I went to PCPartPicker and tried to assemble a similarly spec’d PC, not with the absolute cheapest components, but definitely from the lower end sorted by price, it came out close to $800.
I guess if Valve can price it at that and be smaller it might have a market, but if much more than that people are better off just buying a PC.
P.S. Since Valve is not buying retail I think there is room for lower than that, and it’d definitely be welcome, but I’m not sure Valve will make that decision.
It would cost me about a grand to make a pc that still not up to par with a ps5 where I live.
I’ve seen estimates put the materials cost somewhere around the $425 - 500 USD range because of the specific, semi-custom hardware that they’re using. It’s also good to note that Valve will be able to get a better deal than any of us will because they can get bulk discounts and aren’t buying each part at a market rate profit from retail vendors.
Some people seem to be of the mind that it will be somewhere around the $500 - 800 USD range if tariffs and the RAM situation don’t screw with the price, and that it will probably price out the Xbox with Microsoft’s 30% profit demand and be slightly more expensive than the PS5 while having comparable but not quite as much power.
“better off just buying a PC”.
It is a PC.
Smaller makes it more expensive. I hope it’ll be under $1000, but I think I wouldn’t be surprised if it were $1200.
2x8 GB RAM for 130 dollars? What the fuck? I knew theyve gotten more expensive recently but that stings.
Yeah, the AI (manufactured) hype has caused RAM prices to skyrocket thanks to them buying out ALL the fucking RAM for those servers.
I just checked how much my 4x32gb costs. Guys, I’m focking rich
PCPartPicker has a general price tracker where you can see how much RAM has spiked in such a short time. It really emphasizes how crazy things have gotten
That’s almost the Apple fee
Brother it’s so bad. I’ve been trying to help a friend do one recently, or at least plan it, and I’ve watched my previously $85 2x16 sticks of GSkill DDR5 (like the cheapest option I had) shoot up to like $260 in under a month has been insane. It’s not even good ram…
In the same boat actually. Helping a friend with a build and RAM is ridiculous right now. crappy slower 2x16 kits costing $350 and far beyond. Their desired upper end CPU is less than most RAM kits. I was trying to find a middle ground for them with 2x24 but I can’t even find those kits anymore. Doesn’t help that these days 32 is recommended for some games, let alone aminimum for productivity software. I got lucky when I built. Prices were bad (~150 for 2x24!!) but shot up not even days after I built last month and my kit hasn’t even been in stock since I got it.
This bubble can’t burst soon enough…
A friend of mine just dropped $700 on 2x64Gb for his upcoming editing rig. Most expensive part of the build.
That’s insanity lol
I recently (a few months ago) built a new high-end server for my homelab, and bought 512GB of DDR4 ECC RAM for around $510. I just looked it up, and those exact same modules are around $2.5k to $3.5k for the same amount. That’s more than I paid for the entire machine.
My guess is that maybe Valve was able to get a bunch of RAM before the price hikes.
“more expensive” really is underselling it. It’s out of control. Some kits have tripled.
Yep. Everthing has at least doubled in the past ~ two months, because Nvidia’s AI bubble must not be allowed to pop.
The 2x48GB kit (CMK96GX5M2B6000Z30) I bought in August for $300 is currently going for $1175, and it’s likely not getting better any time soon.
YouTube channel Moore’s law is dead priced it out at $425 including controller. For cost not price.
$500 or bust
$299.99 feels like it should be the ceiling for a console.
I’d like it to cost $1.50 but it won’t. The minimum reasonable price this comes in at is around $500 you would have to be really unaware to expect it to be less than that
I don’t know why you get downvoted for this lol. I’ll do you one better. $250 or bust
Fuck it. $199.98.
Hot damn! Shut up and take my money!
Maybe we will all benefit if the 14 year old kids gets a steam machine, instead of some cheap pos with loads of errors, slowness etc = extra rage in games.
Sorry Valve, but you are delusional here. This is going to bite you in the ass like Artifact did.
