this post was submitted on 22 Jun 2026
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Steam Hardware
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It's too expensive, it's just not a good idea for them to have released this. Honestly, they probably should have delayed it for 1-2 years or likely even cancelled it outright.
What they should have done is made a new Steam Link with more capable hardware for cheap. That would have sold like hotcakes.
People don't want to pay $1050 USD for 16GB of RAM and a 512GB SSD. People can't afford to be casually dropping money like that in this economy.
I"m not sure where you are getting this from, but there's absolutely no demand, and I mean none at all, for another Steam Link hardware.
You can run some form of Steam Link on basically anything you can hook up to a TV (or the TV itself).
Sure, and how many of those devices that you hook up to a TV can handle Steam Link at 4K 120 FPS?
Your TV OS may or may not be able to, but if your TV can't then you have basically no other options. The original Steam Link can't, The NVIDIA Shield can't, the Fire TV Stick/Fire TV Cube can't, the Roku can't, the Apple TV 4K can't, none of them can do Steam Link at 4K 120 FPS. An HTPC can, but good luck with HDMI-CEC on that.
I'm not out of touch for thinking 4K at high refresh rates would be nice to have.
I don’t think the target was the same people that would buy a link, the link is for someone that already has a pc. Meanwhile I think the steam machine was meant to compete with the consoles and gather new users into the steam ecosystem and then the price got hammered and took it out of that position.
Sure, I didn't mean that it's a standalone console.
However, at $1050 USD, there's many people who won't be buying this standalone console either.
It would have made more sense to release both at the same time, that way people who are turned off by the $1050 USD (or more) price tag would at least have something they could buy from Valve instead.
Hell, I'd buy a new Steam Link that supports H265 and isn't capped to 1080p at 60 FPS.
I agree fully.
The Steam Link was pretty much a dumb terminal for VNC. In what way does it need to have "more capable hardware?"
The Steam Link did not have H265 supported in streaming settings IIRC.
The Steam Link was capped to 1080p at 60 FPS.
Those are some serious hardware limitations.
They could have easily refreshed it at the time.
I'm not sure anybody really cares about the streaming codec as long as it works with good quality.
But fair enough: I agree it would be nice to have a "Steam Link 2" that could do 4K60 (or better) and (as pointed out in a Machine review video I just watched) support HDMI CEC.
(Maybe some third-party company should do it and name it the "Missing Link," LOL)
The streaming codec matters because it (265) is incredibly better and more efficient, which is what you want for streaming.