Valve isn’t satisfied with selling their newly designed hardware online, they also want to take it to the physical store world. For this, they have partnered up with GameStop in the USA, Game UK, and EB Games stores in Canada to create dedicated Steam sections this fall.
It has been over three years since the Steam prepaid cards launched in the same shops and they’ve been highly successful since then. Now it is time to expand on that for Valve with their Steam Hardware products such as the Steam Controller, Steam Link, and Steam Machines. The three shops, GameStop, Game UK, and EB Games will be the exclusive non-digital retailers for the Steam Hardware, making it available for those who don’t want to order it directly from Valve’s online platform.
The previously announced deal where you get the two games Portal 2 and Rocket League for free with the purchase of Steam Hardware still goes and applies to the physical sold versions too that have been pre-ordered. Users have already been able to pre-order at these shops for a while and the deal also applies to all of them.
I can see this be very successful, especially for the Steam Controller but also the Steam Link. You no longer need to wait long for a delivery, instead you can head down to your local shop and get a new controller when you need it.
