[robmccoll]

For reference, a PlayStation 5 is $600-650 for the base models (lower performance than Steam Machine) and $900 for the Pro model (likely higher performance). I know this is a PC and thus an open platform, but for most buyers in living room gaming, that's the competition. I don't think this will reach mass market success, but I'm not sure that was the goal. Who are they selling to?

Note: I ask as someone with a Steamdeck sitting on the desk in front of me and a custom-built computer under my TV running Linux.

[mrec]

I'm sure they were originally hoping for mass-market success, but given the RAM drought and ensuing pricing, I'm guessing the best possible outcome at this point would be to break roughly even and learn, so that they can put out a more competitive revision if and when prices ever return to Earth.

With Windows becoming increasingly hostile, I do think there's room for a hardware/software integrated "just works" offering in the Linux PC space. Plus software pricing is probably a lot more competitive than console (dunno, never had anything to do with consoles, but my impression has always been that hardware is a loss-leader there).

[mohamedkoubaa]

Mass market success doesn't mean overnight success.

[TiredOfLife]

The only thing about price mentioned during announcement, before rampocalypse, was that it would cost much more than a console.

[kiernanmcgowan]

My guess are people who want to PC game but don't want to deal with building a PC themselves - there's a decent market of pre-built gaming PCs that this would be competitive with.

https://www.newegg.com/Gaming-Desktop-PC/SubCategory/ID-3742

[mikepurvis]

And there's a valid market there, but as someone who just spent half my Saturday morning debugging a CPU throttling issue on my kid's 2020-vintage Lenovo Legion laptop, I feel like a pre-built is in some ways the worst of both worlds, like you don't get the savings and fine-tuning that is something you assembled yourself, but you still get all the fun of debugging driver issues, weird performance stalls, and who knows what else.

That said, I've never had a Steam Deck or tried to seriously game on Linux, so I may be out of touch with how much smoother the picture is in an all-Proton world.

(the laptop issue turned out to be something in the firmware asserting BC PROCHOT for some reason; for now we can periodically clear it with the ThrottleStop utility, but who knows what the actual underlying problem is)

[8note]

the benefit here is that the game developers know this device as a standard target, and steam will tell you how well a game works at purchase time.

valheim started with extremely poor steam deck performance, but at some point, the team did steam deck optimizations that got it humming nicely enough

[Philpax]

The Steam Deck is the closest thing the PC world has to a console (barring the Steam Machine, of course), and features near-console levels of hardware/software integration.

[theshrike79]

Way too many prebuilts use fully custom components making it (intentionally) hard to upgrade them piecemeal.

[mikepurvis]

Sounds like a further disadvantage of going that route, like maybe you get a swappable GPU and RAM, but your motherboard and power supply are custom to the case it came in or something.

[theshrike79]

Yep, this is what I've noticed. As long as you can stick with the same motherboard and PSU, you can kinda-sorta upgrade them. But after that you hit a wall.

[amunozo]

Custom gaming PCs are huge and ugly, which is a concern for me (and my partner). Size and comfort are the main advantages.

[dagmx]

They’re just as ugly and huge as you spec them out to be. There are tons of ITX / SFF builds that look just as good or better.

[ashenke]

But not at a thousand dollars. SFF builds are more expensive and fussier to setup and cool down . So a well made, prebuilt Steam Machine is good value when compared with an equivalent SFF

[tiahura]

Then put it in the basement and run the hdmi cable up?

[amunozo]

I live in a small apartment.

[theshrike79]

I have about 500 games in my Steam library and maaaybe 20% of them are available for the PS5 (which I own).

And I've paid full retail price for maybe two of them, the vast majority is from 50-90% sales. You don't get those for the PS5 that much.

I also don't have any need for a "Gaming PC", what I've always wanted is a console but with my Steam games. This is it.

[protimewaster]

Games at a certain point in their life are cheaper on console. At least, physically. I remember being shocked at this years ago, because I expected PC to be cheapest. But, a few years back, I went through and looked up a bunch of AAA games that were about 6 months old, and a lot of them were cheaper to buy physical, on console, from Amazon or another retailer. Cheaper than they'd ever been available for on PC, according to IsThereAnyDeal.

I think it's partly because, on console, the sellers / devs have an incentive to reduce the price of physical copies, because they need to compete with used copies. They killed used copies on PC, so they don't need to compete with that market.

[izacus]

Physical games are on the way out for consoles and the proces quotes for PlayStations are the models without the drive.

[r0fl]

How do you find time to play 500 games?

Even if a game takes 5 hours that’s 2500 hours

That’s mind blowing to me

[vel0city]

Let's say you on average manage to find 8 hours a week in a normal week playing videogames. A decent bit, no doubt, but not too crazy for someone who would consider themselves a "gamer".

