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Yeah, this is a promising solution to scalping. Previously, if you had only small numbers of consoles available at launch, scalpers and their bots would claim a large share of them. With Valve's new policy, that share is reduced to s/g, where s is the number of verified Steam accounts controlled by scalpers and g is the number of legit gamer accounts. Since s is likely to be much less than g, s/g is close to zero, and scalping is dramatically curtailed. Almost all of the initial batch of consoles will go to legit gamers.

Interesting, as it sounds like a lottery reservation system, which is kinda a neat way to deal with many issues.

I'm always supprised that companies don't do a tiered price release, offer it at 200% price, you get it, 150%, you lower down the list and then 100% lottery time, that way they gain from those who can afford to pay more(maybe able to subsidise other sales later and price cuts down the line). Why feed scalpers when you can coin it directly and then offer a lower price to those who are prepared to wait a few more months or so.

It also reduces the DDoS effect of telling all your customers to repeatedly hit your web servers at a specific day & time.

I would be curious how the public would react to a Dutch auction, where Valve launches the console at a $10,000 price tag, and every ~hour drops the price by $100 until they are sold out. It creates the illusion that buyers are "breaking the line" when buying high, so it's their fault (not valves) for the high selling price. This would also eliminate scalpers.

> This is nice

But this is not nice:

> This item is not available for purchase in your region

> Why a randomized reservation order?

Lies, they just want to protect themselves from the German Tank Problem [0] type of analysis.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_tank_problem

I would love to see a generalized FOSS reservation system that could be used for just about anything that would help address the issues Valve listed. It could be as simple as a short lived deployment (1,3,7,14 days) that writes out the entries to a Google Sheets. I have encountered so many people trying to come up with their own approach to this problem that I think it would be worth solving. Maybe I can find time to work on it later this year.

This is how tickets for sports and concerts should always be sold.

Entertainment tends to compare with airline tickets, except that with air travel, there are regular flights and competition. There is no such thing as a single flight from Paris to New York on one Saturday at 9pm on a window of a few years.

This would also be a very good idea for university course selection systems

Exactly, get the devices in the hands of real users instead of ebay traders trying to get rich.

That's pretty cool!

I am more surprised there's people lining up to buy this when it's genuinely cheaper to get a used PC off a local marketplace. I feel like this is unnecessary as I am pretty sure they'll be able to fill it in one shipment.

Living in Japan, most popular concerts are handled this way. It really really sucks to not get a ticket, and it sucks even more that we need to do it this way because of scalpers. But hey, if it means I overall have a better chance of getting tickets (at list price at that), hey, I guess it is worth it.

I wish there were better ways of defeating scalpers.

It's not worse than a traditional launch, but it's also not much better. Make 1,000 Steam accounts, which are entirely free, and you get 1,000 times more chances of getting one than others.

To be fair I don't think they'll be scalped a lot because the price isn't attractive already and alternatives are plenty.

I don't get why companies don't take advantage of the demand.

For example: Start the bidding at BASE_PRICE (BP) + 2400. Then reduce the price by $1 every 3mins over the course of 5 days. Until the BP is met and then just carry on queuing.

You could buy it early if you want it that much or just wait an extra couple of days and end up in the queue at the BP.

I don't know if it would create pressure on that second it ticks over to the BP, so then its BP+1 - well I guess the nash equilibrium would be pushed up.

Valve's communication around this release has redirected all rage towards Sam Altman rather than the Steam Machine.

Most of the general, watered down tone of Corporate America that we love to hate comes from the legal department, usually at the late-stage point when they make all the decisions in a company: product, business, launches, strategy, direction, etc. Everything needs to run through legal, and they have a final say on everything, including every public communication.

That's why I'd love an interview with Steam's legal head. Sounds like they'd have some wild stories to share.

I have a feeling it would have cost drastically less if we didn't have a RAM / storage crisis, which is really sad.

This is why Apple locks in supplier prices years in advance.

I love it

I won’t buy it

But wow what a nice communication

That’s gonna look great on post mortem report

Is that the coupon code that brings it down to a competitive price?

> There are a variety of reasons, all of which are affecting hardware products everywhere.

I'm pretty sure the price increase is exclusively caused by LLMs.

I totally get where they’re coming from but sadly it doesn’t change the fact that $1100+ is a tough sell for the benchmarks they’re hitting.

Still, how does a PS5 cost half, and arguably, has better/fast hardware? I can't imagine Sony selling them at a loss.

Valve gets it. I very much want to support them and vote with my wallet. Unfortunately the Steam machine isn't a good fit for me. I will buy the frame in a heartbeat though. HMD with a FOSS OS? That's in its own class.

They need to do that because, in some sense, they're competing with Gaming PCs, not really with Gaming consoles. Gaming consoles sell their consoles at a discounted price because they can recoup a lot of it when selling games. Steam can't have a markup on games because they share their marketplace with other PCs.

It's also convenient since they're now facing multiple anti-trust lawsuits.[1]

[1]: https://www.pcgamer.com/gaming-industry/dutch-non-profit-set...

I like that we can write the story that Microsoft sold their software with the home computer on the idea of productivity at home while the actual incentive was entertainment, and valve ends up justifying buying gaming hardware with the incentive that it can do productivity.

That is why the frame will be the most interesting to the people on HN. A VR PC you can do whatever u want with.

I got a Steam Deck for my son. Docking it to an external monitor with mouse and keyboard in desktop mode is just running a nice desktop Linux with KDE Plasma by default. I showed him the basics and it's perfectly usable for his school needs. And he can still put it in his bag and play Skyrim on a train ride.

And I like knowing that I will own the hardware long term. I have so many bricks at home with great hardware and locked boot loaders.

and it makes Steam Deck the best console ever made.

i picked up Darksiders 3 a few weeks ago to play on my deck. at some point i realized i was pretty underleveled but i didn’t wanna grind.

so, opened chatgpt in desktop mode and uploaded my save, asked it to write me a script to set my souls/xp/money to whatever number. it analyzed the save and spat out a bash/python script. after a chmod +x it worked flawlessly. done from bed took like 15 mins to figure it out end to end.

no other what other (handheld) console in history combines the depth of library, the slick console experience, and also lets you chmod +x.

Reminds me of the PS3 and its OtherOS feature.

You write this on the forum where often in apple-based topics folks here defend locked down system ie on phones for themselves as something actually superior. Its often paid PR or folks to deep in the topic to have objective opinions (or simply employees/shareholders) but still, I've had that talk few times and downvotes were flying left and right.

I do hope they will release drivers for the Steam Machine, otherwise the openness isn’t very useful. Or at least make it possible for others to make drivers by publishing specifications.