I don’t see the angle of the argument where people are saying that Valve is just going to eat the loss per sale of this machine. My question is - why bother? Because they’re going to just bank on the goodwill built up with the Steam userbase and rely on them to buy games to make up the losses, which by the way the prices on even Steam’s holiday sales have been quite underwhelming these past few years. So I don’t get why they would bank on that when it is again underwhelming.
The freaking device is 40% fan, lol.
This is for general public. So add 1 million dollars for tech support
If olot really Is going to be priced like that then why? Like you Can Build a PC and Its even fun. You cant make a Powerfull PC that small easly but like…idk
There were some pieces mentioned on waveform about its set up being out of box ready to be turned on by tv remote and those few console like bits that people like me wouldnt know how to do if we built.
Eh, I don’t particularly enjoy building PCs, but I do it because it’s cheaper, esp. for upgrades. I’m really not the target market for this.
That said, this is the right product for a lot of people. Many don’t want to mess with their gaming system, they want it to just work. That’s why consoles are popular, and the Steam Machine being a bit more expensive than a console and get access to Steam’s catalog is very attractive to a lot of people, especially if it otherwise works like a console.
Yeah It works like the pc-console with steamOS ita Just i found that for me and some other people its a Little redundant, but not that people shouldnt buy it
I’m guessing the same reason people don’t always reroof their own house, or replace their own home electrical, or build their own bike. Sometimes it’s worth spending money to avoid doing a thing you either don’t want to or don’t know how to do. As I’ve gotten older and more financially secure that’s definitely been the case with me at least
People out there replacing their homes electrical?
It’s weird being on this site sometimes. Not everyone speaks computer, but it turns out that doesn’t make them dumb, they’re just good at different things. Personally I have no issues doing electrical work but know I would get incredibly frustrated trying to work a Linux machine. I have no interest in learning all that noise because it straight up is not interesting to me and is not worth my time. I had my fill of that nonsense in school. I’d def be a potential customer of something like this that ‘works out of the box’ - honestly that’s the real path to getting people off windows.
Yeah there Is also that. Its more convenient sometimes to not do the “Sorry” job
Plus, they may be able to come in slightly cheaper on volume discounts on components.
I’ve always built my on PCs, but there are times when the whims of the market have made pre-builts cheaper.
If you want a smaller form factor it actually costs you more than a normal tower. This is not a bad way to get a small form factor computer (if it’s priced like a normal sized PC)
Especially with the fucked up RAM prices recently.
Yeah fi you want a small pc its very good since its hard to find Powerfull small PCs
The worst thing about the hardware unveiling is the endless posts about pricing 😮💨
A PC of similar performance is about $550 so I don’t get what they’re saying about it not been priced like a console. That’s about exactly what a Series S would cost.
A PC of similar performance is about $550
where did you get that? With the price increases of pc components in recent months, it’s more like $750+.
I didn’t use prices from last week I used prices from last year because that’s when Steam would have actually made their devices. Manufacturing of the steam machine and the steam frame is rumoured to have occurred around 2023-2024, should the Trump shenanigans shouldn’t have affected things too much.
That’s not to say that somehow much the devices will cost it’s just how much it would have cost to build. How much profit they’re going to try and make on them is an unknown. With the steam deck they aim for $100 profit margin, but who knows with this device. The steam frame is also an unknown because it’s a weird configuration.
Used market prices, probably. An 8GB VRAM video card and an appropriate CPU that wouldn’t bottleneck performance could easily fit under $500. I guess nowadays the RAM would be the hangup lol.
I don’t know why people keep insisting that the current prices are relevant. These products have been manufactured for months now, so we need to be looking at old prices not current market value.
Over, under
$500 USD?
I think if it is over $600 most people aren’t even going to consider it as an option.
That’s the thing I find amusing in this thread. Consoles are a known quantity and it needs to either compete or undercut them. I have a Steam Deck that I paid £320 for (brought up to £400 by the SSD I added). I would most definitely not pay more than £450 for a Steam Box. It may well cost more than that but it is a luxury and I would seriously struggle to justify more than that.
