Tariffs, component volatility, and Valve’s tolerance for losses all lead to uncertainty.
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.
Ain’t no way. I got my steam deck during the first sale for around $330. There is no way their controller based off it will cost about half of something that came with a screen, soc, and bigger battery.
Ps5 controller is like $70, the Steam Controller has more features than that, and the OG Steam Controller was pretty expensive. I’d be shocked if it’s under $100. I’m expecting it in the $150-$200 range. But we’ll see, I’d love to be proven wrong
Original Steam controller felt like it was made with really cheap looking materials to cut costs.
This controller looks like the build quality is much more premium and has a lot of inputs and tech put in than the expensive Xbox Elite. The dualsense edge getting removable joysticks and grips raised the price too.
So when its those controllers that this controller will be closer to in terms of features than the base Sony and Xbox controllers. Being only $100 would be a bargain.
I would be happy if I was proved wrong. Please prove me wrong Valve.
I don’t think that Valve will sell the Steam Machine at a loss.
Closed-system console vendors often do, then jack up the prices of their games and make their money back as people buy games. So why not Valve?
Two reasons.
They sell an open system. If Valve sells a mini-PC below cost, then a number of people will just buy the thing and use it as a generic mini-PC, which doesn’t make them anything. A Nintendo Switch, in contrast, isn’t very appealing for anything than running games purchased from Nintendo.
They don’t have a practical way to charge more for games for just Steam Machine users — their model is agnostic to what device you run a purchased game on. So even if they were going to do that, it’d force them to price games non-optimally for non-Steam-Machine users, charge more than would be ideal from Valve’s standpoint.
While I think you’re ultimately right, 6 years ago I would have said the same thing about the Steam Deck idea, so I’m compelled to offer counterpoints.
Valve, very uniquely, does offer the best Linux-based digital games storefront to use on that Linux gaming PC you bought. So, they’re very much positioned to take advantage of the hardware purchase. Users aren’t “locked in”, but they are compelled in, and users may have a smoother time getting games on Steam than trying to set up controller-based launchers on Heroic or something.
It’s like when the pet isn’t literally fenced into the house, and is allowed to roam free, but is reminded that its fluffy toy and warm meals are all back at home, so it’ll never go far.
Valve also might just be more forward-thinking than most game companies most COMPANIES these days. They build goodwill this way and get people obsessed with their brand by having more wins like this.
Hah, this is where they get you and I’ve been dogpiled for raising this as an issue continuously. This is an illusion of an open system. Where are you going to buy games for Steam Machine? Steam obviously, there’s no competition. Then as your library grows you get more and more vendor locked. Then Valve does an Android application notarising switcheroo and you have Linux machine that’s no different from a Mac or an Android phone. Of course they can subsidise it because they can recoup it thanks to 30% cut and it’ll only accelerate the process.
If it’s priced well and idle power usage good, it can be a great home lab. Run all sorts of services on it. Host your own Google Drive/Docs/Photos alternatives with all the automated categorization like face detection sorting. Should be strong enough to run a lot of unrelated services off one machine. If I ever had gigabit internet, I’d probably try stuff like hosting a Matrix server. Self hosted RSS feed.
Would be great for videos. RDNA3.5 has good AV1 and HEVC encoder and decode I believe. I think h.264 got solid with RDNA3.5. Good for video usually means good for photos too. Probably audio. Blender support for AMD graphics cards continue to improve and game engines have generally always been good. Great for a computer lab to teach something like Godot
The compact media creation thing would be the big thing for me if I needed a computer and this was substantially cheaper than a Strix Halo minipc. Darktable, Kdenlive, Krita, Ardour, Godot, Blender. I’d have people in mind where a $500-600 just under an ~RX 7600 would be a huge upgrade for their personal art workstation and the compact form is a big plus
In this context, “generic mini-PC” doesn’t need to even be “non-gaming-PC”, just not a platform for buying Valve’s games; a razor-and-blades model requires that you be the one selling the blades. If someone just goes and runs games purchased from GOG, that’s already an issue for them.
It’s why inkjet printer manufacturers, who do use this model, try to make it so stupendously difficult to use ink from competitors (outside of the bottled-ink printers, which don’t use that model, where the manufacturers are fine with you doing that).