Edit, reply to bjord as I am rate limited: HDMI CEC, the chipset, GPU drivers, controller receiver etc.

Edit, reply to robhlt: Thanks! Hope we can get that ported to Windows

I mean it's a PC, you can install whatever your want on a PC.

Xbox Series S/X, PS5 and both Switches are pretty much commodity hardware.

Nobody has even hinted that it would be nice to have a 3rd party store or the ability to run whatever OS on them freely.

I keep wondering why.

I don't understand, what is so special about this?

They are selling a x86 PC. All x86 PCs sold by everyone are open and you can install whatever you want.

It's commodity hardware packaged into a small box. There is nothing special here.

Trying to sell it as it if Valve are more consumer friendly here is nonsense.

If you sampled 100 steam players at random, it would look nothing like that.

I don't get it. It's a quite typical commercial clip. Just perhaps less dramatic. What's special about that clip?

That's basically how I looked playing Cuphead with my wife except I think there was a bit more swearing coming from her

I wasn’t going to say anything until I read this comment but that clip of the gameplay and the clip of the two people playing are not from the same source. The one showing the gameplay has a tower of books or possibly a jenga tower on the coffee table that doesn’t exist when seeing the gamers. It’s just editing magic and stitched together to have exactly the effect elicited by your comment.

Just scroll a bit further, you can see more clips just like any other commercial shots from a studio set. I don’t think that’s a point you can praise Valve.

I'm not sure I understand, I'm just seeing a very clearly staged 2 second clip of product usage and reaction like you'd see in any commercial.

> For the inevitable minisforum machines comparisons

It appears the Steam Machine is much more powerful than what a typical mini desktop pc would offer, while staying cool and quiet.

Gamers Nexus review: https://youtu.be/66QzlDewigE

>which, judging by Steam Deck, is quite fair

I love my Steam Deck but let's not forget that it took a solid 2-3 years for it to really become a somewhat turnkey, stable experience. They shipped it in a near-beta state. Flipping between gaming/desktop mode induced a fail state probably 30% of the time until a year ago, docking to TV's can still be very frustrating (aspect ratio and latency are almost always wonky until you tinker with it a fair bit) and isn't nearly as smooth a transition as with the switch, there used to be a VERY frustrating lockout where if your deck wanted to update and you weren't on your home network it wouldn't log in, just all sorts of really frustrating points of friction.

Again I love my deck, it's an incredible and capable device. But it was very clunky those first 2-3 years. It really only matured in the last 12-18mo or so. Hopefully the SM is a stronger experience day/week/month 1.

The Steam Machines raises the bar on PC Console gaming.

Because:

- GPUs don't support HDMI CEC by default, nor does the operating system offer it

- Suspend mode on motherboards often suck

- Many game controllers with 2.4Ghz don't properly import USB Wake events. Or the motherboard didn't implement it properly

I see the Steam Machine as an expensive open source concept car that moves the needle for us PC gamers.

I also work in music production (for video games) and fully switched to Linux + FOSS about a year ago.

I'd say it is a lot more doable if you make electronic styles of music. Harder if you make classical styles, as many of the big sample libraries don't support Linux yet.

Just in case you're interested, here's a list of everything I use: https://johnoestmannmusic.com/tooling/

You are lucky. A lot of the games I play with friends use kernel level anticheat crap that doesn't work on Linux

It’s always fantastic to read a success story of migrating to Linux gaming from Windows. As Windows gets worse and worse there will be more people joining us.

Even without buying you can send Linux gaming signals by playing on Linux and participating in the hardware survey.

I too want to buy one to support the ecosystem, but sadly, Valve doesn't want me to.

> This item is not available for purchase in your region

A much better way to raise that signal, is to use that money to buy native Linux games instead.

Ditto.

I use Macs for work and PC for games, and this little box seems a good opportunity to play The Legend of Linux on a desktop or a couch, and make it true.

Let me guess, DAWs? Have you tried Reaper (FOSS) or Bitwig Studio (commercial)?

How do you use a controller with your TV? Do you route USB over there as well?

Please buy pinephone instead.

According to LTT the original price was in the $800 range, but thanks to Sam Altman it increased to what we saw today.

I bought my own version of a "Steam Machine" i.e. a mini-PC powered by an AMD APU for just €676 right before the RAM prices exploded.

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).

Plus GPU prices. They absolutely got screwed by their launch timing, unfortunately. And they’re not big enough to negotiate better terms though that probably isn’t really an option right now anyway.

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.

I don't know what you mean by 'killed.' It'd be sold out faster than hot cakes.

"killed" is a bit of a stretch. High prices on all gear is here to stay. This is the new normal. Unless that simply means that nobody buys consoles/pc's.

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.

I still think it's a great concept and a really accessible way to get a great computer. But I agree, I thought this was going to land in the $500 to $700 range. That said, I also bought a mini PC for $250, and that same PC is now going for $600. So I don't really think steam can be blamed for that

> killed this product on arrival sadly.

Rather odd to talk about an as yet unreleased product failing in the past tense.

Over $1000 for a machine with only half a terabyte of storage, especially for gamers, is just brutal.

Why dead on arrival though? If you want to buy the same kind of pc, price is the same.

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?

I'm simply impressed they're releasing at all. This has to be literally the worst 6 month time window in the last 20+ years to launch a new computing device at scale and have to build the vendor contracts and inventory from zero.

I'd like to buy one, but its a bit pricey for those specs. $1600 AUD?

I don't disagree that this device is very likely too expensive to sell well.

But! The price is not insulting. You can built a slightly faster PC for a little less, but that PC would be ~10 times larger, it would be louder, it would lack features like HDMI-CEC and good wifi/bluetooth. It really wouldn't compare for living room usage.

In order to get anywhere near the size of the Steam Machine, you'd have to exceed its costs.

This device does sit between mac-mini-esq lower power devices and compact enthusiast builds and, like the Steam Deck, it's an attempt to build a new segment. That said, if you think paying $1000 for this kind of hardware is some kind of exception, I think you should go take a look at what you can get on the prebuilt gaming PC market. You get a little less because the Steam Machine has a small footprint, but if you're looking for a nice little machine you don't overpay by much.

Here, try your hand at assembling one much cheaper at the same performance:

https://pcpartpicker.com/

To me it's not even the comparison with builds that's damning; it's the comparison with handhelds and other mini PCs. Most people excited by this probably have a Steam Deck or another handheld, so they have to be into playing a very specific slice of games that can run slightly better than the handheld.

For example, Forza 6 on high 1080p is 60 for SM vs 40 for high end handhelds and 30 for SD. Even at the original price, is it really worth $750? Not to mention that many handhelds and mini PCs also have USB4 ports that one could attach a retired GPU to get 60fps+ @ very high 2k, but the Steam Machine has no such port and only one NVMe slot.

