This is nice.
Sure they can find mules to buy+receive one and then sell to the scalper, but the more steps you put in the better. Same for the people scamming Sam's club by buying memberships, ordering limited items, then refunding the membership. Just lock orders to members older then >1yr and make sure it only ships to the actual physical address attached to the membership. Flag multiple memberships at the same address.
I've run a modest shipping op and the second I saw even a couple orders of the same product going to the same address I would halt it and do additional verification.
I eventually did, and when it finally arrived at my doorman building I mentioned what was in the package to the doorman, and how happy I was to finally get my hands on it after the effort expended and he said "oh really? there's a guy on the 5th floor who's bought dozens of them - he sold me one at cost".
At the scale of the PS5 release (I don't know how many they first shipped in 2020, but they're at >80M sold now so undoubtedly X million in the first year) - would an address match intervention have been able to differentiate my order from the dozens of orders the scalper on the 5th floor had placed, presuming some cooperation from the doorman to allow for variance in the details of the shipping address the scalper used? I'm reasonably confident the answer is no and I would have been caught in the net that attempted to prevent the scalper from scalping.
These sorts of things are pretty cheaply routed around for those making scalping into a volume business.
Sure you can probably lock things down so you catch the vast majority of these mechanisms, but not without impacting legitimate users. So it's a tradeoff of how much more of a hassle do you want to make things for legitimate customers vs. how much you want to lock out resellers.
You don't even really need a doorman in many buildings either. There will be a shared mail room (if you're lucky) where packages get dropped. If you work from home you just watch the UPS/Fedex tracking and run down the moment it gets delivered to snag it before anyone else sees it.
The few folks I know who did this sort of thing were less professionals making a living off it, and more someone who wanted to subsidize their gaming habit by grabbing 3 or 4 units and keeping one while flipping the rest. They'd just ship to friends/family. The folks buying 50 units at a time are pretty rare from what I can tell.
[edit: to be clear they are not the norm, they are more expensive than buildings without one, but there are still lots of them that are not Trump Tower or other places for the absurdly wealthy]
It’s more about 1000 scalpers buying two or three to immediately resell. There are entire discords and communities around this with thousands of members.
The Steam Machine is ultimately a mid-range gaming PC in a nicer form factor and a slight discount compared to building it yourself. I don't think anyone would pay 1.5x for a Steam Machine when they could just buy a regular PC for less. There's no capabilities the Steam Machine has that a regular PC doesn't, which limits the ability of scalpers to charge larger margins and thereby limits the motivation.
As for potentially impacting the wider PC hardware market? Well, retail scalpers are small fry compared to Altman, Bezos, Musk et al.
> Limit one signup per household. We will use payment method, shipping address, and other information to eliminate multiple entries.
Ecomm orders want to drop to the distribution center as soon as possible, which means you can't wait until you have a whole bunch of them just so you can analyze which addresses are on multiple orders. You would either need to 1) detect this in the warehouse systems (I spent my career working on these, so I can say with high certainty that is almost definitely Not going to happen, especially if they go through a 3PL) OR 2) you have to cancel orders after they have already dropped to the warehouse (which means wasted labor in the best-case scenario).
None of that is worth the effort to a company who is fundamentally still getting paid the same for the product regardless of if the purchaser is a scalper or not.
The solution Valve came up with is quite brilliant.
that's not to say I don't like Valve's solution - I agree, it is very nice
So it really has to be done like Cybertruck early deliveries to 100% prevent scalping and flipping(the fact that Musk nails it...)
ultimately they are selling out inventory so it probably takes a lot of convincing to spend money on a cat and mouse game
And even that isn't as icky as a short project I worked on for a major CC company. Still get the icks thinking about it, and I didn't continue beyond the 6mo contract.
You would have to tell the user “use the corrected/matched one only” though. Some sites offer the correction but don’t make you use it.
Might be acceptable collateral damage, but it’d exclude some people.
Capitalism really does create a perverse incentive here, and when there's significant margin at play, there's an opportunity.
If Alice and Bob live in the same apartment and try to buy Steam Machines, but Bob forgets to include his apartment number (everything gets dumped on a shared package room, after all), Alice will be confused when an automated email accuses her of fraud.
Although I think the language in the response dialog will be nicer than accusing of fraud.
we could say it's 5000 scalper accounts, and 50000000 gamer accounts. but it's not 5000/50000000, it's like 4500/20000. which isn't bad! but scalpers will still be way over-represented, because they'll be trying to buy it when most steam accounts won't.
now one fuzz factor is the queue system, as you're not putting down money to get in line i expect a lot of people who wouldn't otherwise sign up will, in case they decide to buy one when given the chance. so we might have 40000 gamer sign ups, but only 50% will pull the trigger. this also gives scalpers an out should the resale not be worth it.
(obviously all numbers made up)
I feel like I'm having a slow day XD
> You must have made a purchase on Steam prior to April 27th 2026.
I don't fear dying in a car accident. I dread the certainty that one day I'll be 80 and all I'll have left are memories, everything and everyone I ever loved will be gone (unless I have children which is very unlikely at this point), the world will be completely alien to me, and there's absolutely nothing I can do to prevent this - apart from dying even sooner which is even worse.
I think there are ways most people cope with this knowledge most of the time so they don't go crazy. I get why so many elites are obsessed with preventing aging.
By and large, the masses have always experienced football on a TV screen. (though removing lower price tickets from such public sport events is still bad)
The yardstick in European football has always been that an ordinary working person can go and see a game in the stadium. A fair amount of sports did until they got the privatization treatment.
I know it's hard to imagine in the US, what with our quarterly-profit-maximizing corruption, but it is possible to be corrupt and still have to balance long-term concerns like "keep the graft flowing".
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[1] or authorities taking action, but that usually comes after the marks/customers/voters/whatever speaking up loud enough, unless by “taking action” you mean “taking a piece of the action” by way of being corruptible themselves.
[2] from those who do, or might in future, play along with the current race-to-buy-at-fixed-teered-rates system.
I'm so tired of people trying to pretend that limited tickets to an event billions of people want to attend ought to be available to poor people just because. If they sold for a penny, the resale market would eat them up and they'd still cost what they cost. If you'd bought them for $10, you'd instantly turn around and sell them for a few thousand to someone else.
I'm sorry no one prepared you for the fact that rare things have value, but perhaps some introductory economics classes, instead of TikTok-trite-internet-rage would be helpful.
Not everything must be race to the bottom. Not everything should be a fucking market.
If only rich snobs and people with poor financial control can afford your tickets, that will be the type of fan you’ll retain.
If I pay high prices for your tickets and for travel to see you play in one of your limited selection of touring cities, sure, I might go. But if you tour again a few years later, I would rather see an artist I haven’t seen live yet.
Meanwhile if the tickets are affordable, I’ll try and go again. You’ll have my renewed interest every time.
I expect there are plenty of people who would in fact, not do that.
At many income levels and budgets, gaining $1k from selling a ticket helps a lot less than losing $1k from buying a ticket hurts.
Plus many people aren't rational economic actors and would keep the $10 ticket and enjoy the show even if it doesn't make economic sense.
Sure, but there's also the situation of all the people who are locals who don't need hotels and flights and food and etc.
For example, you could make tickets non-transferable, but refundable.
And you think it’s ok for rich people to swoop in, appropriate the attire and vibe of the sport and working class people just need to suck it up because they’re poor? The people who made the sport what it is now can’t enjoy it? The people who STILL make the sport what it is?
Disgusting.
You and I both know, the poor will not do a damn thing.
It's like watching millionaires discussing that nowadays poor people can't afford to go on a rocket to space.
Also, I know for a fact that plenty of working class people from England go to the World Cup. Fair enough, they’re wealthy by the standards of Brazilian favelas but that’s a broader issue. It still stings to see the price gouging that FIFA is enjoying this time round.
Also, I pointed to another comment that working class fans are the fans that make the game. Man U are famously followed by “the prawn sandwich brigade” and the top tier clubs are regularly mocked by others for being out-sung at their own stadiums.
No idea why you would read a comment in a thread specifically about the WC and think, "but boy, think how angry I could be if I decided this comment was about something else entirely?!"
Fusion festival is a Psytrance festival. It's nothing like Burning Man (a DIY community driven festival).
For the American's it would be closer to Electric Forest or Lost Lands (but with good music).
I'd call it an electronic music festival (or a giant rave, because terms like "EDM festival" were invented by corporations to displace "rave" the same way "open source" was meant to sanitize "free software" and Fusion is not a corporate event). I wouldn't call it a psytrance festival - that's just what they play on one stage of many, and maybe the 3rd or 4th biggest. There's a stage run by people from Berghain that plays techno the whole time (my favorite), a drum-n-bass stage, a couple more electronic music stages that I'm not sure about the subgenre, some smaller stages where live rock and metal bands play, theater performances, some kind of car racing thing next to a circus-looking tent, neither of which I've visited. And what the heck is "the hotel"?
Till the sales price matches the market value scalping will exist. The best way to address that is a vickery auction. Till then scalping will continue.
You must have a Steam account in good standing.
You must have made a purchase on Steam prior to April 27th 2026.
Limit one signup per household. We will use payment method, shipping address, and other information to eliminate multiple entries."Brands could do that - or an approximation of that by having an higher launch prize for the initial batch - yet they mostly don't.
Maybe the intent here is not keeping difference to themselves, and there's more brand value in not profiting from supply constraints, while being perceived as doing something about mass scalping.
Since most brands don't seem to agree with you, and if you just feel like you should be able to use your extra money to get lucky, you can still try to convince one of the lucky ones. I guess the few who might take it to eBay will charge even more for the privilege.
Not everything needs to be about efficient markets.
Giving a list price would make no sense in the case of an auction, in fact would be misleading, (maybe even illegal ??), and not just because of these issues.
Most people would bid the maximum that they can justify. That's like saying that only scalpers take part in auctions (easy counter example : eBay).
In real world, sales tactics work. People can be influenced to pay more than they thought they're willing to pay. Scalpers know this and exploit this at scale. A Vickery auction gives basically zero opportunity to get talked up. People will bid at the "thought they're willing" price, and scalpers will outbid them. Then the same people who underbid on auction will go to eBay, see it listed at "influenced to pay more" price, and buy it for much more than they bid.
And yes; the vast majority of eBay auction bidders are indeed scalpers, whose day job is to look for cheap deals that they can resell for more. It's extremely rare in this day and age to actually take advantage of eBay bidding to buy in-demand stuff on the cheap. It's much easier when there's "buy now" option but you need to be fast and lucky because you're competing against scalpers here too. Of course things are different for stuff that few people want in the first place - scalpers are not interested in those because they're too hard to offload, so you get your fair chance.
The corollary to this lottery will ensure that people who want Steam Machines day 1 actually get them at cost. So not only does this negatively impact the supply-side of scalping, but it also impacts the demand-side.
With the lottery, a good chunk of those systems are going those who would be willing to pay markup for them, but didn't. So the lottery does double-duty - it kills scalper supply and demand for scalped units.
The payment addresses sound trickier to work around, but abusers can just invent a fake billing address; many payment methods neither receive nor validate this.
This way it's just a random draw and (I think?) the number of accounts scalpers can enter with is limited because they need to be established. So it might not solve scalping, but it could be a significant improvement.
Biggest impediment would be changes to purchase process. Run one live user through and repeat for how many bots you want to buy more.
Agreed with your comment on random being better. I just found a scalper sitting at a PC for 20 minutes waiting to buy pretty funny.
(Though I guess someone in their family can enter the lottery for them.)
Is there any actual data on this? I know people don't like scalpers but I wonder what the actual percentage is.
And yes, it's not hard to spoof your hardware id, but who is going to buy a machine at scalper prices only to then need to run sketchy software to even be able to use it. It'd completely kill the scalping market and not affect anyone buying one to use.
Second: They could easily allow any account to log in as long as the account that bought it is an actively logged in profile.
----
More complications, more points of failure.
But as I said, you don't like it. ;) Scalping is freedom, if you want to remove scalping, you have to remove some freedom.
"Truth in advertising" in your OP :)
This is a different threat model than anti-cheat. Here you just want it to be annoying enough to stop scalping.
Show me the incentive structure and…
Pre-creating "sleeper" accounts is a common way of circumventing this, though it does require a degree of long term thinking/planning.
>Limit one signup per household. We will use payment method, shipping address, and other information to eliminate multiple entries."
It's not just an account with an age, they have to have made a purchase. And shipping address + payment info also help eliminate duplicates.
It's likely they are weighting accounts that have a lot of (recent) game activity and game purchases as well. Plus, they have access to hardware information via their hardware survey, etc.
Scalping also actively damages the pricing, which is part of the product. Valve wants to sell this product at a specific price, which is targeted to an audience. By scalping and ultimately changing the price, you are hurting both the consumer, who now pays more, and the company, who doesn't see a cent of this increase and is now failing its target.
Scalping also damages the demand for the product, since it creates a submarket that is volatile and unpredictable.
Scalping is a bad thing because by basically any measure, a market with scalping is worse for everybody involved than one with scalping. Except for scalpers, who make money off it by making it worse for everybody else. Which is why scalpers are bad people.
Scalping is a natural "black" market which always pops up to satisfy market demand whenever artificial restrictions are placed on the market.
Even in this case, there will be scalpers providing for people with more money than luck, who want a day one steam machine.
Which, again, hurts both the seller and the vast majority of the buyers.
>Scalping is a natural "black" market which always pops up to satisfy market demand whenever artificial restrictions are placed on the market.
>Even in this case, there will be scalpers providing for people with more money than luck, who want a day one steam machine.
Scalpers, the vast majority of the time, deal with markets with non-artificial restrictions, and use them to their advantage. In this case, Valve has very intentionally designed a system to prevent scalpers because they want people to have a fair chance of getting a product that is very much not artificially restricted. Valve is free to sell to whoever they want, consumers are free to purchase from Valve, and scalpers are in the middle, exploiting the system for profit, and willingly or not pushing for DRM and for binding accounts to devices.
But they only need to do that because of the scalpers! The scalpers aren't adding value, they're adding friction and expecting people to pay extra for it!
Scalpers can only profitably exist when demand at the list price exceeds supply. If you could magically ban scalping, then some number of willing customers wouldn't be able to buy at any price even after jumping through all the hoops.
So are scalpers distributors?
Is the onus on the company/market/"all of us" to find "better" (whatever you think "better" is) distribution methods?
In which way do you see the market for Steam Machines to be artificially restricted?
The same thing happens when governments set price limits.
There's not enough sugar in the world to coat that bullshit.
Scalpers aren't providing anything. The product already exists.
Scalpers benefit customers who are willing to pay the market price but missed out on the lottery and otherwise wouldn't be able to buy at all.
Scalping also damages the demand for the product, since it creates a submarket that is volatile and unpredictable.
Basically the opposite. If there are scalpers, there is a predictable price that I can pay. If there aren't, I have to be lucky or have connections.
Which is why scalpers are bad people.
They are not.
If you entire business is helping the rich ensure the poor lose and raise the price in general, despite what the original provider may have wanted, you are undoubtedly a bad person.
Moreover, that's what happens anyway. If you get one of the slots and you value the difference between what you paid and the "real" (resale) price more than you value having the console, you can still sell it. But then more of the money goes to ordinary customers rather than rewarding people who snipe with bots etc.
I would also point out that you can build a PC to run SteamOS with approximately the same specs for approximately the same price, so it's not clear who is going to be paying a significant premium over the sticker price instead of doing that if they don't get a slot.
When they do this, customers have a conniption.
This works fine for luxury goods, because the whole point is that they are expensive, thus exclusive (see: Porsche, Rolex). But for regular goods, this ends up being penny wise, pound foolish. Yeah, there's a short-term bump in revenues and profits, but it gives competition a massive attack surface, as they can pull away the most loyal customers who are angry over price gouging, and those customers are probably lost forever.
In general customers don't actually care. They want the product and are equally annoyed by it selling out before they can get one and it selling for a price they can't afford, both caused by the company not having enough supply to meet current demand.
