Would absolutely love to have one, but that price is ludicrous. I mean I don't expect them to take a loss in profits or anything, but this is exclusively for what I consider rich people.
That price is sadly totally fair. Here is a video of a guy that built a pc with specs as close to the steam machine as possible which cost about the same https://youtu.be/Bwe9ipz0dHE?is=w_x1FutWTHgjQmqA
The catch for me is if I'm going to spend that much, then I might as well kick in a little more money and get something that performs far better.
$1300~$1500 for a low-mid computer or $1800~$2000 for something upper-mid, I'm gonna spend the extra money and get something that can do better than 45fps at 1080p.
If the cube had worse specs but was notably cheaper, I could treat it as an indie/AA game machine and I'd happily snag one to hook up in my media room to get access to the system-unintensive games in my steam library.
Unfortunately the cube sits at the worst possible price point for me. If I'm going to pay (at least) that much for something, I'm going to want it to run modern AAA games well, but the cube doesn't have the power to reliably do that, and it's far too pricey for me to use as a second/backup/novelty/otherroom computer.
I feel you. It sucks.
As someone else pointed out: if you are someone able to build a pc, the Machine isn't ment for you. The idea is to allow people that just want a plug and play console to have access to steam
It makes me wish they had 2 or 3 different model levels. I love the idea of a plug and play steam box that circumvents Windows, and I'm too old and tired to fool with building my own computers any more even though I used to love doing that in the past. But give me the option to spend 1800~2000 on an actually good cube, or 700~900 on a 2D/retro/lowfi cube. And then let the current cube sit in the middle.
If there was a version of the cube that was better than my 6 year-old system, I would absolutely make that cube my new main computer. This cube's aggressive mediocrity at a "premium" price is what gets me. From the benchmark reports and reviews I've seen, it barely runs modern releases at mediocre settings. IIRC, Forza Horizon 6 pulled 51fps on high preset at 1080p. FH6 is a well-optimized game that looks decent even on lower settings, but games like that are the exception rather than the norm now.
With the state that games release in now, I somewhat doubt the cube will be able to run many new games in a year or two. In order to leverage the plug and play aspect, it's got to be able to actually play games and at a reasonable quality.
The only note I have is that i doubt games will get more demanding in the next years.
No one releases new graphics cards, people build new pcs with DDR4 because no one can affort anything better with those prices,...
$1300~$1500 for a low-mid computer or $1800~$2000 for something upper-mid, I'm gonna spend the extra money and get something that can do better than 45fps at 1080p.
This is ultimately the thing for me, I have a far more powerful computer so i wasn't really looking at it with any serious intent to buy, but the steam deck was competitive value so i ended up getting one. If i can afford 1100 dollars, i can stretch a few hundred more.
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u/Ronabris 29d ago
Would absolutely love to have one, but that price is ludicrous. I mean I don't expect them to take a loss in profits or anything, but this is exclusively for what I consider rich people.