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?