So this is for people who are allergic to the existing solutions (plugging in your handheld, using Moonlight) or just like the brand, but I know it's going to still sell out. I just don't want to hear about extensibility, eco-friendliness, or cost effectiveness from a certain segment of gamers after this.

If you look at how extremely overpriced console hardware typically gets away with being, this is not a bad deal if the system is durable, relatively quiet and there are good games well optimised for it. The deal is sweetened by the fact that you will be eventually be able to upgrade the RAM and storage easily and for cheap if/when prices eventually come down from the current AI insanity levels.

People who are willing to spend $71 on not having to build it themselves. That's the premium according to GNs best-effort like-for-like build.

It's been a while since I built a PC but that price seems very fair

My 15 year old Mac Mini has the same amount of RAM as this machine in 2026. I bought it used around 7-8 years ago for 200 EUR.

> Those are specs that belong on a laptop or a lowend console offering like the Series S.

Unfortunately, valve (and we consumers) have to recalibrate our understanding of which prices qualify as "insulting".

Nope. Just built a pc this Jan. Ram and GPU prices are insane.

This is what you get for the price. Maybe a 100-50 max difference.

I've been looking at building a TV box for a while and this was the number it was hitting

The disk and memory prices are very high right now. Perhaps they could do a disk-less, memory-less variant.

For people who are already throwing money at Valve on a monthly subscription and might otherwise have bought something from Sony or Microsoft, or more likely, will also buy something from Sony or Microsoft.

The consumerist mindset accepts this device.

Who knows, maybe once the AI bubble has burst they will surprise us with a replacement mainboard for this second gen. If they want to keep it in sale as long as the Steamdeck it would make sense to offer gamers a simple way to upgrade their existing machine when Steam's ecosystem is already open to all sides. Maybe they'll even outsource that mainboard upgrade to ASUS, MSI or others. Once we see a teardown we can make a better prediction.

I blame Sam Altman and all the other AI bros for this and everything else in consumer tech increasing in price

The PS5 Pro has 16 GB unified memory, the Steam Machine is 16GB + 8GB. That'll be where some of the price difference comes from. But most likely comes from Sony locking in long term contracts before price insanity.

Different value props. The target audience for this already has an extensive Steam catalogue. To buy a PS5 Pro is going to require re-buying all of your games for it.

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.

Well, and you pay 120$/year for the privilege to play games online on that PS5. That is one of the reasons SONY can subsidize the PS5 unit price and sell under cost. Valve is not in that position, because people would buy it as office PC replacement.

PS5 sells at a loss & makes up the difference collecting rent on a closed system. With Steam you're buying an open system.

> For reference, the PS5 Pro has more than twice the number GPU CUs, an 8-core CPU, a 2TB SSD, a controller, and costs $899.

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.

Not that it matters as much for a gaming console but the PS5 Pro CPU is definitely the slower one.

It makes more sense to focus on its value as a console platform than its price as a PC.

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.

For reference compare it to a PC.

Right, but it’s a PS5, not a PC - you’re paying less for the privilege of letting Sony 100% control what you use the device for, including not being able to play your own games that you’ve paid for. Try doing that on a PC. Try checking your email on your PS5, or steaming the media of your choice.

Can I serve my media library off of my NAS with the PS5? I am legit asking because I just got on the list hoping to use this thing as my home entertainment system

> For reference, the PS5 Pro has more than twice the number GPU CUs, an 8-core CPU, a 2TB SSD, a controller, and costs $899.

Will it run my Steam library of games or do I need to also pay 5000$ again with inflated prices?

I'm sure they were originally hoping for mass-market success, but given the RAM drought and ensuing pricing, I'm guessing the best possible outcome at this point would be to break roughly even and learn, so that they can put out a more competitive revision if and when prices ever return to Earth.

With Windows becoming increasingly hostile, I do think there's room for a hardware/software integrated "just works" offering in the Linux PC space. Plus software pricing is probably a lot more competitive than console (dunno, never had anything to do with consoles, but my impression has always been that hardware is a loss-leader there).

My guess are people who want to PC game but don't want to deal with building a PC themselves - there's a decent market of pre-built gaming PCs that this would be competitive with.

https://www.newegg.com/Gaming-Desktop-PC/SubCategory/ID-3742

I have about 500 games in my Steam library and maaaybe 20% of them are available for the PS5 (which I own).

And I've paid full retail price for maybe two of them, the vast majority is from 50-90% sales. You don't get those for the PS5 that much.

I also don't have any need for a "Gaming PC", what I've always wanted is a console but with my Steam games. This is it.

Right now, noone that can avoid it should be buying ANYTHING with RAM or SSD in it.

We're truly screwed if things don't calm down at least a little....

Reviews are saying it’s actually similar to base PS5 in performance.

They make different performance playstation 5s?! What happenes to the console compatibility story? You used to expect any game to work on any console because they were all near identical.

I picked up a PS5 Pro before Christmas on sale for $599. It seems I made out like a bandit. I assumed prices would go out due to all this AI mess and knew I’d want one for GTA.

Watching the LTT review of the Steam machine, it also reminded me why a console holds a lot of value. A lot of their video was about fiddling with settings per game to get a good balance of performance vs visuals. Something I never have to think about with the PS5, especially the Pro.

While I like the idea of PC gaming, and even more so what Valve is doing, trying to move the industry to Linux, the reality of PC gaming has always felt like a huge pain. As much sys admin as actual gaming.

If the Vavle platform are popular enough, they could get presets with a lot of games, but that remains to be seen.

Playstation price is also increasing FYI

The Steam Machine is likely slower than the base PS5 in terms of GPU performance. As a proxy, the memory bandwidth is 448 GB/s on the PS5 and in the range of 256 GB/s for the Steam Machine's VRAM

Indeed, they are hitting a weird spot, their pricing category is stuck in between people who just want to play without breaking the bank account, who will go for a PS5 or XBox, and hardcore gamers who will go directly for their own custom build PC

I think it was supposed to be priced in below the PS5 Pro but due to ram supply issues and just general silicone allocation issues it was not to be. The steam decks $200 price bump tells as much

At best it'll take over Steam hardware survey as the standard spec of PC gaming.

I can't see anyone other than enthusiasts buying it over a normal console or Windows laptop.

A PlayStation 5 also requires you now to be online every so often (30 days?) for even your single player games.

More properly, this is competing with prebuilt gaming PCs, surely?

Except that unlike a PS5, games are plenty, cheaper, and you probably already have a huge library even before buying it.

I’m not the target but I can see the point.

The PS5 base has 2 more physical cores (4 more threads) than this Steam Machine so I'm not optimistic that the Steam Machine outperforms the PS5.