The actual reason companies don't like scalpers in contexts like this has to do with why Valve is making a console to begin with. Is it because they want to compete with Dell and HP in the market for gaming PCs? No, it's because they want to compete with Microsoft and Sony in the market for distributing games. Which in turn means they want their device to have an attractive price so that more people get one instead of getting a competitor's console. Their expected profit is primarily from selling games rather than hardware.
Selling the initial batch for a higher price is bad for that, because who is going to pay the higher initial price? Their most dedicated customers, who would have bought one from the next batch anyway if they don't get one of these. The ones who would only pay the intended sticker price are the ones who would buy the competitor's console instead of theirs if they had to pay more, and those are the customers they most want to get one immediately before the competition gets their money first.
We'll have to agree to disagree here because in my little bubble people are livid and have been swearing off things due to perceived price gouging. For me it was cereal. I like it but manufactures trying to squeeze $12 a box for it put me off enough that I just don't go down that aisle anymore. Now I eat granola.
I don't think we "need" scalpers though, but they are a fundamental part of markets, and arise when you are trying to break the natural flow of markets. Scalpers are the markets punishment for trying to have your cake and eat it too.
As an adult I have rarely wanted things as badly as I did when I was a kid. But I can sure outbid them.
I think you might actually be maximally wrong, as those with means have plenty of entertainment options compared to those without.
They buy up ALL the stocks. Then puts them on auction sites after supply had hit as close to zero as possible. That's not how economics work by the books.
It's not a perfect system, but money is how we as a society determine how to allocate scarce resources. People labor under the promise that having additional money will give them an advantage in this type of situation.
But... perhaps these guys are playing a longer game? Reputation has value as well and from other comments this move seems to boost reputation significantly.
I'm always supprised that companies don't do a tiered price release, offer it at 200% price, you get it, 150%, you lower down the list and then 100% lottery time, that way they gain from those who can afford to pay more(maybe able to subsidise other sales later and price cuts down the line). Why feed scalpers when you can coin it directly and then offer a lower price to those who are prepared to wait a few more months or so.
In governance, sortition is the selection of public officials or jurors at random, i.e., by lottery, in order to obtain a representative sample.[1][2][3]
In ancient Athenian democracy, sortition was the traditional and primary method for appointing political officials, and its use was regarded as a principal characteristic of democracy.[4][5] Sortition is often classified as a method for both direct democracy and deliberative democracy.
For example, Panini (sports card manufacturer) did Dutch auctions on boxes of new card sets during the peak of pandemic collectible mania. The majority of customers that were willing to pay the highest prices on Panini's website were card breakers, which are people/companies that sell "spots" in livestream box openings (i.e. customers buy the right to all cards containing players from a certain sports team before the box is opened).
For the Steam Controller that's very clearly at least partly what's going on. Valve's "we didn't expect the demand!" schtick is getting pretty hard to buy when they clearly expected around the same expectations for V2 as for V1. PC gaming usage has grown massively since the first controller came out.
Another way would be to auction of X amount of units, then those with cash can pay through the nose directly and again, the company gains and by that, so do normal consumers on a breadline, as it would help reduce the cost quicker down the line for the rest of the purchasers.
Everyone else could get into the second round raffle for a chance to buy / place in line.
Many if not most people will buy the thing for $X, then complain that someone else scored the same item for $X - $100.
Once the price has already dropped more than ten times, and the site says when the next price drop is, people will figure it out well enough.
They would maximize profit for this launch and in the process damage a reputation that is literally worth billions. Gamers are famously sensitive, and famously have a long memory for PR fuckups.
But this is not nice:
> This item is not available for purchase in your region
Also, my office here is absolutely covered in maps of just New Zealand, which always gives me a chuckle.
I live in Melbourne, and our population is larger than that of all NZ so I get why they kind of get forgotten, but it still sucks.
But yeah the selection and availability is nowhere near the USA or even say.. Indonesia.
Also sorry that we send you our trash from Cadburies in tassie.
It's lovely here, but it's been a real shift vs having nearly every retailer available in my county and being able to go to NYC for a weekend on a whim.
If you try to import a phone, you'll also have to pay additional fees to "activate" the IMEI, otherwise you won't be able to connect to local cellular providers.
Lies, they just want to protect themselves from the German Tank Problem [0] type of analysis.
How could you estimate that when they don't let you know your position in the queue (with or without randomisation)?
> we'll send you an email with the option to purchase. You'll then have 72 hours to complete the purchase.
edit: I don't particularly care for Google Sheets, just the idea of solving the underlying problem.
Entertainment tends to compare with airline tickets, except that with air travel, there are regular flights and competition. There is no such thing as a single flight from Paris to New York on one Saturday at 9pm on a window of a few years.
A huge number of people would rather pay a few hundred bucks more to have a plug and play appliance with a warranty from a reputable company show up on their doorstep. They don’t have to learn anything about hardware, or how to install Linux. It just works.
Some people are happy to save the money and take the risk on used hardware.
The Steam Machine is for the former, Steam the platform is for the former and the latter.
Convenience and being an early adopter are hardly at odds with each other. If anything, these people are early adopters because they want the convenience of not dealing with pc builds. People that already have gaming PCs and love that hobby aren’t going to line up to buy something that they enjoy making, or that they know enough about to feel comfortable buying used from Craigslist.
People are paying for a sure thing. Used PCs and no name Amazon machines are not a sure thing.
You and I might see it differently as people fluent with computers. Reseating a ram stick that got jostled in shipping isnt scary to most people on this site. It is terrifying to most of the world though. Steam is going after people that want to use PC games, but not play hardware tech.
Meanwhile, MS is trying to push copilot again.
p.s. a bit of a windows fanboy as well - used to do drivers for it, kind of like the internals / driver model / etc... but I really dislike the path they've taken, and there's nothing else like it.
Finally, I have an old projector setup with an x360/x1x on it right now (hc4000 + diy frame w/ dark energy abyss + 758 v3 + lsr305 + some subs - rag-tag), so I have a good excuse as well :P
i’ve changed. i really do not want to spend any extra time on yak shaving outside the job.
i am happy to pay $1500 for someone i trust with a fantastic track record to do it for me. plus its so cute!!! it will look great in my new apartment with the red faceplate. most gaming things are not cute.
The price of this steam machine is a rounding error away from the build it yourself DIY price. It's not marked up, this is just what PC components actually cost these days :/
Those two are realistically the only upgrades someone buying a prebuilt instead of DIY is going to entertain doing regardless.
But that's all besides the point, which it's simply that clearly the steam machine is priced fairly for the hardware it contains in the current economic market. Whether or not you personally would prefer a prebuilt or to DIY is entirely irrelevant
...
https://www.techspot.com/article/3066-single-stick-vs-dual-c... - seems like 5-50% change in FPS! Way more of a factor (on some games) than I thought.
You'll note in that techspot comparison, by contrast, they used the fastest CPU and fastest GPU and then still used medium/low settings to really maximize whatever difference the RAM speed would have. Which is a valid test, but it's not necessarily going to generalize to low-end hardware. Like the CPU being limited to 90fps instead of 120fps doesn't matter when the GPU is struggling to hit 60fps in the first place.
Of course you can have someone put in a new one for you, it's called an "RMA"? A GPU defect is going to show up well within the warranty period. It's things like fans that will fail over time.
Every time I've seen a comment like this, the eventual parts list is about the same price, has large deviations, or re-uses existing hardware (or used hardware). Looking at all the subreddits, the general consensus seems to be the price is fine for the components, and (if you care) it's impossible to build anything with that form factor.
actually, show me any PC like that...
I wish there were better ways of defeating scalpers.
To be fair I don't think they'll be scalped a lot because the price isn't attractive already and alternatives are plenty.
> Are there any criteria for signing up?
> Customers must meet the following criteria to be able to sign up:
> You must have a Steam account in good standing.
> You must have made a purchase on Steam prior to April 27th 2026.
> Limit one signup per household. We will use payment method, shipping address, and other information to eliminate multiple entries.
But the Steam Machine is really just a PC with a couple of neat features. If you are willing to overpay a scalper for a Steam Machine, it seems much more reasonable to suggest that maybe you should just take that same amount of money and buy a machine where that money translates into power rather than scalper profit. After it became clear that the Steam Machine was going to be hit hard by the price increases, I just bought a machine that was pure AMD. Where it is living I don't care if it's a little cube or not, nor do I care about the LED bar, and the integrated puck wasn't a big deal when I just use the current one as a charger too. For just a bit more money than the Steam Machine it's about 50% more powerful on all relevant fronts, and I may upgrade to a 9070XT (current latest-gen AMD card) which isn't an option on the Steam Machine. And since I bought that machine the same machine is now nearly $100 more expensive itself.
Paying a scalper for the controller at least makes some sense. Perhaps the same for the Steam Frame. But of the three things Valve is releasing this year, I'm not sure it makes sense to pay a scalper an extra 50% for a Steam Machine. In that scenario, you're not really paying that extra for the machine as a whole; you're paying extra for those "couple of neat features" alone, the form factor, the integrated controller puck, the LED on the front, whatever else is specifically about the Steam Machine and not a true statement about any machine with SteamOS or Bazzite installed. You need to want one of those things really, really badly to overpay that much. The value proposition is quite different.
Of course, this is a very analytical take on what may be a primary-emotional decision for some people. We'll see.
I guess you could find somebody online and buy their account, but surely this would be a slow and unreliable process.
It's basically super easy and trivial to buy verified accounts for many many platforms
Instead of
123 Main St.
123 #1 Main St.
123 #1 Main St. -> 123 #001 Main St.
>Limit one signup per household. We will use payment method, shipping address, and other information to eliminate multiple entries.
Seems like they have chosen some reasonable options here. 2 months ago having purchase and trying to detect households. Likely also including phone number, Steam Guard client and family sharing.
Even Nintendo has been setting fairly strict requirements to pre-order some of their products, like requiring 50 hours of playtime on the original switch to pre-order the Switch 2
For example: Start the bidding at BASE_PRICE (BP) + 2400. Then reduce the price by $1 every 3mins over the course of 5 days. Until the BP is met and then just carry on queuing.
You could buy it early if you want it that much or just wait an extra couple of days and end up in the queue at the BP.
I don't know if it would create pressure on that second it ticks over to the BP, so then its BP+1 - well I guess the nash equilibrium would be pushed up.
Given that people are going to spend money anyway it seems more honest and reasonable to direct this money to the party that makes the thing by letting it to run auction.
Society has found out money is a good way to encourage/discourage certain behavior in a predictable, deterministic, and quantifiable way. It really sucks that it has to be money, and maybe this can be solved with some other universal token that cannot be bought with wealth but equitably distributed some other way.
For example the dynamic fees in express lanes in California aren't really for the purposes of paying for the roads. They dynamically adjust it such that the traffic in the lane is operating at peak efficiency. Too few people using it obviously reduces throughput, so the price cheapens to have people using it, and too many people using it causes a collapse in efficiency so the price increases. Having some kind of adjustable cost on it lets the control system appropriately change the demand to keep it efficient.
You can get it at the lower price, you just have to wait. The same happens with loads of digital devices. On release day the price is higher.
If it helps you can separate it and have the first a 'ticket' in line to buy the product for the regular price. You just reserve your spot with the auction. The queue price just drops over time.
I get your cynicism it would just go to billionaire shareholders, but profit itself isnt the enemy, greed is.
rent seeking however... rent seeking should be taxed to hell and back.
To me greed is being willing to take to the detriment of others.
Internally, it's equivalent to a mid-grade PC from 2018. You're not playing AAA games in 4K on this thing.
> Over the past year or so, that has changed quickly and significantly, most visibly for RAM and storage components. There are a variety of reasons, all of which are affecting hardware products everywhere. The overall effect is that our original goal for the price of Steam Machine is no longer viable. So the prices we're sharing today reflect the state of the world for manufacturing; or, more accurately, it reflects the price of the components as we've secured them over the past 6 months.
Take notes about the tone, the communication style, the honesty that you can feel by reading those words. There are no problem that can’t be alleviated (if not solved) with good communication to your customer, and you can bet that Steam knows damn well theirs!
I believe in you Gabe.
I'm also happy with older games. I just don't know how powerful these GPUs are.
We all know why hardware has become unaffordable even if Valve hasn't spelled it out.
But thats my perspective, which obviously I feel like is closer to the truth on the ground, wouldn't claim it's some universal truth though.
I can accept that as a contributing cause but the main cause is the small number of companies that are buying all the ram. Even if there was more supply they'd still be screwing up the prices.
If the fries factory runs out of fries, would we blame consumers for buying too much, or the factory for not catching up with demand? Why sell stuff if it's not meant to be bought?
I don't much blame the factory that's already running 24/7 for failing to catch up in the short term. I'm not going to insist they do the impossible, or that they should have forseen a demand spike that caught us all by surprise.
High demand and a long lead time product - you can’t spin up fabs overnight to adapt to demand.
This creates a period where the people with the largest amount of capital can out compete other buyers in the market.
This is the situation at play right now. Your model is too simple.
We'll see actual outrage when the masses defer new smartphone upgrades due to price bumps.
That's why I'd love an interview with Steam's legal head. Sounds like they'd have some wild stories to share.
Also on a 2025 launch, but that 2023 mid-level hardware feels already pretty weak in 2026, especially for a console you're supposed to run 6-7 years into the future. Sure, it's as powerful as a base PS5 but that console is already 6 years old by now. So the valve box is a pain to justify jumping in unless you're a big valve fan and don't want to DIY a PC.
That wouldve put the steam machine somewhere around the $800 mark for the base edition, which would’ve been so, so much sweeter of a value proposition.
If you don't, then yes, as a PC enthusiast I'm sad as well. But like, it's a little bit ironic to be complaining about RAM prices if you've got 5 sub-agents hacking away.
If the price is expected to fall over time, then the negotiated price is below market at the beginning and above market at the end. From the suppliers view, they take a loss in the early years that they recover later.
Apple probably pays a premium to shift this risk to the supplier. Besides that they don't take a loss just because prices tend to fall. They only lose if market prices fall more steeply than expected.
I won’t buy it
But wow what a nice communication
That’s gonna look great on post mortem report
I'm pretty sure the price increase is exclusively caused by LLMs.
Valve doesn't need this to do well to survive. And you don't need a steam machine (or any >$1000 machine) to play PC games. Just wait it out or buy used hardware. Hell, even an rog ally x plays just about anything (and also supports steamOS), and you can still get that at reasonable prices.
This means the PS5 is subsidised, whereas Valve hardware does not tend to be. They have confirmed that internally all divisions must be roughly profitable/break-even.
I don't know how much money they make from each unit but major profit is not the goal here. They want to sell more games to more casual people who don't even own a PC anymore.
Edit: looks like it took 10 million PS5s to break even. The article is 5 years old I wonder if it’s true in 2026.[2]
> The existing industrial arrangement at the time was that of a bundled console-plus-cartridge business model, where the console manufacturer (say, Atari with its VCS/2600) sold the console at a loss and cross-subsidized it with the money made on cartridges sold with a huge profit margin.[1]
[1] https://thereader.mitpress.mit.edu/how-nintendo-bled-atari-g...
[2] It took Sony years to stop losing money on PS3 sales, but the company stopped selling the PS4 at a loss around six months after its debut in 2013. The PS5 has taken ever so slightly longer, but it’s clearly not repeating the costly exercise of the PS3 despite early reports suggesting Sony was struggling with PS5 pricing due to expensive parts.
[2] https://www.theverge.com/2021/8/4/22609150/sony-playstation-...
> Yes, Steam Machine is optimized for gaming, but it's still your PC. Install your own apps, or even another operating system. Who are we to tell you how to use your computer?
It feels very commonsense that you should be able to run whatever you want on the computer that you have purchased, but it is surprisingly uncommon.
When I used it I was somewhat incredulous that I could simply exit Steam mode have an actual Linux desktop environment, where I could literally do what I wanted. It was my computer, a proper general purpose computing machine, and it was (willingly* in my control. No sneaky root needed.