Heroic launcher lets you install games from other launchers although Steam experience is better. But, biggest thing is you can just install Windows, which those who play games that refuse to enable anticheat on Linux will end up doing if this is going to be their main PC.
Like imagine if you could pick up a PS5 or Xbox and install Linux or Windows on it. Id pick one up for that purpose completely negating the reason Sony and Xbox put out the hardware, which is to get people to buy from their store and take 30% of every sale so even if they sold at a loss they are guaranteed to recoup it. Open that hardware up though and they’ll have system that are just going to be a loss.
Does Heroic launcher guarantee that the game you bought will not break Wine compatibility when patched by the developer? What kind of consumer experience are you trying to sell here?
What’s to keep Windows from deciding to get rid of allowing people to install any exe? What’s to stop them from deciding to charge a 30% fee of all transactions from exes that they allow to be published? Whats to stop them from banning Steam, Epic, GOG from existing on their OS so everything is through the Microsoft Store?
So for free linux-native stuff, there’s the default package manager that comes installed. Switch your steam deck to desktop mode. There’s a lot there, including emulators that will run on steam deck from ancient Atari shit to Nintendo switch.
But you can also run non-steam executables with proton. Heroic, lutris, etc are great tools from that. You can buy your games anywhere without rootkit DRM. Most things from itch.io or gog.com will run. Or, you know; other places. You can just pirate shit.
You can in fact uninstall the stock OS and run anything you can compile for midrange x86 hardware.
You missed the part where Android wanted to lock people out of installing their own apps. They postponed it for now due to pressure but it will happen eventually. Also the part where bootloaders lock you out of changing OS. This thing is possible when you vendor lock people in a vertically integrated system and people here are completely oblivious to the trap they’re walking into because they think Valve will be forever cool.
Yeah those cases were bad, steam deck just has Linux on it though. Arch based I think with two DE’s: KDE plasma and a modified’ ‘steam big picture’ mode.
I don’t think anything is locked, and they aren’t fucking with that in any way dell lenovo or system76 couldn’t.
Not yet but they hold you by the balls because you buy license most of your games through Steam. Once they’re entrenched enough they can do whatever. Android was a very open platform in the beginning, now it’s almost iOS. You can fork Android / SteamOS but without Play Store / Steam consumers aren’t that interested.
GoG, epic, any other store really. Proton is made by valve but it works in whatever, and there are tools now to use proton (not wine, proton) outside of steam to get all the goodies you got on top. Heroic launcher does that for the games you get from the Amazon store, gog, epic, and any other exe you got.
I even installed battle net, and once you open it everything you install from there works in that bubble and work, I played plenty HOTS games.
I play modded D2 without much issues.
You know why the steam market share in Linux is so high? Because they are the ones that put the work to make windows games work on Linux. Yes, wine existed before but they both adapted it for games and contributed to the overall wine project a ton. Also, iirc, steamdecks make up for 30% of the Linux machines from valve’s yearly reports. The market is tremendously tiny yet.
Good guess. For reference, Xbox series X without optical drive is $600 currently. PS5 Pro without optical drive is $750 currently. The specs on Valve Machine seem more similar to PS5 Pro, I think.
The hardware is stronger than Xbox Series S but weaker than base PS5. It doesn’t even get close to PS5 Pro. I recommend watching Digital Foundry video about it.
This article is pure sensationalism and speculation. The reason GabeCube’s hardware is mid is because it was made with affordability in mind. It’s supposed to be cheaper than if you would build a regular PC with similar specs. Expect something around $500-$600 price point.
Thanks for the correction. Obviously an uninformed opinion on my part. Although I was also thinking they would try to make it price competitive with current consoles.
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.
Number of investors think you should be willing to invest in a machine that you probably don’t have money for to enrich them. They think you should buy games at $70 or something instead of wait for them to be $30 like on sale. Like I wait. Not all of us want to be in debt.
You’re fundamentally misunderstanding what this development means for gaming affordability. Not having to buy a scarce, way overpriced Nvidia (or even AMD) external/discrete GPU to play the latest games means that PC gaming is a whole lot cheaper. If game developers are optimizing for hardware like the Steam Machine - budget external graphics cards and iGPUs suddenly become viable again as well.
That doesn’t mean it doesn’t have investors. It means it’s not publicly traded. Private investment buy company stock directly. That’s the premis behind VC fundraising
Wont be that low, but Steam Deck needed a screen, battery, portable form factor, and inputs.