IIRC from an earlier article, they’re still looking at factors and don’t yet know for sure (I suspect that it might be that Trump tariffs and whether they will stand is an input).
Definitely over 500$. Considering the statement it sounds like it will be at least 800 dollars.
Yeah, I’ve been guessing $800-1000. That’s a decent deal on a prebuilt with this performance.
Facts people forget:
- Assembling your own Steam Machine with similar parts will cost around 800
- Even if you assembled it yourself you would be missing features, such as cec, wake by controller, sleep mid game, etc. LTT will try to build one, it will be interesting to see what they come up with, but I’m 90% it won’t have feature parity.
- There’s lots of engineering gone into this machine, they’re way more compact, less power hungry and more quiet than anything you can build yourself.
- Buying the same build as a prebuilt brings a premium and costs around 1000
- Valve purchases stuff in scale so they can diminish their margin and could potentially sell it cheaper than prebuilts, and possibly cheaper than building it yourself.
- Consoles are sold at a loss, and they recover it with games because the platform is closed.
- The Steam Machine is not closed, they can’t be sure they’re getting game purchases, because people might be buying this to be their work computer. So they have to price it as a PC, with margin on hardware, not promise of future returns.
- Price might fluctuate between now and announcement, RAM prices are going crazy nowadays.
With all of that being said, it seems to me it’s very likely it will be around 800 but less than 1000. For people saying you can build one for that price yourself, sure, go ahead, you’ll have a huge, power hungry loud box, without the same features and you would have saved only a small fraction of the value by having to assemble everything yourself.
Facts
Buying the same build as a prebuilt brings a premium and costs around 1000
For 1k you can get a 9600 9060XT 16gb system, which is waaaaaay more powerful, so this is quite an exaggeration.
With all of that being said, it seems to me it’s very likely it will be around 800 but less than 1000
maybe more with the way ram prices are skyrocketing… because even though it comes out next year, they are probably being manufactured and stockpiled right now.
Consoles are sold at a loss, and they recover it with games because the platform is closed.
Sometimes, but evidently not currently. Sources seem to indicate that only Microsoft seems to say they are selling at a loss, though it seems odd since their bill of materials looks like it should be pretty comparable to PS5…
I’ll agree with the guess of around $800, but like you say, the supply pressure on RAM and storage as well as the tariff situation all over the place, hard to say.
…LTT will try to build one…
Jay already tried. It was bigger, didn’t have the custom OS, and cost $1700. He could have done better except he was part limited to what rhe Microcenter he was at had on hand. Doing a bunch or research and getting different parts would probably bring down the price.
* Even if you assembled it yourself you would be missing features, such as cec, wake by controller, sleep mid game, etc.
I’ve been actively mass downvoted on Reddit for being excited for these features. People are really fucking stupid sometimes.
I have a significantly more powerful PC (in a tower case) currently hooked up to my tv surviving the same purpose and I will likely be getting the Steam Machine entirely for these features.
“But just use a dongle” they say. And I do. It works about half the time and I have to do this weird dance involving pulling up Kodi
Also people who like to DIY seem to forget that a lot of people want a turn-key solution, I even dare to say that most people prefer a ready made solution. Even a lot of people who work in tech when they get home want a just work solution.
And a lot of the prebuilts have a ton of cut corners. A well put-together machine that people can trust to play their games at a base performance could be great for those who don’t want or can’t DIY.
Yup, I love DIY, had tons of fun building my wife’s mini-itx gaming rig, my NAS and even my desktop (although it was the boring one of the three since it’s just standard). I love poking on my system, trying out stuff, etc. But I bought a Deck and my only mod was getting EmuDeck in it, it just works for what I want it to, and that’s worth a lot to me, it allows me to pour my time on stuff I want to be building and just game on my gaming boxes.
Nail On The Head.
I work in tech. I also have terrible dexterity. While I love my gaming PC, I dread upgrades or things going wrong. I hate applying thermal paste, replacing a motherboard, etc. I’d gladly pay “prebuilt” prices for something from a company I can “trust” (as far as corporations can be trusted).
