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I imagine most of the more tech savvy people on Lemmy would scoff at this and say “Might as well build a PC” (me included, which I already did), but this is aimed at the consumers who do not have that skill set and are willing to pay that price point for a Steam gaming system /shrug
unlocked, cec, full desktop, form factor, silent, plug and play, built in wireless for controllers and a base station for VR.
if you have disposable income and have those requirements i think it makes sense, especially since the market can remain irrational as long as it wants.
i really hope it sells out as it shows there’s demand for support on Linux and that game developers should at least target minimum specs to the steam machine which is a boon to the whole community
I wanted the tiny box format for playing my steam library on the TV without needing to run a cable from the PC. Wasn’t sure I could build one this small so I waited to see how much this was.
Around $800 for the 2TB model was my hope when it was announced. Stupid AI data centers screwing over memory prices.
I think $800 for 2 TB was still a bit overoptimistic, but I suppose we’ll never really know.
I mean, before the AI bullshit picked up, I managed to get a couple of used Samsung 4tb 990 ssds for $250 a piece. $800 for a nice console/PC with that much storage wasn’t much of a reach then, given consoles usually are sold at cost to get you invested in the ecosystem.
Not a fair comparison. You found a very special deal for those drives which were half the price of a decently performant one at half the capacity at normal sale prices.
But what I am implying is that if AI hadn’t jumped prices soo much, they probably could have gotten last gen 2tb drives for much less than $200, which would make them pretty price competitive. I got mine as the next Samsung pro line was launching (I believe I saw a few new ones for $300 at the time), and while they were a good deal at the time, they were not a unicorn. And given I’m pretty sure the steam machine only supports pcie4 drives, though I might be wrong about that (besides, almost no one needs pcie5 drives outside of very specific use cases), so again, if the AI madness hadn’t occurred, a $800 steam machine with 2tb of storage would have been a possibility. Which is yet another reason to say fuck AI.
A $600 difference seems way too steep - I still think $1k @ 2 TB would have been the best possibility if not for everything getting fucked by the slop machines.
Base price was supposed to be $750 for the 512GB model. I would expect $899 at most for a 2TB model back at pre AI bullshit prices to miss the “1k” negative headline they are riding now. The 150 upcharge for 2TB would have been totally in spec, if a bit expensive as those drives were going for under $100 for a while.
Not by the outlook at how cheap a 2tb drive would have cost by now if AI data centers didn’t fuck it up. A 2TB nvme drive 3 years ago was ander $110.
Versus around $300 now, so that would theoretically only represent a $200 price difference.
We’re getting down to a workable $800 pricepoint. You forgot to deduct the ram and other components that have also been vastly inflated, or taken into account that by all typical logic before the ai shit storm was that if a 2tb drive was $120 three years ago, by now it should have been about $75. Same for the ram having a price decline.
Not really, since the starting point for the 2 TB model is $1,349.
You could probably build a comparable machine for $800 or so today, but from that perspective you are paying a couple hundred bucks for the form factor and the convenience of not having to source all the parts.
Exactly, the small form factor is a huge draw. I’ve built as-small-as-possible cheap gaming PCs before and never gotten close to this size.
I currently use one with no video card that just streams my main PC, but the streaming sucks.
For a TV PC the cube form-factor is nice, in a “sit on top of the furniture looking pretty” sort of way. However, I think a short-depth 1U form-factor to stack with hi-fi equipment would be a good way to do it as well, and relatively easily achievable to DIY with off-the-shelf parts.
I don’t think I would have much success trying to build a SFF PC today for 1k or less. You pay a premium for mini-itx and really tiny cases, PSUs, everything. The only cost that is the same is the CPU really, even a heatsink often needs to be very specific to fit a case.
The last two SFF cases I picked up that are high quality were $200. Just look at minisforum stuff, their products are expensive and look nice, it’s all in the same vein.
You can definitely find better deals for desktop gaming performance, for sure, but I doubt people are going to find something that’s off the shelf at 27L or less and same or better perf for cheaper.