So just needing a case and less size and battery power restrictions might make it easier to do more with the same money for the same reason smartphones can be more expensive than PCs and laptops and consoles because of the use case expected of them and the challenge portability adds.
Bro, the steam deck was $400 for the base model when new. I got a base model for $330 a few months after release. $400 is really low for this, but it also doesn’t have a screen and battery. I’m guessing (hoping) for $600 base model.
All of this is going to be based on the fluctuation of RAM prices and tariffs, as well as whether or not Valve has an existing stockpile of RAM from 6 months ago.
FWIW, Sony just announced a Japan-only PS5, sans optical drive, for about $350. Now, US prices are remaining higher, but the GabeCube is likely to have less performance than a PS5. I can’t see them going much over $600 and still having a value proposition. Even that is going to be based on the gigantic library of Steam games that can be played on it that aren’t on the PS5.
No. It’s going to be sub PS5 in terms of performance and should be priced accordingly. You can make the argument that games are a bit cheaper on Steam so they can maybe charge a premium for that.
I am ostensibly the target market for this as I refuse to play games at my desk, only the couch. But I would love to get into the Steam ecosystem and play on my couch and PCVR titles. But I would only consider one if it could do the things my PS5 does at a similar price for both the system and VR headset.
I’ve wondered for lot of PC gamers why they don’t get a fiber optic hdmi cable to connect their PC to the TV, since seems a waste to have such a powerful machine then be stuck to a monitor when playing a cinematic graphics driven title like Cyberpunk 2077.
Makes sense if the PC is on another floor or too far to do. But, I’ve seen 30m hdmi 2.1 fiber optic cables that can push 4k/120 over that distance.
Does for me since my main goal is to sit on the couch and use a controller and be able to take advantage of the 4k resolution and the 120 hz panel with freesync on a larger screen and HDR.
And all it took was the price of a hdmi cable to get it to happen versus hundreds or thousand more to get another separate system for the TV.
Not an issue either. If you can have the money for a fiber optic hdmi cable then you have the money for a powered usb cable to extend the wireless range.
I’ve been gaming on PC that wasn’t near my TV for years since back during the 360/PS3 era. And hdmi and usb cable is all that’s been needed to get started. Nothing more complicated beyond that.
And OS front end? There’s Steam big picture mode or just use a cheap wireless keyboard like the K400 to navigate the desktop. You are talking to pc gamers who built a powerful pc. Im not talking about this set up to some console player and trying to convert them to PC. And I’m not trying to convince someone who wants a dedicated system for the TV so might want a dumbed down UI, but someone who has a powerful PC they use for desktop use and gaming and wants to play on the TV too without moving their PC.
Just showing there is a cheap affordable option using existing powerful hardware that one already has on hand if they want to also utilize it on their TV. But if someone insist on dropping hundreds or thousands more for a secondary system to play on the TV that’s fine too.
I’m using the k400 to navigate desktop. I’m using my controller to play games. Kind of weird to go through the set up of playing on the couch in front of a TV away from the desk and thinking about using a mouse and keyboard instead of a controller.
Honestly, they could sell at a loss and still profit. Steam has the biggest selection of games bar none, they’ve built a culture of buying games too collect them with no intention of playing them, and they get a decent cut of every sale. If they thought of it as a 10 year plan they could sell this thing for $400, and undercut the entire rest of the condole scene, land this in the living room of every kid who wants to game world wide, and literally crush the big 3 in sales.
And then Microsoft or Sony would bulk buy 10k steam machines to use in their server rooms. They can’t sell at a loss because the hardware is not locked, otherwise people could just buy these and use them for whatever and Valve wouldn’t see a cent from those machines. At the very least they need to be sold at a neutral price point, but more than likely they’re looking to get some profit over them.
People seriously underestimate the performance that you can pull out from some medium-level hardware with an highly-optimized OS. I mean, just watch what they were able to archive with the Deck.
Yes, but also consider you are running a more updated, optimized version of Cyberpunk than what everyone experienced when it first launched (and more optimized drivers/FSR/etc). So the true performance gains of mid-low range hardware is masked by the fact that the game is not so horribly unoptimized anymore.
In other words, the actual performance increase of hardware over the years is perceived to be higher than it actually is due to other factors.
But the existence of a steam machine would incentivize releasing games in this kind of optimized state.