A thousand dollars seems fantastically reasonable for a well-engineered home-gaming machine that can play current gen PC games at high quality. I spend that much every several years on upgrading or building a new PC.
My complaint is not the price, I think the price is fair. Let’s talk wages.
Assembling your own Steam Machine with similar parts will cost around 800
No, it won’t. $800 will get you a machine that’s around 50% faster. Controller included.
Even if you assembled it yourself you would be missing features, such as cec, wake by controller, sleep mid game, etc. LTT will try to build one, it will be interesting to see what they come up with, but I’m 90% it won’t have feature parity.
Fair enough.
There’s lots of engineering gone into this machine, they’re way more compact, less power hungry and more quiet than anything you can build yourself.
It’s literally a laptop CPU with a laptop GPU.
Buying the same build as a prebuilt brings a premium and costs around 1000
Also not true. A 1k prebuilt is around 70% faster. Controller not included, though.
Valve purchases stuff in scale so they can diminish their margin and could potentially sell it cheaper than prebuilts, and possibly cheaper than building it yourself.
Sure, but that’s an argument in favour of it costing less.
Consoles are sold at a loss, and they recover it with games because the platform is closed.
Yeah, and the best selling console of the generation is $450 for the digital-only version.
The Steam Machine is not closed, they can’t be sure they’re getting game purchases, because people might be buying this to be their work computer. So they have to price it as a PC, with margin on hardware, not promise of future returns.
Stop this delusion. If this was an actual possibility, it would already be happening with the Steam Deck. Yes, I know you know someone who did it. I know someone who bought a Surface to put Linux on it. There’s dozens of us!
Price might fluctuate between now and announcement, RAM prices are going crazy nowadays.
That I see happening. RAM/storage might triple in price tomorrow which would push the price of the whole industry up.
LTT will try to build one
Time for another video of Linus failing to follow basic instructions and going out of his way to break the OS because Linux gaming bad
I hate LTT, but they did absolutely nothing wrong or anything a normal user wouldn’t do in that video.
I don’t think so, I think a normal user would pause when the system asks him to type “Yes, do as I say” as that is clearly a sign that you’re about to shoot yourself in the foot.
You are very far removed from a normal user then.
Most people rarely read warnings or signs. They’re used to needing to just click accept and move on. More than that, their entire experience thus far will have trained them to just type in the magic command line words and get it over with. This is what linux enthusiasts beat into them while pretending everything is a cake walk. “Don’t trust anything” while simultaneously telling them to use this and that script, and copy this and that text into the terminal. Its not at all a wonder to imagine that behaviour.
It wasn’t a standard accept/continue/yes prompt, it wasn’t something that he could just press enter or something easy and continue without noticing, he had to have read the message to know what to do, it was something akin to:
WARNING The following essential packages will be removed. This should NOT be done unless you know exactly what you’re doing! … You’re about to do something harmful, if you’re sure of what you’re doing type the phrase “Yes, do as I say!”
The message couldn’t have been more clear about it. Plus most users wouldn’t need to use the terminal, he just happened to use the distro during the brief window that that bug existed.
As a Linux enthusiast I can definitely tell you I never encourage people to just type words in the magic box and get it over with, and always tell them to understand what they’re typing.
It wasn’t a standard accept/continue/yes prompt,
Doesn’t matter. This is an opinion that is 100% formed in an echo chamber where you are far removed from what a regular user would think going through this process. All of these prompts you think look different, to a normal person might as well be literally exactly the same. “I don’t know what I am doing, but the program says to do the next thing, with some warning that probably doesnt matter because I’m not doing something hard or critically important”.
Of note:
WARNING The following essential packages will be removed. This should NOT be done unless you know exactly what you’re doing!
That is a message that would not impede a regular user at all, or would completely stop them from using the OS.
They’re trying to install steam. Why would they have any reason to believe that whatever programs are mentioned matter, or think that this message matters when they’re doing something that is in theory extremely simple?