FYI, there’s STL files available for a 3d printable mjolnir case. Really small form factor and you can save a fair bit of money by printing it yourself
Yes, a completely different setup than I have would allow for other options.
Something like the Small Form Factor Optiplex computers fits nicely into any old home entertainment or stereo setup, but I suppose we already have about a thousand machines that will fit that slot and people that wanted to do that probably already did.
I built a PC last year for my living room and I’m running bazzite on it. Works great. Slightly larger than a console but this is the case I used.
https://a.co/d/09asiNdc
The Gabe cube is roughly 6x6x6 inches.
That case is nearly 15x16x4 which is far, far larger. I already have a case that size which is how I know the 6" cube form factor would be much better for my setup.
I mean, you can do the same thing with a steam deck if you have it. I got one of those anker docks with an RJ45 and ran CAT6 from where my fios ONT hits my network switch and where my big gaming pc is. The wireless streaming sucks big time and is completely unreliable.
I have a steam deck and have it hooked up to the TV. The machine is a little bit beefier and the cube format would be more convenient for my TV setup.
Plus there’s still latency, even if you’re streaming through sunshine/moonlight. That being said, streaming that way is definitly faster than the Steam Link software
I wonder how many people there are that fall in that category but who wouldn’t just buy a much cheaper console instead though.
Honestly that makes me like Steam even more. Any company that is willing to put up that much money to serve a niche market earns my respect. Sure they’re doing it for the simple reason of Steam machine owners being guaranteed Steam gaming customers but it’s still serving a subset of their customers like few companies do these days.
Bless Valve for investing money purely for the goodness of making money
Sure, but they’re one of the only companies proving that consumerism doesn’t mean you have to be a complete asshole of a company. They make money, people get the product they want at a price point they are satisfied with.
They also profit off child gambling
I’m a data analyst by trade so rhetoric like that can fuck right off. You want to talk about loot box mechanics? Sure. But bullshit scare mongering descriptions like that have no place in reasonable discourse.
That’s what loot boxes are, and I won’t sugarcoat it.
That isn’t even the most important reason, IMO. I think they’re doing it mostly to actively push Steam OS and thus normalize Linux for gaming. Not because they care about Free Software in principle, mind you, but as a hedge against the existential threat of Microsoft locking them out of Windows.
Shit I’ll take that as a reason too and gladly back them for it.
Tbf, they can’t sell it at a loss because they aren’t guaranteed Steam customers.
If it was sold at a loss, businesses could easily buy a bunch of them as workstations. Plus, it’s just a PC with no lockdowns. If you buy a Steam Machine, there’s no reason you couldn’t reflash it with Windows and exclusively play games via EGS and Ubisoft Connect.
An existing PC game library, better pricing and flexibility for PC games, wider and more robust controller support …
All true. If you already have a large library of PC games, it wouldn’t make much sense to get a console. But then you probably already have a PC as well, and can ride it out until the AI bubble pops. That’s certainly what I’m doing, as now is probably the worst time in history to buy new PC hardware.
Of course, some may say it’s only the worst time in history for now…
They said this is more powerful than 70% of steam user’s PC.
I believe it. I’m sure there are millions of people using Steam to play Dota or CS2 on stuff like old laptops. But how many of those are willing and able to spend 1000+ for an upgrade?
Ultimately, stock may be so low that it doesn’t really matter though.
That means there are a shitload of potential customers, not “I wonder how many people there are that fall in that category but who wouldn’t just buy a much cheaper console instead though.”
If you ignore the price, sure.
What are you on about? There are people that will still want/need to upgrade, and those are the customers. It’s not ignoring price, that is simply the price whether it’s a PC or a steam machine. Something tells me you just want to disagree so ciao.
How many of those are Steam decks?
I know that Steam Deck is talked about a lot here, but the overall numbers really aren’t that high. And who knows if Steam took that number out for the steam machine analysis.
And those people cant afford the steam machine. I just don’t see how the steam machine isn’t DOA.
… There are plenty in that group that can afford a steam machine. Why is everyone acting like that 70% is living on gruel.
If they could then they would have already bought better hardware for less money than the steam machine.
