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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
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 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.
An existing PC game library, better pricing and flexibility for PC games, wider and more robust controller support ...
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.
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.
Gonna get skewered for this take but... that's slightly better than I thought it would be. I thought it would be 1500 USD at the minimum.
EDIT:
Join the list any time before June 25th at 10 a.m. PT. On that date, the list will be closed and randomized, and you will receive an email with your results shortly after.
OH NO brother they're RAFFLING IT!? hahahaha that's fucked
They will sell out instantly and this blocks the scalpers.
Oh yeah sorry, I don't mean to say they're wrong for doing it. I just mean that scalpers are now so prolific that this is the only way to ensure fair purchases, that's the fucked part.
OH NO brother they're RAFFLING IT!? hahahaha that's fucked
I’m actually glad to see it. A raffle is one of the only realistic ways to deter scalpers while still leaving the console eventually accessible to people who actually want to play on it. Fuck scalpers; anything that hurts them is a win in my book.
OH NO brother they're RAFFLING IT!? hahahaha that's fucked
I disagree. The Deck and Controller each had their queues announced at least a week ahead of time. The queue for the Steam Machine kinda just shadowdropped in comparison. Plus a raffle doesn't penalize anyone for having work or living in a timezone where they'd normally be asleep.
Given the circumstances it's pretty fair.
It's a one-per-household, vetted for bots and scalpers raffle, yup. Well, more of a first-wave-shuffling and then waitlist, really.
Each global region has separate quantities and lists, and each version of the box has their raffled/shuffled lists.
What's nice about that is, not only are they going to actively try to limit to one household, but as long as you get in before the 25th, even if you get shuffled to the very end, you're still going to be before anybody that comes in almost 4 days later, and have a chance to be literally first. Chaotic, but I think that's kinda fun.
randomization is to determine the order of receipt
... that's high demand, sheesh
So thats pretty much as expected - 7 months ago it would have been ~$700 as predicted
The sad part is that Valve really did price all the parts for pretty much as low as they could go:
AI pushed gaming 10 years back
AI did a number to gaming, but truthfully, gaming technology was probably about to stand still anyway. Barely any studios can afford to make a game that's so technologically advanced that it pushes our current hardware to its limits.
Oh please, plenty of games push my top tier hardware to its limits!
It’s just that they do it by not bothering to optimize their software.
You're probably right...
As an optimist, I really hope this hardware crunch leads to a greater focus on polish and optimization. I feel like a lot of development studios have let specs inflate to cover being unwilling to focus on building their games efficiently. It can feel crazy when you start comparing specs on games from different studios.
As a realist, I imagine we're just going to have a lot more cloud gaming services and that may just end up being the norm. I'm still waiting for a AAA publisher to start releasing their games exclusively to cloud platforms, probably first as a pre-release or early access bonus of some sort. I have my money on Ubisoft as the first big one if they manage to keep it together as a company.
As an anarchist, I've been looking into selling all my electronics and investing in some farmland.
I'll throw steam os on my mini PC and just pretend it's a steam machine. I knew they were going to break $1k but yeesh, breaking it AND only 512gb is tough
Rough timing. My entire gaming PC cost less than this and is much more powerful, judging by the specs. But I built it out with 32 GB RAM and a few terrabytes of SSDs and NVMe before the current silicon panic, and just upgraded the GPU last year before the prices increased.
I don't see how there was any way of winning for Valve on this with the current market. It's not worth the cost, but there's also likely no way they could make it cheaper.
It will most likely sell out constantly for the next year, they will be fine.
It could or should have been around 700-800. We must be thankful AI companies that it is how it is now.
I'm still getting one but this is clearly a luxury item now rather than a competitive console. Sucks to be Valve here, the timing really worked against them.
I just really hope the VR headset is not much worse than this as I just want to play No Man's Sky on linux VR.
