The title is a bit misleading, as the article lists diverging analysts’ opinions, ranging from Valve willing to sell at a loss or low margins, to high prices due to RAM and SSD price volatility.
Becsuse they said the Frame was gonna be less than a Index complete kit ($1200) I kinda wondered if the GabeCube would be $1200.
Which, since I haven’t built a PC since just before COVID lockdowns but keep hesring about soaring costs, I’m not sure if that is actually a decent price, a low price, or a high price.
Low
If this post is intended as discussion material; No, not as long that I have my stationary computer that fills my gaming needs.
I guess if you have a stationary computer that fills your gaming needs you really aren’t the target group regardless of the price.
I have two consoles for the family and casual gaming I’d LOVE to replace.
This ain’t it.
Who is?
There is zero market for an underpowered “PC” console with less VRAM than literally every other current console including switch 2 that is gimped from half of PC games by Linux.
This thing just does not make any sense
Unless they reveal a huge list of exclusives, this is dead in the water.
Who is?
My ex wife for one, who would like to play Steam games but is not experienced enough to build and fiddle with a gaming PC, much less Linux, and just wants a box she can just plug in and turn on without calling all the IT folks in her family.
Don’t forget about our nerd bias. Most people here have a different perspective than 95% of normies. Remember how clueless the average person is about the inner workings of modern tech.
Half the posts I see on lemmy about this are incredibly out of touch with mainstream gamers and consumers and I’m getting second hand embarrassment from it.
Most people do not want to tinker with their shit at all, and the proportion of people that care about display port vs hdmi is probably about the same they want exactly what you said, ease of a console with the nimble power of a PC. This is exactly that
8GB VRAM is enough for upscaled FHD games.
What’s your favorite console?
There is zero market for an underpowered “PC” console with less VRAM than literally every other current console including switch 2
The Switch 2 only has 12 GB of LPDDR5X shared memory between CPU/GPU. 3 GB are reserved for the system, that leaves you with about 9 GB shared between CPU and GPU.
The Steam Machine uses GDDR6 and has 8 GB of dedicated VRAM.
This steam machine is woefully underpowered compared to the PS5 and series X, and they’re going to be replaced in the next 2-3 years max.
Of course there is. I would much rather have this than a gaming console. Don’t have to re buy any game and all the benefits of the PC library of games. Perfect for couch gaming and possibly doubling as a media device.
The list of exclusives you refer to is literally PC games, a library massively larger than any console on the market.
no way this thing costs more than 800
Get ready to be horribly dissapointed…
maybe lol
It’s likely in everybody’s best interest that this is a wild success. Not only will game developers be incentivized to actually optimize their games for reasonable setups; this will unseat Nvidia’s monopoly over gamers with their ridiculously overpriced graphics cards and also Microsoft’s monopoly of a gamer’s operating system.
Nvidia’s partnership with Palantir is incredibly concerning and any blow to Nvidia is a welcome one. Encourage these developments and hype this all up.
The article i saw a few days ago specifically mentioned that they didn’t really talk about the price but when asked if it would cost more than the ps5 pro they didnt really say no and only offered that it will be priced accordingly to the hardware used to make it. To me, that most likely means it’s going to cost around $1k. The absolute max is would ever be willing to pay is like $600. I have no doubt it will sell, but at that $1k price, they will severely limit the group of people that will be buying it. Honestly, if that is the cost, they should be shying away from even associating it as a console and just market it as a PC due to how people think.
Yeah, on announcement day people were adamant about it costing less than consoles, but one look at the specs and you’d know there’s no way of that happening.
I’d be shocked if it’s under $600
They can’t sell this at a loss, or at least it would be incredibly risky. This is (intentionally) “just a PC”. It ships with SteamOS but you can of course install whatever you want, including windows. If it is (much) cheaper than a roughly equivalent normal PC, companies might just start buying them in bulk but obviously not generating the supporting sales needed.
I heard at one point in time the fastest super computer in the world was a cluster of 900 ps3. It was cheaper then buying a single computer and in the beginning of the ps3 era you could easily format and run Linux on them.
I certainly remember PS2 consoles being used like that. The cell processor was impressive.
I ran ps2 Linux as my “desktop” for 6 months or so back in the day. It wasn’t capable of much compared to a general purpose computer at the time. Videos only played at almost full speed if you ran em in fbdev from a vterm with nothing else running. There was so little ram that using kde1 would run you into slow motion computing because of all the swapping. Window maker was ok, but running much of anything inside it would eat through that 32 megs of ram pretty quickly (I spent most of my time in vterms).
They did it with ps3 also although in research to make sure I was no mis-remembering I found out I was wrong. It was 33rd fastest super computer not #1.
I saw in a LTT video that they already claimed they will not be selling this at a loss because they want their hardware division to be self-sustaining.
I don’t think companies would be able to buy them in bulk, at least not directly.
Valve sells direct to consumer, no retail in the middle, they have their own online storefront (duh).
They’re not going to do a B2B mass order.