If you are stuck to Windows there are some 3rd party efforts like https://github.com/ddeverill/SteamlessController
The last generation of steam controller still had a mode you could start it in where it would register as xinput device. Seems that's gone on the new generation.
Yes? What's wrong with that? Then it's at least usable.
Can you hack it together in theory, get something working but making sacrifices left and right? Sure. But why would Valve want to do that? Use experience would be incredibly bad.
But give it time. There will be a standalone driver for Windows eventually, either from Valve or from the community.
they created a nasty gambling system with their loot boxes that exists outside controlled casino environments and which impacts young adults a lot.
Open up Roblox and see the sheer amount of loot boxes via Robux with Pay 2 Win items, battle passes, daily rewards, etc.
Counter Strike meanwhile has item skins which don't impact the game. They aren't more OP, in fact, most of the time they give you a disadvantage.
Counter Strike is an 18+ game. Kids shouldn't be on this anyways.
Loot boxes are not a fun mechanic. Loot boxes are not designed to entertain you or give you good value for your money. Loot boxes only exist to make you gamble with your money over something that could easily be sold as a single purchase item, or better yet, be rewarded in-game. Simple as that. It’s a gambling scheme. Always has been. Always will be.
But still, Roblox should do a better job regulating the games on its platform
All I've seen is that everyone is doing at cost nowadays. The PS4 Pro was the last subsidized console.
> https://www.pcmag.com/news/sony-says-499-ps5-no-longer-sells...
A interesting scenario would be to sell the hardware at cost, but include a 30% off ticket to the steam store (up to a few hundred dollars, in savings).
$799 for a locked down version, $1049 for an unlocked version. Opportunity to pay $300 to unlock it later at any time. 5% discount on purchases on a locked device.
(then again i always buy the most expensive SKU they offer so im very outside the target buyer profile for such)
[1]: https://www.pcgamer.com/gaming-industry/dutch-non-profit-set...
I feel the 'don't waste time on HN' thing. I'm working on it, minimizing social media usage, minimizing non-productive screen time.
i picked up Darksiders 3 a few weeks ago to play on my deck. at some point i realized i was pretty underleveled but i didn’t wanna grind.
so, opened chatgpt in desktop mode and uploaded my save, asked it to write me a script to set my souls/xp/money to whatever number. it analyzed the save and spat out a bash/python script. after a chmod +x it worked flawlessly. done from bed took like 15 mins to figure it out end to end.
no other what other (handheld) console in history combines the depth of library, the slick console experience, and also lets you chmod +x.
It's in fact one of the least powerful handhelds (of the x86 class.)
> Somehow Cyberpunk 2077 ran really well on it.
With significant dropping of settings across the board, with 30-40fps at best and frequent drops into sub <20fps during the action.
That may count as "really well" depending on your definition I suppose. I wouldnt tolerate it, but i'm sure many would/do.
It’s just hard for me to be impressed by one of the weakest entries from both a performance and image quality point of view. It’s all subjective though so if others do find it impressive, all the power to them.
I actually think the SW2 port is the most “impressive” handheld experience I’ve seen so far. Given its a superior experience “out of the box” as it were.
There are alternatives for both, if/when I ever want them.
Edit, reply to bjord as I am rate limited: HDMI CEC, the chipset, GPU drivers, controller receiver etc.
Edit, reply to robhlt: Thanks! Hope we can get that ported to Windows
for example: https://www.phoronix.com/news/Valve-Old-AMD-Linux-Love-Song
Apple could handle dev keys for free, if this was actually about security. But they don't because its another step on their road to locking down OSX like they do iOS and ensuring they make every platform developer pay their taxes.
Developers also can't access the biometric security features at all without an Apple dev account either. Even for my local software that I build for myself, I cannot use fingerprint unlock without an Apple dev license.
I don't really want to pay $100/yr to release free software for OSX, so I don't.
Nobody has even hinted that it would be nice to have a 3rd party store or the ability to run whatever OS on them freely.
I keep wondering why.
There is a certain appeal to this for many people that hacking it to run your own OS isn't really sought after.
I'm not sure if you're being dishonest or just ignorant of the console hacking scene.
> Nobody has even hinted that it would be nice to have a 3rd party store or the ability to run whatever OS on them freely.
If people are going through the trouble to defeat DRM, I would say that's more than a hint that people want the ability to run whatever OS on them freely.
But for consoles it's just crickets.
We shouldn't need to "defeat the DRM", it should be allowed full stop.
They are selling a x86 PC. All x86 PCs sold by everyone are open and you can install whatever you want.
It's commodity hardware packaged into a small box. There is nothing special here.
Trying to sell it as it if Valve are more consumer friendly here is nonsense.
Quickly more and more companies are adopting the model of finding ways to trap the user into continuously paying them more money after the sale, then locking down hardware and software to ensure the customer is properly trapped, and maybe price cutting their competitors a bit. The death of mobile computing is actively happening right before our eyes as Google completes the trap by restricting users ability to install apks. Ultimately customers end up paying more and having a shittier experience as a result of this.
I think it needs to be applauded when a company refuses to engage with this model and simply lets you own what you bought and paid for, and brings this idea to a market that has long been infected with lockdownitis. (Unfortunately in this case the price is not "a little bit higher", but what can you do when component prices have become crazy...)
If you are comfortable building a custom PC and fixated on the spec sheet sure, it's not that exciting. But there are some rough edges with PC couch gaming that are sanded off with this machine.
What exactly do you think an Xbox is? PS4 & PS5?
Everyone loves to say the Xbox and PS4/5 are just like an x86 PC except for the fact they are missing a huge aspect of what makes a PC a personal computer. If the vendor locks you out of doing personal computing, it's not really a PC, is it? Refering to x86 as a PC is such an outdated way of thinking. I can go buy an ARM-based laptop and do more with it than an x86 console. Even an iPhone offers a more PC like experience than an x86 console. The Hubble Space Telescope runs a 486, does that make it a PC as well?
1) Full compatibility with SteamOS. You won't have to fiddle with drivers/hardware/whatever to get it working[1].
2) The physical hardware is maximally condensed, more so than you'd be able to do yourself with a SFF build.
I'd have definitely considered this if I wasn't already doing my own SFF stuff. Gaming on the Deck is a delight and I'd love that console-esque experience for my primary gaming PC as well.
[1]: Incidentally, it looks like they're working on broader support. Sweet! https://www.theverge.com/games/953411/valve-steamos-desktop-...
So does the typical gamer who's not a nerd like GP. I'm not framing it as an insult, more like a reminder: we infamously ignore the power of brands and sensible defaults chosen for you.
The Steam Machine is the best of both worlds, yes, it is a plain PC and Valve is recognizing that. However, they are also selling a fully supported Linux gaming rig that plays many Windows games out of the box.
That might not excite everyone, but it does me.
Check out the gameplay video partway down the page, where the two people are on the couch playing Cuphead. Right under "Your Steam library in more places."
It's just... a real clip of real people playing a real game and reacting in a real way. It's funny. I know it's stupid to call out, but how many exaggerated versions of this scene have you seen before? And Valve is smart enough to say "Let's just film two people playing a real game and snip a nice, realistic reaction shot from it."
Most of those are probably NOT plugged into a TV, so in that way I agree that these are not typical Steam users. That's why the Steam Machine was developed, to bring gaming back to the couch in a way that the Steam Link didn't succeed at.
Also in the way that the Ouya didn’t succeed at - their kickstarter tagline was “Cracking open the last closed platform: the TV”. I actually had completely forgotten about the Ouya, but the wording of your comment made me go look it up.
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/ouya/ouya-a-new-kind-of...
It was a fun idea, even though I mostly just used it as an emulator box.
The controllers were neat but a bit janky, I always had issues w/ the batteries.
I did not love the v1 Steam Controller, but it's easy to use with other controllers.
The SD doesn't seem to support AV1 decoding, the resolution streaming resolution won't go to 4k despite forcing it in the settings, and the most annoying issue, if the framerate is not set to 90fps, there is 30ms of additional streaming latency. Which means, if I connect it to my 60fps living room tv, it will add 30ms of latency.
Then there are a bunch of minor issues, no virtual monitor, having to manually swap settings to windowed mode and hope the game offers the correct resolution for my TV (since my gaming rig is on an ultrawide), having to leave the gaming pc on and unlocked.
Apparently Apollo or Moonlight will solve some of the annoying issues, but I'm kind of soured on the streaming experience at this point. Streaming on the SD should Just Work.
Marketing is made so they you identify with the product or identify with an aspirational version of yourself. Gaming is seen as heavily male-dominated. Expanding that is smart.
(And yes, I know why you're asking and what answer you're looking for.)
>Marketing is made so they you identify with the product or identify with an aspirational version of yourself. Gaming is seen as heavily male-dominated. Expanding that is smart.
This is the most simple and probably accurate explanation. Companies like to make money, untapped markets look like money.
The problem is that then, the current audience, who is primarily male, can raise concerns about the marketing not catering to them anymore.
There's a political arm who doesn't like that at all, and they will not only attempt to enforce collective delusion to dismiss the whole thing (what do you mean? everybody plays videogames, playerbase is split 50/50 pretty much!), but invalidate the very idea that a primarily male audience can have grievances about being catered to.
This makes them look insane and alienates the original audience politically speaking, and ironically, makes the original audience look bigoted, which puts consumers off.
This dance has been going on for like a decade and a half at this point and it's only recently that signs of it dying down have started to show. I can only hope.
People are not vectors of real-valued numbers, and "mean person" is not a coherent concept. Does the average person have half a penis and half a vagina? Is their skin a tan-ish mocha brown? Do they have slightly but not really curly hair that is long in some parts and short in others? Incomplete epicanthic folds?
Any representation of people will be a randomly chosen sample, and not an attempt to visualize the blending of all people from the sample.
IMHO there isn't a realistic "typical gamer stereotype" anymore
sure you can pick any of the past stereotypes and will find people like that, even many, but it's not "most" or even "a slim majority"
Games, and with that Steam, have spread through all of society and Steam is the most wide spread platform for it.
So whatever anecdotal data you have based on your local environments selection bias is probably not "overall representative", just a slice of one of the many many different kinds of people playing games bought from steam.
Unfortunately I usually meet gopnik and niño rata in Dota and CSGO and not typical young nerds from Seattle
It's not my point, but I don't think you're giving a strong rebuttal either.
92% identify as male, 7% female.
https://sqmagazine.co.uk/steam-statistics/
I think that it's true that games are definitely being played by both males and females today, but I think that statistics is that mobile games skew female, and PC games skew male.
A female share of around 40-48% has held steady in this report since around 2007.
Quantic Foundry's research largely backs that women prefer more casual-genre games like match 3, with a mobile bent that wouldn't show up in Steam data: https://quanticfoundry.com/2017/01/19/female-gamers-by-genre...
But they also show a heavy preference for third-person MMOs that are also less likely to show up in Steam data: https://quanticfoundry.com/2023/01/27/perspective/
(Your reply is another example of right-wing discourse being around prejudiced assumptions instead of reality.)
I'm very curious what you and others think the average Steam user really looks like.
Or pick some player profiles at random, count how many girls vs guys you find (very easy to tell with high accuracy just by looking at the games they play, yes there are exceptions but they're actually quite rare, I promise you can get >90% accuracy after you do a few).
Steam user base is at least 3/4 male by user count, probably even more by play time.
In any case, I don't think "not wanting to make assumptions about people based on little to no information" really counts as "very rigorous standards".
Doesn't Steam have a very long tail? Most played might not be very representative.
Maybe young men are just boring and all play mostly just a few games, while majority of players that are more diverse have their interests spread more evenly across others?
Games are so wide spread through all parts of society and Steam is the largest platform for them, sampling 100 people is fully non representive.
Whatever stereotype of two people on a couch you pick, there are not just thousands but more like many 100,000ths to millions of people not matching the stereotype at all. I mean think about it steam has daily active user numbers in the multiple tens of millions.
My best guess is, the people on the photos are related to whoever created the photos in some arbitrary way. It's a pretty common practice for startups when you need photos like that and have no need for "professional actors/models". Like employees of you or who ever you might have hired to do the photos, or some of their friends etc. You still need to singn a simple contract but it's much less time intensive, complicated and annoying to do compared to trying to hire models (of any kind including such made to look like "gamer stereotypes") .
0.000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000001%
That's 248 zeroes after the decimal point.
This is a completely nonsensical assumption. If you find three firefighters and one unknown person at a table playing cards, what do you think the probability that the fourth person turns out to be a firefighter is?
But either way I don't understand your argument.
If you're picking 100 people, they won't share any trait. But how is that relevant to this video clip?
If you're picking a random living room where people are playing steam games, there's a reasonable chance it looks like the video clip. Why not? The odds are low you get someone looking exactly like that, but you can say that same sentence no matter who gets picked. Don't fall victim to the lottery paradox.
except it very well might look quite like that. I happen to know such a case and I don't know that many people IRL.
Video Gaming became widely available roughly in the 90th in many of the places the steam machine is expected to mainly sell to (US/EU/CA/AU/UK/some other places, a lot of special cases). And most people who grew up with video games don't stop gaming. This means that Steam customers and gaming in general is not _at all_ anymore a hobby where most people fall under a small handful of stereotypes.
In turn statements along the line of yours are really quite meaningless and misleading. Steam has stopped being "just for nerds" or anything like that a long time ago.
And sure, things are probably different if you limit yourself to people active on steam forums, that place has a very different bias and using it as basis can lead to huge misconceptions about how people who "use" steam generally live.
Lastly let's also take a moment to consider who this steam machine is advertised to:
- no children, doing so is a regulatory pain
- not young adults, in current times 1k is just too much for someone currently trying to see if they can move out of their parent's place
- so more adults with a stable job/income, which grew up with gaming or at least do game a lot (so mainly age group ~20-35)
- also excluding the kind of people which would anyway go for a 3+k gaming system even if prices where more normal (like a lot of tech enthusiasts with money, "pc masterace" gamers, etc.)
and if you consider that potential customer base the chance for a randomly sampled home (of the target customer audience) to look somewhat like that(1) just went up quite a bit.
And exactly this is also the group for which the clip is, because a major part of the clips "message" is something on the line of a vague combination of "It's a product for everyone"/"Not just for nerds"/"Not just for tech enthusiasts"/"No special tech knowledge needed to play". I.e. "hey person who might live in an apartment without any nerdy stuff, it's also for you, you don't need special tech skills or anything like that". And this is kinda the only group where such a clip might make a difference in weather or not they buy, most other customer groups either won't buy anyway or will make a decision based on spec and reviews...
So IMHO this is a very well chosen clip setting.
Funnily the room does contain a lot of the kind of "not perfectly fitting furniture" you find a lot IRL due to a combination of people not finding fits and replacing/adding furniture over time with slightly changes in taste. I wonder if that was intentional or if the studio provider just didn't care or hat issues finding the right sets of things them self.
---
(1): As in: It has no "nerdy" things, or tech enthusiasts things. And is "just" a "normal/boring" adult apartment taken a clip of shortly after it was cleaned.
I mean, you could say this of I think pretty much literally any ad. Were you previously unaware of advertising?
if you sampled 100 blackberry customers at random, they'd absolutely hate a software keyboard
and so on
This is how staged reaction looks like: https://www.residentialsystems.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/0...
The Steam's clip is actually nowhere near like that.
It's funny how it works. I took an iPhone selfie of myself as the character that I go out to do street photography as and my wife and my son say "you staged that!" but then I hand out my business cards with it and everybody else tells me it is a great photo.
It’s never, in EFL, “HOW…LIKE”
Next up is “make” vs “take” a decision.
Yet one is not like the other.
Valve staged a scene of two people playing a game like how most people play a game. Just like that, there are many small human touches to this Steam Machine page. The messy cable picture where they show off the led strip, the honest and plain FAQ. Etc.
We don't have to glaze Valve for doing this, but we can still appreciate it.
