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Steam Machine Price Announced - Starting at $1049 / £879

The dream is over...
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All these machines require fast DDR and NVram chips which are manufactured by a staggeringly small number of vendors, all of whom have had their production strip-mined by AI companies leading to severe supply shortages and hence skyrocketing unit cost.

The industry hasn't dropped the ball. The ball was taken away from them by the chip suppliers and the AI companies.

The only shielding was to sign supply contracts for volume prior to the supply drying up. Which is what has somewhat helped Sony, but companies like MS who were leaning hard on JIT procurement have been fucked royally.
True but the situation is still fucked up for everyone at the end of the day. There's no reasonably priced gaming hardware to buy.
 
I don't really believe this - Valve marketed this thing running modern AAA games like Black Myth Wukong and Silent Hill f, while insisting post-reveal that the hardware was more than ample enough for games of that caliber because it's better than 70% of PCs on Steam. It was a lot of spin and peddling of bullshit stats from Valve, quite frankly.

Aside from that, I agree with you that it should've been positioned like a gimmick device. But that only works if it's priced like one too.

In terms of benchmarking obviously heavy games like Crimson Desert, for once I think journalists are doing gamers a big service here. People need to realize before they buy that the premium price is not reflective of the premium experience they're probably expecting.
That video just highlights a disconnect between marketing and engineering more than it shows they were trying to make an RT machine to run console games. Yeah I suppose there could have been people out there who might have assumed this thing could competently run Crimson Desert or games of that ilk. We're splitting the demographic pie pretty thin at the "willing to spend $1.5k but totally blind to specs", but I'm sure they exist to some degree. I'd certainly never tell anyone that they should buy this with intentions to play those kinds of games. You might get lucky with some especially lean stuff, but I wouldn't count on it.

Before the RAM hike this thing was poised to be a solid $500 indie box, despite what one youtube video says. The spec reveal said otherwise and today's benchmarks don't surprise anyone who knew how to read them. The cold water in the face in the price. I hope time doesn't make the price look better, but I'm not convinced it won't.
 
The more I look at this the more shitty this product looks to me. $1500 CDN without a controller

My PS5 pro cost me 900 CDN on a no tax day close to launch. Even with multiple years of PS plus you're barely scratching the get in price for the SM. Not to mention you can get a used PS5 on marketplace for 1/3 the price.

This isn't even good for a multiplayer only gamer as a lot of MP games aren't even available on steamOS. Like the ones I play.


I love my deck and was looking forward to this as my next gaming purchase but… Just no.
 
True but the situation is still fucked up for everyone at the end of the day. There's no reasonably priced gaming hardware to buy.
For sure. This was the absolutely worst time to release new gaming hardware.

Things got really bad very shortly after they announced the Steam Machine and has just been getting worse and worse.
 
Gabe buying a superyacht recently and a 78 million dollar mansion last week makes this sooooo much funnier.

"B-b-but Gaben understands us gamers right?"
 
100% this.

Price difference between 7600 and 9060XT 16GB is not that much compared to how much better and not memory limited 9060XT is:

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Keep in mind steam machine is fighting a 7600 on windows. Linux/RadV runs RDNA2/3 around 8-12% faster than windows.

Steam machine was benched 15% below PS5. It's around an RX 6600 in raster. It's that bad.
 
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Performance is just one of many advantages of PC.

Also if you look at the Steam hardware survey you'll find that a good amount of PC gamers are playing on machines worse then current generation consoles. I wouldn't look at NeoGAF users as a normal representation of PC gaming.
I'm just looking at this crazy pricing and I think its going to cost close to $2000 in Canada and without controller, I just can't think of single reason to buy this over proper PC or even consoles.

But you are right I'm no expert in PC gaming so maybe there is something there I'm not seeing.
 
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Best thing Valve released today was news on broader SteamOS compatibility.

At least that means people with more sense than money can make use of the best part of this hardware.
 
This is what I was talking about this weekend with you DenchDeckard DenchDeckard . You gotta learn to be more consistent man. Your PC bias is screaming at us nowadays.

One is a pc the other is a console. It's completely different. I literally wrote that this is a hard pass in the df thread and i said this was cheaper than I expected with the current crisis. That is all.
 
Reaction is a bit overboard IMO -- price is steep, but the whole market is right now.

I can see some legitimate reason to be skeptical of this price if you have the time/resources to pick out a comparable PC build and set it up for cheaper.

But I don't see any reason for console players to scoff at it... when you're paying for online, paying a high premium on games without deep sales, and no access to mods or community features, even getting your next PS6 or whatever console at half this base price doens't make up for the losses over time.
 
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Reaction is a bit overboard IMO -- price is steep, but the whole market is right now.

