The original price should have been in $700-800 range, pre-RAM and storage pricing escalation, which would have changed the equation drastically. I even considered getting it as a mostly streaming box for a living room, intending to play only the lighter games on device. But for the announced price and after delays, it just doesn't make sense financially. As is, you're grossly overpaying for the level of GPU performance Steam Machine offers.
reply>The original price should have been in $700-800 range, pre-RAM and storage pricing escalation
replyAlso 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.
What's most surprising is the benchmarks dont look too hot vs the PS5... which doesn't cost nearly as much.
replySony are masters of optimizations. Some of their PC ports run really well on the Steam Deck.
replyI’ve seen from a couple of places that a valver has commented that they can’t say exactly what the original price goal was, but that you can get an idea from the price increase of the steamdeck (~$200 usd)
replyThat 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.
I feel bad for them running into this shortage right before launch. Steam Machine was announced before all this.
replythere's probably ~$150 in the ram and ~$100 in the SSD alone, not to mention everything else.
we gotta have data-centers though because, uh.. well, we gotta have em.
replyTo a large extent, all these datacenters are being built because people want tokens. Do you use something like Opus or GPT5.5 for coding? Well, you're part of the demand.
replyIf 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 someone is using heavily underpriced tokens I don't blame them much either. They're not funding the hardware purchases, super-investors that want to control the AI world are.
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