(both "semicustom AMD" so probably effectively the same architecture)

Unlike a PS5, a PC has all the games that I want to play. And to drive home the irony, right now I'm actually using my Steam Deck to play a game that was originally for the PS3 (Valkyria Chronicles). Legitimately purchased, even!

Yeah. I don't think they're gouging, I totally understand how expensive RAM and storage and GPUs are, but...oof. I just can't justify it as a 'fun' purchase.

I mean, can the market really handle any of these prices? If we're truly stuck with these increasing prices for another year or so, whole sectors might get "restructured", including gaming, simply because people cannot afford the devices they depend on.

Yeah. But they’re only other choices to just sit on it for a few more years, which point they would need to put different hardware in and it would just increase costs.

This may be the best option of a couple of terrible ones.

Same, I could have maybe justified $600 to my wife, $800 would be really pushing it. But 1k+ with a controller? There's no way when we have other things to save for. I am sure young single people will still buy it and it will sell out, but my Series X was $550 a few years ago and ill enjoy that in my living room for a while longer.

Yep, and I feel many commenters in this thread are comparing value propositions only in terms of specs. I’ve built a number of Mini-ITX cases, from 5L to 20L, and they are a pain to work with and maintain. In some cases it’s impossible to make a reasonable filtered airflow, so dust builds up very fast, and a teardown to do clean up is pretty annoying. Steam Machine looks very straightforward to maintain. And it’s also tiny and quiet.

Same here, I know why it costs as much as it does, and that doesn't deter me. I want it for my living room, and to just mess around with. Will enter the lottery and hope my number gets picked!

I'm skeptical that they have working CEC. The steam deck, for example, does not. It also doesn't work reliably with many TVs. I'll believe it when I see it.

Until the next Steam sale. Steam Summer Sale is coming up!

> The Steam Deck+a PC places Steam in a different league than the PS5 (for now).

It places it in same league as PS Portal and PS5

Yeah. Hope they never change.

Isn’t this industry standard? How many PCs have locked boot loaders?

Edit, reply to Rohansi as I am rate limited, I’m talking about gaming PCs not consoles.

Why is it surprising? This is essentially a pre-built PC in a small form factor and most PC peripherals are USB-A.

A USB-C PD power supply which supports 130W is probably gonna be more expensive than whatever power supply they're using now...

Xbox 360 controllers (and their knock-offs) are still extremely common choices for PC gamers who want a controller. Xbox because they have good windows plug-and-play, 360 because there are still plenty of $20-ish dollar ones available, as opposed to the ~$40-50 range for the Xbox One controllers.

Wired Xbox 360 controllers (and most of their off brand alternatives) have a non-removable USB-A cable.

These are USB3-A, so USB3-A to USB-C cables will properly work at full potential for any of your USB-C peripherals.

It's a bummer if have none of these cables around, but it's still more elegant than adapting USB3-A stuff to USB-C.

Steam machine uses about 200W. Can you even buy any 240W pd power bricks. Quick search on amazon shows that all that advertise 240w can only output 140w max on single cable

The main market to me is going to be ibuypower people, so a console gamer who wants to jump to PC but doesn't want to self build.

I've been screwing around on pcpartpicker on and off for today, and I don't see a clean way to get steam machine specs for less than $800 if you build it yourself, and closer to $900 if i'm being honest (and in no way will it be SFF).

I think the big thing will be if steam can commit to this like the deck and get better performance over time. Consoles out perform their hardware thanks to lots of optimization, enforced by knowing you're stuck with/always going to have the same specs.

The steam machines success to me pivots completely on if they can capture a market of customers who want to jump from console and don't want to become hardware savvy (which has not gotten as easy as it should).

Compatibility and performance in the next 6 months is going to determine a lot.

And if someone better than me wants to check my PC Part picker work: https://pcpartpicker.com/list/HCtXkD

I've got $766 for CPU/MB/HDD/GPU/RAM.

And all those consoles (save the Switch maybe) are heavily subsidized by those companies to compete at that artificial price point.

According to LTT Valve made the conscious decision NOT to subsidize the Steam Machine to let the market compete. I very much respect that and will be willing to pay the premium because of that and:

- using my purchase to vote for/encourage the growth of the Linux ecosystem.

- as a PC gamer I'm already highly invested in the Steam platform with all of my other gaming purchases.

Just round up the penny for the more honest price.

Nintendo Switch 2 $450

Xbox Series S (512GB/1TB) $380 – $450

Xbox Series X (1TB) $650

PlayStation 5 Slim (Digital) $600

PlayStation 5 Slim (Disc) $650

PlayStation 5 Pro $900

Steam Machine 512GB: $1050

Steam Machine 2TB: $1350

The PS5 (which is realistically the main competitor) has the caveat that to get even something as basic as multiplayer you need to pay a $10-20 monthly subscription, so you can multiply that by however many months you plan to own it and add it to the price.

Switch 2 performs very well for the price. It is getting the same games as PS5 etc.

I'd like to factor in the cost of games, but then my Steam library might be a little bigger than the average... Am I willing to pay €60 for a game? Rarely. Am I willing for the spring/summer/winter sale on Steam? Yes!

Idk why anyone thought this would be a "PC console killer" type of product. Consoles are subsidized because they act as the entry point to closed hardware/software ecosystems. You can't do that with a general purpose PC because it's an open ecosystem by definition.

But there are economic benefits to an open ecosystem. The Steam Machine has a gigantic back catalog of games that can be had for cheap. You also probably already have all the peripherals you'll need for it. And of course they don't charge for online play.

That last part alone makes up for the cost after just 2-3 years.

If you already have a powerful desktop PC in your house, streaming via Sunshine/Moonlight is pretty much perfect these days.

I was wondering if this would be a worthwhile upgrade to my Legion Go Z1 Extreme.

Sounds like it's in the same vicinity for graphics power. Not worth $1k for a tiny bit more RAM.

I do wonder if this will give me any useful presets, in the same way the Steam Deck does. I have no interest in tweaking graphics settings one at a time.

Have you tried Steam Remote Play? It allows your desktop to render games and stream it to your Steam Deck that's connected to your TV. Or to any other device really.

Since it’ll have a mobile SoC with baked in memory I’m hoping that the price won’t be too inflated!

Due to the memory and storage crisis, you actually cannot buy the $500 mac mini anymore. It starts at $799

Your mileage may vary, but I've never gotten reasonable performance out of Crossover. I have a decked out Mac for development and most of the games I've tried in Crossover still need you to turn the settings to damn near lowest possible.

If Mac Minis were viable for gaming, everyone would get one. Unfortunately, Crossover has very spotty support and GPTK starts fraying at the seams on CPU-heavy titles.

