> Why a randomized reservation order?
[...] we wanted to create a system that would be less frustrating and more fair for everyone. A launch that starts at a specific day and time tends to reward bots, people with fast internet connections, talented gaming fingers for quick F5/refresh reactions, and those who can schedule their life around that moment. By accepting reservation signups over the course of a few days, without any incentive to be first, we're hoping to take away some of that friction.
Yeah, this is a promising solution to scalping. Previously, if you had only small numbers of consoles available at launch, scalpers and their bots would claim a large share of them. With Valve's new policy, that share is reduced to s/g, where s is the number of verified Steam accounts controlled by scalpers and g is the number of legit gamer accounts. Since s is likely to be much less than g, s/g is close to zero, and scalping is dramatically curtailed. Almost all of the initial batch of consoles will go to legit gamers.
I've never understood why anti-scalpers just don't work backwards from shipping address. Are these scalpers all really keeping hundreds of actual physical addresses they can receive packages at? Like if you see the limited product has 100 orders going to the same building, or apartment, or whatever then flag it before it goes out. Limit PO Boxes, etc.
Sure they can find mules to buy+receive one and then sell to the scalper, but the more steps you put in the better. Same for the people scamming Sam's club by buying memberships, ordering limited items, then refunding the membership. Just lock orders to members older then >1yr and make sure it only ships to the actual physical address attached to the membership. Flag multiple memberships at the same address.
I've run a modest shipping op and the second I saw even a couple orders of the same product going to the same address I would halt it and do additional verification.
so i think you're a bit off. it's s/g but g is legit accounts who want to buy the steam machine.
we could say it's 5000 scalper accounts, and 50000000 gamer accounts. but it's not 5000/50000000, it's like 4500/20000. which isn't bad! but scalpers will still be way over-represented, because they'll be trying to buy it when most steam accounts won't.
now one fuzz factor is the queue system, as you're not putting down money to get in line i expect a lot of people who wouldn't otherwise sign up will, in case they decide to buy one when given the chance. so we might have 40000 gamer sign ups, but only 50% will pull the trigger. this also gives scalpers an out should the resale not be worth it.
This is also possible because they are only selling through their website, while other consoles go through retailers.
I'd actually prefer a retailer just for doing this over one that was first come first serve.
Does it solve scalping? It seems like there is still money in sighing up with the goal to resell. Granted this is better in that I don't have to race the scalpers.
Till the sales price matches the market value scalping will exist. The best way to address that is a vickery auction. Till then scalping will continue.
I would be careful granting that s is less than g. There are lots of incentives other than scalping for people to create extra illegitimate accounts on Steam, and one individual can often control hundreds of bots, whereas a legitimate user almost never has more than one or two accounts.
It's surprising that the whole Western world is discovering the threat of organized or scripted scalping just now, when it's been a problem in places like Japan for over a decade. Account age requirements, lotteries, quick subject matter quizzes to chase away hired line-sitters, hidden ID code on tickets to ban scalpers on auction site pics, randomized queues for sales page etc etc has all been in use for years. It's been so commonplace that various city-run COVID free vaccine programs had different forms of them.
Interesting, as it sounds like a lottery reservation system, which is kinda a neat way to deal with many issues.
I'm always supprised that companies don't do a tiered price release, offer it at 200% price, you get it, 150%, you lower down the list and then 100% lottery time, that way they gain from those who can afford to pay more(maybe able to subsidise other sales later and price cuts down the line). Why feed scalpers when you can coin it directly and then offer a lower price to those who are prepared to wait a few more months or so.
In governance, sortition is the selection of public officials or jurors at random, i.e., by lottery, in order to obtain a representative sample.[1][2][3]
In ancient Athenian democracy, sortition was the traditional and primary method for appointing political officials, and its use was regarded as a principal characteristic of democracy.[4][5] Sortition is often classified as a method for both direct democracy and deliberative democracy.
In my limited experience of seeing Dutch auctions in practice it actually has the opposite of the intended effect, as the people that are willing to pay the highest are also the people that will have a way to profit, just on a lesser scale.
For example, Panini (sports card manufacturer) did Dutch auctions on boxes of new card sets during the peak of pandemic collectible mania. The majority of customers that were willing to pay the highest prices on Panini's website were card breakers, which are people/companies that sell "spots" in livestream box openings (i.e. customers buy the right to all cards containing players from a certain sports team before the box is opened).