Certified “gamers when women” moment
And then my personal experience with these cheap no-brand mini-computers is that their Linux compatibility is spotty, BIOS updates are non-existend, quality control is severely lacking, and you have basically no support. They are also often pretty loud, overheat and die within a year or two. If something doesn't work properly, you are on your own- the manufacturer will have forgotten about this model in a couple of months, and user base is so low that it's unlikely someone will find a workaround.
So comparatively, a Steam Machine would be much preferable to me, considering that it will likely work out of the box with no compatibility issues, will have a typical valve support (which, judging by Steam Deck, is quite fair), is well-built and near silent.
The problem is once the price crosses a thousand, I'd rather add, say, 500 eur, and get a much more powerful machine. I see a point for the cheapest bottom of the barrel gaming pc/handheld (which would be 700-750) with many performance tradeoffs, but this doesn't look like a good enough upgrade from that. A 12+ GB RTX4070-class videocard, 24-32GB of RAM and maybe even an 8-core CPU for $1500+ would likely be more usable in the current market
It appears the Steam Machine is much more powerful than what a typical mini desktop pc would offer, while staying cool and quiet.
Gamers Nexus review: https://youtu.be/66QzlDewigE
I love my Steam Deck but let's not forget that it took a solid 2-3 years for it to really become a somewhat turnkey, stable experience. They shipped it in a near-beta state. Flipping between gaming/desktop mode induced a fail state probably 30% of the time until a year ago, docking to TV's can still be very frustrating (aspect ratio and latency are almost always wonky until you tinker with it a fair bit) and isn't nearly as smooth a transition as with the switch, there used to be a VERY frustrating lockout where if your deck wanted to update and you weren't on your home network it wouldn't log in, just all sorts of really frustrating points of friction.
Again I love my deck, it's an incredible and capable device. But it was very clunky those first 2-3 years. It really only matured in the last 12-18mo or so. Hopefully the SM is a stronger experience day/week/month 1.
I got the Steam Deck on release. It was a near solid device for me from the get go. Only had the occasional crash/reboot, but I wouldn't describe it as having been clunky.
I love it and use it a lot, but it's not a Nintendo Switch experience, at all.
I got my deck fixed after the warranty period, for example, with very little fuss. They even payed for the shipping of the broken device to them
When these machines were announced I switched to Fedora as a daily driver on my high end gaming rig.
It’s been awesome. I still have to go back to Windows for music production unfortunately. I may switch to Mac for that so I can completely abandon Windows.
I run an optical HDMI cable from my office to my TV and get to play games and use Linux in 77”.
Something feels awesome about that.
Because:
- GPUs don't support HDMI CEC by default, nor does the operating system offer it
- Suspend mode on motherboards often suck
- Many game controllers with 2.4Ghz don't properly import USB Wake events. Or the motherboard didn't implement it properly
I see the Steam Machine as an expensive open source concept car that moves the needle for us PC gamers.
I'd say it is a lot more doable if you make electronic styles of music. Harder if you make classical styles, as many of the big sample libraries don't support Linux yet.
Just in case you're interested, here's a list of everything I use: https://johnoestmannmusic.com/tooling/
Right now Producers and HQ don't want to support it because "theres no money there" and they're bolstered by a crew of developers who have only ever touched Windows who will reinforce the notion that Windows is all you need (because they've sunk their entire career into the platform).
I remember bringing this topic up a decade ago and basically being laughed out of the room, slowly those laughs will become uncomfortable silences, then token support from the passionate, then proper initiatives.
It takes time, yeah, but we're so much further today already than we were 10+years ago.
Could the kernel have something built in to help with this? Like it can tell a program that nothing else is looking at its memory. And then secure boot attests that the kernel isn't tampered with.
That's pretty much a dystopian scenario where you're unable to interact with any network services without using devices with software that's controlled and/or trusted by the service provider. Basically a grave threat to Free Software as a whole, the end of free reimplementations of things you rely on to connect with the society. We already have a glimpse of that on mobile phones controlled by Google and Apple, we don't need more.
There are kinds of games that actually rely on anticheats to be viable, but they're in the tiny minority and I don't think they're worth reorganizing the society over. Most just consider it a solution for problems caused by their incompetently designed netcode.
But "covers for incompetently designed netcode" doesn't hold at all.
Netcode and cheat-resistance are mostly orthogonal. Netcode is latency-hiding — prediction, reconciliation, interpolation. Cheating is the client being an endpoint you don't control. You can have flawless netcode and still get wallhacked, because a wallhack touches the renderer, not the wire. You have to ship that data for the client to draw the level.
Server-side validation kills the cheats that surface as state: speedhacks, teleports, impossible positions; but it's blind to the ones that don't touch state at all. A wallhack reads memory the client holds. A vision aimbot runs on a second machine reading the screen- nothing crosses the network for the server to reject.[0]
That's why the kernel and attestation stuff exists. Not lazy devs papering over a bug: a class of cheat that server authority structurally can't reach, because the cheat never lies to the server.
I understand the dystopia argument, and it's a decent one. "Just write better netcode" isn't.
I'd humbly request that you spend time trying to actually grapple with the problem, there are some exceptionally well paid and talented programmers who are working on this non-stop in the large publishing houses (EA, Ubisoft, Tencent, Activision) who would do anything to avoid paying royalties to shitty software that breaks the performance and reliability of their games: yet for some reason year over year they can't seem to manage it.
Worth understanding why that is, instead of assuming incompetence or malice; perhaps its a harder problem than you think.
You're welcome to, but those games precipitously lose players, because it's frustrating.
https://www.reddit.com/r/GTA/comments/1af8t12/online_isnt_fu...
Big question is whether they can make craching the anti-cheat it hard/unpredictable enough that the publishers will trust it. If the publishers release such a platform and someone releases a live distro that can crack it with 3 mouse clicks, that's a lot of wasted effort.
I have no idea how effective the Windows anti-cheat is, but I imagine that Linux tooling in general is going to make it harder to lock a user out of controlling their own machine.
Tangentially, I wouldn't use kernel level anti-cheats, but if Valve's solution is indicative of the SotA in userspace anti-cheat solutions, there's a lot of room for improvement.
I often feel these comments are made by people whose preferred games are not ruined by cheaters. This is happening right now in Arc Raiders, and it's really sad to watch. The developer, Embark, is now investigating using KLAC to reduce the number of cheaters.
[1]: https://www.gamingonlinux.com/anticheat/ [2]: https://partner.steamgames.com/doc/steamdeck/proton
If it’s something even less doable than that… well I’ll do without.
I'm curious because if a game requires anticheat that means there's an intention that I'd be playing with people who would cheat if they could. And I don't want to have anything to do with people like that. I don't really understand why anyone wants to spend their time playing games with assholes from the internet.
There are a lot of games out there where a group of friends parties up and then goes against other parties of friends out there. Sometimes I want to play with my friends against others instead of only against my friends. Its been a pretty common kind of game style for decades.
> I don't really understand why anyone wants to spend their time playing games with assholes from the internet.
Yeah, it'd be nice to somehow exclude those assholes who would cheat. Maybe if there was some kind of technology which could limit the ability for people to use cheats, some kind of "anti-cheat". It would probably have to be pretty low level in the system to properly enforce this "anti-cheating" integrity, maybe in the kernel and hardware level?
And nobody is forcing you too.
> I don't really understand why anyone wants to spend their time playing games with assholes from the internet.
Maybe your experience and preference is not shared equally by all? HN users in particular to seem to struggle with this concept for some reason.
Dolphin is Linux native. Works fine except for the huge input lag using GameCube controllers (via wii u adapter which is the only solid way), which means I can't really use it. Known issue with some driver, I tried a kmod to overclock it but no dice.
Even without buying you can send Linux gaming signals by playing on Linux and participating in the hardware survey.
> This item is not available for purchase in your region
I use Macs for work and PC for games, and this little box seems a good opportunity to play The Legend of Linux on a desktop or a couch, and make it true.
If you want to venture into the FOSS DAW realm on Linux you have to go to LMMS and Ardour. I've played around with them, they're a little bare-bones, but they do work. Issue is I haven't been able to use them properly, because I just can't stand to look at them, they are afflicted with the medium-size open-source project curse of looking particularly horrid. I hope this isn't taken as an affront to any of the developers behind these projects, a DAW is a hard task, but I keep asking myself, out of the set of developers who work on these projects, is there really no one who feels the same way as me? Am I just afflicted with some weird pixel-peeping autism-esque disorder that makes me stare at the constantly-reocurring-throughout-all-FOSS-applications clump of jarringly gradient-ed grey buttons with white icons on them, their round corners contrasting with each other because they're clearly placed way too close together than they were meant to be? (I swear I see this in every mid-scale project using QT and older GTK!)
And I also need to confirm, this isn't just a "slight annoyance" for me, I have genuine issues when I have to concentrate on a project within some application that is suffering from the FOSS UI affliction, my mind wanders to looking at those buttons again, or those #00FF00 greens, or at some label that has clearly seeped a few pixels downwards out-of-alignment with the button it was placed in...
Ugh, I know I have some issues for sure, but I know someone else has to care about this too? It's the main reason why I fail at using non-textual FOSS software, and have to resort to Logic Pro or Ableton!
Sorry for the rant, I had to get it out of me. I wish I had more time in a day, then perhaps I could go to these projects and help out with UI, but I have a feeling my proposals will be rejected, even if I had the time to make them, I have found most FOSS developers are quite happy with how their UI usually looks like, including many people here on this forum.
Also isn’t the case with Ardour that they essentially want you to pay for the binary because compiling it is a PiTA and there are no instructions on how to do so?
No doubt the price was lower before this hardware shortage, but the $800 is not a reliable number afaik.
That's set the steam machine at either $650 or $800, depending on which interpretation you're using.
And in both machines a similar percentage of their price is caused by these components.
AMD GPU's are all still basically MSRP. You can get a 9070 for $600 off amazon right now.
I couldn't afford to replace my current NVMe drives (which is why I'm very happy I set everything up with the Samsung 970 Pro, as they're 2-bit drives that will outlast even my grandchildren).
I actually had to RMA some RAM yesterday, and even that has gotten so expensive that it now costs more than my entire computer cost in 2020.
https://bsky.app/profile/papapishu.bsky.social/post/3movfklq...
https://bsky.app/profile/papapishu.bsky.social/post/3movfklq...
It is an AOOSTAR GT37 which actually outclasses the €1,039 Steam Machine in most areas except graphics. One cannot blame Valve here though, the hyperinflation of RAM prices is too blame here.
AOOSTAR GT37 (€676 a few months ago [now vastly more expensive if you can still get one at all]) vs Steam Machine (€1039 right now)
CPU: 12x Zen 5 vs. 6 Zen4 Graphics: 16x RDNA 3.5 vs. 28 RDNA 3 RAM: 32 GB LPDDR5X vs. 16 GB DDR5 + 8 GB GDDR6 HDD: 1 TB vs. 512 GB (both NVMe-SSD)
I expect the Steam Machine to run graphically demanding FPS games quite a bit better due to the extra RDNA cores and faster VRAM. However it might actually be the inferior gaming machine for CPU/main RAM intense strategy or simulation games (e.g. Stellaris).
On Stellaris: I remember having a pretty good experience (not stellar) playing on a 2012 AMD FX-8350 desktop cpu. The six year old midrange laptop cpu Ryzen 4650u smokes that desktop cpu.
https://www.cpubenchmark.net/compare/1780vs3766/AMD-FX-8350-...
Just to draw out the fact that with the Steam machine you will have a better Stellaris experience than what I had 7-8 years ago. (Because I assume even better performance than this laptop class cpu)
My thoughts go more on the question if 15GB ram 8GB VRAM is enough for the next 7 years. And if Steam verified will all be split up, and become more confusing, between the 3 different devices they have.
I’m not sure I’d want this at $550, but maybe. At $1050 without controller it’s a solid no.
I’m sure some people will want it. I have no interest in maintaining a PC so if I wanted to play PC games this is probably how I would do it. But the price just absolutely kills it for me.
Yeah I probably wasn’t going to then.
Valve could have priced this at 5k and probably found a couple thousand buyers, and if they only made a few thousand boxes they could claim it sold out then too. This thing is DOA in terms of having any major success or impact on the gaming market when I can walk down to my neighborhood PC store and either build a better PC myself for less money (at off the shelf markups no less!!!) or get a pre-built with better specs that costs less. I could buy a P5Pro and a Switch 2 combined for less money than the 2TB version, and the PS5Pro has 2tb as well!
Its actually mind boggling that Valve is coming in with a less economic product that a fucking hand-built premade at my local PC store.
No way players will ever accept microtransactions...
Ok, Asia is doomed but no way western players will ever accept microtransactions...
No way...
Just to pick on someone, iBuyPower's cheapest "RDY" prebuilt gaming PC has 6 performance cores, 16GB RAM, 8GB VRAM RTX 5050, 1TB NVME, and costs $1200. Basically same specs as the Steam Machine, for a very similar price, but in a typical midtower instead of a sleek, compact cube
The RTX 5050 8 GB is 10-20% faster and the Intel 225F is significantly more powerful (a bit harder to get percentage ranges there since there aren't many 225 benchmarks).
The Steam Machine has been known to be roughly a Ryzen 5 3600 + RX 7600 M performance wise for a while and the release benchmarks have confirmed it; given Valve's statements that it would likely cost more than consoles before prices went haywire, I don't think the Steam Machine would ever have been priced competitively.
> The RTX 5050 8 GB is 10-20% faster
yeah... like I said, basically the same? but if you're determined to split hairs, then that 10-20% faster is also 10-20% more expensive ($1050 vs $1200), so it's still a wash either way. But when "just" a 5060 Ti 8gb (supposedly a $380 GPU) is then 50% faster than the 5050... Clearly the steam machine and 5050 are playing in the same ball pit here. They're doing the same gaming experience
You need to build within the same constraints.
Also, it's $71 more thanjdiy according to GN.
I don’t really understand the point of this comment. Shouldn’t we operate under the assumption that it will work? Is there something particular problematic about the 5050?
Also, AMD GPU’s are still very affordable and totally viable. I have a 9070 and I love it.
At these prices, it's not going to convince console gamers/more casual gamers to move to Steam.
Steam Deck was also vastly more appealing at launch when the base model was £349 (64GB/LCD). It now starts at close to twice the price, £649 (512GB/OLED) despite the hardware being kind of old at this point.
I'm already running Linux on the desktop. I don't use it for anything else, I have a MacBook for non-gaming. The desktop is due for an upgrade soon, and upgrading to a Steam Machine makes total sense to me. I don't have to deal with driver issues, and I get a supported config that will just work with my steam library. I might have to put my current SSD into a cage and add it as an external drive somehow, because I don't want to download a couple of TB of Steam library.
I don't give a shit about graphics quality - I play games for the gameplay not for the graphics, and mostly play strategy games anyway.
I already have a Deck and love that for travelling. A Machine as a non-travelling version of that would be great.
I see examples like this: https://www.bestbuy.com/product/cyberpowerpc-gaming-desktop-... ($1200)
The Steam Machine is $150 cheaper, less storage, and due to lower TDP going to perform more poorly. But... I want something I can hide behind my TV that is very quiet. Can you help me find towers like that?
I’m not going to start posting a bunch of different computers and then have us get bogged down nitpicking the specs. Go look at a couple of vendors and compare prices. The steam machine is just not competitively priced IMO and you don’t need their hardware to get the same experience when bazzite exists and runs great. Plus they will probably do a major release steamOS for desktop again soon anyway so you can likely boot that up soon.
Steam machine is a PC (not like a console): - not priced as a loss leader - runs any desktop OS - it’s a PC
You can do all of this out of box, it’s turnkey, it’s primarily a console experience but a PC if you need it. My point was that comparing this to a prebuilt or BYO PC is like comparing a console to a PC. Different value prop.
It's telling that depending on who I talk to, they go "it's a PC, not a console" or "it's a console, not a PC." It's neither and it's both. It brings the PC's flexibility to a console experience, but for $1100 is that enough? It won't be as turnkey as a console (steam deck showed they can't quite get there) and it's hundreds more than one.
