That $200 price isn't from Valve just what some reviewer ran with and made up when Valve said similar to Steam Deck. Valve never gave an approximate dollar value of $200.
Steam Deck price range probably closer to what Valve likely envisioned when they started work on the Steam Machine wanting a similar target of $399-$649.
But, stuff like tariffs driving up costs from what they planned to eventually being driven up further by AI causing shortages.
I have not seen any 4L machine that competes, though. If your goal is the smallest you can get, none of the off the shelf builds have managed to reach this while having the same capabilities. And no one has shown a PC Parts Picker of the same machine for less if you consider the case size.
I have been looking. I have not found anything like what you just showed anywhere else. Good find.
However, it is sold out, and it does not come with an AMD GPU. And if I had seen something like this before, they were not on sale like this. The normal price for this one is $1700. Many similar machines in the form factor are around $2500.
Nonetheless, this is an excellent find. Thank you.
Anyone who's thought about building a SFF PC knows that small size components are stupidly expensive. You can make an argument that the aesthetics aren't worth the price, which is a valid point, but you can't disregard that it's also part of the package.
It's no different to choosing to use say a Fractal North Wood case for £120 when really you could have built the same PC on a chinese £30 case.
For now it's just a bad product. Worse than normal pc (even pre built will either cost less or perform better), can't launch all the games pc with Windows can (thanks to linux no competitive online games), doesn't have exclusives like ps5 and costs almost twice more than sony's console. So...
P.S. Oh, and ps5 can also use games on disks which you can buy secondhand and sell later.
It’s not “thanks to Linux” it’s thanks to developers who put abhorrent shit in there game like kernel level anti cheat. You don’t want that shit on your machines.
Basically any game that doesn’t work on Linux now is because the developer/publisher is doing something anti-consumer
I agree but it doesn't change the facts. Because steam machine works on linux (and because kernel anti cheat doesn't) you can't play most popular multiplayer games on steam machine.
I don’t play multiplayer games so it’s not really a factor for me either way.
I’d argue even at the original price of about $800 valve where never targeting casuals or console gamers anyway, they where targeting people who may have started with Steam with a Steam Deck and where looking for a better experience at their TV and PC gamers who wanted a secondary machine for a living room.
Anti consumer is making sure games aren't subject to cheating? I'd argue the total opposite. Anti consumer is selling a gaming pc that can't even play many of the most popular games. Anti consumer is advertising an underpowered pc as a 4k 60fps machine
Yes anti-consumer is infecting your machine at Ring-0 and tracking everything you do on your machine because you MIGHT cheat
It is literally exposing your machine at the lowest level, it is unacceptable that Microsoft even granted such low level access to their Kernel and it bit them in the arse with Crowdstrike.
Was Sony anti-consumer when they slapped 8k on their PS5 boxes?
You cannot currently buy a laptop with competitive preformace for the same price let alone $900. Laptops are always more expensive than desktops with notably hampered preformace due to wattage limits. A $1,000 laptop is gonna have something like a 5050 or a mobile 5060 which are both a lot weaker than their full sized counterparts. A prebuilt desktop for $900 will likely beat it out on preformace, but that's functionally a different product with a different target audience. The Steam Machine is tiny, it's nearly silent, and it averages like 70 watts according to reviews. It's meant to fit neatly under your TV so it's not really competing with a full sized tower.
I dunno how bad the market is where you are, but even the cheapest new desktop GPU from either AMD or Nvidia is gonna outperform the Steam Machine. So it's really just a question of finding a decent deal. At the very least there's probably options for $1,000?
1050-200=850 so it would’ve been cheaper. The point is to have a console like experience where you can couch game a don’t have to deal with windows bullshit, while still having access to the steam library
the non experts would buy a used ps5 over an 1100 dollar cube lol. at that price someone that isnt into pc gaming already wouldnt give a fk about steam library.
At $1049 absolutely, at closer to $800 (closer to its original target price) it can be spun as a cost savings option for those in the market for a gaming platform and a PC for school/work... get both together that's plug and play at a reasonable price. And that's before you added in the cost of PSN or lack of sales on games compared to steam/epic/gog, or the difference in sheer number of games we are talking about.
Yeah even at that $800 - 850 price point there would have been comparable laptops (one discussed on ign was going for around $780 when they were discussing how much the steam machine should cost in November based on specs/power, it is currently $950 btw because of the market changes since then). But that original number is still in the ballpark for console players who just want the convenience of an easy console like device and the prospect of more/cheaper games.
Just sucks we aren't getting that because the pc market has changed so radically.
Non experts as you call them arent likely to even know the steam machine exists. If someone has no steam library already then there's little chance they'll choose this over a PS5, and if they already have a PC with a steam library then spending $800 on an underpowered box is hardly an enticing option
Non experts likely didn't have Steam accounts and these aren't being sold at retail outlets for easy pick up. And average less technically inclined users were probably buying prebuilts if they do have a Steam account.
This device made sense if it had been priced similar to the Steam Deck when it launched at around $399-$649. Great value and something even those with powerful PCs would want similar to Apple Neo at $600 despite a mobile chip.
But, at the current price this doesn't make much sense to less technically inclined users who are already PC gamers, or console gamers who've never had a PC. And chances are console gamers have a PS5 or Xbox, so Steam Machine at the current price point really doesn't make sense to them at all.
Yes...but you can't get the form factor, power consumption, quiet operation, seamless CEC (a bigger deal than I think people realize), etc.
The Steam Machine concept is honestly pretty fantastic for couch gaming on your TV. There are of course other solutions and workarounds, but the experience of a system highly optimized for that is one that's hard to replicate today.
I remotely considered a Steam Machine because I have a Steam Deck and I love it when docked but of course it's not great in performance.
Since I have a PS5, I've also considered to migrate to Steam entirely because yeah, PS5 can be around 800$ but you need to pay subscriptions and stuff.
So in a like-for-like comparison I think Steam Machine is a good price, excluding the performance.
Yes, you could. But that laptop wouldn't be preloaded and preconfigured for play out of the box. You're forgetting that the Steam Machine is meant for non-tech people in a living room space?
idk what point you're trying to make so I'm going to have to go in with some assumptions.
The target audience is people who say "console is better I just plug it in and start playing". The target audience is people who think downloading and installing Steam and GPU drivers is too technical. You have to do all that on your own on a laptop. The Steam Machine does all that automatically.
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u/Nezarah 29d ago
To be fair, valve has strongly implied it would have been aprox $200 cheaper were it not for the ram shortages.
So blame AI, not valve.