[andy_xor_andrew]

This is a weird thing to call out, when there's so much else to talk about (price, specs, etc) buuuuuut-

Check out the gameplay video partway down the page, where the two people are on the couch playing Cuphead. Right under "Your Steam library in more places."

It's just... a real clip of real people playing a real game and reacting in a real way. It's funny. I know it's stupid to call out, but how many exaggerated versions of this scene have you seen before? And Valve is smart enough to say "Let's just film two people playing a real game and snip a nice, realistic reaction shot from it."

[redox99]

If you sampled 100 steam players at random, it would look nothing like that.

[brechin]

Based on https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/ I would imagine out of 100 Steam players, most are playing at a Windows gaming computer with an Intel CPU, a bunch with Windows/AMD, then a few with a Mac, then one with a Steam Deck.

Most of those are probably NOT plugged into a TV, so in that way I agree that these are not typical Steam users. That's why the Steam Machine was developed, to bring gaming back to the couch in a way that the Steam Link didn't succeed at.

[mega_dean]

> bring gaming back to the couch in a way that the Steam Link didn't succeed at.

Also in the way that the Ouya didn’t succeed at - their kickstarter tagline was “Cracking open the last closed platform: the TV”. I actually had completely forgotten about the Ouya, but the wording of your comment made me go look it up.

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/ouya/ouya-a-new-kind-of...

[toobulkeh]

Oh god I bought one of these. It was so terrible. Valve is definitely the right company (private) to pull this off. Gabe just needs to own a foundry and they’ll be set.

[genewitch]

i got it because it was sold as an alternative to the steam link, but it's just an android phone that connects to your tv - with a market for games.

I bought a steam link shortly after, and it still worked the last time i used it.

[kraquepype]

I've still got my ouya, wonder if it still works.

It was a fun idea, even though I mostly just used it as an emulator box.

The controllers were neat but a bit janky, I always had issues w/ the batteries.

[ryukoposting]

Having used a Steam Link, I couldn't tell you why it failed. It works great. Maybe the controller was the problem.

[brechin]

My guess is connectivity. I was only happy with the Steam Link when it was using a wired connection. This isn't an issue in my home, but most homes don't have wired Ethernet all over.

I did not love the v1 Steam Controller, but it's easy to use with other controllers.

[mywittyname]

Even with a wired connection, I hate Steam Link. It's fine for streaming to the Steam Deck while playing on the Steam Deck, but Steam Deck -> TV has a lot of issues. I could probably resolve them if I faffed around enough, but I've spent enough hours trying instead of gaming.

The SD doesn't seem to support AV1 decoding, the resolution streaming resolution won't go to 4k despite forcing it in the settings, and the most annoying issue, if the framerate is not set to 90fps, there is 30ms of additional streaming latency. Which means, if I connect it to my 60fps living room tv, it will add 30ms of latency.

Then there are a bunch of minor issues, no virtual monitor, having to manually swap settings to windowed mode and hope the game offers the correct resolution for my TV (since my gaming rig is on an ultrawide), having to leave the gaming pc on and unlocked.

Apparently Apollo or Moonlight will solve some of the annoying issues, but I'm kind of soured on the streaming experience at this point. Streaming on the SD should Just Work.

[genewitch]

steam link is a device as well as apparently a software; the steam link was a small device that only connected to steam software running on windows, it had 2 USB ports, an ethernet port, and an HDMI port.

it worked fine for me wirelessly, but for 1080p or more wired is more or less required. 720P on my projector it ran wirelessly fine.

[boca_honey]

Yeah those people are definetly not a realistic sample of the average Steam user. I wonder why they chose them in particular.

[tyre]

They want to expand the public's perception of who a gamer is, to make people feel more comfortable identifying as a gamer. If you included a sweaty CSGO player farming loot boxes with bloodshot eyes at 3am, that doesn't give you a new market. They're already going to buy.

Marketing is made so they you identify with the product or identify with an aspirational version of yourself. Gaming is seen as heavily male-dominated. Expanding that is smart.

(And yes, I know why you're asking and what answer you're looking for.)

[Levitz]

It's a more nuanced situation than people generally want to accept.

>Marketing is made so they you identify with the product or identify with an aspirational version of yourself. Gaming is seen as heavily male-dominated. Expanding that is smart.

This is the most simple and probably accurate explanation. Companies like to make money, untapped markets look like money.

The problem is that then, the current audience, who is primarily male, can raise concerns about the marketing not catering to them anymore.