You can’t optimize “for pc” because “pc” could mean any configuration of components. Obviously you can optimize, but you can’t “target”, you can’t say “we got it running at 60 fps stable on ‘’pc’.
You can “optimize” for a pre defined steam machine. You can say “we got it running at 60fps stable on the stock steam machine”
The steam deck provides at least a compelling reason and it didn’t sell all that great. This is just pissing money away on shitty hardware.
Console buyers are not going to be pulled away from their eco systems and PC builders are going to know better. At best they’re going to get a sliver of the pre built market and they will quickly adjust while the box sku will remain largely untouched.
I’m looking for small cheap boxes to put in other rooms for the family and to replace consoles and it’s a non starter for me. Who is actually going to purchase this thing?
You could buy a refurbished laptop, or spend a few extra bucks and get twice the GPU 🤷♂️ and a machine with proper RAM and vRAM.
PC builders aren’t interested in prebuilts. If this provides 90% of the experience of a prebuilt at 50% of the price, it makes sense. We don’t know the actual percentages yet but you get the idea hopefully.
My point was that many prebuilts are so shit, that it’s easy to make a comparatively good product. I mean ffs some of them don’t even run their CPUs and RAM at advertised speeds.
Laptops are a completely different breed that this thing isn’t gonna compete with, not at 800 bucks, not at 200.
I’m working on an ~$800-900 build for my little cousin with a Ryzen 7600X and a Radeon 7600 in an mATX mini-tower. According to the specs I’ve read, this is at or above the Steam Machine in both processing and graphics power.
Socket AM5 motherboards are weirdly expensive in the ITX form factor; I bought an ITX AM4 motherboard for like $100 a few years ago, but like, Asrock isn’t selling a B650M-ITX Pro RS, not in this hemisphere anyway. That and non-stupid ITX cases are difficult to find. A lot of the “it’s a PC tower, but ITX size” like the Meshify Nano are being discontinued. So motherboard manufacturers think the ITX market is going for extreme high end, as if we need lots of PCIe lanes on motherboards that only fit one slot, and case manufacturers don’t think heat sinks exist.
The success of the Steam Deck clearly proves how many pc users prefer a ready to go console-like experience, over high performance. Anything under 850 will sell like crazy. And considering that this is a Linux pc, i saw this as an absolute win. 2026 could really be the year of Linux.
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…I might pick up the controller if it’s not a hundred bucks.
The controller is going to be closer to $200
Ain’t no way. I got my steam deck during the first sale for around $330. There is no way their controller based off it will cost about half of something that came with a screen, soc, and bigger battery.
Ps5 controller is like $70, the Steam Controller has more features than that, and the OG Steam Controller was pretty expensive. I’d be shocked if it’s under $100. I’m expecting it in the $150-$200 range. But we’ll see, I’d love to be proven wrong
Wasn’t the OG steam controller $50 ?
I got the steam link for ~$10 but that was after it was discontinued.
Yeah, it was. So it had more features than most controllers at the time and I think was still cheaper.
Cool, let’s have a gentleperson’s bet. I’m going sub $100.
Going on off the price of the dualsense edge we will be lucky if it is only a 100 bucks.
The original steam controller was $50, I would hope they’d be able to keep it under $100.
Not to mention a steamdeck is $400, and that’s got a lot more going on than just a controller.
Original Steam controller felt like it was made with really cheap looking materials to cut costs.
This controller looks like the build quality is much more premium and has a lot of inputs and tech put in than the expensive Xbox Elite. The dualsense edge getting removable joysticks and grips raised the price too.
So when its those controllers that this controller will be closer to in terms of features than the base Sony and Xbox controllers. Being only $100 would be a bargain.
I would be happy if I was proved wrong. Please prove me wrong Valve.
I mean the original controller had gryo, track pads, USB dongle and Bluetooth, haptics, and buttons on the back.
However, I do agree the controller felt cheap (I think really just how light it was).
We’ll have to see. I think they could pull it off as they’ve been more aggressive with pricing than other companies.
Some analysts think Great headline
“9 out of 10 dentists recommend…”
From the GPU specs in expecting a firmly mid range machine. Probably about the price of a PS5 Pro, but with the performance of a base PS5.
They could sell me a wrapped up bc250 and I’d still buy it before any other brand just because.