That doesn’t make any sense at all. People can buy whenever they want. And whether it’s a PC or a steam machine this is simply the price. There’s discussion everywhere that building yourself would have a whopping $70, and of course prebuilt will be the same.
I have friends who only have consoles. This is who I think should be looking at this. People like me who wanted a second PC for the living room may pass on this because of the price, though. I don’t need a second PC that bad. But for my people with no PC, no monitors, no keyboards, this is pretty decent. Not to mention the it’s an alright deal when pricing out a build yourself.
Except a PS5 Pro is $1100CAD and this is $1500CAD ($2000CAD if you match storage with the PS5 Pro, which is 2TB.) That is a huge jump. This is too underpowered for enthusiasts, and too expensive for console only gamers. Early indication is that it’s also underpowered vs a PS5 Pro, so I think it’s underpowered even for console gamers.
I know why they have the price pressure they do. But I can’t say I’m not wildly disappointed. This had the potential to end the console market entirely and now it’s looking like another also ran.
I was almost definitely going to buy this. At this price vs performance, I don’t think I’ll even put my name on the list. Much of this is out of Valve’s hands, but maybe they should have just scrapped it until pricing is better. This might be worse than nothing.
One thing I will say is I love the form factor. If was looking to build a living room PC this would be a serious contender because the design is great. But it’s just not enough to pay $1500 for a PC that matches the spec of my $800 PS5.
Sure, it’s a huge jump. But it’s also a mostly lateral jump if you already have a PS5 or Xbox. That’s why I specifically state that this is for people who have a console but no PC. Software availability semantics aside, BeamNG coming to PS5 makes my desire to have one of these in the living room close to zero now. Unless it can run Cities Skylines 2.
I agree. their best play here would have likely been to just delay release until the hardware market stabilized. its going to flop at it’s current pricing.
Except there’s ongoing costs to have manufacturing equipment and warehouse stock sitting around doing nothing. Plus they likely had minimum quantity manufacturing contracts signed
If Valve decided to sign hardware contracts at the prices that are forcing them to do this, that’s on them. I’m saying they shouldn’t have done that in the first place. The project should have been held off until it stabilized.
clarification: There is no way they didn’t have some form of forecasting on how much they would be paying per unit prior to signing said contracts. I agree with you, they probably have contracts in place now, but there’s no way they agreed to these contracts without knowing the price of hardware they ate buying. It’s not like they can sign a contract, and then two months later, AMD can be like, hey, by the way, you know that hardware market issue we have? Yeah, so that agreed upon rate you’re gonna have. We’re adding $300/p unit to it. Usually it’s a I will buy X amount of units at Y cost over Z period, and then they renew/negotiate the contract as needed.
I mean, speaking for myself, I already bought the consoles back in 2020. I bought a Steam Deck to access non-console games.
This does what the Steam Deck does only moreso.
Yeah, but Steam Deck had an extremely attractive and competitive price when it launched.
“Equivalent” consoles are much more expensive now as well. The entire playing field is fucked.
“equivalent”, base ps5 has equivalent performance while being half the price lol.
PS5 pro is $900, champ, and it’s got vendor lock-in.
My point is that everything is more expensive. Sony jacked those prices up by hundreds of dollars already.
equivalent performance to a base ps5, lol
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=66QzlDewigE
I’m not watching a video. Share something serious.
Dubious comparison aside, the lack of total vendor lock-in + wider and vastly deeper controller compatibility adds massive value.
And AGAIN, all hardware is simply more expensive.
I just gave the neighborhood kid my xbox-s (with expanded memory), my switch hasn’t been touched since my deck arrived. I have everything I need already purchased on steam, I’m not building a second library, or paying 50% more than when I started for a rotating library, I’ll buy a few more games on steam but my catalog is insurmountably full as it is. And now I’ll get to enjoy it with slightly higher graphics on a much larger screen!
With today’s prices how much cheaper would you get building similar yourself?
I heard from a trusted colleague that the difference is about $70, but you also get a possible steam controller discount + a sweet-ass form factor + better compatibility guarantees.