If a business wanted to try and stockpile them, for whatever reason, to turn into their own thing… or, to try to cause a price panic / supply shortage…
… they’d have to use/create basically a scalper network of essentially unaffiliated people.
If they sell it only through Steam as they do with the Steam Deck, companies wouldn’t really be able to buy them in bulk.
Dude the switch 2 is $500. Having a general purpose computer that hooks just as easily to your TV as a gaming console for double that price is perfectly fine IMO.
Not going to happen
I have a desktop, but would buy it for the bespoke compact hardware to fit in the TV console. The dedicated antennas are a clear sell as well.
Right now I Steam Link via Shield, but I need wired or a better router to do any low latency play.
Higher RAM price is irrelevant as it acts on the whole market, it’s not a disadvantage specific to the Steam Machine
It may act on the whole market, but it doesn’t have the same impact on every OEM.
It’s a bigger issue for Valve than the console competition, who have established supply chains potentially with fixed prices for certain terms or at least more significant volume discounts, and proprietary compatibility hurdles binding their customers, so they can sell hardware at a loss if they want to.
If Valve sells the computers at a loss they run the risk of people buying them for other uses, without generating corresponding Steam profits.
Personally, I would be interested in a different type of Steam Machine: A shrouded motherboard as a sort of LEGO base, into which you place modular blocks or cartridges that contain the PSU, CPU, USB, RAM, Wi-Fi, audio, drives, and graphics. Each block can have rails, to provide connections for power and signals, so that users don’t need to futz around with wires. Just plonk a brick down onto the rails below it, and you are good for that part.
Would it actually work from an engineering perspective? No idea. All I know is that I would replace parts of my PC more often, if I didn’t have to worry about screwing up in some fashion.
Look at the price of Xbox series X SSD expansion vs PS5 and see if that’s what you really want. $150 for 1TB with Xbox or 2TB for the same price or less for PS5? 1TB NVMe is well under $100 right now.
This. Components would be overpriced and proprietary. Nobody wants that.
Building and upgrading a computer really isn’t that difficult. All the parts only fit in one spot. Getting compatible parts can be tricky if you don’t know what you’re looking for…but this problem could strike this idea, too, because there would certainly need to be different generation mainboards whenever CPU sockets or chipsets or memory speed or really anything else on the mainboard comes around.
So such a solution would likely lead to less choice and more proprietary vendor-locked garbage. Just now solely on the hardware side.
But wait…what games are compatible with this system? What games will run well?
This is something Valve has done really well…they built a benchmark system. This is the problem that’s been plagueing PC, imo. AAA games get built for bleeding edge tech, necessitating upgrades…while the steamdeck sets a bar that developers have to be playable on in order to tap that entire market. Could the game run better on better systems? Sure, probably. But it needs to be at least playable on steamdeck.
What I’m trying to say is we should all just standardize on PlayStation. Cheers.
Monopolies are good for innovation /s
(Bell Labs being probably the only notable exception)
I will only consider buying it if it’s half that price. Also I’m in a specific intersect of necessary mobility & content with what I have.
Even if it won’t be that high, it’s definitely gonna cost more than Steam Deck.
You ain’t getting one then lol.
A new Steam Deck OLED is $650 right now. Y’all are absolutely delusional if you think Valve is gunna sell the new Steam Machine with 6x the power of a Deck for $600.
Personally, I think $800 is the absolute lowest these things will go for, and that is a stretch. Unless they are planning on cutting the price on Decks by 20-30% which would be ludicrous considering they are already selling them at a loss and making up the difference on the game sales.
Valve has already said they are pricing the Steam Machines as entry level gaming PCs. And Idk what world some people are living in, but this ain’t 2010 anymore. Entry level PCs are $750+ nowadays, unless you are buying some parts used.
I’m not happy about this. I remember back in highschool building some nice entry level gaming rigs for $500, but those days are long past. I probs won’t be getting a Steam Machine, but that’s because I am a tinkerer and I’ll just jank one together for my own use, but for somebody who wants a solid entry-level gaming PC that has a really great ecosystem around it and is no muss no fuss, the Steam Machine is a pretty good option.
My prediction: 512GB Steam Machine will be $800-$900, the 2TB one will be $1,000-$1,200.
Why is the two terabyte model $300 more expensive than the 512 GB, a 2 terabyte storage module definitely does not cost $300. Also the steam deck is quite old now, so for the same price as what they paid for the steam deck chips they could get a more powerful chip, so there’s no reason to necessarily believe that they are paying considerably more for the chips in the steam machine than they paid for the chips in the steam deck. Also if you look at pricing for equivalently capable hardware you can do it for about $450 retail, and obviously Valve are not paying retail.
I can’t guess at what the price will be or what makes sense for Valve, but I’m not interested at $1000. I can do a Linux box on my own for much less, or for about the same amount, a Windows box that can run all games without tinkering.
I really would like to upgrade to a steam cube as my current PC is about 15 years old just with upgraded RAM, storage, and graphics but i also only play games that came out over a decade ago too
