Official Steam sections are appearing in retail stores across the US, UK and Canada. We took a quick look.

Just in time for the holidays, Valve have announced that they are officially launching their Steam Hardware range in the US, Canada, UK and Europe.

Valve co-founder and managing director Gabe Newell and business development lead Erik Johnson recently appeared on the first episode of a new internet podcast, GameSlice, hosted by video game journalist and presenter Geoff Keighley.

On March 3rd, Valve released news of their latest products at the 2015 Game Developers. The news includes the official announcement of the Source 2 engine, SteamVR, Steam Link, as well as updates to Steam Machines and the Steam Controller.

With Steam’s 125 million active accounts, it shouldn’t be that much of a surprise that Valve is interested in the physical realm of hardware.

Valve is once again attending Gamescom, Europe’s largest gaming trade fair, which takes place on August 13th-17th at the Koelnmesse exhibition center in Cologne, Germany.

As in recent years, they’ll be set up in the Business Hall, so there will be no public access to Valve’s booth.

LambdaGeneration confirmed this in an email to Valve’s Doug Lombardi earlier, who said that there will be no press or public showings planned this year and only business related meetings will be taking place.

But that still begs the question, what will Valve be doing there?

A while back Gabe Newell stated that if The Heart of Racing charity reached $500,000+ in donations, he’d host an AMA session on Reddit. And a few days ago, they passed said stretch goal, and Gabe went on to announce that an AMA would be held on March 3rd at 1:00 PM PST.

17,000 users visited the IAmA subreddit, waiting for Gabe Newell to start the show. And they waited for a while, but nothing happened. Well, at least not for another 25 hours – then it started. Valve time, ladies and gentlemen.

Nevertheless, it happened. Erik Wolpaw, Erik Johnson, Ido Magal, Greg Coomer and Gabe Newell all sat down to answer the question that the fans might have. Let’s take a look at some of the more interesting answers we got.

This week Valve introduced us to a trio of living room orientated products that will be entering the Steam Universe in 2014.

The announcements took place as a series of countdowns which occurred on rather peculiar and cryptic webpage on the Steam Store. The page, titled as The Steam Universe Will be Expanding in 2014, presented three small circles which individually became available on Monday, Wednesday and Friday respectively.