There's a political arm who doesn't like that at all, and they will not only attempt to enforce collective delusion to dismiss the whole thing (what do you mean? everybody plays videogames, playerbase is split 50/50 pretty much!), but invalidate the very idea that a primarily male audience can have grievances about being catered to.

This makes them look insane and alienates the original audience politically speaking, and ironically, makes the original audience look bigoted, which puts consumers off.

This dance has been going on for like a decade and a half at this point and it's only recently that signs of it dying down have started to show. I can only hope.

[skupig]

Maybe you're out of touch, they pretty much look like the typical young nerd from Seattle.

[barbs]

No, it's the children who are wrong!

[hellosputnik]

Isn't it ironic that you used anecdotal data as a rebuttal to anecdotal data?

[dathinab]

to some degree that is the whole point

IMHO there isn't a realistic "typical gamer stereotype" anymore

sure you can pick any of the past stereotypes and will find people like that, even many, but it's not "most" or even "a slim majority"

Games, and with that Steam, have spread through all of society and Steam is the most wide spread platform for it.

So whatever anecdotal data you have based on your local environments selection bias is probably not "overall representative", just a slice of one of the many many different kinds of people playing games bought from steam.

[skupig]

Nope! That's just how a normal conversation works.

[haunter]

>typical young nerd from Seattle

Unfortunately I usually meet gopnik and niño rata in Dota and CSGO and not typical young nerds from Seattle

[solid_fuel]

Tangential but I would not want to play CSGO from a couch with a controller, it's already sweaty enough with a mouse and keyboard.

[haunter]

I used to play the PS3 version lol, good times. I've actually just downloaded it last week to run it in an emulator. So nostalgic with the old menu, old weapons, old maps etc. (only works offline against but but still fun)

[malfist]

Who says they're average? Why should they be average?

[MrDrone]

What leads you to that conclusion? What do you think the average Steam user looks like? What about them doesn't fit your idea of this?

[piker]

Average? Well, male for one.

It's not my point, but I don't think you're giving a strong rebuttal either.

[DoctorOW]

I'd say about half of Steam players aren't male. The "video games are for boys" thing is kind of a self fulfilling prophecy because anyone who believes that will obviously not play with a woman.

[gpt5]

From SQ Magazine (not sure how reliable they are):

92% identify as male, 7% female.

https://sqmagazine.co.uk/steam-statistics/

I think that it's true that games are definitely being played by both males and females today, but I think that statistics is that mobile games skew female, and PC games skew male.

[eldaisfish]

the comment you replied to is a homophobic dogwhistle.

The tech sector is rife with blatant homophobia, racism, and a false sense of intellectual superiority. Hacker News is an excellent cross section of the typical techbro culture.

[munificent]

There is no average Steam user.

People are not vectors of real-valued numbers, and "mean person" is not a coherent concept. Does the average person have half a penis and half a vagina? Is their skin a tan-ish mocha brown? Do they have slightly but not really curly hair that is long in some parts and short in others? Incomplete epicanthic folds?

Any representation of people will be a randomly chosen sample, and not an attempt to visualize the blending of all people from the sample.

[squigz]

Do you and GP understand that it's not 1998 anymore and that many, many different types of people from all walks of life play games?

I'm very curious what you and others think the average Steam user really looks like.

[ct520]

Going out on a limb here, maybe they think the average gamer isnt trans?

[weakfish]

What does that have to do with anything?

[squigz]

Is the implication here that the people shown in that video are trans? How do we determine that?

[eudamoniac]

The average steam user is a mid twenties straight male. The average steam user in USA is a mid twenties straight white male. The average steam user nowhere on earth is anything resembling these marketed demographics

[cwillu]

The average steam user is intersex, leaning male. The _median_ steam user is male. Neither is terribly representative of the market as a whole.

[eudamoniac]

How representative of the market do you think a transgender person is? Probably less so?

[squigz]

Do you have any actual data to back this up? Because it doesn't really line up with my experience.

[dandellion]

Go on Steam, look at the most played games right now, look at the demographics for those games.

Or pick some player profiles at random, count how many girls vs guys you find (very easy to tell with high accuracy just by looking at the games they play, yes there are exceptions but they're actually quite rare, I promise you can get >90% accuracy after you do a few).

Steam user base is at least 3/4 male by user count, probably even more by play time.

[eudamoniac]

"the average American gamer is a 37-year-old white man" looks like gamers got older from the last time I checked, but yeah

https://archive.ph/1wgRn

[eudamoniac]

Which part? Are you actually claiming that in your experience steam gamers are mostly black, mostly gay, mostly women, or what? Because that would be a shocking statistic we'd probably know about given the general population demographics of race/orientation, and general interaction with the female sex in real life.