Wine is wine, yes, but CodeWeavers is not Valve. Mac gaming is niche. The budgets involved are incomparable. Expect it to take weeks to months for hotfixes applied in days to Proton to filter through to CrossOver.
(This is my lived experience: HD2 patch 28th April broke wine compatibility, Proton had a hotfix in a day or two, CrossOver had a preview that partially fixed it May 11th and a release that fully fixed it June 9th; it was unplayable from April 28th to June 9th, longer if you count the stuttering issue that it suffered since March.)
The future of gaming on a Mac is also made less certain by the upcoming obsolescence of Rosetta. AFAICT Apple won't just pull it out completely, but they're clearly uninterested in supporting it long term, so over time the experience of trying to get x86 games to run on ARM Macs will worsen.
(I think I'll aim for a DIY PC build in 2027 in the hopes memory prices decline by then, but it's a faint hope!)
I wish that Apple would throw a few nickels that way; Apple Silicon is almost wasted without a decent games library. It would realistically be my only computer if that were the case.
In fact you could literally just buy a separate PS5 and Macbook Neo and spend less than most Steam Machine configurations, so even the "it's also a computer" selling point is not that big of a deal.
No steam sales on consoles after all
But you cant compare the price point with what it used to cost and imagine that its overpriced now and that people will seek alternatives. There aren't any cheaper alternatives.
This has played out time and time again during every other supply-side shock. Once prices go up, they don't come back down.
For the current DRAM situation, I can almost promise we'll never see $60-$90 RAM again. Maybe, 32GB won't cost you $500 eventually, but it'll cost you $250-$350 instead of $500. If the market can bear it, why would anyone get into a price war that's just a race to the bottom where no one wins?
What do you mean?
2011: 2 TB HDD for $79.99 ($0.0000400 / MB).
2012: 2 TB HDD for $157.27 ($0.0000786 / MB).
2014: 4 TB HDD for $109 ($0.0000367 / MB)
2024: 8 TB HDD for $111.98 ($0.0000140 / MB)
https://web.archive.org/web/20250318110739/http://jcmit.net/...
https://www.thecpuguide.com/pc/disk-price-history-hdd-ssd-pr...
That doesn't disprove my point though. Prices are still higher as a baseline than before the supply side shock. Prices raise to a "new normal" and consumers adapt, removing pressure to lower back down to pre-shock levels.
wholesale egg prices have actually plummeted, yet retail prices have only drifted slowly downward incrementally, and have not reached the previous baseline. Its asymmetric price transmission, and its a documented economic phenomenon. "Prices go up like rockets, and fall like feathers"
Looking at the chart, it seems to be the case that every sharp increase in price has been followed by a sharp decrease in price.
Just for fun, here's the same chart adjusted for inflation: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=1WXWZ
Prices will continue to go up.
Though that’s kind of cheating considering it’s basically a monopoly at this point
If that bubble pops like it seems to be threatening to do memory prices could drop back to their old levels give or take some sticky inflation.
Can you explain this chart?
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/historical-cost-of-comput...
You need to provide a compelling argument why it is different this time.
The counter-argument is pretty basic:
RAM companies are currently selling as much as they can at high prices. This leads to investment in building new factories.
At some point the supply of new RAM will match the demand for it. When that occurs companies can increase profit by cutting prices to gain market share.
What's more, all the RAM companies have slightly different estimates of what the demand is. This leads to different levels of investment in new factories. Some will over-invest in new factories and the only way they can make their investment back is by increasing market share.
The final factor is new entries in the market. Chinese RAM manufactures can already produce DDR4 RAM (but only small amounts of DDR5). They can both increase supply of DDR4 RAM and are aggressively chasing DDR5 capabilities.
TL;DR: The profit motive is too strong for companies to artificially keep prices high once demand drops.
Then it's just the same capacity, but without huge buyers. Still the prices won't come down...
If they built new factories now, they would just lose money to an investment that would not pay off.
(Of course under the premise that AI collapses or is saturated at some point. If that doesn't hold true then ex falso quodlibet!)
Because they have orderbooks 2 years (at least) into the future so know what demand is there - and they are demanding deposits for future orders.
It's easy to see if this is true. Look for news on new factories opening:
Micron: https://finance.yahoo.com/technology/ai/articles/micron-mu-p...
Samsung: https://www.kedglobal.com/korean-chipmakers/newsView/ked2026... (note this is doubling Samsung's memory production)
SK Hynix: https://finance.yahoo.com/sectors/technology/articles/sk-hyn...
How long does building a factory take?
If the demand grows with their production they can sell more units at the same price.
If demand goes down by a certain percentage, they sell more for less + they lost the investment into new factories.
It all is based on IFs and about personality, about "optimism" vs "pessimism"
I for one think that the AI bubble will "burst" at some point and I think that then there will be a lot of hardware to go by.
Time will be the judge of my abilities to replace the Oracle of Delphi.
Suppose you have a warehouse full of widgets. You bought them them for $450 each, and sell them for $500. You're really happy with this profit, and you can just keep selling them at $500...forever, right?
But then, I get my own warehouse and fill it with widgets that I bought at $400 each because I entered under better market conditions. And I really want to sell these widgets -- they aren't making me any money when they just sit there taking up space and burning rent.
So I price these widgets at $475, to attract customers. It works; the widgets are flying off the shelves. And they're being purchased by people who used to be your customers, and I'm making even more money per-unit than you are.
What's your next move? Do you want to keep losing customers to me, or do you want to adjust your price to be more competitive?
A new entrant isn't guaranteed to now price at $475. They'll see the incumbent being successful at $500. Now they price at $499 rather than trigger a destructive price war. Companies collude on this quite frequently. When everyone keeps their prices high, all get to enjoy the big margins.
Outside of that, ok so you have a warehouse full of widgets you need to move fast. So you undercut, and sell out. If demand is still bigger than your supply, you're now out of capacity, customers are going back to buying for $500 from your competitor. That means you've mispriced your limited inventory, so now you raise your prices up to closer to $500 because it helps you control your capacity, and also you know the market can clearly bear it.
Anyway, those are obviously overly simplified scenarios prices rarely fall down dramatically because of tacit collusion. Its asymmetric price transmission ("Prices go up like rockets, but fall like feathers")
Retailers are mostly free to offer things at whatever prices they want. But the market has more power than you may think to correct it.
> They make about $20 per user annually and, assuming an active TV service life of five years, yield about $100 over the lifecycle of a main viewing room TV.
https://omdia.tech.informa.com/om030986/in-the-smart-tv-indu...
Look at monitor price drops (comparing the same tech). Same price drop curve.
You can also look at computer monitors (which don’t have advertising and spyware) and see an enormous price drop.
Edit: I found this which estimates you can make about $100 in ads and data collection over the lifetime of a TV https://omdia.tech.informa.com/om030986/in-the-smart-tv-indu...
Rather odd to talk about an as yet unreleased product failing in the past tense.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_on_arrival#:~:text=In%20a...
What? This is so obviously incorrect that I'm not even sure how to respond to it.
If you were to anticipate a failure for a soon to launch product, it is entirely appropriate to say “dead on arrival”. A similar metaphor might be calling the product “stillborn”.
Okay, but the commenter I replied to said neither of those things. They didn't say "it'll be DOA", or even "it's DOA", but rather "killed this product on arrival". Despite my previous knowledge of the "dead on arrival" idiom, I found this particular wording strange due to its use of past tense, so I wrote a comment expressing that.
If you disagree, that's fine, but you've chosen an extraordinarily unproductive way to express that disagreement.
You can buy a PS5, of course, but that's a different walled garden.
If you are in the market for a 3k pc, sure do it, but if you are in the market for a 1k pc, why not a steam machine?
I think this product is going to be hamstrung by its attempts to present as a midpoint between a PC and a console. The way this is being achieved seems to be by selling a device with the specifications of a console but the price tag of a PC.
Valve already did the "this is a lowend device and that's okay" thing with the Steam Deck, and got away scot-free because nobody expected a handheld and people didn't have a ton of preconceived notions. The Deck was also a better value since it was (prior to the price hike) priced reasonably for its specifications.
The desktop PC and/or living room console modalities are both significantly more stratified. People have solidly defined expectations about price-to-performance-to-usability ratios in both of these sectors, and I worry this doesn't go far enough in any particular direction to meet the demands of either market.
Leaves me wondering who exactly this is for.
But! The price is not insulting. You can built a slightly faster PC for a little less, but that PC would be ~10 times larger, it would be louder, it would lack features like HDMI-CEC and good wifi/bluetooth. It really wouldn't compare for living room usage.
In order to get anywhere near the size of the Steam Machine, you'd have to exceed its costs.
The Mac mini costs $600.
[1] https://www.xda-developers.com/mac-mini-m4-gaming-hands-on/
However, at the price of $1130 for Steam Machine + controller, you might as well buy the Mac mini and a PS5 on top for $1250.
It just seems like a poor deal.
The best argument I have heard is that people already have large Steam libraries, but then again, those people typically already own a gaming PC.
To be clear, you have to pay to play certain games online. A lot of popular ones are free and general internet access does not cost anything.
A lot of folks also aren't all that interested in playing games online anyway.
A great example of the target audience are the people who've been playing games on the Steam Deck, but want something with a bit more oomf without the hassle of building a PC. I am not in that demographic! But I have a friend who is. He's quite happy to pay more for convenience. He already has a gaming laptop, but I can see him getting this to replace his ancient Steam Link.
If you only compare the hardware, that's true. Even if you don't consider all the other functionality that a PC has vs. a console, add all the different ways to get free and heavily discounted games on Steam/PC, and the results of that calculation might start to look very different.
Anyways, just wanted to add that the steam machine and PCs killer differentiator: a truly open platform that no mac, ps5 and other consoles can offer. Do whatever you want, install whatever software you want, whatever OS you want. Break the rules, face the consequences. Live life like a living being, not as a slave to some corpo.
I take it you meant GP (as in, the post I was responding to - which to this post is actually GGP but I digress).
I don't think it is. Their reasoning is:
> there are reasons someone might want a 6" cube instead of a full PS5 and a mac mini. None of them are low price but they are reasons nonetheless.
Mine is that it is indeed price, only not the price of the hardware alone but rather the price of the ecosystem as a whole. Another aspect that I didn't cover is that a game that you buy today for PC will likely still work on whatever PC you have 20, 30 years from now. The same cannot be said for consoles.
I do agree with your second paragraph though! :)
A piece of hardware that runs a basket of popular higher-end games at close to 60fps is generally what people look for. If you know you wanna run DF you can use much cheaper hardware, but if you wanna run "games" you wanna check that your target pc performs good enough on a selection of games.
Good - at parity with a PS5 Pro or XBSX in the latest AAA titles.
Great - better than PS5 Pro or XBSX in the latest AAA titles.
I mean that for real: I’ve been impressed by the performance of the M4 Mini I own, but a gaming machine it is not
Maybe in the future. There should be a new generation of Mac Mini's soon, further extending the performance lead of Apple chips.
Maybe once Fable is back or the next OpenAI model releases, we could take a look at implementing a compatibility layer to translate DirectX games to Metal.
Even if that should yet be out of reach, such a project may become more feasible if AI progress keeps up.
At some point you need to face the reality of it not happening.
At 2TB SSD, you should compare to the $1350 steam machine instead.
The GPU isn't exactly equivalent. Gamers Nexus puts it closer to RX6600 performance. But that ignores the RDNA3 improvements so I don't really have a good comparison for that.
They did announce SteamOS for general computers, so I don't expect game support to be too different.
Would it be difficult to make a PC with a similar power/performance profile?
It wouldn't be surprising if Valve's efforts at integrating the unit (putting the relevant chips on a single board, eliminating anything unnecessary, and improving cooling) could shave a significant amount of power.
The Steam Machine is about a 6" cube. That's ~3.5L in volume. This case is ~33.6L. 33.6 / 3.5 != 4.
PCPartPicker Part List: https://pcpartpicker.com/list/3WkCdq
Price: $1021
So if you want something small, it's a bit more expensive
For example, Forza 6 on high 1080p is 60 for SM vs 40 for high end handhelds and 30 for SD. Even at the original price, is it really worth $750? Not to mention that many handhelds and mini PCs also have USB4 ports that one could attach a retired GPU to get 60fps+ @ very high 2k, but the Steam Machine has no such port and only one NVMe slot.
So this is for people who are allergic to the existing solutions (plugging in your handheld, using Moonlight) or just like the brand, but I know it's going to still sell out. I just don't want to hear about extensibility, eco-friendliness, or cost effectiveness from a certain segment of gamers after this.
Maybe they lowered to 16gb to reduce the price.
A relic from “Hard Disk Drive”, which was about two persistent storage technologies ago.
Unfortunately, valve (and we consumers) have to recalibrate our understanding of which prices qualify as "insulting".
This is what you get for the price. Maybe a 100-50 max difference.
I've been looking at building a TV box for a while and this was the number it was hitting
The consumerist mindset accepts this device.
There's no Steam subscription of any kind to access your library. Whether you're spending $0 on average year, or $300 -- you get to access your Steam library the same.
For reference, the PS5 Pro has more than twice the number GPU CUs, an 8-core CPU, a 2TB SSD, a controller, and costs $899.
My old Ryzen 3700X gaming PC has 16GB of RAM and 8GB of VRAM (RTX 2070 Super) and there isn't any game that runs better on it than my Xbox Series X. And the GPU in the Steam Machine is slightly worse than an RTX 2070 Super.
You typically don't want to do this anyway in games. You're probably doing something wrong if you're reading textures/meshes on both the CPU and GPU.
> Don't forget about how much more RAM a general purpose OS like Steam OS can consume versus a gaming specific OS too.
SteamOS is meant to be a gaming specific OS first. It has a desktop environment but none of that loads unless you switch to desktop mode. That's just taking up some disk space while you play games.
I think it's fair for some of us to consider the resource usage of a core feature and not really accept "just don't use desktop mode" as a viable suggestion. Especially if half the pitch is "it's a mobile PC." You can't use many of the features it's capable of in gaming mode.
Also, you can build a decent PC for $1049, but getting it into a decent form/noise factor is going to ratchet that price up. Add in the proprietary CEC stuff that Valve has done for it and it's not as terrible as it seems.
Even if I didn't have a Steam Library, I wouldn't buy the PS5 anyway: no Steam Sales there. And Steam Sales are a godsend.
My games have been working on my desktop from 10 years ago, the SteamDeck, my laptop and likely any future computer I buy that runs Linux.
Only the Nintendo store have games priced usually a bit higher.
Why would I re-buy all the games I own?! The vast majority of people one-and-done games and movies. There are a handful they go back to, and that's it.
CHILDREN replay games cycling through them ad-infimum because their entire concept of time is like 3x less than we've been waiting for the next GTA.
And they don't have money! Adults are the majority of the market now.
Any other behavior from adults, who are seriously time constrained, is niche. And that's fine if someone wants to spend their adult time on earth replaying games, but let's be honest. It's niche.
Citation needed.
I would say I am the exception, but hardware survey says otherwise. There are a lot of people for whom the Steam Machine would be at worst a sidegrade.
No? You can plan all your PS4 (and regular PS5) games. Plus some PS3 and PS One (IIRC) other games.
* PS3 games and the like require a 150+$ yearly subscription, and it's streaming for many of them. No thanks.
* No PS2/PSP/Vita compatibility, heck no emulation at all.
With this thing you could buy it and then install your favorite Linux distro on it and never give Valve another dime. If they ate the cost, businesses would buy them up as the best value for the compute and they're not buying Steam games.
PS5 hardware sales started generating profit in the first year. Only for the first few month the sales were "subsidised".
Yes, but we are in the unique situation that we saw actually increasing prices for RAM and storage over time due to AI craze. You (or me) have no idea what Sony's markup on consoles is right now.
Valve often boasts that they have a very high Rev / Employee number.
They're not, because they don't lock down the hardware to only Steam.
If they subsidized the cost, people could just buy them as general purpose computers and not buy steam games on them.