While it sounds nice in principal, it basically just means cashed up people get it first. But there is also the fun side of it becoming a status symbol I guess. Drive up future demand.
I would be curious how the public would react to a Dutch auction, where Valve launches the console at a $10,000 price tag, and every ~hour drops the price by $100 until they are sold out. It creates the illusion that buyers are "breaking the line" when buying high, so it's their fault (not valves) for the high selling price. This would also eliminate scalpers.
The problem with a dutch auction is if you don't know how a dutch auction functions, it looks like you're getting royally screwed. That's why they're usually reserved for professional settings.
I moved to New Zealand recently from the US and am now seeing that everywhere. A lot of the time some local ecommerce platform imports the Australian version of most electronics with a markup, but we don't have official retailers for a lot of products, most notably Pixel phones. Also no Apple stores, though there are official retailers for Apple products.
I would love to see a generalized FOSS reservation system that could be used for just about anything that would help address the issues Valve listed. It could be as simple as a short lived deployment (1,3,7,14 days) that writes out the entries to a Google Sheets. I have encountered so many people trying to come up with their own approach to this problem that I think it would be worth solving. Maybe I can find time to work on it later this year.
Would love to know if you decide to work on this, or if otherwise, want to collaborate. feel free to email me hello@mannan.is - or maybe I'll begin work on this before you and we can share notes
edit: I don't particularly care for Google Sheets, just the idea of solving the underlying problem.
This is how tickets for sports and concerts should always be sold.
Entertainment tends to compare with airline tickets, except that with air travel, there are regular flights and competition. There is no such thing as a single flight from Paris to New York on one Saturday at 9pm on a window of a few years.
I am more surprised there's people lining up to buy this when it's genuinely cheaper to get a used PC off a local marketplace. I feel like this is unnecessary as I am pretty sure they'll be able to fill it in one shipment.
A huge number of people would rather pay a few hundred bucks more to have a plug and play appliance with a warranty from a reputable company show up on their doorstep. They don’t have to learn anything about hardware, or how to install Linux. It just works.
Some people are happy to save the money and take the risk on used hardware.
The Steam Machine is for the former, Steam the platform is for the former and the latter.
I get to support people that are very involved in making sure that a long list of x86 win32 software that I want to be able to run plays well with linux and osx (not-quite-directly, but the crossover folks are on it) - regardless of whether it's on steam or not. Plus general linux desktop work in the "make games play well" department.
if i was 10 years younger, sure I’d build my own. my roommates and i build our own gaming PCS, router, nas, home theater pc, we ran our own ethernet through the house. we ran openbsd on the router and freebsd on the nas, for fun.
i’ve changed. i really do not want to spend any extra time on yak shaving outside the job.
i am happy to pay $1500 for someone i trust with a fantastic track record to do it for me. plus its so cute!!! it will look great in my new apartment with the red faceplate. most gaming things are not cute.
In Australia, it wouldn't even need to be a used PC. The Steam Machine is $1600 AUD here, you can get a brand new gaming PC for that. Not a particularly amazing machine of course, but you can walk into a shop and buy it right now.
For €1039 you can even get a mini-ITX PC that fits nicely in your living room. Install SteamOS to get a similar experience. Only thing you will not get is the HDMI CEC functionality.
Living in Japan, most popular concerts are handled this way. It really really sucks to not get a ticket, and it sucks even more that we need to do it this way because of scalpers. But hey, if it means I overall have a better chance of getting tickets (at list price at that), hey, I guess it is worth it.
I wish there were better ways of defeating scalpers.
It's not worse than a traditional launch, but it's also not much better. Make 1,000 Steam accounts, which are entirely free, and you get 1,000 times more chances of getting one than others.
To be fair I don't think they'll be scalped a lot because the price isn't attractive already and alternatives are plenty.
>You must have made a purchase on Steam prior to April 27th 2026.
>Limit one signup per household. We will use payment method, shipping address, and other information to eliminate multiple entries.
Seems like they have chosen some reasonable options here. 2 months ago having purchase and trying to detect households. Likely also including phone number, Steam Guard client and family sharing.