The upcoming Steam Frame will be the real make-or-break moment for ARM PC gaming. Up until now, nobody has seriously attempted to make ARM work for the "Steam Deck" segment of users.

Eh, it was the exact same system for the Switch 2 and no one I know waited more than a week for theirs.

Given it requires a Steam login of a certain age to register, I suspect this is just to limit the scalpers.

>Selling them below cost to subsidize steam-sales would probably create bad incentives for them.

They could have sweetened the deal somehow, though. Maybe owners get a discount on games or something. It was bad timing, but it's not like they can't afford to take a bit of a hit for good will.

At least it's repairable so unless you break the motherboard you can probably fix it.

That's my hope as well. I don't need/want a Steam Machine, but I want it to succeed, especially if it forces better support for anti-cheat.

Maybe it'll become a cheaper entry-level machine in a couple of years if they can keep producing them.

Steam Support can probably get it sorted.

If that's the cost of a _working_, well supported and _viable_ open platform, than so be it. People, especially the ones here at hacker news, ought to give way more value to this, else we lose it all.

If you have hundreds of Steam games you bought through sales events, then that changes the calculus a bit.

It’s not just the ram now, it’s also the storage. A double whammy.

Yes, so many people were claiming that it will be around that price point. That seemed straight up delusional to me. Memory price has roughly quadrupled and 32GB DDR5 basically cost the same as the original cheapest steam deck.

Similar here. I have the PS4 here and rarely even use PlayStation these days. Mostly it is just PC (now runing Linux even for gaming) and Steam Deck. I was thinking about upgrading to PS5 a year or two ago bu then did some calculations and it is more expensive then it looks at first (PlayStation+ is in practive not optional and it is 72 €/year at minimum, games are quite more expensive themselves than on the PC, and well there is a lot less choice in games). So I have basically just started moving my game library to Steam and PC (GoG and similar other sources store), just makes more sense with PC and now Steam Machine makes inot the a console form factor while still having all the power and freedom of PC. So yeah an easy decision to go with Steam Machine. Sure price of the hardware itself is not exactly very attractive but yeah not so much different to what is normal these days in PC hardware (fsck all these terrible "AI" slop scam bubble corporations). Would love to see a cheaper bare-bones edition without RAM and SSD inside but even without this I think Steam machine will be quite a nice replacement for PS4.

> with Windows but still open and you could load SteamOS on it

You're describing Every Computer Ever.

It’s called the Xbox and the reason it wasn’t at this price point is that Microsoft has the capital power to subsidize the cost at risk of the Xbox division not being profitable. Valve doesn’t have such freedoms on hardware it seems.

But, will it properly support NVIDIA GPUs? That’s was the biggest pain point for years.

I mean, it is $1200 if you want a controller included

On the Steam store they've done a great job with their certification program for the Steam Deck.

Also, I don't think their target market is people who don't own any Steam games yet. It's going to be people with already extensive back catalogues on Steam.

Now game devs can optimised their game for it and Steam Machine will get royal treatment. It's not unusual for a PS5 game to run slow on a PC with much better hardware due to not being optimised. The Nintendo switch is a great example, pretty old hardware but the games run well (for their intended experience).

Many people are complaining about the price but you can bring you entire steam game collection and even use as a PC if you want, I sold my PS5 once it became a useless brick cause Sony prevents you from running Linux.

True. But if it doesn't work, a refund is quick and easy

If Valve learned to operate on a proper schedule instead of Valve Time they would have been able to stockpile these parts and release with better prices.

Proton, the Steam machine, the Steam deck, etc. were probably never about making money. It's Valve's "Plan B".

They started with Proton after Microsoft suddenly made a move with the Windows store and also started bolting down Windows a bit. As with most things Microsoft that initiative quietly died over time. But at that time Valve probably couldn't afford to take any chances. It probably also made them realize they had build a castle on someone elses land.

If you are making money in the amounts Valve is, then even the simplest risk analyses is going to show that "Microsoft rug pulling you" is one of your few existential threats. Even though the probability is low or medium-ish at best, the impact is massive. Even anti-trust isn't going to save you. By the time Microsoft gets convicted, you are already dead. Just look at Netscape.

Valve makes it very very easy to be a PC gamer, and, importantly, slightly harder to be a PC gamer who buys games in places other than Steam.

Yes you can buy games on GoG or Epic and play them on a steam deck or a steam machine. But it's juuuuust enough faff to be annoying enough, that you'd rather just get them on steam. I know people (and am a person) who have rebought games they already own so they are on steam, to make playing between steam deck and desktop more reliable.

It's the same with the steam controller. You _can_ use it with games outside of steam, but it's enough of a faff that you find yourself avoiding it.

It's incredibly effective, and why they are an effective monopoly in PC gaming.

Why is the gasoline high octane in your metaphor? It's not like it's going to burn better.

This only goes to show how MBAs are destructively myopic.

Valve understands that inextricably tying themselves to Windows is a long-term death sentence. SteamOS represents a lifeboat for when Microsoft goes full iOS and decides to lock down Windows in exchange for taking 30% of all software purchases. Valve has been taking this threat seriously since at least 2010, which is why they've been investing in Linux gaming. Both Steam Deck and the Steam Machine are further steps toward complete independence from Microsoft.

this Steam Machine hadn’t been announced back then? Not even the steam deck, which has been a massive success.

You pay a premium for “it just works”.

Only about 65 dollars cheaper for a comparable build and it wouldn't be small.

Can you still, in 2026?

I think with reasonable and somewhat common sales and picking right machine probably could find even better prebuild. Size not withstanding.

I think you would struggle to NOT build a more performant PC for the same price.

https://pcpartpicker.com/list/brbFsK This is $50 more but it has 1TB of storage and a newer generation of both CPU and GPU and will absolutely destroy it.

I'm sure you could get actually easily cheaper and better even, I haven't followed the market a lot lately.

Prebuilt are likely to be even better deals because they will use some cheap noname parts for the RAM and the PSU, which is mostly fine.

around 800 usd according to LTT’s video (near the end)

It's even worse value for productivity, though, because the CPU is purposely throttled to prevent overloading the thermal solution and the PSU.

Not a lot of games play nice with crossover. I wish I could dual boot windows on this m3 mbp like I could on my old 2012 model. I feel like tf2 performance is actually worse on kegworks with the m3 pro than it was when I would dual boot windows 10 on the 2012 computer. So many lag spikes. A bunch of explosions will go off and the game will stall for a moment and you just get fragged. There are plenty of games that also won't let you play multiplayer at all due to anticheat not playing nice with wine.

"native" macos games on the m series aren't even that much better because they usually just run through a rosetta layer that seems to lock FPS at only 40. Fans will spin full bore because the game is so unoptimized.