I’m gonna say that’s next to nothing, especially when you consider driver support.
Agreed - that’s part of what I meant by “compatibility guarantees,” but I should have called out drivers more explicitly.
Don’t forget all the time you save not having to configure stuff and fight with drivers. I enjoy dealing with that stuff because I like to learn, but others might not.
I was going to mention that driver support for known hardware is pretty huge. I am not a tinkerer at all, so I personally find this appealing.
Tbh, it’s not a big issue for Linux in general. Device drivers are all baked into the kernel and get automatically updated alongside system updates.
I made the switch from Windows to Nobara a few weeks ago, and normal tasks have been fairly smooth
I have been on Linux for years now, but known hardware is the reason why things will tend to break less often with driver updates, and updates in general. With a PC that gets hardware upgrades semi regularly, that is much more of an issue in my experience.
I think he got that from Gamer’s Nexus. But that is when you use similar components. You can also easily find components for the same price that are better. Especially when you use the 2 TB model as your base.
But you won’t get CEC or the integrated Steam Controller dongle of course.
Still, while it’s not a great price it isn’t a bad price either.
Or the small form factor.
I admit, I was hoping Valve’s production numbers would have brought economies of scale to make the smaller form factor a non-issue, but that doesn’t seem to be how it turned out
I wish they could scale up massively. They still seem to operate under the assumption that they’re a small player. Though according to one interview (I think with Tested) they couldn’t even source the numbers of memory they wanted. On top of the horrendous price.
In terms of hardware, they kinda still are. They’re not shipping out nearly as many units as the Switch, XBox, or Sony. Sure, some of that is simply their lower volumes, but they also don’t have monopolies via exclusives due to PC being an open ecosystem. After the Steam Deck launched, plenty of other manufacturers either updated or developed new handheld PCs to compete.
Also, scaling up manufacturing is expensive and risky. Ram manufacturers rapidly scaled up production about 10 years ago to address a shortage, and they all got burned with overstock (and accompanying low prices) when the shortage ended. That’s part of why they don’t want to scale up again to deal with the current ram shortage, because they know they’ll get burned again in a year or 2 if they do.
Plus, Valve has already stated they don’t want to own the entire PC hardware market, they want to expand the ecosystem and have multiple manufacturers competing for customers. If the Steam Machine is enough to pressure XBox, Sony, Nintendo, etc. to turn future generations of consoles into mere prebuilt PC’s they’d be happy with that
In Poland with already high electronics prices and 23% VAT, I could build something similar for around $1000.
Woo $49 savings.
The thing is, 23% VAT applies to the SM too.
I think it depends on how much time and effort you are willing to put into sourcing and building everything and how important the form factor is. Lots of guys build pretty capable livingroom computers out of old Small Form Factor business computers, but once you have it all together its not a LOT cheaper than this.
It really comes down to how you value your time. You could beat this price, but if you value your time in doing so (i.e. if its not something you think is fun on its own) its probably not worth the effort.
i pieced together a comparable 2tb on pcpartpicker, using the cheapest reputable choices and vendors. it was about $200-250 less for the pc (without an os) in a standard matx tower form factor.
That’s a major detail
That and you have to get the parts and build it yourself, which isn’t everyone’s cup of tea
There are things this does that would be very difficult to achieve in a custom build. It’s very compact and quiet and has very good driver support without any tinkering. It’s a machine you hook up to your living room TV and for that it works very well, including CEC support which is not standard on PC hardware. The price is of course hard to swallow and performance isn’t great but i think this thing will definitely sell all the units they can possibly make.
The first two are real advantages, but I think any random AMD-based system (CPU and GPU) would be damn near equal in terms of driver support.
It’s also a fundamentally different user experience. Sure you could load SteamOS onto a machine you built. But the point is that this targets the couch players, instead of the desktop players. And very few PC players will build a new PC just for their couch.
I love my Steam Deck, because it has caused my wife’s complaints about gaming to dry up almost completely. When I’m at my computer desk, she can’t snuggle with me. But by moving to the couch, we can snuggle while I play. Her complaints weren’t really about my gaming; they were about my physical unavailability. And the Steam Deck allows me to access the vast majority of my PC games on the couch, so we can both be happy.