Steam accounts newer than April do not qualify, plus I think you need to have spent at least $5 to qualify for the reservation queue (i.e. not community limited)
Do you really think a fresh steam account will have equal footing? I'd be surprised if that was the case.
Even Nintendo has been setting fairly strict requirements to pre-order some of their products, like requiring 50 hours of playtime on the original switch to pre-order the Switch 2
I don't get why companies don't take advantage of the demand.
For example: Start the bidding at BASE_PRICE (BP) + 2400. Then reduce the price by $1 every 3mins over the course of 5 days. Until the BP is met and then just carry on queuing.
You could buy it early if you want it that much or just wait an extra couple of days and end up in the queue at the BP.
I don't know if it would create pressure on that second it ticks over to the BP, so then its BP+1 - well I guess the nash equilibrium would be pushed up.
Because public image matters. Steam has built a reputation for being customer friendly. Coming up with a Byzantine pricing system for your highly anticipated new hardware will not be well received by the steam users. The extra short term earning will be a drop in the bucket compared to what steam is already making from taking 30% off most game sells, but the reputation damage will linger forever.
> Steam Machine, like our other hardware products, is made up of many components that we source from manufacturers around the world. The price at which we sell our hardware is a direct result of the cost of these components. We felt like we had a good understanding of how those costs might change over time when we first started sourcing them for Steam Machine back in 2023. That understanding was born from the many years of data we all have about the evolution of PC hardware prices – primarily, that it tends to get cheaper over time as new technology arrives.
> Over the past year or so, that has changed quickly and significantly, most visibly for RAM and storage components. There are a variety of reasons, all of which are affecting hardware products everywhere. The overall effect is that our original goal for the price of Steam Machine is no longer viable. So the prices we're sharing today reflect the state of the world for manufacturing; or, more accurately, it reflects the price of the components as we've secured them over the past 6 months.
Take notes about the tone, the communication style, the honesty that you can feel by reading those words. There are no problem that can’t be alleviated (if not solved) with good communication to your customer, and you can bet that Steam knows damn well theirs!
Most of the general, watered down tone of Corporate America that we love to hate comes from the legal department, usually at the late-stage point when they make all the decisions in a company: product, business, launches, strategy, direction, etc. Everything needs to run through legal, and they have a final say on everything, including every public communication.
That's why I'd love an interview with Steam's legal head. Sounds like they'd have some wild stories to share.
The original price should have been in $700-800 range, pre-RAM and storage pricing escalation, which would have changed the equation drastically. I even considered getting it as a mostly streaming box for a living room, intending to play only the lighter games on device. But for the announced price and after delays, it just doesn't make sense financially. As is, you're grossly overpaying for the level of GPU performance Steam Machine offers.
I’ve seen from a couple of places that a valver has commented that they can’t say exactly what the original price goal was, but that you can get an idea from the price increase of the steamdeck (~$200 usd)
That wouldve put the steam machine somewhere around the $800 mark for the base edition, which would’ve been so, so much sweeter of a value proposition.
there's probably ~$150 in the ram and ~$100 in the SSD alone, not to mention everything else.
we gotta have data-centers though because, uh.. well, we gotta have em.
Apple is also an absolutely enormous company. Even if Valve wanted to lock in prices, they're simply too small for RAM manufacturers to notice on their radar, unfortunately.
That would only works until it doesn't. The suppliers got supplier too and those in turn have their own supplier. I don't know about any specific contract but I bet there's a force majeure or price excluding input cost somewhere.
They know it's a tough sell. Fortunately for everyone in the market, you can still find used CPUs/GPUs/RAM pretty easily and save a decent amount if you're ok with building your own.
Valve doesn't need this to do well to survive. And you don't need a steam machine (or any >$1000 machine) to play PC games. Just wait it out or buy used hardware. Hell, even an rog ally x plays just about anything (and also supports steamOS), and you can still get that at reasonable prices.
Given the price of components right now, I don’t know. 1k for that small of a form factor seems acceptable. It’s a nice addition to the living room, could likely play a role in cancelling expensive video streaming subscriptions. Might also run some local LLMs. Seems decent.
The PS5 can only play games that you pay Sony a tax to play. The steam machine can play any game, including those bought outside Steam and thus without paying valve a tax.