Plus most users wouldn’t need to use the terminal, he just happened to use the distro during the brief window that that bug existed.
How does this negate the fact that the actions taken were reasonable and absolutely not the users fault? In fact, the fact that this was fixed and treated so urgently betrays what a flaw it was.
As a Linux enthusiast I can definitely tell you I never encourage people to just type words in the magic box and get it over with, and always tell them to understand what they’re typing.
Lets for the sake of not stating what I actually assume to be true take your word at face value.
What you recommend is simply incompatible with the majority of people. They don’t have the time or effort to devote into actually learning as much as you’d need to learn for this to actually be useful advice.
A great amount of information must be completely skipped over and ignored to be proficient in a reasonable amount of time.
I’ve used Linux at multiple jobs, and used it as my main desktop OS for more than a year. I know this to be true. For the average person to follow your advice, they’d need to have a firm grasp of BASH. Expecting people to learn even one scripting language, especially an old esoteric one with many gotchas and vestiges of its time is an absurd ask, so of course no one would listen to your advice as it is utterly unreasonable on its face, and completely incompatible with the level of user adoption people hope for.
So then, there is the other advice, from people who are also elitists, but in a different way. They believe these people must be stupid to not figure out the problems on their own, and casually tell them to just RTFM or use X, Y or Z script with reckless abandon.
Neither of these lead to anything remotely resembling the ease of use of operating systems these users will have come from, no matter how much Linux enthusiasts insist their weird edge cases where they feel those OSes are inferior mean that somehow, magically their opinions apply to the users they are appealing to.
I have a lot more to say honestly, as I have certainly thought about this a lot, but by this point and given the excerpt I am replying to, I’ve learned to never expect good faith discussion, so I’m just limiting my losses by stopping here as I expect toxic positivity as a response.
I agree with lots of what you’re saying, this was a serious bug, it wasn’t the user’s fault, and users can’t be expected to learn bash.
My point is that the message tried to be as scary as possible, because if that message shows then something is about to uninstall critical components from the system, the bug here was that trying to install steam triggered that. I agree that it wasn’t Linus fault, but I think that most users would stop at that message, he didn’t because he thinks he knows what he’s doing, but he doesn’t, he’s in that middle ground where he knows enough to be confidently wrong.
Let me ask you, how would you have given that message in a way that would make people stop?, remember that the message is valid, the bug was installing steam doing that.
failing to follow basic instructions and going out of his way to break the OS
Otherwise known as a typical behaviour of majority of users
Yeah, but to be fair that was a shitty thing the system did, anyone with experience would know not to do it, but honestly it should have never happened. On the other hand, Linus is a bit daft and lots of stuff blows over his head monumentally, in the same video where he said he would be building a Steam Machine he also couldn’t seem to grasp that this is just a computer and people would see it as a prevuilt. In short I don’t think he will acknowledge lots of the killer features in the Steam Machine just so he can claim his thing does the same. But at least it will be an interesting watch.
Yeah, I agree.
I detest Linus, but at least attack him for legitimate shit.
He was approaching linux as a basic idiot, like someone like me, and that is absolutely something a new average linux user would absolutely do.
iirc, that bug was known before hand, and no one bothered to fix it until famous man made video that got famous.
It was known beforehand and was fixed already by the time he released his video, he just happened to luck out and encounter it during the short spam it existed.
I disagree that he approached it as a complete idiot, he approached it as someone who knows what they’re doing, when he definitely doesn’t, and that was the issue. Anyone without technical know-how would have panicked at the system asking him to type “I know what I’m doing”, and anyone with enough technical know-how would have paused at that and read the message carefully and moped the fuck out. He had enough knowledge to think he knew what he was doing, but not enough to actually do, and the boldness to think he knew better.
That being said, I agree that there’s plenty of other stuff to bash him for, and that was not a great example, lots of people would have found themselves in that same situation, and I don’t think it’s unfair to say the fuck up there was not entirely on his part.
Good thing his team has a few linux nerds. So unlike that challenge where he was alone, here his team would work on it.