Valve would only be in a position to subsidize the hardware if they locked the hardware down to just the Steam store.
> The National Center for Supercomputing Applications had already built a cluster based on the PlayStation 2.
Not to mention that the NSCA was just throwing spaghetti at the wall to see if it would prove useful when it came to the PS2,[0] and their setup never worked reliably.[1] The PS3 had several supercomputers made independently.[1][2][3]
[0] https://www.ncsa.illinois.edu/2003/05/27/playing-the-superco...
[1] https://www.warhistoryonline.com/war-articles/ps3-supercompu...
I stopped PC gaming about a decade ago and my current daily driver is a Macbook. I periodically play games on my a PS5 or XBOX, but there are a ton of great games on my Steam wishlist.
I feel like I'm the exact target market for this (although I'm not going to buy at this price point at this time). I don't want to bother with Windows and would love a 'console' allowing me to play most Steam games without a lot of hassle.
I have the Deck and I mostly use it to emulate Switch & PS2 games.
[pirate flag emoji].
Games from sources other than Steam are a bit more fiddly to get going, but it's far from impossible. Like Valve says, it's your computer.
That article is from 8 months after it released. Notably it doesn't count the Digital Edition, but I doubt it also got sold at a loss for that much longer.
PS5 Pro had a launch price of $700, which already felt steep. How is $900 not even worse value? Even if it's "better" than the Steam Machine, let's not pretend that it's actually a good value for the hardware.
The lower the price, the more boxes sell, hopefully making the platform large enough for publishers to target.
The higher the price, the better specs the box can afford, increasing the platform's longevity.
The hidden value you don't see in the specs is that publishers will target this platform specifically for a certain amount of time.
PC: AMD Ryzen 5 7600X 4.7 GHz 6-Core ($170)
-
SM: AMD RDNA3 28CUs 8 GB
PC: AMD Radeon RX 7600 8 GB ($280)
-
SM: 16GB DDR5
PC: 2 x 8 GB DDR5-5600 CL40 ($225)
-
SM: 512GB NVMe SSD
PC: Samsung 870 Evo 500 GB 2.5" SSD ($283)
-
Other parts the PC will need:
- CPU Cooler ($18)
- Motherboard ($100)
- Case ($60)
- PSU ($60)
-
SM: $1,049
PC: $1,196
To be fair, all the latest generation consoles are near 100% backwards compatible with their respective last gen. This has historically been more tricky due to architecture changes but it seems like all consoles have converged into more or less bog-standard prebuilt computers so it's less of an ask.
But still, I trust my Steam library to last longer than anything I've bought digitally on consoles.
Before that, I played Psychonauts 1.
We forget how many insanely good, solid games existed even in just the PS3 era.
"...and it's a PC
Yes, Steam Machine is optimized for gaming, but it's still your PC. Install your own apps, or even another operating system. Who are we to tell you how to use your computer?"
It's not just a gaming console.
Will it run my Steam library of games or do I need to also pay 5000$ again with inflated prices?
People love talking about console exclusives, but every game from before 2013 is basically a PC exclusive.
Can you imagine if the PlayStation Store sold games on the PS5 that you couldn't play there because they were actually Windows games?
It isn't a short list of AAA games that don't run on SteamOS.
Note: I ask as someone with a Steamdeck sitting on the desk in front of me and a custom-built computer under my TV running Linux.
With Windows becoming increasingly hostile, I do think there's room for a hardware/software integrated "just works" offering in the Linux PC space. Plus software pricing is probably a lot more competitive than console (dunno, never had anything to do with consoles, but my impression has always been that hardware is a loss-leader there).
https://www.newegg.com/Gaming-Desktop-PC/SubCategory/ID-3742
That said, I've never had a Steam Deck or tried to seriously game on Linux, so I may be out of touch with how much smoother the picture is in an all-Proton world.
(the laptop issue turned out to be something in the firmware asserting BC PROCHOT for some reason; for now we can periodically clear it with the ThrottleStop utility, but who knows what the actual underlying problem is)
valheim started with extremely poor steam deck performance, but at some point, the team did steam deck optimizations that got it humming nicely enough
And I've paid full retail price for maybe two of them, the vast majority is from 50-90% sales. You don't get those for the PS5 that much.
I also don't have any need for a "Gaming PC", what I've always wanted is a console but with my Steam games. This is it.
Even if a game takes 5 hours that’s 2500 hours
That’s mind blowing to me
If you check out Humble Bundle, you can find bundles of games where you get 20-30 games for around $20. Many of them are charity bundles, like one I got to help people in the Turkey/Syria area affected by the 2023 earthquake. Those bundles mostly consist of keys redeemed on the Steam platform. I don't play first-person-shooters, so those are going to sit in my library unplayed & uninstalled.
You do that like 50 weeks a year. That's ~400 hours a year. 2,500 / 400 = 6.25 years.
My Steam account is 20 years old. Even if we doubled it to 5,000 hours, that's 250 hours a year. Roughly 5 hours a week on average.
That said, a lot of people just end up owning a lot of games on Steam through sales even though they may never play them or only put a few hours in them. I've got >200 games and yet over half have <2 hours of play time. A ton I've never installed, they just came bundled in sales with other games I did actually want. When you can buy a whole publisher's collection of games for like $20 on some crazy sale why not?
I think it's partly because, on console, the sellers / devs have an incentive to reduce the price of physical copies, because they need to compete with used copies. They killed used copies on PC, so they don't need to compete with that market.
but youre exactly the target market for this it sounds like
I think you could kind of get there with a gaming pc that boots up steam big picture immediately? but it would feel hacky vs this for sure
We're truly screwed if things don't calm down at least a little....
We're also nearing PS6 time in the next year or two. It's already six years old.
Watching the LTT review of the Steam machine, it also reminded me why a console holds a lot of value. A lot of their video was about fiddling with settings per game to get a good balance of performance vs visuals. Something I never have to think about with the PS5, especially the Pro.
While I like the idea of PC gaming, and even more so what Valve is doing, trying to move the industry to Linux, the reality of PC gaming has always felt like a huge pain. As much sys admin as actual gaming.
If the Vavle platform are popular enough, they could get presets with a lot of games, but that remains to be seen.
If the price was not upset by the RAM debacle it would have been a very attractive offer, no subscription and more upgradable. I still think in time when the market calms down and supply is less constrained it will reach that price point, even at its current price it's not a completely unreasonable offering for a family member especially with the ability to share your existing steam library.
I can't see anyone other than enthusiasts buying it over a normal console or Windows laptop.
Denuvo and other DRM also exists though.
I’m not the target but I can see the point.
indie devs have easy access to release on PS5, latest Xbox, Switch alongside Steam simultaneously
the subscription any of those users have (a prerequisite for online or multiplayer access) also comes with many many free games, games that are otherwise $4 - $25 without the subscription
people already in those ecosystems have been accumulating (unplayed) titles just like Steam users meme about, and as soon as they sign in on their new console all are available
And yet steam's indie library far outpaces what all other consoles indie games combined provide. Also you get access to a vast amount of games distributed independently and other stores that the PC ecosystem has available.
> the subscription any of those users have (a prerequisite for online or multiplayer access) also comes with many many free games, games that are otherwise $4 - $25 without the subscription
I don't think most PC gamers like being told every month what games they have to play in order to maximize their subscription value. They view it as wasting 100$ yearly just to have the ability to play online along other features that are free on PC.
> people already in those ecosystems have been accumulating (unplayed) titles just like Steam users meme about, and as soon as they sign in on their new console all are available
That's a legit improvement from the console platforms but since it was only a change made in the previous gen you can only go back a single generation for now. On steam your library might encompass stuff sold three generations ago and if you are willing to take advantage of PC gaming outside steam you can go as far back as the invention of video games itself with emulators.
Running an outdated, out of support version of android with limited app availability and a crappy selection of poorly maintained emulation forks... with a buggy GPU driver that causes so many visual and performance issues on a digital platform that does everything they can keep you from installing your choice of OS, let alone the lack of usual niceties that desktop operating systems get you. It will do in a pinch but I don't think anyone who likes emulating stuff enjoys using a system like this. Even a new flagship phone will share some of these issues and if you have an iphone you will pay to have an still inferior solution that can vanish at moments notice if apple decides the emulator your purchased isn't compliant to their draconian guidelines or isn't compatible with newer apis. I guess at least the UI/UX will be nice.
At what point does the value proposition go back, for the target audience you are fond of and can imagine to be disinterested in both consoles and enthusiasts uses of old phones
That was the premise of this thread, the price point of consoles and a generally antiquated understanding of current gen console indie gaming libraries
I constantly encounter indie games that are only on PC, for example Satisfactory, Chained Together, Last Call BBS
Steam is still way better for indie stuff
(both "semicustom AMD" so probably effectively the same architecture)
[0] https://www.memoryexpress.com/Products/MX00135058
[1] https://www.canadacomputers.com/en/armoury-gaming-desktops/2...
[2] https://www.canadacomputers.com/en/gaming-desktop-pcs/275404...
Don't get me wrong, I'm not commenting on the value, but rather the markets ability to handle it.
This may be the best option of a couple of terrible ones.
I've tried various iterations of a gaming HTPC over the years, and they've all been pretty miserable. That lack of any reasonable or stable CEC solution this whole time so far has honestly been an oversized anchor this whole time. And I think Valve is doing a bit of a disservice not advertising it more.
Valve is still great.
Edit, reply to Rohansi as I am rate limited, I’m talking about gaming PCs not consoles.
I can buy a game on PC and play it on the go, I don't have to buy anything else.
The Steam Deck+a PC places Steam in a different league than the PS5 (for now).
Nintendo Switch 2 is way closer, however the games are different (I don't love Nintendo games).
Finally for those of us with a big Steam library and kids, buying a Steam machine or a Steam Deck means I will spend ZERO on games (I can confirm)
Jokes aside, I figured out techniques to avoid buying all together, which is great. I already spent plenty.
It places it in same league as PS Portal and PS5
I can already stream any steam game on any android and iphone out there
I would also be expecting Wifi 7 support as well as unified memory considering they ordered custom AMD silicon. Understandable that it is a rather conservative design for their first generation though.
All my cables I would connect to my home PC/macbook are USB C. IE bluetooth adaptor, sd card adaptor, external ssd, mouse/keyboard, a soundbar etc.
I have several chinesium clones of dewalt batteries/tools, IE lights, compressors etc. They all have USB c output.
"most pc perihpials are USB-A" is not exactly correct for some time now. (not that I'm a fan.)
I even bet many mac users wished their device had a usb-a port or two in order to not be so dependent on adapters, hubs and docks.
Lower transfer rate means less shielding is needed for the cable as well as the overmold, and enables longer and more flexible cables, as extra shielding stiffens the cables.
Because they saved die space in silicon? Same reason the MacBook Neo only has a single USB 3 and a USB 2. It seems that their A-series Pro silicon only has hardware for a single USB 3, and their non-Pro silicon doesn't even have it at all. I highly doubt they are sparing pins from the connector, the complexity of making a special port variant for that far surely outweighs any potential savings.
I am semi-frequently annoyed that my laptop has 0 USB-A ports. At least give me one.
The wired controller is USB-A. The bluetooth controllers "are" USB-C... but came with A-to-C cables, not C-to-C.
Approximately every time I want to plug something in to my laptop that's not a charging cable for another device, it's USB-A.
More to the point, anything I'd want to plug in to a gaming machine, is usb a.
Most new gaming mice and keyboards sold in 2026 use USB A. Not to mention all the older ones that still work.
In 2026 the single most useful port to add to my Macs would be USB-A, with no close competition. On any device with 2+ USB-C ports, it'd easily be worth sacrificing a USB-C to get a USB-A.
Most devices have a cable that’s fully replaceable so you can choose to use C to C or C to A but basically everything has usb C on the device end.
Yes, but we're talking about the ports on the Steam Machine, so the host end is what matters. And gaming peripherals are likely even more skewed towards USB A, because Macs are not the main target for that.
The only PC peripheral I have with USB-A is a mouse dongle when I'm lazy and don't connect bluetooth - and that one I connect to the monitor.
All others are usb-c.
Wired Xbox 360 controllers (and most of their off brand alternatives) have a non-removable USB-A cable.
It's a bummer if have none of these cables around, but it's still more elegant than adapting USB3-A stuff to USB-C.
That said I would not trust this as a PSU for a computer which uses almost all the available power output and does not have it's own internal battery. Most USB-C chargers are not designed to run at 100% capacity for extended periods and could not handle sudden spikes over the rated capacity. Even for desktop PSUs you always want to get something that has a good headroom over the actual power draw for stability.
Nintendo Switch 2 $449.99
Xbox Series S (512GB/1TB) $379.99 – $449.99
Xbox Series X (1TB) $649.99
PlayStation 5 Slim (Digital) $599.99
PlayStation 5 Slim (Disc) $649.99
PlayStation 5 Pro $899.99
From reading posts on X/Twitter, I got the feeling that PC Gaming enthusiasts truly believed this was going to compete with console gaming and those players would flock to the utopia that is Steam OS and managing hardware. At this price I believe its way too expensive to temp console gamers and Steam supporters will probably balk about the specs to price ratio.
I've been screwing around on pcpartpicker on and off for today, and I don't see a clean way to get steam machine specs for less than $800 if you build it yourself, and closer to $900 if i'm being honest (and in no way will it be SFF).
I think the big thing will be if steam can commit to this like the deck and get better performance over time. Consoles out perform their hardware thanks to lots of optimization, enforced by knowing you're stuck with/always going to have the same specs.
The steam machines success to me pivots completely on if they can capture a market of customers who want to jump from console and don't want to become hardware savvy (which has not gotten as easy as it should).
Compatibility and performance in the next 6 months is going to determine a lot.
And if someone better than me wants to check my PC Part picker work: https://pcpartpicker.com/list/HCtXkD
I've got $766 for CPU/MB/HDD/GPU/RAM.
Like what? The only "specific" thing that comes to mind are the boot animations and the Decky plugins (which should work with all SteamOS-like distros).
All of the optimizations, "Steam Deck" graphics settings, controller mapping support, Linux-friendly anticheat and more works on any Linux PC. Almost nothing is bespoke to the Deck, by design.
According to LTT Valve made the conscious decision NOT to subsidize the Steam Machine to let the market compete. I very much respect that and will be willing to pay the premium because of that and:
- using my purchase to vote for/encourage the growth of the Linux ecosystem.
- as a PC gamer I'm already highly invested in the Steam platform with all of my other gaming purchases.
Nintendo Switch 2 $450
Xbox Series S (512GB/1TB) $380 – $450
Xbox Series X (1TB) $650
PlayStation 5 Slim (Digital) $600
PlayStation 5 Slim (Disc) $650
PlayStation 5 Pro $900
Steam Machine 512GB: $1050
Steam Machine 2TB: $1350
But there are economic benefits to an open ecosystem. The Steam Machine has a gigantic back catalog of games that can be had for cheap. You also probably already have all the peripherals you'll need for it. And of course they don't charge for online play.
That last part alone makes up for the cost after just 2-3 years.
> https://www.pcmag.com/news/sony-says-499-ps5-no-longer-sells...
Wish it was cheaper but would look forward to a “just works” experience including sleep/instant game resume.
Add my thousands of already owned Steam games and it makes me excited for a great couch gaming experience. It’s the reason I don’t get a PS5/Switch cause I don’t wanna rebuy all the games and they are not on sale as much.
I have even connected 2 computers directly with an ethernet cable to rule out my networking gear and it was ok but very very far from perfect!
Not to mention the experience is clunky at best. Switching resolution, losing settings, dealing with encoding/decoding, etc.
With that in mind, I maintain that this stuff is very very far from perfect.
I feel like the problem is a very large number of rough edges and software bugs, hardware issues, etc. But it's so possible to stream over the local network with zero noticeable latency. Only if all the stars align and there are no bugs.
The chroma encoding is a little disappointing, but I don't think there's any way to bypass it, even at 1080p.
Sounds like it's in the same vicinity for graphics power. Not worth $1k for a tiny bit more RAM.