This means the PS5 is subsidised, whereas Valve hardware does not tend to be. They have confirmed that internally all divisions must be roughly profitable/break-even.
Why can’t you imagine it? The console makers have been selling at a loss for 3 maybe 4/5 decades.
Edit: looks like it took 10 million PS5s to break even. The article is 5 years old I wonder if it’s true in 2026.[2]
> The existing industrial arrangement at the time was that of a bundled console-plus-cartridge business model, where the console manufacturer (say, Atari with its VCS/2600) sold the console at a loss and cross-subsidized it with the money made on cartridges sold with a huge profit margin.[1]
[2] It took Sony years to stop losing money on PS3 sales, but the company stopped selling the PS4 at a loss around six months after its debut in 2013. The PS5 has taken ever so slightly longer, but it’s clearly not repeating the costly exercise of the PS3 despite early reports suggesting Sony was struggling with PS5 pricing due to expensive parts.
They were originally sold at a loss, then became per-unit profitable at some point, and now they might be eating a loss on them again. But they lock in hardware prices years in advance.
PS5 has a lot parts in high volumes negotiated years in advance so they can leverage lower prices than valve. Valve ships like 10% max of the volumes that Sony sells.
I am pleased to see hardware not being locked down as a selling point:
> Yes, Steam Machine is optimized for gaming, but it's still your PC. Install your own apps, or even another operating system. Who are we to tell you how to use your computer?
It feels very commonsense that you should be able to run whatever you want on the computer that you have purchased, but it is surprisingly uncommon.
Valve gets it. I very much want to support them and vote with my wallet. Unfortunately the Steam machine isn't a good fit for me. I will buy the frame in a heartbeat though. HMD with a FOSS OS? That's in its own class.
Even though I balked at the Steam Deck prices on the recent inventory restock, as they were up ~30% presumably due to the same hardware shortages, I got one anyway. Prices won't drop anytime soon and if any for-profit organization has earned my loyalty, its Valve.
When I used it I was somewhat incredulous that I could simply exit Steam mode have an actual Linux desktop environment, where I could literally do what I wanted. It was my computer, a proper general purpose computing machine, and it was (willingly* in my control. No sneaky root needed.
They need to do that because, in some sense, they're competing with Gaming PCs, not really with Gaming consoles. Gaming consoles sell their consoles at a discounted price because they can recoup a lot of it when selling games. Steam can't have a markup on games because they share their marketplace with other PCs.
You could still offer this, similar to the ad tier and ad free tier of a kindle, or a carrier locked phone.
$799 for a locked down version, $1049 for an unlocked version. Opportunity to pay $300 to unlock it later at any time. 5% discount on purchases on a locked device.
I would assume it also has to do with if not fundamentally manifesting from Steam being an organisation of technologists. They don't want to put out a project which has a worse operating system than their workstations.
I like that we can write the story that Microsoft sold their software with the home computer on the idea of productivity at home while the actual incentive was entertainment, and valve ends up justifying buying gaming hardware with the incentive that it can do productivity.
The urge to tear down the stack of cellphones I have and pull the boot flash chip hits me occasionally. It would be a substantial project, though, so I haven't done it. Yet.
I got a Steam Deck for my son. Docking it to an external monitor with mouse and keyboard in desktop mode is just running a nice desktop Linux with KDE Plasma by default. I showed him the basics and it's perfectly usable for his school needs. And he can still put it in his bag and play Skyrim on a train ride.
and it makes Steam Deck the best console ever made.
i picked up Darksiders 3 a few weeks ago to play on my deck. at some point i realized i was pretty underleveled but i didn’t wanna grind.
so, opened chatgpt in desktop mode and uploaded my save, asked it to write me a script to set my souls/xp/money to whatever number. it analyzed the save and spat out a bash/python script. after a chmod +x it worked flawlessly. done from bed took like 15 mins to figure it out end to end.
no other what other (handheld) console in history combines the depth of library, the slick console experience, and also lets you chmod +x.
You write this on the forum where often in apple-based topics folks here defend locked down system ie on phones for themselves as something actually superior. Its often paid PR or folks to deep in the topic to have objective opinions (or simply employees/shareholders) but still, I've had that talk few times and downvotes were flying left and right.