You do that like 50 weeks a year. That's ~400 hours a year. 2,500 / 400 = 6.25 years.

My Steam account is 20 years old. Even if we doubled it to 5,000 hours, that's 250 hours a year. Roughly 5 hours a week on average.

That said, a lot of people just end up owning a lot of games on Steam through sales even though they may never play them or only put a few hours in them. I've got >200 games and yet over half have <2 hours of play time. A ton I've never installed, they just came bundled in sales with other games I did actually want. When you can buy a whole publisher's collection of games for like $20 on some crazy sale why not?

[Tangurena2]

I have a huge number also. And I've played a small fraction. For example, Stellaris - I've got almost 900 hours played. Against The Storm is running a close second. Some other games, less than an hour. If it is 99 cents, I'm probably going to get it if it looks somewhat similar to anything I enjoy.

If you check out Humble Bundle, you can find bundles of games where you get 20-30 games for around $20. Many of them are charity bundles, like one I got to help people in the Turkey/Syria area affected by the 2023 earthquake. Those bundles mostly consist of keys redeemed on the Steam platform. I don't play first-person-shooters, so those are going to sit in my library unplayed & uninstalled.

[aNapierkowski]

yeah i wonder if SteamOS gets a more official generic release or if it stays pointed at Steamdeck and Steam machine directly the only differences between this and a "Gaming PC" are the OS & tiny form factor (which are both quite relevant)

but youre exactly the target market for this it sounds like

I think you could kind of get there with a gaming pc that boots up steam big picture immediately? but it would feel hacky vs this for sure

[ErneX]

Reviews are saying it’s actually similar to base PS5 in performance.

[inigyou]

They make different performance playstation 5s?! What happenes to the console compatibility story? You used to expect any game to work on any console because they were all near identical.

[redwall_hp]

They still are. Any PS5 will play PS4 games. The PS5 Pro is a mid cycle spec bump that allows some newer games to have slightly better graphics. The games are still hard required to function within the expectations already set for the first PS5 model. I played Ghost of Yotei just fine on a non-Pro, and it targets the newer model.

We're also nearing PS6 time in the next year or two. It's already six years old.

[maccard]

It got messy but pretty much all ps4 games work on ps5, and all ps5 games run on the ps5 and ps5 pro. On Xbox, everything runs on series S and series X.

[al_borland]

I picked up a PS5 Pro before Christmas on sale for $599. It seems I made out like a bandit. I assumed prices would go out due to all this AI mess and knew I’d want one for GTA.

Watching the LTT review of the Steam machine, it also reminded me why a console holds a lot of value. A lot of their video was about fiddling with settings per game to get a good balance of performance vs visuals. Something I never have to think about with the PS5, especially the Pro.

While I like the idea of PC gaming, and even more so what Valve is doing, trying to move the industry to Linux, the reality of PC gaming has always felt like a huge pain. As much sys admin as actual gaming.

If the Vavle platform are popular enough, they could get presets with a lot of games, but that remains to be seen.

[Creamsicle47]

Playstation price is also increasing FYI

[ygouzerh]

Indeed, they are hitting a weird spot, their pricing category is stuck in between people who just want to play without breaking the bank account, who will go for a PS5 or XBox, and hardcore gamers who will go directly for their own custom build PC

[andrew2025]

The Steam Machine is likely slower than the base PS5 in terms of GPU performance. As a proxy, the memory bandwidth is 448 GB/s on the PS5 and in the range of 256 GB/s for the Steam Machine's VRAM

[gymbeaux]

The PS5 base has 2 more physical cores (4 more threads) than this Steam Machine so I'm not optimistic that the Steam Machine outperforms the PS5.

(both "semicustom AMD" so probably effectively the same architecture)

[lowbloodsugar]

Zen 2 vs Zen 4 though. pS5 probably slower for CPU tasks

[vablings]

I think it was supposed to be priced in below the PS5 Pro but due to ram supply issues and just general silicone allocation issues it was not to be. The steam decks $200 price bump tells as much

[gymbeaux]

The Steam Machine makes sense if it costs the same or less than a current-gen console, but a whole grand for this feels icky. I paid around $300 for the original Steam Machine (Alienware Alpha) in 2014. It played Fallout 4 better than the PS4 and Xbox One which cost about the same. The "tradeoff" was that you had to maintain the PC's OS, which at the time had to be Windows 10.

[vablings]

Well, the steam machine was supposed to be 850 dollars (mentioned on LTT) which is 50 dollars cheaper than the PS5 Pro, you get a smaller machine that you can do whatever you want with and are not required to pay any online subscription fee ($80) a year.

