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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 wonder how many people there are that fall in that category but who wouldn’t just buy a much cheaper console instead though.
An existing PC game library, better pricing and flexibility for PC games, wider and more robust controller support …
All true. If you already have a large library of PC games, it wouldn’t make much sense to get a console. But then you probably already have a PC as well, and can ride it out until the AI bubble pops. That’s certainly what I’m doing, as now is probably the worst time in history to buy new PC hardware.
Of course, some may say it’s only the worst time in history for now…
They said this is more powerful than 70% of steam user’s PC.
I believe it. I’m sure there are millions of people using Steam to play Dota or CS2 on stuff like old laptops. But how many of those are willing and able to spend 1000+ for an upgrade?
Ultimately, stock may be so low that it doesn’t really matter though.
That means there are a shitload of potential customers, not “I wonder how many people there are that fall in that category but who wouldn’t just buy a much cheaper console instead though.”
If you ignore the price, sure.
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.
Bless Valve for investing money purely for the goodness of making money
Sure, but they’re one of the only companies proving that consumerism doesn’t mean you have to be a complete asshole of a company. They make money, people get the product they want at a price point they are satisfied with.
I have friends who only have consoles. This is who I think should be looking at this. People like me who wanted a second PC for the living room may pass on this because of the price, though. I don’t need a second PC that bad. But for my people with no PC, no monitors, no keyboards, this is pretty decent. Not to mention the it’s an alright deal when pricing out a build yourself.
I mean, speaking for myself, I already bought the consoles back in 2020. I bought a Steam Deck to access non-console games.
This does what the Steam Deck does only moreso.
Yeah, but Steam Deck had an extremely attractive and competitive price when it launched.
“Equivalent” consoles are much more expensive now as well. The entire playing field is fucked.
“equivalent”, base ps5 has equivalent performance while being half the price lol.
PS5 pro is $900, champ, and it’s got vendor lock-in.
My point is that everything is more expensive. Sony jacked those prices up by hundreds of dollars already.
equivalent performance to a base ps5, lol
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 mean, before the AI bullshit picked up, I managed to get a couple of used Samsung 4tb 990 ssds for $250 a piece. $800 for a nice console/PC with that much storage wasn’t much of a reach then, given consoles usually are sold at cost to get you invested in the ecosystem.
Not a fair comparison. You found a very special deal for those drives which were half the price of a decently performant one at half the capacity at normal sale prices.
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.
Agreed - that’s part of what I meant by “compatibility guarantees,” but I should have called out drivers more explicitly.
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.
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.
Just my GPU cost that much 3-4 years ago, it’s overkill now but I got it for VR and sold my VR stuff after 2 years. That for an entire system could work depending on performance. I’m betting new consoles would be around the same price if they were released this year.
I got lucky I think. Bought two Sapphire Pulse RX 9070s last year for myself and my wife’s rig, close to or below MSRP. Mine was $600, wife’s was $540. We had 6700XTs previously, only reason we upgraded was because I was having issues with performance on E33. We plan to pick up Solasta II when it drops which is also UE5, and had some existing games with a bit of performance drop (like 40k: Rogue Trader) so decided the upgrade was warranted.
We’re both gaming on Linux, so the performance and stability with AMD was preferred, no question.
yeah I’m fine with my DDR 4 32 gig laptop. I bought it before I became homeless and the thing is good for what I need.
I’m still on 32 GB DDR4 as well, running a Ryzen 5600x and RX 9070 GPU. I was planning to potentially upgrade to a new mobo/CPU/RAM this year or next year, but I just have no reason to upgrade now, between the prices and the fact that I’ve had no issues even with recent UE5 games like Expedition 33 at 1440p/UW and in some cases up to 4k resolutions for slightly older stuff. It runs everything just fine for my purposes, and the whole system is really power efficient for the performance, I don’t think I’ve ever seen it hit above 350w total power.
Gamersnexus shows a comparison with the Steam Machine getting 93 fps on Resident Evil 4 remake at 1080p with “priorize graphics” setting, while my GPU (Sapphire Pulse 9070) hits 275 fps on the same settings. Can’t complain.
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.
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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.
randomization is to determine the order of receipt
… that’s high demand, sheesh
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 ;(
Brutal.