I’m fine with both. My phone and my “console experience that’s more open than an xbox” are wildly different scenarios, for which I have different needs and expectations.
There are alternatives for both, if/when I ever want them.
I do hope they will release drivers for the Steam Machine, otherwise the openness isn’t very useful. Or at least make it possible for others to make drivers by publishing specifications.
Edit, reply to bjord as I am rate limited: HDMI CEC, the chipset, GPU drivers, controller receiver etc.
Edit, reply to robhlt: Thanks! Hope we can get that ported to Windows
Probably because it's very niche. Talking to many friends, and an increasing number of posts on various console subreddits, there's lots of comments from PC gamers that embraced the console life due to it's simplicity. This has increased since the PS5 Pro released - "Close to PC-level graphics, without the PC-level costs and mucking around with settings"
There is a certain appeal to this for many people that hacking it to run your own OS isn't really sought after.
Every console on the market right now is locked-down proprietary garbage, that's the basic reality. The PlayStation 5, the Xbox One, they are also technically x86 PCs as they run on x86 processors, but they are specifically locked down to prevent any use outside of their narrow use cases that are optimized to make them money. Valve is really the only company that's developing proper consoles with a custom operating system and custom AMD chips while not locking down the hardware, despite the strong incentives of locking people into paying them 30% forever and preventing access to competing game stores
The PS5 and Xbox are also very close to being an x86 PC, but you're not installing your own OS on there even though there are few technical hurdles if the manufacturer removed the mechanisms to prevent that.
It supports HDMI CEC, it has a built in dedicated radio for the steam controller, it ships with Steam OS, and will receive support from Valve.
If you are comfortable building a custom PC and fixated on the spec sheet sure, it's not that exciting. But there are some rough edges with PC couch gaming that are sanded off with this machine.
1) Full compatibility with SteamOS. You won't have to fiddle with drivers/hardware/whatever to get it working[1].
2) The physical hardware is maximally condensed, more so than you'd be able to do yourself with a SFF build.
I'd have definitely considered this if I wasn't already doing my own SFF stuff. Gaming on the Deck is a delight and I'd love that console-esque experience for my primary gaming PC as well.
I think it's because if it was someone else (e.g. Epic), they would have locked down the hardware and sold it like a console or smartphone where you can only install things from their app store.
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."
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.
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") .
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.
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.
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.
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.
For the inevitable minisforum machines comparisons - it's not as bad for Valve as it seems.
You can't just add a dedicated GPU to a cheap miniPC with an integrated graphics- power delivery and airflow will have to be different, and you may be surprised to find out that even the cheapest mini PCs with dedicated graphics aren't significantly cheaper than a Steam machine (if at all).
And then my personal experience with these cheap no-brand mini-computers is that their Linux compatibility is spotty, BIOS updates are non-existend, quality control is severely lacking, and you have basically no support. They are also often pretty loud, overheat and die within a year or two.
If something doesn't work properly, you are on your own- the manufacturer will have forgotten about this model in a couple of months, and user base is so low that it's unlikely someone will find a workaround.
So comparatively, a Steam Machine would be much preferable to me, considering that it will likely work out of the box with no compatibility issues, will have a typical valve support (which, judging by Steam Deck, is quite fair), is well-built and near silent.
The problem is once the price crosses a thousand, I'd rather add, say, 500 eur, and get a much more powerful machine.
I see a point for the cheapest bottom of the barrel gaming pc/handheld (which would be 700-750) with many performance tradeoffs, but this doesn't look like a good enough upgrade from that.
A 12+ GB RTX4070-class videocard, 24-32GB of RAM and maybe even an 8-core CPU for $1500+ would likely be more usable in the current market
I love my Steam Deck but let's not forget that it took a solid 2-3 years for it to really become a somewhat turnkey, stable experience. They shipped it in a near-beta state. Flipping between gaming/desktop mode induced a fail state probably 30% of the time until a year ago, docking to TV's can still be very frustrating (aspect ratio and latency are almost always wonky until you tinker with it a fair bit) and isn't nearly as smooth a transition as with the switch, there used to be a VERY frustrating lockout where if your deck wanted to update and you weren't on your home network it wouldn't log in, just all sorts of really frustrating points of friction.