Will Crossover survive the dropping of Rosetta 2 that is coming?

Rough but true. This has PMF but not at this price.

Given the current state of the global market it will likely take a few years for prices to come down

Prices coming down? In this economy?

16GB DDR5 + 8GB GDDR6

It is 16GB plus an additional 8GB for graphics.

I say, be happy this means your 7 year old pc will be future proof for longer!

We have too good consumer protection laws for Valve. Makes my view of them negative, so I'll go elsewhere when I can.

Can you check how much that mini pc costs today?

Just today I was thinking about threading the needle on that and making my own Steam Machine with an AMD BC-250 board. Maybe I still will, it'd be a 10th the price and I do love to tinker.

Framework provides adequate price to value, what are you saying?

This doesn't have the best value

Good luck playing PC games on PS5 or Xbox Series X.

They're not. The Deck is hundreds of dollars more expensive than the Switch 2. The Switch 1 sold 155 million units, making it the second most popular console of all time. Switch 2 is also selling very well.

Switch 2 is faster, lighter and cheaper than Steam Deck.

They already require you to have made at least one purchase on Steam before April.

there are re-shipping services that will re-ship the item to you for an extra fee. The fee can be quite high though.

That's likely because the HDMI Forum don't allow open source HDMI 2.1. [0]

That said, there are signs that it's coming to the AMD drivers. [1] [2]

[0] https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2024/02/hdmi-forum-to-amd-no...

[1] https://www.techpowerup.com/348723/amd-readies-full-open-sou...

[2] https://www.fosslinux.com/157755/hdmi-2-1-on-linux-complete-...

The DisplayPort 1.4 instead of 2.1 is also interesting. The RX7000 series came with DisplayPort 2.1.

DisplayPort 1.4 should be enough to do 4K@120hz. Not enough bandwidth for HDR at the same time though

Naw. I think they'll sell every single one they're able manufacture for the next couple years. The pre-order list will probably fill most of those.

It was kind of expected since Steam Deck (obviously) had an AMD APU, and AMD works much better with mainstream Linux projects in general.

valve themselves also personally employ multiple major contributors to the amd linux drivers

https://www.phoronix.com/news/AMD-Marek-Joins-Valve

Because most PC peripherals (mice, keyboards, microphones, controllers, USB headphones, detachable hard drives) are still USB-A on the other end of their cable. Yes this is changing, but in this case I appreciate them acknowledging the reality on the ground and not creating a situation where there are many dongles afoot.

You can install a SteamOS-style console experience on any old PC, including handhelds or mini-pcs with integrated graphics. Bazzite is a great choice for that, even my RX560 handles it without issue.

> a Nintendo Switch would provide much better bang for you buck.

A secondhand Steam Deck would also be better value, but this isn't a value-focused product. The Steam Machine is Valve's second stab at the premium couch-based PC gamer market, this time with Proton and a bigger focus on controller usability for ordinary PC games.

Find me a PC in this form factor that is as well tested and supported as the steam boxes are, with the specs they are claiming to have, at this price. Its a little above the curve but a little is not a lot, and you get a fully supported Linux box at that price.

.....and if you think this is expensive just wait until the PS6 and new Xbox are released.

I think it's far from dead-on-arrival. I don't want to buy a PC, put it in a garage, etc. I want a little box I can easily hook up to my TV and play Steam games on. This scratches that itch. I'm old and want convenience. I know a lot of other people in my peer group who are going to pick one up too. Also I don't play any competitive games where I care about anti-cheat. I just want to play my RPG/JRPG's on a big screen and I want it to be plug-n-play.

"For a Linux user, you can already build such a system yourself quite trivially..."

"No wireless? Less space than a Nomad? Lame"

Same here. My home computer only runs Windows because I play competitive online games. It would be incredible if Valve built some kind of certified, locked-down kernel, but I doubt that will happen.

The online discourse around this is also incredibly toxic, filled with utopians who don’t understand how serious cheating is in these games, or that kernel anti-cheat, while not perfect, is the best solution available today.

I think calling the hardware generations out of date when it performs on par with a PS5 on new games is a bit inaccurate.

I would, admittedly, be interested in an anticheat that reboots the machine for deck into a secure mode.

>In my opinion, it would've been worth the money to just buy a gaming PC, put it in a garage, hidden room, etc with the networking gear, then stream it over the network to a Steam Link or using Apollo/Artemis/Moonlight/Parsec; anything.

During covid, instead of getting second budget gaming PC, I setup janky multi-seat program (Aster), to split single windows machine where I could play locally and someone else could play on steamlink. There's so many games out there that you can run multiple instances simultaneously. Or simply stream desktops to media room paired with a good remote.

It was very janky, setup, streaming DRM (or not). But justifies world of spending on one highend system than multiple mid / tier. The Aster program was designed for low income nations where you split a single workstation into like 8+ substations (i.e. education). TBH if Valve sold a 2-3k steammachine super host that can stream multiple games to different thin client, and value proposition is this is the only entertainment unit for your entire house, I think it would pique interests. Maybe tile different streams into one client for splitscreen playing. Sell those controllers.

The hard truth is that as much as you think yourself as a "proper" gamer, this segment always has, always will, _not_ be the proper target segment. Don't forget that mobile gaming has more revenue than everything else… combined. They have a play on this, and as much expansive as it looks, it's mostly due to the hardware inflation, and compared to alternatives, it won't look bad at all. For the segments that matters.

> In my opinion, it would've been worth the money to just buy a gaming PC, put it in a garage, hidden room, etc with the networking gear, then stream it over the network to a Steam Link

Well if you scroll down the page, it's presented as a selling point of the machine

> I see the world moving to thin clients that play games via some remote desktop infrastructure.

You can barely code in such an environment to a satisfactory degree. You want to stream 4k games with low latency?

> In my opinion, it would've been worth the money to just buy a gaming PC, put it in a garage, hidden room, etc with the networking gear, then stream it over the network to a Steam Link or using Apollo/Artemis/Moonlight/Parsec; anything.

I'm someone who has built dozens of gaming PCs, and wired my house. I also have zero interest in doing the above... if I have to pay few hundred extra to get a Steam machine hooked up to a TV without all that hassle... I'll do that.

It's not the absolute best value for gaming. It's not horrible in current market conditions but it's also not targeting "best value for gaming" anywhere in the marketing materials. It's hardware that can play your Steam library on your TV. There are harder, less expensive ways to do that, as there have been for ages.

If you're a console gamer, there are less expensive, just as easy options to play console games, so it's definitely not suited for that market.

It's really only catering to people with disposable income that want a cute way to hook up a Steam-capable machine to a TV. It's not a huge market, nor is it a non-existent market.