I don’t think that Valve will sell the Steam Machine at a loss.
Closed-system console vendors often do, then jack up the prices of their games and make their money back as people buy games. So why not Valve?
Two reasons.
They sell an open system. If Valve sells a mini-PC below cost, then a number of people will just buy the thing and use it as a generic mini-PC, which doesn’t make them anything. A Nintendo Switch, in contrast, isn’t very appealing for anything than running games purchased from Nintendo.
They don’t have a practical way to charge more for games for just Steam Machine users — their model is agnostic to what device you run a purchased game on. So even if they were going to do that, it’d force them to price games non-optimally for non-Steam-Machine users, charge more than would be ideal from Valve’s standpoint.
Steam deck has customization you can buy with their points, I could see them getting some extra game sales that way
While I think you’re ultimately right, 6 years ago I would have said the same thing about the Steam Deck idea, so I’m compelled to offer counterpoints.
Valve, very uniquely, does offer the best Linux-based digital games storefront to use on that Linux gaming PC you bought. So, they’re very much positioned to take advantage of the hardware purchase. Users aren’t “locked in”, but they are compelled in, and users may have a smoother time getting games on Steam than trying to set up controller-based launchers on Heroic or something.
It’s like when the pet isn’t literally fenced into the house, and is allowed to roam free, but is reminded that its fluffy toy and warm meals are all back at home, so it’ll never go far.
Valve also might just be more forward-thinking than
most game companiesmost COMPANIES these days. They build goodwill this way and get people obsessed with their brand by having more wins like this.deleted by creator
Hah, this is where they get you and I’ve been dogpiled for raising this as an issue continuously. This is an illusion of an open system. Where are you going to buy games for Steam Machine? Steam obviously, there’s no competition. Then as your library grows you get more and more vendor locked. Then Valve does an Android application notarising switcheroo and you have Linux machine that’s no different from a Mac or an Android phone. Of course they can subsidise it because they can recoup it thanks to 30% cut and it’ll only accelerate the process.
Theoretically people could use it for a cheap non-gaming PC, except the cheapest non-gaming PC would be non-gaming specs.
Anyone using it for cheap crypto-mining is an idiot, the cheap option there is a rack full of bang-for-buck GPUs.
Are there any other use-cases that involve gaming-PC specs? Making videos, perhaps?
If it’s priced well and idle power usage good, it can be a great home lab. Run all sorts of services on it. Host your own Google Drive/Docs/Photos alternatives with all the automated categorization like face detection sorting. Should be strong enough to run a lot of unrelated services off one machine. If I ever had gigabit internet, I’d probably try stuff like hosting a Matrix server. Self hosted RSS feed.
Would be great for videos. RDNA3.5 has good AV1 and HEVC encoder and decode I believe. I think h.264 got solid with RDNA3.5. Good for video usually means good for photos too. Probably audio. Blender support for AMD graphics cards continue to improve and game engines have generally always been good. Great for a computer lab to teach something like Godot
The compact media creation thing would be the big thing for me if I needed a computer and this was substantially cheaper than a Strix Halo minipc. Darktable, Kdenlive, Krita, Ardour, Godot, Blender. I’d have people in mind where a $500-600 just under an ~RX 7600 would be a huge upgrade for their personal art workstation and the compact form is a big plus
In this context, “generic mini-PC” doesn’t need to even be “non-gaming-PC”, just not a platform for buying Valve’s games; a razor-and-blades model requires that you be the one selling the blades. If someone just goes and runs games purchased from GOG, that’s already an issue for them.
It’s why inkjet printer manufacturers, who do use this model, try to make it so stupendously difficult to use ink from competitors (outside of the bottled-ink printers, which don’t use that model, where the manufacturers are fine with you doing that).
Could be good for some home automation workflows- plex server, transcribing security cam video, doing object detection on said video.
🏴☠️?
Simply not true.
What is the competition on Linux? What’s their market share?
Heroic launcher lets you install games from other launchers although Steam experience is better. But, biggest thing is you can just install Windows, which those who play games that refuse to enable anticheat on Linux will end up doing if this is going to be their main PC.
Like imagine if you could pick up a PS5 or Xbox and install Linux or Windows on it. Id pick one up for that purpose completely negating the reason Sony and Xbox put out the hardware, which is to get people to buy from their store and take 30% of every sale so even if they sold at a loss they are guaranteed to recoup it. Open that hardware up though and they’ll have system that are just going to be a loss.
