi, Bluetooth, and an AMD Radeon R9 270 graphics card.

The size if the unit is said to be around the same size as a PS4 and a tad smaller then an Xbox One.

Blizzard has announced that they are planning to roll out changes to Battle.net accounts that have parental controls switched on: all purchases made using real-life money will be prevented.

In a forum post Support Forum Agent Vrakthris gives notice of the upcoming change, laying out what the e-mails Blizzard is sending out in the next few days to the parent and child accounts will say. He says that “We wanted to let everyone know this was coming and, considering how many phishing emails are out there, that it is indeed from us.”

The text of the e-mail sets out what the change will mean to the accounts in question, preventing any purchases in World of Warcraft, Hearthstone and Diablo III’s soon-to-close auction house as a default setting. It also lists how to change this option (a process that requires an e-mail to be sent to the parent account) and that Blizzard is “making this change to ensure that Parental Controls users will have more control over real-money purchases in Blizzard games.”

Although surprised that this wasn’t already a process that was in place, this is a good move on Blizzard’s part to support parents and alleviate any worries they might have of companies taking advantage of their children in a grab for more profits. Safeguards like this can only be a positive thing.

Mentioned forum post is here

The planned second test season for Blizzard’s card game Hearthstone has been delayed after maintenance revealed some sprite issues that prevented a transition between the seasons.

“Due to these issues, we are extending the duration of Test Season 1 until we can ensure a smooth transition.” Community manager Zeriyah told members of the forum on the 2^nd.

This follows on from Blizzard’s decision to delay Open Beta of the popular game until 2014 when originally it was scheduled for December 2013, when they also sent out invites to all who had opted-in for the Closed Beta before the 20^th of December. It also follows Blizzard’s line at that time about giving priority to putting out working and polished games rather than attempting to meet deadlines with a game that might be a little broken in places. Even if the hype for the game has settled down a little bit from its initial fever pitch, another small delay isn’t likely to turn many off from wanting to play the game if they can’t already.

The new test season would have reset player ranks, but for now the first test season continues for the foreseeable future. Future season ends will see rewards of alternate card backs and golden heroes based on the player’s performance.

A lot of Steam users today will have been met with a frustrating sight if they tried to access the Store or Community through their Steam launcher – that of a grey screen with only an error code upon it.

This is the second time in recent days that Steam has been hit with problems, apparently caused by a DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service) attack on the system by two people, both of who have taken to their Twitter accounts (@chFtheCat and @LARCENY_) to boast of their ‘feat’. The reasons behind the attacks, the first one which took place over the 1^st and 2^nd of the month (depending on whereabouts in the world you live), are still unclear at this point but for lack of a better reason e-fame seems to the goal of the pair.

As of writing both Store and Community can still be accessed through the Steam website 90% of the time, so this attack has been nothing more than a minor irritation and won’t really make much difference to Valve, except possibly a negligible hit in the sales of the days these attacks have happened. Twitter has also acted by suspending the account of @LARCENY_ although his friend is still active, tweeting in a manner you’d expect from someone who does this sort of thing for kicks.

Valve still hasn’t commented upon the attacks, but the Launcher being taken down twice in so few days is somewhat concerning even if the site still works. It’s currently unclear how long everything will be down this time.