It was probably a bigger market at $750 than $1050, but we can't have nice things.

> Steam is in the unique position to create a kernel anti-cheat

Valve has a long-term policy of being utter trash at game security.

> I know that's not popular. But they are the only ones with the install base AND ability to pull it off in a such a fashion that wouldn't be so god-awful.

Epic Games does fine (though they did it by purchasing an anticheat startup).

EDIT: Oh, you're talking about making an anti-cheat focused Linux kernel build? Meh, still would not trust Valve on that front given their long-standing policy of not giving a shit.

>It's just dead-on-arrival...the hardware is generations out of date

Some people say this same thing about the Nintendo Switch and its successor, but here we are, with the former closing in on highest selling console of all time, and the latter tracking above that.

I'd say that heavily depends on what you see as alternatives. For some the Steam Machine is filling an unmet need in the market, for others it's a more expensive gaming pc or gaming console.

As we are on HackerNews, there's a good chance that you can build / setup your own pc with better specs which you might want to look into and then decide.

You can upgrade the ram yourself.

Sadly I don't see that happening. Game devs have gotten used to having their cake and eating it too by developing for Windows and using Proton as a crutch to get the the Steam OS certification too. flibitijibibo was right: linux porters have probably gone out of business.

Budget reasons would be my guess. The USB-C port here is 10 gbit while the USB-A ports on the machine are USB 2.0(front) and 5gbit(rear) speeds.

While they could have and imo should have just put usb 2.0 C ports on it, users have an expectation that USB-C ports are fully functional high speed ports. On most machines you can plug something in to any USB-C port on a device and they all work the same.

Because most peripherals that are likely to be used with it are still USB-A. Things like mice and keyboards and gamepads and headphone and whatnot.

Yes you can connect keyboard and mouse; Overwatch (https://www.protondb.com/app/2357570) and WoW (https://appdb.winehq.org/objectManager.php?sClass=version&iI...) should both work well, as do the vast majority of single-player games. Some multiplayer games with particularly invasive anti-cheat may not, so if you have anything else in mind best to check before buying.

It's just a Linux box, you can do anything that you can on any other Linux machine (including install Windows).

Linux more or less runs most Windows games. The ones that don't run are ones where the developer is going out of their way to make them not run - mostly with kernel-mode anti-cheats that just find themselves staring at the wrong kernel.

Steam makes that pretty seamless and Steam games "just work". For non-Steam games you need to do some tinkering, it's stuff that most people browsing this forum can do.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48633563

It was never about us.

Worth watching for the Steam OS problems part

For some reason I never considered this route, despite following the PS5 Linux developments... is there a specific reason that the XSX is harder to homebrew than the PS5?

It would be incredible to convert my dusty XSX to a linux box

I've built my own PC several times and am a hardcore Linux enthusiast.

However at this point in my life, the best gaming experience i get is from XBox live/online subscription. I got to the browser, click on a game and start playing without caring for anything else. The most complicated thing i have to do is connect an Xbox gamepad for games that require it (I prefer keyboard +mouse whenever possible).

I wish Steam had something like that for the games I've bought. I've got several games in the library, I cant play some of them because currently I have a Mac m4.

> Isn't it going to be old in a few years and then you have to get rid of it because upgrading components isn't a viable option?

I expect to get the rest of this decade out of my Steam Deck so IDK, very different to my normal expectations for a computer. The Steam Deck also defines a floor that will allow compatible games to be very performant on the Steam Machine so I think that will help the Steam Machine have a decent lifespan.

I also think on some level we need to start resigning ourselves to getting 10+ years out of our computers!

Compact, convenient, console-like experience that pulls games from your existing steam library. Same niche as a normal console, just not locked down in the same sense. If it weren't for the price I'd consider one, but I'd rather limp along my existing systems for as long as possible (and it sounds like SteamOS support for broader systems is improving).

With current hardware prices, I'm not sure it'll be 'old' in gaming terms in a few years. I'm expecting the PS6 to be only a moderate upgrade over the PS5, not arrive for another year at least, and probabky take 5 years to overtake the PS5.

I doubt anyone's associating the Steam Machine with the term "hacker". The "hacker" type crowd already game on Linux, they're not the target audience here. This is for the normies, for people who want to play PC games with a console-like experience, without any hassles of manual setup and tweaking that the hacker crowd normally are into.

Do you usually want to upgrade components in a console?

Do you have an active VAC ban? If not, it may be worth contacting them to ask why, they're quite responsive

It is immutable and has versioned image releases (unlike Arch, which is mutable and rolling release).This adds stability, makes the system less prone to breakage, and easy to rollback (factory reset).

Ans of course, the biggest visible difference is that this boots directly into Steam big-picture mode, where you operate the UI using a controller (although it does support KB+mouse), which makes it ideal to use connected to a TV, like a regular gaming console.

SteamOS is highly customized and managed by Valve. It doesn't have the Arch repos or pacman. Updates to the OS come from Valve in large releases rather than per package. All apps installed either come through Steam or Flatpak.

So it's Arch in the same way Android could be called Linux.

Yup it is Arch Linux, that basically boots into Steam client with Big Picture mode. And if you switch to desktop mode you get a standard Linux with KDE Plasma desktop environment.

I don't think the goal here is to necessarily sell a bunch of hardware units, but to create a new product category of devices which buy games from steam, like the steam deck did with handheld gaming PCs.

I don't think we could ever expect a specific gaming PC to compete with the volume sold of gaming consoles that have exclusives people really, really want to play.

It was never going to do those numbers, regardless of price.

4k with upscaling is the promise.. don't know if it will hold

The problem is that the market has basically bifurcated. In the Indie space, people want novelty, and that's too risky for AAA (even 10 year old AAA) scale games. Over in the modern AAA space, you've got a more reliable user base (in that they're more eager to buy slight changes to the same game over and over), but you're competing more on "Wow" factor. And ever-better graphics have been a pretty easy way to convert investment into "wow", without much risk (compared to changing game mechanics more, which might kill your golden goose).

I find it far more plausible that AI-assisted game dev will help indies catch up in scale to 10 year old AAA than the modern AAA studios deciding to throw in the towel on the graphics arms race.

A question for the ages.

indie games community has joined the chat

You are describing indie games.

According to Tom's Hardware, it's North America, the United Kingdom, the European Union, and Australia.

https://www.tomshardware.com/video-games/console-gaming/valv...

No need to wait and buy anything. Try any gaming focused Linux distributions and you can already have this. Check out CachyOS, Nobara, Bazzite ...