Does Heroic launcher guarantee that the game you bought will not break Wine compatibility when patched by the developer? What kind of consumer experience are you trying to sell here?
What’s to keep Windows from deciding to get rid of allowing people to install any exe? What’s to stop them from deciding to charge a 30% fee of all transactions from exes that they allow to be published? Whats to stop them from banning Steam, Epic, GOG from existing on their OS so everything is through the Microsoft Store?
What if? What if?
What stops Windows? Business consumers paying for the OS and the fact that they don’t have any successful app store. What stops Valve?
The competition on…
Okay, so, it’s an OS right?
So for free linux-native stuff, there’s the default package manager that comes installed. Switch your steam deck to desktop mode. There’s a lot there, including emulators that will run on steam deck from ancient Atari shit to Nintendo switch.
But you can also run non-steam executables with proton. Heroic, lutris, etc are great tools from that. You can buy your games anywhere without rootkit DRM. Most things from itch.io or gog.com will run. Or, you know; other places. You can just pirate shit.
You can in fact uninstall the stock OS and run anything you can compile for midrange x86 hardware.
You missed the part where Android wanted to lock people out of installing their own apps. They postponed it for now due to pressure but it will happen eventually. Also the part where bootloaders lock you out of changing OS. This thing is possible when you vendor lock people in a vertically integrated system and people here are completely oblivious to the trap they’re walking into because they think Valve will be forever cool.
Yeah those cases were bad, steam deck just has Linux on it though. Arch based I think with two DE’s: KDE plasma and a modified’ ‘steam big picture’ mode.
I don’t think anything is locked, and they aren’t fucking with that in any way dell lenovo or system76 couldn’t.
Not yet but they hold you by the balls because you
buylicense most of your games through Steam. Once they’re entrenched enough they can do whatever. Android was a very open platform in the beginning, now it’s almost iOS. You can fork Android / SteamOS but without Play Store / Steam consumers aren’t that interested.GoG, epic, any other store really. Proton is made by valve but it works in whatever, and there are tools now to use proton (not wine, proton) outside of steam to get all the goodies you got on top. Heroic launcher does that for the games you get from the Amazon store, gog, epic, and any other exe you got.
I even installed battle net, and once you open it everything you install from there works in that bubble and work, I played plenty HOTS games.
I play modded D2 without much issues.
You know why the steam market share in Linux is so high? Because they are the ones that put the work to make windows games work on Linux. Yes, wine existed before but they both adapted it for games and contributed to the overall wine project a ton. Also, iirc, steamdecks make up for 30% of the Linux machines from valve’s yearly reports. The market is tremendously tiny yet.
What is their current market share on Linux?
Why is that even relevant? You said people can only get games on Steam and that’s just not true
If they have no market share then that competition exists in theory only.
It’s going to be more than an Xbox, but not too crazy. Probably $800 is my guess.
Good guess.For reference, Xbox series X without optical drive is $600 currently. PS5 Pro without optical drive is $750 currently.The specs on Valve Machine seem more similar to PS5 Pro, I think.The hardware is stronger than Xbox Series S but weaker than base PS5. It doesn’t even get close to PS5 Pro. I recommend watching Digital Foundry video about it.
This article is pure sensationalism and speculation. The reason GabeCube’s hardware is mid is because it was made with affordability in mind. It’s supposed to be cheaper than if you would build a regular PC with similar specs. Expect something around $500-$600 price point.
Thanks for the correction. Obviously an uninformed opinion on my part. Although I was also thinking they would try to make it price competitive with current consoles.
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.
Holy crap I’d forgotten about that.
Yeah, nvidia needs to die. Nothing tied to palantir should survive.
Yaaas let’s smash the Nvidia monopoly and Palantir’s evil plans.
Number of investors think you should be willing to invest in a machine that you probably don’t have money for to enrich them. They think you should buy games at $70 or something instead of wait for them to be $30 like on sale. Like I wait. Not all of us want to be in debt.
You’re fundamentally misunderstanding what this development means for gaming affordability. Not having to buy a scarce, way overpriced Nvidia (or even AMD) external/discrete GPU to play the latest games means that PC gaming is a whole lot cheaper. If game developers are optimizing for hardware like the Steam Machine - budget external graphics cards and iGPUs suddenly become viable again as well.