I can see some legitimate reason to be skeptical of this price if you have the time/resources to pick out a comparable PC build and set it up for cheaper.

But I don't see any reason for console players to scoff at it... when you're paying for online, paying a high premium on games without deep sales, and no access to mods or community features, even getting your next PS6 or whatever console at half this base price doens't make up for the losses over time.

You understand that PS5 and Xbox Series X are almost 6 years old right???

LOL
 
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Reaction is a bit overboard IMO -- price is steep, but the whole market is right now.

I can see some legitimate reason to be skeptical of this price if you have the time/resources to pick out a comparable PC build and set it up for cheaper.

But I don't see any reason for console players to scoff at it... when you're paying for online, paying a high premium on games without deep sales, and no access to mods or community features, even getting your next PS6 or whatever console at half this base price doens't make up for the losses over time.
the price might be high but the convenience of plug-and-play is really good
especially if you have over 100 Steam games like I do
 
I went ahead and bought the Dbrand Companion Cube. Even if I don't get one or decide not to/return it it'll just be a nice piece of merch from one of my favorite game series of all time.

Just look at this thing!

I'm just looking at this crazy pricing and I think its going to cost close to $2000 in Canada and without controller, I just can't think of single reason to buy this over proper PC or even consoles.

But you are right I'm no expert in PC gaming so maybe there is something there I'm not seeing.
I get it, and I would say that for most people you should still just build your own PC.

Price wise I tried putting together a similar spec build in a ITX form factor through micro center and it was $1114 w/o tax. Mini PCs in general are also priced quite high to the point where I would say a Mac mini is the best value mini pc.

Reaction is a bit overboard IMO -- price is steep, but the whole market is right now.

I can see some legitimate reason to be skeptical of this price if you have the time/resources to pick out a comparable PC build and set it up for cheaper.

But I don't see any reason for console players to scoff at it... when you're paying for online, paying a high premium on games without deep sales, and no access to mods or community features, even getting your console at $500 base price doens't make up for the losses over time.
Yeah, I think it's just the general exaggeration that happens with everything especially here.
 
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no but for the people who have a massive steam library and like the idea of Plug and Play yes
Yeah, for me my interest in Steam Machine despite the price comes down to:
  • Console like plug and play nature
  • Proper suspend/resume and wake from controller
  • HDMI CEC that actually works
  • Getting away from dogshit Windows
  • Ability to hot swap SD cards back and forth between my Steam Deck and Steam machine especially as somebody who wants to get more into emulation and have a SD card with EmuDeck all set up on my Deck
 
Oh no, Steam is pricing a prebuilt PC in line with market realities, which makes it prohibitively expensive. This is proof that everyone who ever loved Steam was wrong and mistaken, or something. Other acceptable takes:

-Steam was desperate to expand to the living room, but have no idea what a mess they just walked into. Now, Gabe won't be able to buy an additional yacht, and will spend the rest of his life depressed that he doesn't understand Console Gamers.

-It'll sell through its initial run of 200 units, proving Steam fanboys have no standards, and are directly responsible for the rot in this industry, especially high prices. If you want prices to go down, you need to slowly hunt these guys down one by one, like points on an overworld map.

-The idea of not subsidizing a hardware For the People is morally wrong. Unless you're Xbox, depending on what week it is.
 
It's got console form factor but it's hardly "plug and play". You're going to have to mess around with game settings quite a bit and if you want to play a good chunk of the popular multiplayer games you'll have to learn how to install windows.
 
So turns out Valve is woke slop?

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Use of the word "y'all" combined with those people being included in the marketing as well??

Freezing Major League Baseball GIF by MLB
 
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There's no other thing they can do at this point… There's no more empty space in the desert of alamogordo and they are not going to afford the loses… In the upcoming weeks Valve is going to announce that the Steammachine is sold out and probably you are not going to hear anything about it until they announce the end of production.

I find it hard to believe Valve will allow themselves to go out like this. That would be a huge PR disaster.
 
PS6 will be cheaper than this

WHOA! Now you've done it. For the sake of posterity, can you at least list out what you believe the PS6 will have SSD wise? I'm assuming you're saying, it'll be cheaper with a 1TB drive and a controller, right?
 
Yeah it's really more "it only makes sense to subsidize closed ecosystem devices." As has been said dozens of times across various threads, they just aren't trying to compete with consoles at all. This is just one option for PC gaming.

(it doesn't seem like a good option but since this isn't not a "platform" there's no real stakes here)

Then I wish the media would stop calling it Valve's Steam "console".
 
They should've made it more powerful than the ps5 pro and charged $1800. Same people would've bought it as they would now yet you could've marketed it as the most powerful gaming console that plays pc games.

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