They could totally make money selling it at a loss. The reason so many people care is that there’s an opening in the console market for an affordable option
If they subsidized it, wouldn’t that risk businesses buying it as a cheap-for-its-specs option for their office computers? It’s not locked to being a gaming machine like consoles. You can just install windows on it.
Fairly easy fix, there, given this is Valve who own the marketplace:
- Only initially sold via Steam
- Require a Steam account to buy, and the amount must be unrestricted (have bought some amount of games, I think is the way they do that)
- Optional: restrict sales to 1 per account initially, maybe open that up later
That’s a tradition with gaming systems, see the Navy’s playstation supercomputer!
That’s the feel good warm marketing Sony spun for the thing. The PS3 sold around 88 million units. It flopped at first because it didn’t have any games for it. The Linux thing was a quirky fun but ultimately useless feature. You had to code custom software for the thing, it had no commercial software for Linux on a PS3. Its sales ballooned after it became the cheapest bluray on the market, and it was after the removal of otherOS support.
Less than 10 thousand were used for distributed computation clusters. The famous navy supercomputer only had 1.7 thousand units or so. Against the global sales numbers it was barely a rounding error.
I’m sorry, I’m not sure what your point is - yes it was a broadly impractical thing to do, that’s not in dispute.
I think it’s a response to the sentiment that Sony somehow got bit by selling PS3 at a loss because it triggered some huge supercomputing purchases of the systems that Sony wouldn’t have liked, and that if Valve got too close to that then suddenly a lot of businesses would tank it by buying too much and never buying any games.
Sony loved the exposure and used it as marketing fodder that their game consoles were “supercomputer” class. Just like they talked up folding@home on them…
That’s a bit different IIRC, they purchased them directly from Sony and they didn’t have any of the OtherOS hardware lockouts like retail consoles did.
At launch and for a good while PS3 came with a boot to Linux enabled by default, some universities around the globe bought some “from the shelf” to make some server farm and such.
Yeah, but in relatively small volumes and mostly as a ‘gimmick’.
The Cell processors were ‘neat’ but enough of a PITA is to largely not be worth it, combined with a overall package that wasn’t really intended to be headless managed in a datacenter and a sub-par networking that sufficed for internet gaming, but not as a cluster interconnect.
IBM did have higher end cell processors, at predictable IBM level pricing in more appropriate packaging and management, but it was pretty much a commercial flop since again, the Cell processor just wasn’t worth the trouble to program for.
Retail units couldn’t access most of the RSX in OtherOS for Sony reasons, Geohot fixing that was why they killed OtherOS.
Apparently the DOD units never had any lockouts on the GPU.
It was not most resources. It was just one SPE that was locket behind for the firmware.
I’m not entirely sure on the difference here, valve is selling them directly and by all the reporting we’ve seen, there aren’t going to be hardware restrictions on any of the models.
That’s the feel good warm marketing Sony spun for the thing. The PS3 sold around 88 million units. It flopped at first because it didn’t have any games for it. The Linux thing was a quirky fun but ultimately useless feature. You had to code custom software for the thing, it had no commercial software for Linux on a PS3. Its sales ballooned after it became the cheapest bluray on the market, and it was after the removal of otherOS support.
Less than 10 thousand were used for distributed computation clusters. The famous navy supercomputer only had 1.7 thousand units or so. Against the global sales numbers it was barely a rounding error.
Edit: replied to the wrong comment but I think it is still relevant. The risk of companies snatching steam machines in bulk is null, stop listening to LTT.
Unlikely.
Businesses generally aren’t that stoked about anything other than laptops or servers.
To the extent they have desktop grade equipment, it’s either:
- Some kiosk grade stuff already cheaper than a game console
- Workstation grade stuff that they will demand nVidia or otherwise just don’t even bother
On servers, the steam machine isn’t that attractive since it’s not designed to either be slapped in a closet and ignored on slotted in a datacenter.
