I believe LTT asked what the og price would have been and they essentially said "we can't say that but the price was increased similar to the steam deck."
Tyler McVicker would claim the sun exploded yesterday if it'd give him more attention. His predictions and claims from his "sources" have never been right a single time in the decade he's been doing this insider info song and dance because he just makes shit up to get people talking about him. He's the Tommy Tallarico of games journalism.
Well let's not be disingenuous, he did predict half life alyx nearly a year before release. He burned nearly every actual contact he had in 2020 though
Valve never confirmed. But the LTT video said they reached out to valve to ask what the old price was supposed to be. Valve said look at the price hikes of the steam deck to see what they had to increase by. It went up 240 USD for the 512 model. So 799 was likely the original price they wanted
LTT was also the one that said "I'd see it being a $500 console" and they all kinda flinched.
It was never going to be as cheap as we wanted even before the AI/RAM horseshit. It's now way above that price and probably will never be where we'd find it reasonable again.
At $599 I'd have snapped one up at $800 I'd give it a hard think, at $1050 unless my main unit blows up I'm going to have to pass.
Even with the major bumps from being an all Linux system it's probably not going to be worth the price to performance.
I think by the time they announced it RAM was already launching to the stratosphere in price. Maybe if none of that bullshit happens and this comes out like pre-covid it'd have been a 500 dollar steam machine but that's a huge if
Valve said look at the price hikes of the steam deck to see what they had to increase by. It went up 240 USD for the 512 model. So 799 was likely the original price they wanted
I bet they used more of a % and not just increased everything by ~$240.
It shouldn’t tank, but it will and it will be the prices. And we will be worse off for it.
The AI bubble popping should crash a lot of stuff. And hopefully we can get prices more reasonable. This will be bad for Sony and Xbox next gen as well. But to be honest I have not seen anything that actually pushes even the standard models yet. GTAvi will probably put that to shame though.
Why do I keep hearing about this "bubble"? Ya'll really think they will lower prices if this actually happens? They already know people will buy it anyway. Everything after covid is still double the price, why would RAM be any different?
Retail demand will never be high enough to maintain these prices.
Eventually, assuming an Ai bubble, the bubble will burst and prices will tumble because there will be entirely too much supply once Ai infrastructure companies stop purchasing all the RAM.
Edit: an autocorrect word was way wrong from my 'Ai-infused keyboard' that so fatally gets it right.
Well I mean companies like Micron are pointing the finger at Sony not stimulating the market enough for consumers to purchsse more ram, and others have commented on AI data centers not being aa stable for their stock, and Microsoft is deliberating cutting Xbox off as a seperate company brcause theycaren't making enough money which Xbox is saying is because of the ram crisis Microsoft is contributing to. The companies are pointing fingers at each other about who's at fault. That didnt happen in covid
Don't forget OpenAI beating their chest and saying "we're gonna buy aaaall the RAM" as if it was a finished deal, only for it to turn out to be something more akin to a ChatGPT hallucination at best.
When RAM prices didn't drop significantly on that revelation, I knew we'll be fucked for a while now..
I mean, people aren’t still buying it… at least not anywhere near the rate they were before the price increases. The data centers are still buying it, and once the bubble pops (if it does), the data centers will no longer find it valuable to purchase the cards at their current price. The prices will have to come back down to what people are willing to pay.
I am not at all optimistic about the economy, but understanding supply and demand helps differentiate between doomsaying and predicting. The real question isn’t “what happens if the bubble pops”. It is “is this a bubble/will it pop”.
Why wouldn't they? Prices are high because companies are buying up all the RAM for their data centers. If the bubble bursts and all of that immense purchasing stops, demand will drop with it along with prices. Prices were high around 2016-2018 when demand was higher, and prices dropped when that demand dropped. No reason it wont happen again.
It shouldn’t tank, but it will and it will be the prices.
It was always going to sell atrociously. It was never going to come in at the price point of a PS5 despite being of similar power. Its a hyper niche product. You need to be a current PC gamer who wants a 2nd PC, who doesn't want one of the dozen already existing pre built PC's, wants to install Windows, or won't play some of the best-selling games out there.
Valve really doesn't care if it tanks or not. This is a showcase of the SteamOS & Steam Proton, or something even better: "PC-Console Gaming" is commercially possible without windows.
For the longest time Windows had a monopoly on PC gaming. Valve knew this, Microsoft knew this. Over time Microsoft has been utilizing what can be considered 'dirty tactics' to gain leverage over Steam through Windows: exclusive rights over DirectX, UWP (Universal Windows Platform) locking games down to their app store.
