I think people underestimate how hard it is to build a computer this small and this functional with off the shelf parts. I have a case that just has a motherboard, power supply, and SSD in it for video streaming and web browsing on my TV, and it’s almost as big as this. It’s a relatively high spec MOBO since I wanted to stream fames from my PC initially, but still.
I don’t have confidence I could make this myself at these specs.
I just want the controller and I want it now. Maybe the vr too but I need to make more money first.
The pc makes sense though. It’s better than what a lot of gamers I know have. Out of 30 people on our server only myself and 3 others have more powerful computers.
Aren’t the consoles loss-leaders to lock you into their platform? I don’t see how Valve can be expected to match that price range.
I don’t see how Valve can be expected to match that price range.
They don’t have to. Even if the sticker price is $50 more and the console equivalent, for a lot of people that’s a better value because you don’t have to pay >$100 per year for online services.
And if it’s priced the same as a similarly spec’d PC, there’s still wiggle room there. Are they comparing to a custom-built PC? Or are they comparing to a prebuilt?
They can’t, and they won’t.
The way I see it, the people the Steam Machine is meant for are these:
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People who are sick of the increasingly predatory nature of console gaming and want to switch to PC, but don’t have the confidence or knowledge to build their own
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People who are similarly sick of Windows bullshit and want to try Linux for gaming, but don’t have the confidence or knowledge to do it themselves
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People with plenty of cash who fancy an extra gaming PC to put under the TV
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Valve fans who will buy anything Valve releases, no matter what
IMO it’s not trying to compete against consoles directly, and especially not on price. It’s trying to be an alternative for people who are already fed up with consoles - with lock-in and subscriptions and price-hikes and being advertised to - which is a certainly small but hopefully impactful market.
Something that I don’t really see people talk about and could be a huge selling point for people is that it’s pretty small. Especially for folks that live in a small studio, saving space can be pretty important. I know mini-PCs are big in China, which itself is a huge market
Absolutely, for real. It’s smol and cute, and that’s a plus.
Of course, it isn’t like you can’t build yourself a small PC if you want to. I’ve got a build in a Fractal Design Terra with a beefy GPU, and that thing is barely bigger than a shoebox.
But building small is even more daunting for newcomers than building large, so IMO it ties into the same angle of people wanting something that is premade and a product that just works, right down to the SteamOS operating system it ships with.
There is some overlap among those, particularly 2-4 and 3-4.
Also, I’ve read a lot of comments from people for whom the Steam Deck was their first experience with Linux and they are overwhelmingly positive. I can see this new device having the same effect.
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Valve is insanely profitable and makes money with every game sold on Steam. Selling the Steam Cube at cost would make financial sense for them over the long run.
Not anymore. That changed with the Xbox one and PS4.
They probably caught on when people started buying hundreds of xboxes to build supercomputing clusters
Depends on the console and the point in its lifecycle.
Unfortunately, during the pandemic we discovered what happens when things are underpriced. Effectively, if you don’t have the original company pricing their products according to the market, the scalpers all swoop in and buy up all the stock and resell it at market rates.
The difference here is you can only buy them directly from Valve, they’ll probably have some sort of limit, and you’ll probably need an account to be a certain age, at least in the early days.
They had the exact limits you described back when the Deck was released and that didn’t stop scalpers.
However, the Deck was a much more hyped product, so there was more incentive for scalpers to jump through the hoops.
I don’t remember hearing anything about Deck scalpers
Me neither. I’m sure it happened, but it didn’t seem to be a major issue
Nintendo had a similar implementation and I don’t recall mass scalping of those devices either. Obviously anyone could purchase a single one and scalp it but that doesn’t create a mass shortage.
Still gonna buy it
I’m might be tempted by this thing.
I’ll have to see the price and the real world specs.
I have a framework desktop which probably fills al lot the same niches though… having this set up with the tv is something the framework doesn’t do.
Why can’t the framework desktop be on the TV?
I don’t think it has hdmi cec the way steam box does.
Plus I use it as a server and it constantly has most vram used by ml models.
For instance, the Framework HDMI module card is not explicitly advertised as supporting HDMI-CEC, but the Parade PS186 chipset inside of it does, and the card itself is detected by cec-ctl and works as expected.
https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/HDMI-CEC
This may just be referring to Framework laptop though idk
Oh cool! I might have to try this out!
If I can get this to run on “console mode” and ssh into it for my server needs, that would be awesome
Maybe then I’ll just need to buy the steam controller
All Steam installations include the SteamOS GUI “Big Picture Mode”, so you don’t need to install SteamOS to use the nice console/controller interface. I believe you could just set Steam to launch on startup and also configure Steam to open in Big Picture Mode by default
Well I know what I’m doing after work this week.
I have atomic fedora cosmic, so I’ll see what levers I need to pull to make this work. Maybe I need to add steam to the os tree and break it out of its flat pack.
Thank you for the tip!
It’s going to be a complete repeat because they learned nothing from the first time. This is only really appealing to console games as PC gamers have nothing to gain from buying one, but pricing it like a PC means console gamers won’t buy them either. This is exactly what happened the first time.
The first time it was largely due to lack of game support and confusion as they were 3rd party devices.
This time pretty much every game will run through Proton, Linux for desktop has matured a lot, SteamOS is much better and Valve are selling it 1st party. It will sell a lot, even if it is priced as a PC… I mean at the end of the day it is a PC, a custom SFF one, which are usually very expensive. This will good value for what it is, you just can’t compare it to a console.
I play a lot of PC games and it’s definitely of interest; if I can buy a powerful, compact machine that can play everything for less than the cost of a current generation 12-16gb+ GPU, I’m sold.
Why would I want to spend a bunch more money to build/upgrade my own rig? Have you seen RAM prices lately?
There’s still at-home streaming. I just upgraded to an RX 9070XT so I can stream 4k60 to my TV through my Steam Deck using Sunshine and Moonlight.
Granted, a big reason why I did that was because they were selling for $600 a week ago on Newegg. Plus I didn’t want to have to fight Nvidia drivers on Linux while trying to mod Skyrim to hell
I am a PC gamer and am considering one as long as the price is reasonable.
This is only really appealing to console games as PC gamers have nothing to gain from buying one
I have a PC gamer friend who has an 8-year-old PC. He has said he is getting a Steam Machine.
What this offers PC gamers is a ready-made box. Some PC gamers don’t want to build a PC, they want to just buy it. And this offers a very standard package to get.
I partially agree with you, this needs to be under $800. But the last attempt was awful, this would have to be over $1000 to be as bad as the original Steam Machines. Also Linux could not play many games back then.
The pc parts market is getting fucked by the AI rush, so maybe it’ll work out better.