Especially with the llm crash, this may keep the fabs running
Its some degree of good from like every direction.
Investors? Valve is a private company
That doesn’t mean it doesn’t have investors. It means it’s not publicly traded. Private investment buy company stock directly. That’s the premis behind VC fundraising
i swear i read somewhere that they were shootin for around $400 for a base model
Just saying
The steam deck was 600€
The steam Maschine is 4x faster
I think your math dosent math
Wont be that low, but Steam Deck needed a screen, battery, portable form factor, and inputs.
So just needing a case and less size and battery power restrictions might make it easier to do more with the same money for the same reason smartphones can be more expensive than PCs and laptops and consoles because of the use case expected of them and the challenge portability adds.
Bro, the steam deck was $400 for the base model when new. I got a base model for $330 a few months after release. $400 is really low for this, but it also doesn’t have a screen and battery. I’m guessing (hoping) for $600 base model.
There is absolutely no way they’re selling it for less than $400. Whoever said that has absolutely no idea what they’re talking about.
They told LTT that they were planning to price it competitively with entry-level PC’s, not consoles
All of this is going to be based on the fluctuation of RAM prices and tariffs, as well as whether or not Valve has an existing stockpile of RAM from 6 months ago.
FWIW, Sony just announced a Japan-only PS5, sans optical drive, for about $350. Now, US prices are remaining higher, but the GabeCube is likely to have less performance than a PS5. I can’t see them going much over $600 and still having a value proposition. Even that is going to be based on the gigantic library of Steam games that can be played on it that aren’t on the PS5.
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No. It’s going to be sub PS5 in terms of performance and should be priced accordingly. You can make the argument that games are a bit cheaper on Steam so they can maybe charge a premium for that.
I am ostensibly the target market for this as I refuse to play games at my desk, only the couch. But I would love to get into the Steam ecosystem and play on my couch and PCVR titles. But I would only consider one if it could do the things my PS5 does at a similar price for both the system and VR headset.
I’ve wondered for lot of PC gamers why they don’t get a fiber optic hdmi cable to connect their PC to the TV, since seems a waste to have such a powerful machine then be stuck to a monitor when playing a cinematic graphics driven title like Cyberpunk 2077.
Makes sense if the PC is on another floor or too far to do. But, I’ve seen 30m hdmi 2.1 fiber optic cables that can push 4k/120 over that distance.
That alone wouldn’t solve most of the problems of playing on the couch.
Does for me since my main goal is to sit on the couch and use a controller and be able to take advantage of the 4k resolution and the 120 hz panel with freesync on a larger screen and HDR.
And all it took was the price of a hdmi cable to get it to happen versus hundreds or thousand more to get another separate system for the TV.
You still need a controller that will go that far and an OS/frontend that works on the TV.
Not an issue either. If you can have the money for a fiber optic hdmi cable then you have the money for a powered usb cable to extend the wireless range.
I’ve been gaming on PC that wasn’t near my TV for years since back during the 360/PS3 era. And hdmi and usb cable is all that’s been needed to get started. Nothing more complicated beyond that.
And OS front end? There’s Steam big picture mode or just use a cheap wireless keyboard like the K400 to navigate the desktop. You are talking to pc gamers who built a powerful pc. Im not talking about this set up to some console player and trying to convert them to PC. And I’m not trying to convince someone who wants a dedicated system for the TV so might want a dumbed down UI, but someone who has a powerful PC they use for desktop use and gaming and wants to play on the TV too without moving their PC.
Just showing there is a cheap affordable option using existing powerful hardware that one already has on hand if they want to also utilize it on their TV. But if someone insist on dropping hundreds or thousands more for a secondary system to play on the TV that’s fine too.
I’ve tried these couch keyboard mouse setups and they always suck.
I’m using the k400 to navigate desktop. I’m using my controller to play games. Kind of weird to go through the set up of playing on the couch in front of a TV away from the desk and thinking about using a mouse and keyboard instead of a controller.
Honestly, they could sell at a loss and still profit. Steam has the biggest selection of games bar none, they’ve built a culture of buying games too collect them with no intention of playing them, and they get a decent cut of every sale. If they thought of it as a 10 year plan they could sell this thing for $400, and undercut the entire rest of the condole scene, land this in the living room of every kid who wants to game world wide, and literally crush the big 3 in sales.