If the price was not upset by the RAM debacle it would have been a very attractive offer, no subscription and more upgradable. I still think in time when the market calms down and supply is less constrained it will reach that price point, even at its current price it's not a completely unreasonable offering for a family member especially with the ability to share your existing steam library.

[mock-possum]

More properly, this is competing with prebuilt gaming PCs, surely?

[_jas]

Curious as I’ve been thinking about doing the same, what are you running on your Linux box for your TV? You have to deal with family and little kids too?

[lunar_rover]

At best it'll take over Steam hardware survey as the standard spec of PC gaming.

I can't see anyone other than enthusiasts buying it over a normal console or Windows laptop.

[LinXitoW]

Right now, noone that can avoid it should be buying ANYTHING with RAM or SSD in it.

We're truly screwed if things don't calm down at least a little....

[kibwen]

Unlike a PS5, a PC has all the games that I want to play. And to drive home the irony, right now I'm actually using my Steam Deck to play a game that was originally for the PS3 (Valkyria Chronicles). Legitimately purchased, even!

[bigyabai]

Now that Bloodborne is "on PC" (wink wink) there's kinda no reason to own a PS4 or PS5 in my opinion. Persona 5 was the only other holdout, but now P5R has a great PC-native release.

[rgreekguy]

A PlayStation 5 also requires you now to be online every so often (30 days?) for even your single player games.

[protimewaster]

Doesn't Steam do that too? For a long time, offline mode in Steam didn't work for many people, and, when it did, it wasn't reliable for being offline for long periods of time. Is that all sorted?

[amlib]

Given that it's an open platform your device isn't hostage to valve's whims nor are you powerless to overrule any DRM you judge unfair.

[Telaneo]

Steam's DRM can be trivially bypassed if you care and know where to look.

Denuvo and other DRM also exists though.

[lreeves]

This is completely untrue and was based on some weird TikTok rumors.

[pjerem]

Except that unlike a PS5, games are plenty, cheaper, and you probably already have a huge library even before buying it.

I’m not the target but I can see the point.

[yieldcrv]

has that still been accurate in the last half decade?

indie devs have easy access to release on PS5, latest Xbox, Switch alongside Steam simultaneously

the subscription any of those users have (a prerequisite for online or multiplayer access) also comes with many many free games, games that are otherwise $4 - $25 without the subscription

people already in those ecosystems have been accumulating (unplayed) titles just like Steam users meme about, and as soon as they sign in on their new console all are available

[ex-aws-dude]

As someone who plays a lot of both I would say it still is

I constantly encounter indie games that are only on PC, for example Satisfactory, Chained Together, Last Call BBS

Steam is still way better for indie stuff

[amlib]

> indie devs have easy access to release on PS5, latest Xbox, Switch alongside Steam simultaneously

And yet steam's indie library far outpaces what all other consoles indie games combined provide. Also you get access to a vast amount of games distributed independently and other stores that the PC ecosystem has available.

> the subscription any of those users have (a prerequisite for online or multiplayer access) also comes with many many free games, games that are otherwise $4 - $25 without the subscription

I don't think most PC gamers like being told every month what games they have to play in order to maximize their subscription value. They view it as wasting 100$ yearly just to have the ability to play online along other features that are free on PC.

> people already in those ecosystems have been accumulating (unplayed) titles just like Steam users meme about, and as soon as they sign in on their new console all are available

That's a legit improvement from the console platforms but since it was only a change made in the previous gen you can only go back a single generation for now. On steam your library might encompass stuff sold three generations ago and if you are willing to take advantage of PC gaming outside steam you can go as far back as the invention of video games itself with emulators.

[yieldcrv]

and all of those obvious counterpoints is still not enough to justify the price difference between a current gen console and this Steam Machine when an old sub $99 mobile device can power three generation old games as well, and connect to a monitor for those inclined to go out of their way for that user experience

[amlib]

> when an old sub $99 mobile device can power three generation old games as well, and connect to a monitor

Running an outdated, out of support version of android with limited app availability and a crappy selection of poorly maintained emulation forks... with a buggy GPU driver that causes so many visual and performance issues on a digital platform that does everything they can keep you from installing your choice of OS, let alone the lack of usual niceties that desktop operating systems get you. It will do in a pinch but I don't think anyone who likes emulating stuff enjoys using a system like this. Even a new flagship phone will share some of these issues and if you have an iphone you will pay to have an still inferior solution that can vanish at moments notice if apple decides the emulator your purchased isn't compliant to their draconian guidelines or isn't compatible with newer apis. I guess at least the UI/UX will be nice.

[yieldcrv]

Alright, so at what price does your opinion stop being true, because there will certainly be consumer hardware price hikes again in 6 months, due to further RAM demand