I do wonder if this will give me any useful presets, in the same way the Steam Deck does. I have no interest in tweaking graphics settings one at a time.
> In an effort to improve the purchase experience and limit resellers, we're implementing a reservation system.
> Starting right now, you can sign up for the Steam Machine model/bundle you're interested in.
> If you're busy now, no problem: You can sign up anytime before Thursday June 25th at 10 a.m. Pacific.
> At that time, we will close signups and do a one-time randomization to determine the reservation and waitlist order.
Having to enter a lottery to buy one makes it feel like Valve doesn’t have new stock in the pipeline for the foreseeable future.
Given it requires a Steam login of a certain age to register, I suspect this is just to limit the scalpers.
Is it dumb of them to do this? Not really, they got unlucky with the timing and they already designed the machines. Selling them below cost to subsidize steam-sales would probably create bad incentives for them.
What will this mean for Valve's future? Nothing, they're still a relatively lean company with a money machine.
Will this dissuade them from creating hardware in the future? Probably not, the Steamdeck was really succesfull and they've got more than enough resources to do a few failed experiments.
They could have sweetened the deal somehow, though. Maybe owners get a discount on games or something. It was bad timing, but it's not like they can't afford to take a bit of a hit for good will.
Of course Crossover support is worse than Proton, so it will not be viable alternative in real gaming scenarios. But Proton is made by Crossover team.
And Apple hardware is 2x cheaper.
The upcoming Steam Frame will be the real make-or-break moment for ARM PC gaming. Up until now, nobody has seriously attempted to make ARM work for the "Steam Deck" segment of users.
Maybe it'll become a cheaper entry-level machine in a couple of years if they can keep producing them.
4 year old chip design on an equivalently old process node, not that unlike nvidia selling 2-3 year old chips as the spark. Thanks to AI boom, consumer market really just getting the warmed-over leftovers here from AMD and NVDIA.
But is that really so bad? I don't want to say 'sell it at a loss' but loss leaders don't need to bankrupt their companies in order to do their job.
If you sold them at or below cost then people would figure out how to buy 100's and make server farms out of them. Particularly for this hardware. The awkwardness of the hardware being made up for by the subsidy from the manufacturer. But pricing them at break-even would still be good business.
[0] https://www.techpowerup.com/342970/valve-claims-steam-machin...
This is glorious
So I have exhausted all of the obvious routes for logging into my Steam account. Perhaps there are additional routes to discover, but I'm not particularly motivated to look for them at this point. If just getting logged in is this painful, I'm not particularly optimistic about the experience of buying or owning the thing.
HDR on that screen is just something to behold and UHD-BD drive is the cherry on top.
https://github.com/streetpea/chiaki-ng
I could see myself buying the undeniably beautiful GabenCube at spec if the price were at or only slightly above SW2/PS5 level; as an additional device to play the outlier game that is exclusive to "PC" and Steam Deck / Macbook Pro not delivering enough oomph for it to run satisfactorily.
You're describing Every Computer Ever.
Mainstream console pricing is a bloodbath enabled only by perverse financial incentives.
What are you trying to prove? That Microsoft has hardware pricing magic?
That’s great.
Also, I don't think their target market is people who don't own any Steam games yet. It's going to be people with already extensive back catalogues on Steam.
Many people are complaining about the price but you can bring you entire steam game collection and even use as a PC if you want, I sold my PS5 once it became a useless brick cause Sony prevents you from running Linux.
They started with Proton after Microsoft suddenly made a move with the Windows store and also started bolting down Windows a bit. As with most things Microsoft that initiative quietly died over time. But at that time Valve probably couldn't afford to take any chances. It probably also made them realize they had build a castle on someone elses land.
If you are making money in the amounts Valve is, then even the simplest risk analyses is going to show that "Microsoft rug pulling you" is one of your few existential threats. Even though the probability is low or medium-ish at best, the impact is massive. Even anti-trust isn't going to save you. By the time Microsoft gets convicted, you are already dead. Just look at Netscape.
Yes you can buy games on GoG or Epic and play them on a steam deck or a steam machine. But it's juuuuust enough faff to be annoying enough, that you'd rather just get them on steam. I know people (and am a person) who have rebought games they already own so they are on steam, to make playing between steam deck and desktop more reliable.
It's the same with the steam controller. You _can_ use it with games outside of steam, but it's enough of a faff that you find yourself avoiding it.
It's incredibly effective, and why they are an effective monopoly in PC gaming.
/s
Valve understands that inextricably tying themselves to Windows is a long-term death sentence. SteamOS represents a lifeboat for when Microsoft goes full iOS and decides to lock down Windows in exchange for taking 30% of all software purchases. Valve has been taking this threat seriously since at least 2010, which is why they've been investing in Linux gaming. Both Steam Deck and the Steam Machine are further steps toward complete independence from Microsoft.
The random reservation order takes the scalping issue out of the fulfillment part and into allocation making it a lot harder on the scalper.
You can achieve a lot by specifically optimizing your game for a particular machine and Valve has such extreme market power that every game studio releasing on PC will make sure that their game looks and runs great on the Steam Machine.
This machine is more limited than I expected e.g. only 8 GB VRAM, however because of Valve's market power all game studios will see 8 GB VRAM as the new limit. Every game will now aim to look and run great with only 8GB VRAM.
As a poor gamer, I truly appreciate Valve setting such a low standard for gaming PC hardware. Game studios were certainly already looking at 16 GB VRAM + 32 GB RAM as the new standard for AAA games. That is now history.
It could have been something, but the target market is precisely the market that will look at the price and say "Nah".
And as one point of clarification, game makers by and large still aren't targeting Linux. This machine works via the absolutely excellent, almost magical Proton (https://github.com/valvesoftware/proton) that lets you run most of your Windows library on Linux, largely seamlessly.
I disagree that the target market won't accept the price. I see the target market as less technical people, who don't care about hardware specs, but just want to play Steam games without issues.
The price is in the same region as an iPhone, and if you care enough about PC gaming to buy a gaming PC at all, you are certainly willing to spend at least as much money on it as you spent on your phone.
Most games are tested on a steam deck nowadays.
Ftfy
https://pcpartpicker.com/list/brbFsK This is $50 more but it has 1TB of storage and a newer generation of both CPU and GPU and will absolutely destroy it.
I'm sure you could get actually easily cheaper and better even, I haven't followed the market a lot lately.
Prebuilt are likely to be even better deals because they will use some cheap noname parts for the RAM and the PSU, which is mostly fine.
Let alone having to put the PC on the floor because it won't fit anywhere else in the living room.
It's not huge, it's a mid-tower (admittedly, not a pretty one). But the real benefit is that it is upgradable. Basically you are trading off user serviceability for "it just works" and the form factor.
Another thing the Steam machine has is HDMI-CEC support, which is nice if you intend to use this with a TV, perhaps with KDE Plasma Bigscreen. But $1000 is rather steep for a console/HTPC.
The CPU hard-throttles to 4 GHz after exactly 8 minutes of sustained load.
Very tired of every interaction with every tech company and subscription service making me feel used rather than served.
"native" macos games on the m series aren't even that much better because they usually just run through a rosetta layer that seems to lock FPS at only 40. Fans will spin full bore because the game is so unoptimized.
That’s rough.
And this likely goes on until AI really dies or stabilises...
At this price and features it'll probably just be a footnote.
What do you mean? Most PC's have mixed memory configurations.
Steam Machine game testing - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48632989 - June 2026 (19 comments)
I really like the idea of travelling around with my iPad but have a very small but sufficiently powerful computer tucked away in my bag (along with needed cables) if I need it (because, well, Apple is not going to let their iPads unleash their capabilities).
There are some around (even in my geography) but all of them seem to be half-heartedly done.
This is such a bummer. I live in the European Economic Area (EEA)
https://www.amazon.com/MINISFORUM-Desktop-Computer-Output-Gr...
Provides some of the worst value for money on the market ($1,049 with no controller, additional $70 for controller): worse than the PS5 ($599), Xbox Series X ($599), Switch 2 ($449), and DIY PCs.
This doesn't have the best value
Comparing the Machine to the Framework to the Mac is an Apples-to-Grapes-to-Oranges comparison.
Which tracks, to my wit; my Switch 1 is a buyers remorse product. If I knew that a Linux x86 handheld was eventually getting made, I'd have never bought it.
What if, in addition, a nominal fee was charged just to have a chance to purchase a Steam Machine? Let's say $3 (or whatever). Then, all that money is donated to an organization like Extra Life or Game for Love?
In that way, someone with 5000 scalper accounts knows they're going to be out $15k just to get in line. And everyone else who is trying to buy just one isn't sweating the nominal fee.
I'm genuinely asking.
Valve gets it
Too bad YouTube doesn't have a proper API for building 3rd party clients. I would love to build one and use it on my SteamDeck and on the big TV with the SteamMachine.
That said, there are signs that it's coming to the AMD drivers. [1] [2]
[0] https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2024/02/hdmi-forum-to-amd-no...
[1] https://www.techpowerup.com/348723/amd-readies-full-open-sou...
[2] https://www.fosslinux.com/157755/hdmi-2-1-on-linux-complete-...
DisplayPort 1.4 should be enough to do 4K@120hz. Not enough bandwidth for HDR at the same time though
I'll be getting one eventually either way, hopefully after the RAMpocalypce has ended, just because I enjoy collecting consoles and games, and I want to support Linux through SteamOS. I'm sure I can find a place for it in my life, but it's not something I need.
I want a Steam Machine for my living room, but these specs are just terrible for 2026. According to Digital Foundry, this $1200 machine is worse than a $500 6-year-old base PS5.
Steam Machine - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45903404 - Nov 2025 (1514 comments)
For balance:
I don’t need a Steam Machine - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45943992 - Nov 2025 (272 comments)
I could understand having both C and A on the machine, but having the one C port on the back seems like a mistake since that's the port I'd think you'd most want quick access to to plug in flash drives and such if you wanted to copy files from a phone or laptop. While the back ports are where you'd stick the fixed receivers.
> a Nintendo Switch would provide much better bang for you buck.
A secondhand Steam Deck would also be better value, but this isn't a value-focused product. The Steam Machine is Valve's second stab at the premium couch-based PC gamer market, this time with Proton and a bigger focus on controller usability for ordinary PC games.
.....and if you think this is expensive just wait until the PS6 and new Xbox are released.
I'm not convinced this hardware is "an extension of PC gaming, not a console" when the hardware is generations out of date. To credit Microsoft, Sony, and other players, the reality is that unless you are "in the game" for decades, you HAVE to provide a convincing differentiator from the other console markets.
Steam had this with the Steam Deck and personally, I see the world moving to thin clients that play games via some remote desktop infrastructure. It makes no sense to buy this hardware even if it was 500-700 dollars.
In my opinion, it would've been worth the money to just buy a gaming PC, put it in a garage, hidden room, etc with the networking gear, then stream it over the network to a Steam Link or using Apollo/Artemis/Moonlight/Parsec; anything.
Tangential to this discussion: Steam is in the unique position to create a kernel anti-cheat. I know that's not popular. But they are the only ones with the install base AND ability to pull it off in a such a fashion that wouldn't be so god-awful. It's clear that multiplayer gaming isn't going to go away from kernel anti-cheat. It's also clear that developers are still going to target Windows-only with Steam Deck support as a best-kept basis.
I don't see the Steam Machine/Deck as a competitor until they solve the kernel anti-cheat portion. Until then, it can play games that are older, not popular, or single-player which is a valid market but not one that I am a part of, anyway.
EDIT:
S) It's not meant for you.
A) Sure. But you're telling me people are going to pay $1,050 to couch-potato games? I don't see that market and I'm not really sure how you would swing that.
A) Which isn't a valid differentiator. The PS5 is 6 years old and not $1,050. Even if it was $600, that's not a good deal.
A) Sure. But you could also save money and put a regular PC behind or near your monitor or TV.
A) I get it, but there's so many cheaper options out there. Honestly, it'd be better value to get a Steam Deck, get a docking station, then hook that up to your TV than to buy this.
I don't get it. I don't get the market segment that does want this when there's so many better options on the market.
Feels like they should have gone cheap. Undercut the switch and be the cheapest way to play games on your TV. We're pretty far past performance equalling more entertainment. A 150-200 box to play indie side scrollers is a niche that exists.
But even docked, it's a winner for her and all her friends. She's converting more parents over via her friends. The well off ones are just buying from Valve like me. The less so, are using whatever PC is around to mixed results. I'll see how it goes as the kids get older, but I think there's a bigger case than you think and I think it's mostly years long PC gamers who want a more communal experience be it with partners, kids, or friends.
Even buying an old tiny micro PC that's 10th gen Intel would've been a cheaper buy.
I've absolutely loved being able to check a store listing page and immediately know if a game will run well on the Steam Deck. Having the same program for a higher end target would be really nice for me.
Also, getting the CEC right is really valuable for me. If I'm building a computer there's no chance I am going to be able to get it to play nice with the TV using just the controller.
There's also potential for community fixes for older games with issues. And easier troubleshooting cause you can just look up "fix for X game Steam Machine", or "does X game work on Steam Machine"
There are advantages to this over something generic, or building your own machine.
lmao bring up the wife factor, please.
We are devs here. We can have and build gaming PCs I hope?
Yes I will gatekeep.
Yes it is the best as I can get and play anything I want.
Well, you're not doing a good job of it! I'm going to buy one and use it to play games and have a good time.
They will buy a PS5, Switch or Xbox.
If you know PC gaming you will just get a gaming desktop. With newer hardware.
They will buy a PS5, Switch or Xbox.
If you know PC gaming you will just get a gaming desktop. With newer hardware.
"No wireless? Less space than a Nomad? Lame"
The online discourse around this is also incredibly toxic, filled with utopians who don’t understand how serious cheating is in these games, or that kernel anti-cheat, while not perfect, is the best solution available today.
FWIW, the easiest way to dispel the fallacies pumped out by these individuals is to ask how much time they've sunk into a reasonably contemporary competitive online game. I almost never meet people who have these delusions about anticheat being ineffective that also has actually invested significant (>500) hours into the games that they're appropriate for.
(people who work with spam and fraud/abuse prevention also usually don't have these delusions, because the underlying economics are similar. turns out that actually having experience with a thing is enough to disillusion most people of stupid ideas about that thing, who know?)
All of us refuse kernel level anti cheat.
Dota overwatch is the best we have available for anti cheat. It's better than kernel level anti cheat
If we look at a game like Rust it's impossible for it to exist without a kernel anti-cheat today
Ring 0 anticheat is a mitigation, and just one step down the road of enforcing fairness. The goal of erasing cheaters quickly becomes a Procrustian bed that alienates fair players and funds cheat developers, there's nothing that gamedevs can do client-side to solve this problem without redefining how PC gaming works. Out of all the games I've put 500+hrs into, votekick is the only working anticheat that I've encountered.
Competitive games will likely add AI-based flagging into the mix, but it still doesn’t make sense to make cheating as trivial as adding a few uprobes/kprobes on a Linux box.
I would, admittedly, be interested in an anticheat that reboots the machine for deck into a secure mode.
The GPU is on par with the 3060 12GB and RX 7000 series GPUs which are older.
The PS5 is six years old! This is a brand new machine!
The Steam Survey is a better indicator of what you should target vs. something like the Steam Machine or Deck IMO.
I can get something like 80% of the graphics with 20% of the GPU because the places where games are really pushing graphics out now are really resource intensive. Ray tracing is amazing but we got REALLY REALLY good at making games look good without it too.
Wait, really? I looked at the specs and saw like 2/3 the CUs of a PS5.
During covid, instead of getting second budget gaming PC, I setup janky multi-seat program (Aster), to split single windows machine where I could play locally and someone else could play on steamlink. There's so many games out there that you can run multiple instances simultaneously. Or simply stream desktops to media room paired with a good remote.