Putting all this aside, businesses love simplicity in their procurement. They aren’t big on adding a vendor for a specific niche when they can use an existing vendor, even if in theory they could shave a few dollars in cost. The logistical burden of adding Steam Machine would likely offset any imagined savings. Especially if they had to own re-imaging and licensing when they are accustomed to product keys embedded in the firmware when they do vendor preloads today.
Maybe you could worry a bit more about the consumer market, where you have people micro-managing costs and will be more willing to invest their own time, but even then the market for non-laptop home systems that don’t think they need nVidia but still need something better than integrated GPUs is so small that it shouldn’t be a worry either.
They’re letting us discuss this ad nauseam just to understand what prices people consider acceptable for these devices
I doubt it. I think they understand that the hardware market is volatile and what might cost $800 now might be $1000 in a few months.
Anything more than $500 and we riot!
You’ll have to deal with a cult that will defend their lord Gabe’s every move.
Get ready to riot because there’s no way it’s that cheap. My money is on $800-1000.
If it is priced higher than $600 they won’t sell enough to justify their existence. It will just be a repeat of last time.
This is perfect for people wanting a new console with a large games library, but Valve seems to be trying to force the square block in the round hole by placing it in the PC market space.
Why? Look at how many people here say they want Steam OS, and Lemmy skews heavy toward Linux users. This is that, but OOTB.
I don’t think it’ll sell anywhere near as well as the Steam Deck, but it’s also a less exciting form factor. I do think it’ll sell a fair number of units though.
The cheapest equivalent prebuilt I can find with similar specs (RX 7600 is slightly better than the Steam Machine) is $850, and a DIY build is more like $900 (lots of corners cut), so there’s probably not much margin on the prebuilt. Valve is probably saving some cash with their custom CPU, and they’re probably shipping it with a Steam Controller, hence the $800 target. If component prices rise significantly before launch, I could see $1k.
It depends on how many Valve have already manufactured. If they were smart they’ll be quietly manufacturing these and only just now announced it. You don’t announce a product until you’ve got some units sitting in a warehouse somewhere, or else a competitor might see the opportunity to make things difficult for you.
That’s a bad take. Look at PC prices. What equivalent PC could you build for $1000? This is going to be 800+ and still the best value in the PC market. Until they get steam OS on arm and you can put it in a 600 Mac mini.
Equivalent doesn’t mean much when it’s not a standard, upgradable PC. This device competes with consoles, not desktop PCs, and needs to be in that price bracket, as the equivalence is not on the hardware or performance, but just “can it play current-gen games?”
An equivalent PC would have a full fat non-mobile graphics card. They keep trying to claim it’ll do 60 FPS at 4K with AI upscaling. Which is the same as saying it’ll do 60 FPS at 1080p.
This would be a compelling product as a console, the PC capable parts are a nice bonus but no one’s going to be buying this to be their primary computer unless they are going to replace a potato.
Regardless of what the market is doing if it’s anything more than $700 it’ll flop. Which would be an incredible shame but it is what it is. No one is going to pay $1,000 for a PC that cannot be upgraded.
I don’t think this is accurate. The majority of IRL gamers I know are casual people with crappy Minecraft-level pre-builts (hugely overpriced usually; I know someone who spent 1.1k on a 3060 Ti pre-built) or 10 year-old computers built by their neighbors. A lot of casual gamers exist and the steam machine will be very appealing to them as an easy upgrade.
In a way, you’re right. A lot of people will be upgrading potatoes. Or replacing thin air next to their TV’s.
Even I, with a custom built with a 7900 XT running openSUSE TW, am considering this for doing stuff in the living room (or similar, I live in a tiny apartment lol) with friends or just casual-TV gaming and media. I don’t have that right now, and even 900€ sounds appealing for doing that with a Linux-based computer (and gamescope!!!, which I can’t get working on my device) I have full control over, but know will work.
I don’t know of something equivalently priced, but it there is something, please tell me. I think they have a market here. I personally, at least, have been waiting years for something like this to recommend to friends and to an extent to myself.
This is absolutely where it’s going to be.