[tshaddox]

“Movie stars tend to be more attractive and better at acting than the median human. Really makes ya think doesn’t it?”

[dathinab]

and you might also end up with 100 people with punk hair stiles, or firefighters or whatever

Games are so wide spread through all parts of society and Steam is the largest platform for them, sampling 100 people is fully non representive.

Whatever stereotype of two people on a couch you pick, there are not just thousands but more like many 100,000ths to millions of people not matching the stereotype at all. I mean think about it steam has daily active user numbers in the multiple tens of millions.

My best guess is, the people on the photos are related to whoever created the photos in some arbitrary way. It's a pretty common practice for startups when you need photos like that and have no need for "professional actors/models". Like employees of you or who ever you might have hired to do the photos, or some of their friends etc. You still need to singn a simple contract but it's much less time intensive, complicated and annoying to do compared to trying to hire models (of any kind including such made to look like "gamer stereotypes") .

[redox99]

About 0.3% of people are firefighters in the US. The odds that you end up with 100 of them is:

0.000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000001%

That's 248 zeroes after the decimal point.

[amluto]

Are you, for some reason, assuming that every time n people play games together, those n people are drawn independently from the population?

This is a completely nonsensical assumption. If you find three firefighters and one unknown person at a table playing cards, what do you think the probability that the fourth person turns out to be a firefighter is?

[rsynnott]

Only if you assume that people who play games together select the person to play games with entirely randomly. In practice, firefighters would tend to know other firefighters, so a bunch of firefighters in a room playing a game isn't _that_ improbable.

[brailsafe]

I don't see where you're hoping to take this. Looks like a pretty normal scene to me. What substance are you adding to the thread?

[redox99]

I'm just saying it doesn't deserve such praise for being "real", because if you placed a spycam in a random steam user house it wouldn't look like that. Not that there's anything wrong with it being carefully crafted like any marketing material.

[Dylan16807]

Picking 100 people and picking 2 people are entirely different things.

But either way I don't understand your argument.

If you're picking 100 people, they won't share any trait. But how is that relevant to this video clip?

If you're picking a random living room where people are playing steam games, there's a reasonable chance it looks like the video clip. Why not? The odds are low you get someone looking exactly like that, but you can say that same sentence no matter who gets picked. Don't fall victim to the lottery paradox.

[brailsafe]

You're still not saying anything specific, what about it wouldn't look like that and why? Again, looks pretty legit to me, and all I'm using is my eyes and exposure to people in the world.

[fwip]

"Wouldn't" is a pretty strong word.

[dathinab]

> user house it wouldn't look like that.

except it very well might look quite like that. I happen to know such a case and I don't know that many people IRL.

Video Gaming became widely available roughly in the 90th in many of the places the steam machine is expected to mainly sell to (US/EU/CA/AU/UK/some other places, a lot of special cases). And most people who grew up with video games don't stop gaming. This means that Steam customers and gaming in general is not _at all_ anymore a hobby where most people fall under a small handful of stereotypes.

In turn statements along the line of yours are really quite meaningless and misleading. Steam has stopped being "just for nerds" or anything like that a long time ago.

And sure, things are probably different if you limit yourself to people active on steam forums, that place has a very different bias and using it as basis can lead to huge misconceptions about how people who "use" steam generally live.

Lastly let's also take a moment to consider who this steam machine is advertised to:

- no children, doing so is a regulatory pain

- not young adults, in current times 1k is just too much for someone currently trying to see if they can move out of their parent's place

- so more adults with a stable job/income, which grew up with gaming or at least do game a lot (so mainly age group ~20-35)

- also excluding the kind of people which would anyway go for a 3+k gaming system even if prices where more normal (like a lot of tech enthusiasts with money, "pc masterace" gamers, etc.)

and if you consider that potential customer base the chance for a randomly sampled home (of the target customer audience) to look somewhat like that(1) just went up quite a bit.

And exactly this is also the group for which the clip is, because a major part of the clips "message" is something on the line of a vague combination of "It's a product for everyone"/"Not just for nerds"/"Not just for tech enthusiasts"/"No special tech knowledge needed to play". I.e. "hey person who might live in an apartment without any nerdy stuff, it's also for you, you don't need special tech skills or anything like that". And this is kinda the only group where such a clip might make a difference in weather or not they buy, most other customer groups either won't buy anyway or will make a decision based on spec and reviews...