It was very janky, setup, streaming DRM (or not). But justifies world of spending on one highend system than multiple mid / tier. The Aster program was designed for low income nations where you split a single workstation into like 8+ substations (i.e. education). TBH if Valve sold a 2-3k steammachine super host that can stream multiple games to different thin client, and value proposition is this is the only entertainment unit for your entire house, I think it would pique interests. Maybe tile different streams into one client for splitscreen playing. Sell those controllers.
I really don't see the vision Valve is looking for here.
Well if you scroll down the page, it's presented as a selling point of the machine
You can barely code in such an environment to a satisfactory degree. You want to stream 4k games with low latency?
I'm someone who has built dozens of gaming PCs, and wired my house. I also have zero interest in doing the above... if I have to pay few hundred extra to get a Steam machine hooked up to a TV without all that hassle... I'll do that.
It's not the absolute best value for gaming. It's not horrible in current market conditions but it's also not targeting "best value for gaming" anywhere in the marketing materials. It's hardware that can play your Steam library on your TV. There are harder, less expensive ways to do that, as there have been for ages.
If you're a console gamer, there are less expensive, just as easy options to play console games, so it's definitely not suited for that market.
It's really only catering to people with disposable income that want a cute way to hook up a Steam-capable machine to a TV. It's not a huge market, nor is it a non-existent market.
It was probably a bigger market at $750 than $1050, but we can't have nice things.
Valve has a long-term policy of being utter trash at game security.
> I know that's not popular. But they are the only ones with the install base AND ability to pull it off in a such a fashion that wouldn't be so god-awful.
Epic Games does fine (though they did it by purchasing an anticheat startup).
EDIT: Oh, you're talking about making an anti-cheat focused Linux kernel build? Meh, still would not trust Valve on that front given their long-standing policy of not giving a shit.
Some people say this same thing about the Nintendo Switch and its successor, but here we are, with the former closing in on highest selling console of all time, and the latter tracking above that.
There isn’t teal system seller at the moment
Look at the PS2. Incredible games on bespoke custom harware.
We didnt know how good we had it.
This is just a x86 PC.
Note that you can order more storage but not more RAM. Although that may also be to force vendors to target this exact architecture.
Also: oooh internal power supply! Someone thought about elegance too.
Unless you buy it because it's an x86 based mac mini. That may be true for quite a few early adopters, who knows.
What we actually need is developers testing their games on Proton to make sure they run well day, releasing graphics presets that run well on the hardware, and simply not blocking Linux through anti cheat.
I must preface this by saying that I'm not a game dev, but the Steam Runtime SDK has been offering stable versioned targets for linux for close to a decade now. Porting to one of them shouldn't be more difficult than porting to any other console specific SDK.
How the turntables…
If it doesn't run and you are a commercial client, Microsoft will implement a compatibility hack for you in the latest windows code so your thing from 1995 will work.
There is no parallel to this in the tech world so far. Linux gets around this by requiring you to recompile things, but recompiling old code along with old compilers and old libraries and all their dependencies is a nightmare.
As we are on HackerNews, there's a good chance that you can build / setup your own pc with better specs which you might want to look into and then decide.
While they could have and imo should have just put usb 2.0 C ports on it, users have an expectation that USB-C ports are fully functional high speed ports. On most machines you can plug something in to any USB-C port on a device and they all work the same.
Indeed, thankful for that.
I wonder if they mean that? Japan is 100V.
I couldnt produce 10y visa statements from another country i lived in.
Since then I just dont use steam, shame cause i like the hw
Linux more or less runs most Windows games. The ones that don't run are ones where the developer is going out of their way to make them not run - mostly with kernel-mode anti-cheats that just find themselves staring at the wrong kernel.
Steam makes that pretty seamless and Steam games "just work". For non-Steam games you need to do some tinkering, it's stuff that most people browsing this forum can do.
I've run Bazzite on my desktop for the last year and every update has just been hitting the "Apply" button in the settings page with my xbox controller. While on mutable distros it's always involved going in to the terminal and running a series of commands or opening the repo list and manually replacing the release name for Debian. I know there is a GUI software store to do it but it literally never works because some error will show up that isn't handled and you just get a generic error message.
It follows a different philosophy. I've been using atomic systems for the past year or so as my main driver.
If you want to install something that needs superuser access, you do it inside a container. This protects your OS from breaking.
The number of times I've accidentally installed something which broke my window manager or compositor is now zero
It would be incredible to convert my dusty XSX to a linux box
Xbox 360 was notoriously hard to reverse engineer at the time. Maybe for similar reasons.
I have no need for it right now, but when the next big Windows-only game comes out, it’ll be pretty tempting. (The last Windows gaming I did was when The Elder Scrolls Online came out…)
this is for folks who want steam games in their living room and dont want to build their own system.
However at this point in my life, the best gaming experience i get is from XBox live/online subscription. I got to the browser, click on a game and start playing without caring for anything else. The most complicated thing i have to do is connect an Xbox gamepad for games that require it (I prefer keyboard +mouse whenever possible).
I wish Steam had something like that for the games I've bought. I've got several games in the library, I cant play some of them because currently I have a Mac m4.
maybe im misunderstanding, but you exactly like the person that a steam machine is for.
I expect to get the rest of this decade out of my Steam Deck so IDK, very different to my normal expectations for a computer. The Steam Deck also defines a floor that will allow compatible games to be very performant on the Steam Machine so I think that will help the Steam Machine have a decent lifespan.
I also think on some level we need to start resigning ourselves to getting 10+ years out of our computers!
I'm hopeful that with the insane hardware prices right now, studios will be forced to actually make their games work on older hardware.
Until they want to play Fortnite/Roblox/whatever else.
a) they already use Linux, but want to buy this anyway just to encourage the ecosystem
b) they want to recommend it for the normies they know, who find Linux, or gaming on Linux, daunting
So my point still stands.
Here's hoping my $135 BC-250 arriving tomorrow works without any issue.
Either way, congrats to Valve!
Anyway, upon registration I was informed that my account was "not eligible". You are welcome, I guess.
No, and never had one. My account is as clean as pristine as it gets. I already mailed them but never got an answer.
I guess there are important differences?
Ans of course, the biggest visible difference is that this boots directly into Steam big-picture mode, where you operate the UI using a controller (although it does support KB+mouse), which makes it ideal to use connected to a TV, like a regular gaming console.
So it's Arch in the same way Android could be called Linux.
I can still customize and configure things, or not really?
does that mean I can't customize the OS, like shortcuts?
I’m pretty sure that this OS partition gets completely wiped every update though so your customisations will have to be reapplied.
I will probably wait for reviews to see how it goes
I still feel very interested, though, but I would need to adapt some workflows that I have with paint.net for now
I would have hoped for ~600$ with the economic realities maybe 800$, but 1000$+ just feels like too much doesn't valve have like a multi-billion dollar muscle couldn't the folks make it a tad cheaper...
I guess we can only blame the current market conditions at the end of the day.
So unless it releases on the Steam Machine or PC, then the sales of the Steam Machine are going to be really poor.
That is even with the price of the Steam Machine being more expensive as well. You might as well buy a PS5 Pro or Xbox at the point.
And for premium games we spent $45, or about $150 today.
As I noted when announced, it's something that doesn't get headlines, but a real barrier for enjoyment for a console-like PC. Hate being stuck with 'guest 1' and 'guest 2' or whatever. Many games want each player to progress and without true multi sign on, it just doesn't work. Hence games dropping local multiplayer on PC.
I find it far more plausible that AI-assisted game dev will help indies catch up in scale to 10 year old AAA than the modern AAA studios deciding to throw in the towel on the graphics arms race.
At Xbox Showcase, many of the popular beats were bringing back elements from Halo or Gears of War that fans missed.
The formula for making hits seems to be pretty clear, but the studios are bucking it.
indie games community has joined the chat
I mean publishing titles with the polish & breadth of content of Arkham City , 2013 Tomb Raider , Titanfall 2 etc.
Luckily the market did find a sort of stable target to aim for with the Steam Deck; many modern titles do aim to work well with those modest specs, such as Cyberpunk 2077, Baldur's Gate 3 etc. And when Blizzard launched Diablo IV on Steam, they explicitly announced that they had partnered with Valve to ensure the game was heavily optimised for the Deck and very playable on Day 1 (and it was indeed, from my experience).
Hopefully we see more such examples with the Steam Machine. And I do agree with you that they could've gone with specs worth $250, but sadly with the current pricing crisis, $250 won't get much and I bet many people would've laughed at the specs. Even the Switch 2 now costs $500. :(
The capitalism part actually made sense until it didn't
I hope this and the steam deck-likes continue to be successful and incentivize developers to optimize their games for last-gen and portable hardware. I think the "steam deck compatible" certification has already been fairly good for that.
My 2021 machine is still more powerful (apart from the GPU maybe, but that one is from 2022 and has 12GB memory) and I can't justify buying this for that amount.
Would've loved to have a dedicated machine for gaming, but alas.
It’s dead on arrival
This is gonna be such a litmus paper test for the most fervent valve suckers
https://www.tomshardware.com/video-games/console-gaming/valv...
Steam Machine
I'm buying the Steam Machine as well to game on the couch. Give me 4k 60fps and that's all I need. The Steam Controller is also fantastic shape on my hands, very comfortable.
How'd the 14 sneak in here
dhh has been parroting tony robbins stuff and other vaguely white supremacist stuff on his blog.
His blog is a mix of zealous out-of-touch and unloved techbro shit and the most rancid far-right essays possible. Trust me, he's earned it.
It makes me feel insane that people just skip over this stuff. The guy is openly citing "people" like Tommy Robinson yet he's still a popular and respected distro guy? I'm going to commit a crime.
Was already kind of annoyed at the "manual" not being very comprehensive - think I'll switch to another distro or fully yank control away from Omarchy and just roll my own Arch, I guess. Depends on how much work it'll take.
I'm glad I asked!
You can install it on your normal, average Arch installation anyways. Don't need to rip everything out from the root just for a pre-configured meme distro. It's not as if Omarchy had hard forks of all the software it steals, anyways. It really is just dotfiles.
Even divested of emotional arguments, "LARBS but in 2026" is the sort of deliberate toe-stubbing that people should not recommend. If you're using Hyprland without knowing how to use Hyprland, you should either 1) be using KDE/GNOME or 2) pin every single system package that you install. Hyprland does ship breaking changes, you can update your system into an unrecognizable mess.
Either you want a gaming computer, and you'll get a much better one that can be upgraded in the future for the same price, or you want a console, and you'll never pay a grand for it.
4 years old hardware and poor connectivity.
I really can't think of a single use-case where the Steam Machine is the right choice actually, unless your one and only wish is to make a donation to Gabe.
You can have the same performances in the same form factor with the same OS (but more upgradability) for less, or you can improve on any of those points for the same price.
This also remains true for Apple! I don't care about performance. At all. I write text in a terminal! I only care about the hardware working as expected, out of the box, without having to tinker with bullshit. And Steam provides a platform that fulfills this, every time!
I think if the Xbox ended up being more like the Steam Machine (i.e. more like a PC) then this middle ground that the Steam Machine sells to would probably go away as I don't think the group of folks who care that it's Linux based is high enough to support production.
All that said, I don't think this is a good value. I'm presuming if I did a little work SteamOS 3 would be workable for me, and I have significantly more RAM, and possibly a better GPU? Not exactly sure where the GPU falls out, but I definitely believe I could buy a better GPU for less than the new box.
If it gets preferred shipment for the controller, you could buy it and sell the box and keep the controller. :) I think my controller ship date is estimated in 2027 right now.
The Steam Machine doesn't have a single exclusive, therefore it will not sell, no matter its price point.
Pricey, but so is any other sort of electronic entertainment hardware these days.
take a sip at GamingOnLinux community... they don't seem to care about stuff running perfectly on Proton and not natively or that Gabe is buying another 600 million USD yatch. they love the Steam ecosystem more than developers crafting games and abiding to 30% of fees that are a clear sign of monopoly power
It was so much less of a hassle than I had expected.
That being said, I wouldn't make a PC until RAM and storage prices come back down to earth.
You'll also need the exact same configuration on this than on any other computer on which you install SteamOS.
There's also absolutely no guarantee that this will "work well". I fully trust Valve to be fair, but you're talking about a completely untested piece of hardware.
Grasping at straws.
You're mixing up the experience of putting together the machine and using it. Why do you think playing games on Steam is not just clicking play and playing?
>Valve is doing the vertical integration, they're putting together the hardware, the software and the OS, of course you'll be getting a better experience than pulling together random stuff.
I mean, the GN review already talks about how some things don't quite work right because games are seeing Steam OS and assuming the hardware is a Deck. I'm not so sure it's such a given that the experience will be smoother, at least in the early days.
Game devs will NOT be optimizing specifically for this hardware lol, that's ridiculous. PC optimization (and this is a PC) has nothing in common with console optimization.
Only place I saw 2.5G actually be beneficial is Wi-Fi 6E/7 for the APs.
Personally, I'm rarely "surprised" by a need to play a specific game that I don't already have downloaded/installed so I can just tell Steam to download the game in advance. But if I were to be in such a surprise scenario, we're talking the difference between popping on one youtube video while I wait or popping on two youtube videos while I wait. In both scenarios, I am waiting for a small but not insignificant amount of time... now if we could get 10gbps that'd be a game changer. I wouldn't even context switch for a 2.6 minute wait.
[0] https://gameboost.com/blog/call-of-duty-bo7-download-size
Now, I don't want to overstate it: it's simple disappointment. I'm still interested in the machine, as is.
Now I envy you living in a country where an internet uplink speed of > 1GbE exists for typical private households.
Fairly common for those with full-powered gaming desktops and Steam Decks, and soon, Steam Machines.
Personally... my internet is only 300 Mbps. My WiFi connection is roughly on par with 1GbE. I have a very small pool of 2.5GbE capable devices, but overall I'm just not fussed about making the switch.
can i build a mini pc myself? probably but meh
That's what, ~4-5 years of gaming on a superior GPU without the headaches of hardware failures or upfront cost of 1000$?
Yikes Valve. The only folks buying gaming PCs these days are people eeking out an advantage in competitive 3D shooters or folks unaware of how far cloud gaming has come.
I couldn't imagine playing a game by streaming inputs to a server 30ms away, which then streams those inputs another 30ms to the game server, and then having that round trip.
60ms screen delay and 120ms total delay.
One more data point - you're getting 1080p medium settings (for latest games) with a Steam Machine at ~1000$ upfront vs 4k max settings but 20-50ms added latency (for most people) for ~20$/mo without any longterm commitment.
That's where we're at. I'm in the 2000$ upfront to get max settings, minimal latency camp myself but I consider that to be a niche, luxury purchase category.
It's like how someone can play League of Legends at 80 ping for years, but once you're down to like 10 once you can't really go back.
Yet it will still be out of stock for a long time.
A company that spins up a division, builds a product, sells 100k of them, and winds down is a success
Keep in mind this entire venture from Valve is also about ensuring they can't be made a vassal of Microsoft.
I think ultimately there goal is to push more people towards Linux so that more games get developed there. All of their hardware pretty much targets the Linux side of gaming, so they really are trying to get rid of the Microsoft monopoly on PC gaming which I think is great.
Honestly tempted to buy a couple for relatives, who do some phone gaming and one who owns a 3DS they use, and see if they find anything interesting in PC gaming. Also make it a decent media center of course too.
And lack of DRM makes a PC in general a mediocre experience for official streaming services if you want more than 720p streaming. If you care about that.
Now that I see the final price of the Steam Machine, I'm gonna be recommending the BC-250 more strongly.
I dont have much hope in getting that, let alone this.
Now we're expected to pay almost 2x the cost of a current-gen console for what is probably near-identical console performance? Doesn't make sense. I appreciate Valve being in the hardware business and I understand that inflation/the AI bubble are hurting PC components but a grand for this is a terrible value. I mean let's see what the benchmarks look like, but "Semi-custom AMD Zen 4 6C / 12T" sounds like what's in the PS5 and Xbox One. Actually those have 8C/16T CPUs.
lol
I think most of people who wanted (me included) a steam machine are now between buying it or not buying anything at all.