[infecto]

It is great timing in a way. There is a backlash with consoles and now more than ever the energy around AAA studios feels pretty low. You don't need incredible horsepower to play really fun games that still look visually appealing.

[ray_v]

And the price is steep but in my opinion, you really do get a lot of value here - especially with the fact that you instantly pull a ton of your library in seamlessly. If you've been in this ecosystem for a while that's a huge selling-point - or, at least it was for me!

[infecto]

Agree. I suspect others who use steam are thinking the same thing.

When I heard the news for playstation my mind instantly jumped to silly digital prices for games forever. I look at the nintendo switch store and they will sell a digital copy for new retail price for years after even if you can pickup a used copy on ebay for half the price or less.

[ethbr1]

This. The biggest value proposition of a console that plays Steam games is the ability to acquire Steam games during Steam sales.

The closed console ecosystems seemingly have far less incentive to ever discount games, even old ones.

[weakfish]

Yep. A large part of the value prop for me is easy portability of the same games and saves to couch or PC with zero effort or re-purchase.

[ZekeSulastin]

I never want to see HN complaining about Apple prices ever again now that I see multiple folks calling the Steam Machine a great value.

[amarant]

The steam machine handily beats apple in terms of dollar per TFLOP and dollar per GB memory. It's also easier to upgrade, making it likely to last longer.

Unified memory puts Apple in it's own category for certain workloads however, but since we're talking about gaming here, and not local LLMs, Apple simply cannot compete on any kind of value comparison

[infecto]

It’s not a terrible price for a unified device that will just work with your steam library. You could save a few hundred building your own but it will be a larger form factor and take a little more messing with to run.

[ethbr1]

And as the TCO enterprise adage goes: the cost of continued support.

It's one thing to value ones own time spent supporting something at $0, but most people probably shouldn't.

And it's incredibly inefficient to debug and maintain your own custom stack, when Valve can assign a team to do the same thing at orders of magnitude lower unit cost for standardized hardware/software configurations.

[doctorpangloss]

A great value if you pirate games.

[krzyk]

Great value if you buy games in steam sales, which are so common and deep that it leaves any console way back.

[somat]

Yeah PC is sort of the "forever" console, I mean it's not strictly, there is always the upgrade grind, but new hardware tends to run old software fine(ish) and many(most if you play a lot of the smaller indie stuff) new games work fine on older hardware.

It is a huge mess compared to consoles but that is often the price of freedom and I am happy that at least one system escaped control of a single corporation.

[infecto]

I still think the best bang for your buck. Even now with inflated prices. I can’t remember when I picked up my 1080, maybe 2018. I just upgraded last year. Obviously I missed out on beat in class graphics but it kept kicking and doing a decent job for such a long time.

[thewrinklyninja]

The Nintendo Switch was a great console for pointing that out as well. fun games on older mobile hardware even at the time it came out.