Yeah I can feel you. I built mine just a few months before that terrible "AI" slop bubble scam hypte started. The only mistake I regret now is that I only went with 32 GiB of memory and said to myself I can upgrade later to 64 GiB if I need more. Well luckily most of the time I don't but yeah sometimes it could come in handy. Not for games but for other work. Ah well, still happy I was lucky to do it before the AIpocalypse

Why isn't this URL included in this post?

Care to explain what Omarchy has to do with Valve?

Same. Gaming exclusively on Linux (openSUSE Tumbleweed) for the last 2 years or so and also loving the Steam Controller.

Gaming just works for me with Steam and Ubuntu. Steam no longer filters out Linux games to its own category, it simply assumes most games work now (and they do!).

I'll probably buy one. It's small so it fits under my TV, fits in with my furniture. Since it's all vertically integrated I know I can just connect it to the TV and it'll boot quickly and work well, and it has all my Steam games. I value my time and lack of frustration more than a few hundred dollars.

I want a simple UNIX workstation that "just works". Apple broke this promise to me with Tahoe, where horrific design decisions compounded the bugs on essential peripherals (Tahoe began spinning up and down my external raid array to sleep constantly, for no reason, making extremely loud noises as the drives repeatedly if it's idle, forcing me to constantly touch files in a while loop over dozens of partitions -- also I have a few petabyte of storage and it now takes ages to mount every reboot, as now with Tahoe Spotlight indexing is done as part of the mounting process and I can't opt out of this behavior and I'm in a warzone where power outages necessitating shutdowns are frequent). I have since used a docked Steam Deck as my daily driver and everything I want just works! It's now my UNIX desktop OS of choice. I've been on the Mac since OS X but Tahoe was so bad that now I consider an operating system designed for wasting time gaming a more serious and less disruptive option to my daily workflow. Heck of a job you're doing, Tim Apple!

I think there's a middle ground of people who just are not interested in building or upgrading a gaming computer (or just don't like their typical form factor in the ready to go out of the box gaming PCs) but also don't want the completely closed off ecosystem of a console.

I think if the Xbox ended up being more like the Steam Machine (i.e. more like a PC) then this middle ground that the Steam Machine sells to would probably go away as I don't think the group of folks who care that it's Linux based is high enough to support production.

I thought about it, but don't think I'll push the button. I have a falcon nw gaming rig in my living room right now running windows / steam big picture and an NVIDIA 3060Ti -- and it's .. fine, but long in the tooth. I wouldn't mind a more console-ish hardware experience for steam gaming, and compared to a new falcon box, this thing is cheap. I experimented with just running SteamOS on the falcon hardware a few years ago, but it was a little fussy, and I wanted to also use the system for local inference, and, and, and.

All that said, I don't think this is a good value. I'm presuming if I did a little work SteamOS 3 would be workable for me, and I have significantly more RAM, and possibly a better GPU? Not exactly sure where the GPU falls out, but I definitely believe I could buy a better GPU for less than the new box.

If it gets preferred shipment for the controller, you could buy it and sell the box and keep the controller. :) I think my controller ship date is estimated in 2027 right now.

Prebuilt machines have a terrible reputation, I could see people wanting this for a PC that you don't need hardware expertise to boot up. If you're reading this you could probably pick out your own parts and assemble them for cheaper, but for people who want a console-style plug-and-play type experience I could see the market for it.

Pricey, but so is any other sort of electronic entertainment hardware these days.

do you know fans or people who don't like to tinker computers?

take a sip at GamingOnLinux community... they don't seem to care about stuff running perfectly on Proton and not natively or that Gabe is buying another 600 million USD yatch. they love the Steam ecosystem more than developers crafting games and abiding to 30% of fees that are a clear sign of monopoly power

I wanted a gaming computer (read: an airgapped system that I could install arbitrary software on without fear), and I was sick to death of Microsoft's bullshit and resolved to never buy a Windows machine again, so I've been using a docked Steam Deck as my main gaming rig. It's performed far better than I imagined on the software side (has never failed to run any game in my library, though some have required minor settings tweaks), though the hardware is a little on the lighter side, which is perfectly acceptable for a handheld, but if the Steam Machine had been available at the time I'd probably have gone for that instead.

I feel like there's a midrange of "not particularly techy" gamers who will strongly appreciate - "I don't care about putting anything together, I just want to place PC games like a console."

Interested in hear the justification why you would need more than 1GbE in a machine built specificly for gaming.

I bet at least 90% of people buying this connect it to WiFi and never think about connection speed again!

Personally... my internet is only 300 Mbps. My WiFi connection is roughly on par with 1GbE. I have a very small pool of 2.5GbE capable devices, but overall I'm just not fussed about making the switch.

Cloud gaming is nowhere near the same experience as playing locally. There are a lot of games where milliseconds matter; it's big enough for me and my friends to try Geforce NOW and say, "No, this isn't good enough for a lot of games." You are kind of saying, "the bus only costs $4 a day, that's 30 years of using a car."

No matter how superior the GPU, the latency from streaming will never be able to compete if you're outside of a major hub.

I couldn't imagine playing a game by streaming inputs to a server 30ms away, which then streams those inputs another 30ms to the game server, and then having that round trip.

60ms screen delay and 120ms total delay.

OK. What if I want to mod my singleplayer game? Or, God forbid, make mods for it?

yikes, you will own nothing and be happy.

The repeated insistence that a company can only possibly be successful if it reaches every human being on earth is killing the world.

A company that spins up a division, builds a product, sells 100k of them, and winds down is a success

Keep in mind this entire venture from Valve is also about ensuring they can't be made a vassal of Microsoft.

What? Cloud gaming flopped years ago.

Last I checked the idle power consumption of the BC-250 was on the higher side to make me not want to use it as a media center, though that could be my PSU. No hardware decode/encode (yet) either.

And lack of DRM makes a PC in general a mediocre experience for official streaming services if you want more than 720p streaming. If you care about that.

I got impatient waiting for the Steam Machine to come out and grabbed a BC-250 on ebay that was already set up with a case, fan, and power supply. Works great for reasonably demanding games (CONTROL, Elden Ring, etc.).

Now that I see the final price of the Steam Machine, I'm gonna be recommending the BC-250 more strongly.

Are you using the stock cooler? I’m going with an AIO for the APU, but I worry that the little heatsinks I’m planning for the VRMs aren’t going to cut it.

The 2013 Steam Machine is as different from this device as it could possibly be. Proton didn't exist back then and Steam Input was still in (relative) infancy.

You have my permission. Just do not share any learnings. There is enough LLM trash around as is.

But I don't want a PS5.

I think most of people who wanted (me included) a steam machine are now between buying it or not buying anything at all.

As I was saying. With those specs, you might as well get a PS5 [0] even with a PS5 Pro it would still be cheaper than the Steam Machine.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45908208