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.
It is trivial to switch between gaming mode and desktop mode. I'm not sure what point you are trying to make here.
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.
[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.
I have the Deck and I mostly use it to emulate Switch & PS2 games.
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: $1,196
To be fair, all the latest generation consoles are near 100% backwards compatible with their respective last gen. This has historically been more tricky due to architecture changes but it seems like all consoles have converged into more or less bog-standard prebuilt computers so it's less of an ask.
But still, I trust my Steam library to last longer than anything I've bought digitally on consoles.
Before that, I played Psychonauts 1.
We forget how many insanely good, solid games existed even in just the PS3 era.
> the best one, Veilguard
I assume that's sarcasm or you're the first person I've heard to say that :)
Actually the reason I finally played the series is because my buddy worked on Veilguard. I'll give them credit for assembling something as cohesive as it is considering it went from a single player game to a multiplayer game and back to a single player game during development.
"...and it's a PC
Yes, Steam Machine is optimized for gaming, but it's still your PC. Install your own apps, or even another operating system. Who are we to tell you how to use your computer?"
It's not just a gaming console.
Will it run my Steam library of games or do I need to also pay 5000$ 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.