It’s a good idea, tout the market before doing anything controversial
I suspect it’s because of the uncertainty over tariffs. Ironically making manufacturing in the US less appetising for businesses.
100%
But that’s not a terrible thing, I suppose.
Fair pricing means a reasonable profit on the base cost. Trying to gauge what people are willing to pay means that you want to maximise your profit at all costs, consumers be damned.
I understand that’s what Americans consider “fair”, but I don’t fully agree.
Fair pricing means a reasonable profit on the base cost.
Under many circumstances, this is true. However, console makers have historically sold consoles either at or slightly below cost, expecting to make their real profits on game sales, online store sales, etc… In the business world, it’s called a loss leader. Meaning it’s something popular that the company takes a loss on, while expecting it to encourage more sales elsewhere.
The classic grocery store example is a rotisserie chicken. You can go get a whole rotisserie chicken from the grocery store deli for like $3. It’s so cheap because the store is selling it at a loss. It’s a loss leader. Very few people will simply buy the chicken by itself. Instead, they’ll buy a tub of potato salad, some roasted corn, a can of green beans, and a gallon jug of sweet tea to go along with it. By selling that chicken at a slight loss, they were able to get the customer to buy all of those other things at a profit.
That being said, Valve has already stated that they’re not planning on having the Machine be a loss leader. Which is why people expect it to cost as much as a prebuilt with similar specs.
In most cases, yes. But you have to remember, this is Valve and not some ordinary company. They have extremely deep wallets and a lot of responsibility and expectations on their shoulders (importantly, not the stock market!). If they charged what it cost for hardware and what it cost them to do r&d, it would likely not be in consumers favor.
Like even just get off the American-bad thing for one second: pricing it as a standalone pc basically just means “the cost of the parts”. They’ve put a lot of time and effort into this across their core employees and likely outsourced stuff because they couldn’t, in-house. Actually listening to people and charging relative to that is actually a great way to be fair and make people happy, guaranteeing positive impact of your product. I guarantee they’re paying attention to what people say ALL over the place. Like… Why do you think “it’s done when it’s done” is their pace?
They’re buying the parts directly from the manufacturers though, so cutting out the retailer middle-man could offset the R&D costs.
Research and development is probably very high when you consider Proton, SteamOS, and the semi-custom CPU and GPU. Something between $50 to $100 million would be typical. Silicone is famously expensive in R&D, Proton has continuous costs (and has for quite a while now) that rack up, and SteamOS is literally an operating system. That’s a lot of salaries to pay.
I reckon they’re taking advantage of being private and playing the long game. Very, very long game. They’re not really in danger as long as Steam is successful, but I can’t blame them for wanting a decent gross margin so they can at least cover hardware costs. Especially with memory prices right now, I wouldn’t be surprised at 1000€ here in Germany, though I wouldn’t be happy about it. I would happily buy at 900€ (≈$1040), and be ecstatic at 800€ (≈$920).
Personally, I wouldn’t include Proton in the costs of the Steam Machine. The Deck already is benefiting from it immensely, and I would consider it to be a cost of expanding into Linux gaming in general - especially with the Lenovo handheld and other devices starting to jump on the bandwagon as Microsoft continues to take repeated dumps on their userbase. Its R&D costs are being won back by the market % Steam takes on any games bought and played in Linux, which means that it can benefit from that continued revenue stream rather than the one-off hardware sale.
The hardware has to break even. The software already has.
Is PC
Shock and awe when told it MAY cost similar to a PC
I hope they release the price soon, the discourse on this has become incredibly tiring.
I doubt they will. The market for NAND and ram is insane at the moment, RAM has gone up 100% in the last 3 months. Announcing a price too early could lead to having embarrassingly increase price shortly before or after launch, or take a loss on the products.
That’s not to say I don’t share your sentiments. I too hope they announce it sooner rather than later, but understand why they may be apprehensive.
Remember, an Xbox series X now costs $600 for digital edition ($800 for 2tb + disk drive)
…and those are just flying off the shelves!