8 GB VRAM :(
16 GB RAM :(
But it's not a problem in Linux: https://www.techpowerup.com/348178/valve-engineer-improves-linux-memory-management-for-gpus-with-8-gb-vram-or-less
I mean, it's still a problem, just less of one. Still gonna be an issue with high texture games that cache to VRAM. But this looks to be a 1080p machine, so I suppose that wouldn't be too big a deal here, unless the textures aren't scaled for the resolution (some games do that these days, but I don't know if it's common).
Funny, cause whilst its very pricey, i spent more than this on my phone. And most flagship phones cost about the lower end of this. But because i get my phone essentially interest free over a 4 year contract i somehow justify the cost without thinking too much about the fact that i spent 1500 quid on a small slab of glass and metal.
Maybe i need to rethink my grasp on the concept of money.
I'm glad they are doing a random selection of people who sign up who can order one, way better than the first come first served model that gives all the product to bots/scalpers (like the say in their reasoning).
Price seems reasonable for what you get in this current market ;(
Damn. I can't imagine this is what they wanted to price it at, I'm very sad to say it is a competitive price in this insane market...
This makes me wonder about the next time we have to buy new phones ....
Could've been worse I guess. I know they did their best considering ridiculous market conditions, but it's a hard sell if this was meant to compete with consoles, you can still buy a normal console for roughly half the price.
In terms of being a prebuilt gaming PC, it's not bad. Some people have said a similar spec PC is roughly $100 cheaper if you get everything yourself. Now the question is how much stock Valve actually has to sell, because I assume they won't have that many made because of the component shortages...
It's a brutal time to be releasing hardware like this.
GPU prices, RAM, SSDs, all inflated through the roof.
This should have been the price of a PS5 Pro, with the performance of a PS5 and it's not even that.
I still want the Frame, but only because my OG Rift died a couple of months back. I really don't want to have to go crawling back to Meta for a Quest 3 when I see the price of the Frame, but I'm not optimistic. They really need a reduced spec Frame that just does the streaming portion. With RAM and GPU prices as they are, that would at least make some sense.
Should I even try to build a PC for $1000 or just give up at this point?
For $1k you could do quite better than the Steam Machine (though not mini-sized). Just spec'd out a build on Amazon with AM4 and you've got options:
$55 - Thermaltake 700w PSU
$90 - Corsair 4000D case (I have one of these, good airflow and easy build space). This is a place you could skimp to save a few bucks, e.g. - this case is $55
$130 - Cheap 1 TB SSD (went with Timetec, apparently Fikwot is okay too, seems to be a SSD parts manufacturer that started selling direct)
$85 - B550 ATX mobo
$130 - G.Skill 16 GB DDR4 3200
$175 - Ryzen 5 5600 XT OR Ryzen 7 5700 (5600 is faster but 6c/12t, 5700 lower core speed, but 8c/16t. I have a 5600x, no complaints)
$279 or $290 - RX 7600 GPU, or RTX 5050 (up to preference. The 7600 is generally comparable or slightly better overall, but you will see much better with it on Linux. On Windows the 5050 might be the better choice)
Total cost: About $950 (or $915 with the cheaper case), which leaves a bit of overhead to get a cheap cooler for the CPU (optional since it comes with one), and/or additional case fan(s).
Edit - to be clear, you can probably do better than this. I just browsed prices and parts on Amazon, but you might be able to find parts cheaper on https://pcpartpicker.com/ or by purchasing used parts on eBay.
For example, the Ryzen 5 5600x can be found for around $125 on Ebay, that's $50 savings. And slower DDR4 RAM (2600 base speed) can be found for as low as $65 on Ebay, though I'm not sure if that's a compromise I'd make, up for debate.
I wanted one, but not for this much. Glad I got the first gen steam deck when I could. Steam deck + dock is pretty much the same thing.
Just compared the storage price jump to the current iPad Pro.
512gb to 2tb Steam Machine + £270 (£90 per 512gb) 512gb to 2tb iPad Pro + £800 (£267 per 512gb)
That's straight up robbery from Apple.
I'm curious what companies like EA are going to do if this continues. If your customers cannot obtain the hardware to run your games, what do you do? Start releasing pixel titles or just hope for a whale?