Heh. I used to have a dedicated PC for couch gaming (separate from my desktop gaming rig, and separate from my desktop mini-PC). My desk is closer to the TV now and I consolidated down to one gaming PC. Maintaining two gaming systems (three counting my wife’s rig) was just really expensive. The desktop system used to get the couch machine’s hand-me-downs for GPU and stuff, but I’m happier just running one system now.
Or people that just don’t want to bother with building another machine to put downstairs in the livingroom or whatever. There are a lot of middle aged people who have been PC gaming for decades, are perfectly happy to build their primary gaming machine, and have hundreds of games in their library, and the means to consider the couple hundred dollar price difference between $1000 and whatever they could spend to build a machine to be worth the convenience of not having to do it.
What I wanted out of this was a product that a complete unit that I can just point people to and say get that. I’m not sure if I’m alone in this but personally I find specking out PCs to be really boring, I spent forever trying to make sure all the components work together. And then inevitably someone else in my family will end up with a different spec.
This way everyone has the same system and there’s a big corporation to do tech support rather than little old me doing it. It’s just a shame it’s kind of expensive.
I was hoping for a miracle that I could recommend it to a friend’s son as a good entry into PC gaming. But they’re on a tight budget and I guess they could do better for the same money.
If their budget is tight enough yeah a Linux build-your-own is likely the cheapest way to go. It probably won’t be able to play high end games without getting close to the steam price point but you can go much cheaper and still play the majority of steam games.
Plus if you’re trying to start on a shoestring budget, you probably can do without the extra cost for something with this small of a form factor
You say “skill” but I would argue that personal motivation and interest plays an important factor.
When it comes to different things like fixing your car, cooking your food or cutting your hair, you have the option between saving money by doing it yourself or pay someone to do it for you.
Personally, I’m fine with building my own computer and I cook my own food, but I get a mechanic to fix my car and a hairdresser to cut my hair. I could definitely see the appeal for someone to get a “ready to go”-system instead of putting time and effort into picking components and building and maintaining their own custom PC.
Yeah, I’ve built PCs before, could do it again, but I’m busy and I can’t be arsed. Also, it would probably cost about the same as this machine, just with me doing the labour. Plus, this device looks nice and valve have so far got a good record of making quality hardware, at least IMO.
It‘s not about lack of skill as prebuilt machines that go for roughly the same are more powerful as well. All the Steam Machine really has going for it is the size. That‘s it. Don‘t need your machine to be a tiny cube sitting under the TV? Get literally anything else. Want a Steam gaming system? SteamOS is free for everyone.
Really the most remarkable thing here is the software with SteamOS and Proton. By a long shot. Those are the big things we should be discussing.
The Gabecube will fade into obscurity in no time. It‘s unimportant and unremarkable.
It is aimed at people like me, but it’s too expensive for what it is. I have a PS5, would be happy to buy this to play PC only games, but it just doesn’t make sense for this price, given the performance benchmarks
Think about how much time and effort can go into selecting hardware, optimizing it, managing drivers, tweaking OS to play nice. I’m a masochist so I enjoy learning all that stuff - can’t really blame those who don’t. For them it is actually a bargain
I have the skill, I built all of my families PC’s through the early 2010’s, I’m done with that lifestyle. I don’t want to diagnose and send evidence of wether it’s the ram or the motherboard that needs to be replaced, argue with foreign customer service for weeks, and then wait months for a replacement piece (that now I know has a higher chance of failure) to be delivered.
I’ll trade a slightly higher investment for peace of mind, as long as it’s a good business (sorry apple)
I have the skill, but no longer the willingness to maintain said PC for the enjoyment of everyone else who is less technical. Updates on Steam Deck has been dead easy, and compatibility fairly straightforward.
I’ll still muck around with my own bigger gaming rig, but for the “this goes on the living room” device the SM seems like a good balance.
I think it’s more aimed at the people who will buy anything valve