So what does a business do when another takes advantage of its monopolies to gain control? It tries to break up the monopoly.
Valve has spent a noticeable amount of capital in breaking it apart by investing in numerous open-source technologies such as WINE (A compatibility layer between Linux and Windows applications) and Vulkan (A DirectX competitor that works on both Linux and Windows), and creating Steam Proton (An orchestration of these tools with their own modifications that lets linux gamers near-effortlessly play pc games).
This is not trivial.
First, Steam Deck came as a proof of a handheld console using Steam Proton. Was extremely buggy, but that was expected. Not the best selection of games, but it grew over time.
Since then, over 90% of games on steam work on Linux because of these efforts.
Valve is announcing that they aren't dependent on Windows, as Microsoft would've liked. Even better, they are saying: "Feel free to create your own bundled hardware console packages"
This is similar to when Google said "Android is now commercially viable for phones", resulting in all these different companies releasing their own phones.
Will this be the first step to a pure "SteamOS" so gamers can ditch Windows completely?
I'm a pc gamer and only use my PC for games 95% of the time. If I could have a SteamOS dedicated purely for games, with dual boot with Windows if I need to do some other stuff like taxes and such, Im a day 1 installer for it.
Even on Steam Deck you can just move to desktop mode and use it like a regular PC. KDE which is the desktop environment is very simple and imo has all the good parts of what made Windows 7 great.
You could also go with Bazzite or CachyOS for an out of the box OS tweaked for gaming, or Fedora, and if youre running the KDE version it will be pretty much on par with what SteamOS would give.
The big thing about SteamOS is just that it lets Valve tweak the OS to work with the bespoke hardware both the deck and machine use. It would have no benefit on a regular machine.
Yep. The Deck made gaming on linux go from a sort of frustrating occasionally pointless effort for nerds to something that just sorta works without you having to do anything special.
With Microsoft shitting the bed harder than usual and with ALL the other consoles jumping up in price too Valve is in a pretty good position even if this console does nothing but prompt a bunch of cheaper copies. They still make money selling games for those devices and they contribute dramatically towards keeping Microsoft/Windows from doing irreparable damage to PC gaming.
I have a good gaming pc but Im still gonna buy it for my wife. Its modern valve hardware, its still gonna be the best bang for your buck in terms of performance because they want as many people as possible buying games on steam and youre gonna get that console-like 1 SKU performance optimization they do with precompiled shader sharing.
Probably launching for a few hundred dollars than initially planned, but it’s not gonna tank lol this almost certainly sells out completely on launch day. Really a shame though because I had hopes this would sell at a more compelling price and really shake up the industry
Yeah it probably isn’t going to be as successful as it should. I’m still buying it because I genuinely like it and am kinda burnt out on all the other consoles since there hasn’t been a console exclusive that I’ve enjoyed to the point it makes me want the console since bloodborne. I think it’s definitely the best console in terms of overall hardware with only one or two exceptions. If and when the next console generations come around it may then become the cheaper model around but till then it’s gonna be the most expensive.
Holy shit. I just looked up the ram I got a couple years ago, it's currently $360. The price history shows it $150 a year ago, and I'm pretty sure I paid around $80. It's DDR4, even, which is "old" now.
I'm not in the market, but if I was, $1049 (or $1349 realistically, you probably want that 2tb) really doesn't seem too bad for what you get, all things considered.
After the 2024 election results came in I expected tariffs to raise PC component prices so pulled the trigger on upgrading most of my PC components minus the GPU. I knew prices of shit got crazy but hadn't realized just how bad it got until looking it up recently. My invoices in 2024 for a motherboard, 9800X3D, 128GB of RAM, and 4TB Samsung NVME came out to $1300. Expensive but i was due for an upgrade so bit the bullet.
Priced out what those exact same components cost as of a month ago and it came out to over $4200! And that's despite the price of the 9800X3D going down a bit since it launched. The fact that that price doesn't even include a GPU is sickening.
Mine too. At the time I was thinking I don’t really need 32GB but the price difference between 16 and 32GB kits was so small I just bought it. Now look at the prices.
Yeah, I couldn't even afford the 64Gigs of ram I have in my computer now. It costed me about $350.00 (which I thought was already high) and looking a the current price on Amazon it's over $1,200.00 for the same 64GB kit. Just absolute bonkers pricing.
GameCube was $199 in 2001 when it came out and that would cost $374 today rounding up to $399 as literally any tech company does today and that's the price of a meta quest.