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).
8 GB VRAM in the big 26 is a yikes from me.
Steam Deck works well and has 16GB of unified RAM with only 1GB automatically assigned to VRAM.
Having 8GB dedicated should be a huge improvement.
This machine is designed to be played on a 4k TV. Upscaling may help, but it will hard limit the machine in the future.
Why? 4k is already just past the human vision resolution. Anything denser is just masturbation.
Yea, a lot of people don’t realise, how stupid 8K TVs are.
4K does make a lot of sense in many cases, especially if you set up your TV for an optimal „cinematic“ viewing distance (roughly 2-2.5m for a 65“ TV, for example) allowing it to fill roughly 30-40° of your field of view, as recommended by the SMPTE.
At 30-40° our eyes have about the resolution of 3-4K (or, technically, a bit less than 100 pixels per degree in greyscale, even less in colour).Meaning, you would need a screen that fills more than 40° of your FOV for there to be a meaningful difference between 4K and 8K. That would translate to a distance of less than 2m to the 65“ TV in the previous example. More like 1m if you want to get the most out of the 8K. That’s about the FOV you get in an IMAX theatre. I don’t think very many people would set up their home TV like that, and unless you are, 8K is just throwing money out of the window.
Just because you connect to a 4K TV doesn’t mean is has to play in 4K.
I’ve connected my Steam Deck to my 8K TV.
Well, at least we now know you have more dollars than sense.
Isn’t Steam Deck pretty much 720p? That’s a whole different kind of ask than a machine you plug into a TV - many of which will want 4k resolution. VRAM requirements really tend to balloon with resolution.
Native on the Deck is 1280 x 800. Slightly more than 720p, but not by much!
For anyone who wants the numbers: 720p has only 90% of the pixels as the steam deck, assuming equivalent area.
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…
But you are limited to that consoles game library and a steam machine can play any game ever purchased on steam or added to steam via keys. Plus adding games on sale saves money in the long run.
There is a significant cost savings on the games sideways for those with a large steam library. Not enough at these prices, but it would have been if it was around $800.
$100 cheaper, but can it be done in this form factor? 🤔
"Size
152 mm tall (148 mm without feet), 162.4 mm deep, 156 mm wide"
5.98" tall (5.83" without feet), 6.39" deep, 6.14" wide.
To put it in perspective, PC FANS are 120mm…
Not all PC fans
I wish they would have licensed it to use with Stream providers. That would replace Nvidia Shield and/or Apple TV devices in a few homes.
I suspect the DRM those streaming services rely on will start to budge on Linux in the near future, as it gains market share. In the meantime though, I’ve mostly been using Jellyfin lately, which ironically works on Steam Machine but not the other consoles. I’ve still got my PS4 from 10+ years ago for the regular streaming services, when I still have a subscription to any of them.
I doubt, one of the reasons they kept this on a leash was the incredible amount of third party markets devices that flooded the market pushing malware and trackers. I don’t foresee in a near future the Stream providers flexing more the rules. They will probably keep that close to the small amount of licensed companies and TV manufactures.
They wouldn’t be licensing it to Valve for this device; it would be the DRM vendor updating their software for web browsers on what had been a niche operating system and is becoming less and less niche of late.
It will probably have a boot to desktop mode like the Steam Deck and then you can run any stream in a browser.
Unless there is a workaround that I’m not aware this would only limit to stream 720p in most browsers and 1080p in some browsers. We can’t stream for example Netflix at 4k with this method that you described without a license for the device.
Thats about what I figured, but it still hurts to see
Not bad, still cheaper than a standard pre-built which is in the 2000 range for most configurations that would be future-proof! I plan on getting one of these as I already play games on Linux, and this will allow me to convert my current PC into a purely productivity/entertainment machine. I totally need to set aside some money for this bad boy!
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.
Have you seen PS5 Pro prices lately? $900?
Honestly cheaper than I thought tbh
oof
First - THANK YOU for the heads up! I was hoping when I got the dBrand Companion Cube notification just after midnight.
https://dbrand.com/shop/limited-edition/companion-cube
Second - Anyone notice the controller bundles save you $20 over buying the controller individually? Not so sad my controller reservation is AWOL.
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