And then Microsoft or Sony would bulk buy 10k steam machines to use in their server rooms. They can’t sell at a loss because the hardware is not locked, otherwise people could just buy these and use them for whatever and Valve wouldn’t see a cent from those machines. At the very least they need to be sold at a neutral price point, but more than likely they’re looking to get some profit over them.
They’d need 10k steam accounts tho
Yes, it would be very difficult for the owners @outlook to create 10k accounts.
I’m sure being a handheld had nothing to do with it.
People seriously underestimate the performance that you can pull out from some medium-level hardware with an highly-optimized OS. I mean, just watch what they were able to archive with the Deck.
Seriously! Just started replaying cyberpunk on my base model deck and it is buttery smooth! Very impressive for an igpu!
Yes, but also consider you are running a more updated, optimized version of Cyberpunk than what everyone experienced when it first launched (and more optimized drivers/FSR/etc). So the true performance gains of mid-low range hardware is masked by the fact that the game is not so horribly unoptimized anymore.
In other words, the actual performance increase of hardware over the years is perceived to be higher than it actually is due to other factors.
You know what’s wild? I was a day one buyer on a $30 rebuilt PS4, and had almost no bugs my first 2 playthroughs.
But the existence of a steam machine would incentivize releasing games in this kind of optimized state.
You can’t optimize “for pc” because “pc” could mean any configuration of components. Obviously you can optimize, but you can’t “target”, you can’t say “we got it running at 60 fps stable on ‘’pc’.
You can “optimize” for a pre defined steam machine. You can say “we got it running at 60fps stable on the stock steam machine”
So the problem was the game, not the device…? The hardware was fine?
I’m supportive of the effort, but unless it’s under $500 (it’s not) it’s garbage and DOA.
Prebuilt PC market is fucked, it could be 800 and sell like crazy, if the experience is good
Doubt it.
The steam deck provides at least a compelling reason and it didn’t sell all that great. This is just pissing money away on shitty hardware.
Console buyers are not going to be pulled away from their eco systems and PC builders are going to know better. At best they’re going to get a sliver of the pre built market and they will quickly adjust while the box sku will remain largely untouched.
I’m looking for small cheap boxes to put in other rooms for the family and to replace consoles and it’s a non starter for me. Who is actually going to purchase this thing?
You could buy a refurbished laptop, or spend a few extra bucks and get twice the GPU 🤷♂️ and a machine with proper RAM and vRAM.
PC builders aren’t interested in prebuilts. If this provides 90% of the experience of a prebuilt at 50% of the price, it makes sense. We don’t know the actual percentages yet but you get the idea hopefully.
My point was that many prebuilts are so shit, that it’s easy to make a comparatively good product. I mean ffs some of them don’t even run their CPUs and RAM at advertised speeds.
Laptops are a completely different breed that this thing isn’t gonna compete with, not at 800 bucks, not at 200.
Price out a build that will compete with this and not require an ATX tower.
I’m working on an ~$800-900 build for my little cousin with a Ryzen 7600X and a Radeon 7600 in an mATX mini-tower. According to the specs I’ve read, this is at or above the Steam Machine in both processing and graphics power.
Socket AM5 motherboards are weirdly expensive in the ITX form factor; I bought an ITX AM4 motherboard for like $100 a few years ago, but like, Asrock isn’t selling a B650M-ITX Pro RS, not in this hemisphere anyway. That and non-stupid ITX cases are difficult to find. A lot of the “it’s a PC tower, but ITX size” like the Meshify Nano are being discontinued. So motherboard manufacturers think the ITX market is going for extreme high end, as if we need lots of PCIe lanes on motherboards that only fit one slot, and case manufacturers don’t think heat sinks exist.
Have you seen a PS5? ATX is what people already do at this price point.
ITX isn’t the pull here.
The success of the Steam Deck clearly proves how many pc users prefer a ready to go console-like experience, over high performance. Anything under 850 will sell like crazy. And considering that this is a Linux pc, i saw this as an absolute win. 2026 could really be the year of Linux.
At 1000 bucks you are dangerously close to a 9600 9060XT 16gb build, which would run circles around this performance wise.
There is no way its this expensive. It would be deader than a doornail on arrival.
If this thing isn’t 750 or less, itll be an impossible sell.