So IMHO this is a very well chosen clip setting.

Funnily the room does contain a lot of the kind of "not perfectly fitting furniture" you find a lot IRL due to a combination of people not finding fits and replacing/adding furniture over time with slightly changes in taste. I wonder if that was intentional or if the studio provider just didn't care or hat issues finding the right sets of things them self.

---

(1): As in: It has no "nerdy" things, or tech enthusiasts things. And is "just" a "normal/boring" adult apartment taken a clip of shortly after it was cleaned.

[madeofpalk]

Ignoring the sitting in front of the TV thing, I think if you sampled 2 steam players at random, they would look nothing like any other 100 random steam players.

[nearlyepic]

First time seeing an ad? If you sampled 100 F-150 buyers they would look nothing like the people in the commercials.

[_8L34K]

I think your bigotry override got tripped - the person above never claimed they were representative of some imagined average, just that it was two people actually playing video games...

[patja]

I am guessing the BMI would track. Unless they make unlikely changes including spending more time away from that couch, these two are looking at health consequences that will probably make them a burden on society by the time they hit middle age.

[rsynnott]

Yes, all ads are made by sampling 100 users of the product at random.

I mean, you could say this of I think pretty much literally any ad. Were you previously unaware of advertising?

[JMiao]

those random players have gaming pcs

if you sampled 100 blackberry customers at random, they'd absolutely hate a software keyboard

and so on

[poly2it]

No average pilot.

[raincole]

I don't get it. It's a quite typical commercial clip. Just perhaps less dramatic. What's special about that clip?

[jamilton]

A lot of video game and console ads are much more sensationalized.

[Recursing]

I also don't get it, looks like any other ad

[abustamam]

That's basically how I looked playing Cuphead with my wife except I think there was a bit more swearing coming from her

[Zenbit_UX]

I wasn’t going to say anything until I read this comment but that clip of the gameplay and the clip of the two people playing are not from the same source. The one showing the gameplay has a tower of books or possibly a jenga tower on the coffee table that doesn’t exist when seeing the gamers. It’s just editing magic and stitched together to have exactly the effect elicited by your comment.

[malfist]

The books are beside the TV, not on the coffee table. You can't see them in the second shot.

[Zenbit_UX]

Ah, I think you’re right. That aside, there’s still no evidence of continuity between the two shots and I’m a cynic.

[dandellion]

They're two separate shots that's for sure. I mean, otherwise you'd see the other camera taking the shot from the opposite perspective so...

[uni_baconcat]

Just scroll a bit further, you can see more clips just like any other commercial shots from a studio set. I don’t think that’s a point you can praise Valve.

[imustbeevil]

I'm not sure I understand, I'm just seeing a very clearly staged 2 second clip of product usage and reaction like you'd see in any commercial.

[orphea]

Nah, I have to agree with andy^andrew.

This is how staged reaction looks like: https://www.residentialsystems.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/0...

The Steam's clip is actually nowhere near like that.

[imustbeevil]

I can appreciate that the direction for this commercial was "just play the game and we'll find a good 2 second cut". I'm just worried that I'm seeing people compliment an advertisement. It's the kind of overt emotional marketing I would hope we'd all scroll past looking for the technical specifications.

[PaulHoule]

If you're good at acting you can go up on stage with somebody you met two weeks ago and people will believe that you're family.

It's funny how it works. I took an iPhone selfie of myself as the character that I go out to do street photography as and my wife and my son say "you staged that!" but then I hand out my business cards with it and everybody else tells me it is a great photo.

[LgWoodenBadger]

Idiomatically, it’s “WHAT something looks LIKE” or “HOW something looks.”

It’s never, in EFL, “HOW…LIKE”

Next up is “make” vs “take” a decision.

[orphea]

Noted, thanks! You can tell English is not my first language ;)

[rustyminnow]

In any other commercial they'd be laughing and grinning ear to ear with their fakest smile instead of wincing from dieing in Cuphead. Definitely still staged but refreshingly so.

[leokennis]

Days of our Lives is staged and so is The Godfather.

Yet one is not like the other.

Valve staged a scene of two people playing a game like how most people play a game. Just like that, there are many small human touches to this Steam Machine page. The messy cable picture where they show off the led strip, the honest and plain FAQ. Etc.

We don't have to glaze Valve for doing this, but we can still appreciate it.

[debugnik]

This one is admittedly very natural compared to how cringey they usually get in gaming ads. Which says more about the industry than about this particular clip.