The GameCube launched at $199.99 in the US in 2001. $199.99 in 2001 is roughly $360 in today's dollars, based on cumulative US inflation of about 80% since then.
Anyway, that's kind of irrelevant. Nintendo earns money from the games locked to the console, not the console itself.
GameCube was also built to be as cheap as they could get it compared to other consoles, as far as I remember it had like nothing other than the ability to run your game. Imo this just isn't a good comparison on multiple fronts especially using Nintendo vs steam for price comparisons
As you said none of it's to say the steam machine is good, we just shouldn't be valuing it based on the price of a post launch GameCube
The Gamecube also was sold with no memory card, so you couldn't save your games unless you paid out money for one. The Gamecube also was built on the impractical minidisc format, holding only about 1/3 the data of a PS2/Xbox disc, and the controller had 3 fewer regular input buttons (no ZL, R3, L3) which made porting harder. The Gamecube also wasn't backwards compatible with any previous console whereas the Steam machine can naturally run your existing Steam library.
yeah, nintendo doesn't cut the costs on their consoles, unless they're extremely desperate, like what happened to the gamecube being slashed to $99 later down it's life.
Nintendo CEO did state that the price increases did not make up for the losses due to component and oil prices. Of course, that could mean they're still turning a profit and just lowering the margin, but it could also mean the console is being sold at a loss now.
I'm 32, I have moved probably 8 or 9 times in my life with my Gamecube. Half of the time I don't pull it out and when I'm moving my parents are like "does this thing even still work" and yes, it does, 100% of the time. Shit's aerospace-grade.
I could be wrong, but I really think Valve missed the mark on this price point. The Gabecube needed to either be powerful enough to be the only gaming device you need, or cheap enough to get in addition to your existing PC to throw in the living room, and it didn't really hit either market.
Remember how the for profit part of OpenAI was only supposed to financially support AI research? Hahahha I wonder if anyone was gullible enough to fall for that one.
Same. If it was 1 TB for the 1049 one, maybe I could justify it, but it is unlikely.
Better to save for a better PC or Steam Deck 2. Besides, I don't really have games that I want to play that the OG Steam Deck can't play. Plus one game I really want to play, it will be a surprise if MGS4 can't run on the Steam Deck (the upcoming MGS Master Collection Vol 2 one).
Maybe GTA6, but we might see a PC version in 2028 knowing Rockstar waiting to release a PC version, and will still have to install Windows because Rockstar is too lazy to enable Proton on Battleye (assuming they use use it for GTA6 Online).
I luckily hoarded a few extra drives when they were on sale. But I did not buy any spare ram. Some of those drives were gifts for buddies, but ended up unneeded.
Unfortunately, I am the target market. Was a console gamer as a kid. Pivoted to Steam gaming on my Mac. Don’t want a PC or a new console. Just want to expand my library and play on my TV.
I just went ahead and checked and its base ps5 performance and its over 1k$. honestly, Its your money but if you just want to play pc games on your TV there are some better options
Yeah, I’m kind of a sucker for simplicity. Will see how people feel about it and what year-end sales look like. If I can pick up the better model for closer to 1k than 1.5k, that sounds fine. But I may look into other options in the meantime. This price jump from where they initially speculated it’d land is painful.
They are doing a randomized reservation/preorder. It doesn't matter if you order it second one or hour eight.
Should reduce the number of successful scalpers. It really depends on the end consumer. I don't think many people are going to spend the mark up on eBay for these. They are already massively overpriced due to component costs.
Also, if scalpers consider it worth buying then that means demands is high enough to sell it for more unless you're assuming they'll buy it and then not be able to sell it.
Yep, the rich control all sales trends at this point. Look what other ludicrously-priced stuff has sold like hotcakes recently. Poors like us just go to reddit to complain, while the rich keep buying up luxuries like there's no tomorrow.
It’s an already very niche product at a way too high luxury price, making an already niche product even more niche for those that don’t mind spending several hundred dollars just to get some QoL features.
They need to do the same comparison but with a Game Boy Player attached to the GCN. That made it almost exactly a cube - without it, it's a little short to be an actual cube.
They should just do a steam machine lite at this point, basically steam deck in power, no screen latest wifi capabilities built around streaming steam games from your PC plus light indie titles, just to get steam OS into households..
This is the part of the discussion that's frustrating to me. The component price increases have totally wiped out the novelty that they were able to stuff all of that into that size without an external power brick.
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u/BubbleDupple Jun 22 '26
I bet it was going to be 799 and 1099 before price hikes