Again I love my deck, it's an incredible and capable device. But it was very clunky those first 2-3 years. It really only matured in the last 12-18mo or so. Hopefully the SM is a stronger experience day/week/month 1.
I want to buy one just to raise the signal that Linux support is important.
When these machines were announced I switched to Fedora as a daily driver on my high end gaming rig.
It’s been awesome. I still have to go back to Windows for music production unfortunately. I may switch to Mac for that so I can completely abandon Windows.
I run an optical HDMI cable from my office to my TV and get to play games and use Linux in 77”.
I also work in music production (for video games) and fully switched to Linux + FOSS about a year ago.
I'd say it is a lot more doable if you make electronic styles of music. Harder if you make classical styles, as many of the big sample libraries don't support Linux yet.
It’s always fantastic to read a success story of migrating to Linux gaming from Windows. As Windows gets worse and worse there will be more people joining us.
Even without buying you can send Linux gaming signals by playing on Linux and participating in the hardware survey.
I use Macs for work and PC for games, and this little box seems a good opportunity to play The Legend of Linux on a desktop or a couch, and make it true.
I bought my own version of a "Steam Machine" i.e. a mini-PC powered by an AMD APU for just €676 right before the RAM prices exploded.
It is an AOOSTAR GT37 which actually outclasses the €1,039 Steam Machine in most areas except graphics. One cannot blame Valve here though, the hyperinflation of RAM prices is too blame here.
AOOSTAR GT37 (€676 a few months ago [now vastly more expensive if you can still get one at all]) vs Steam Machine (€1039 right now)
CPU: 12x Zen 5 vs. 6 Zen4
Graphics: 16x RDNA 3.5 vs. 28 RDNA 3
RAM: 32 GB LPDDR5X vs. 16 GB DDR5 + 8 GB GDDR6
HDD: 1 TB vs. 512 GB (both NVMe-SSD)
I expect the Steam Machine to run graphically demanding FPS games quite a bit better due to the extra RDNA cores and faster VRAM. However it might actually be the inferior gaming machine for CPU/main RAM intense strategy or simulation games (e.g. Stellaris).
Plus GPU prices. They absolutely got screwed by their launch timing, unfortunately. And they’re not big enough to negotiate better terms though that probably isn’t really an option right now anyway.
I’m not sure I’d want this at $550, but maybe. At $1050 without controller it’s a solid no.
I’m sure some people will want it. I have no interest in maintaining a PC so if I wanted to play PC games this is probably how I would do it. But the price just absolutely kills it for me.
"killed" is a bit of a stretch. High prices on all gear is here to stay. This is the new normal. Unless that simply means that nobody buys consoles/pc's.
But you cant compare the price point with what it used to cost and imagine that its overpriced now and that people will seek alternatives. There aren't any cheaper alternatives.
I still think it's a great concept and a really accessible way to get a great computer. But I agree, I thought this was going to land in the $500 to $700 range. That said, I also bought a mini PC for $250, and that same PC is now going for $600. So I don't really think steam can be blamed for that
I'm simply impressed they're releasing at all. This has to be literally the worst 6 month time window in the last 20+ years to launch a new computing device at scale and have to build the vendor contracts and inventory from zero.
I respect what Valve is doing here and I loved the Steam Deck but a prebuilt desktop PC with 16 GB system memory and 512 GB storage for $1,000+ is insulting. Those are specs that belong on a laptop or a lowend console offering like the Series S.
I think this product is going to be hamstrung by its attempts to present as a midpoint between a PC and a console. The way this is being achieved seems to be by selling a device with the specifications of a console but the price tag of a PC.
Valve already did the "this is a lowend device and that's okay" thing with the Steam Deck, and got away scot-free because nobody expected a handheld and people didn't have a ton of preconceived notions. The Deck was also a better value since it was (prior to the price hike) priced reasonably for its specifications.
The desktop PC and/or living room console modalities are both significantly more stratified. People have solidly defined expectations about price-to-performance-to-usability ratios in both of these sectors, and I worry this doesn't go far enough in any particular direction to meet the demands of either market.
I don't disagree that this device is very likely too expensive to sell well.
But! The price is not insulting. You can built a slightly faster PC for a little less, but that PC would be ~10 times larger, it would be louder, it would lack features like HDMI-CEC and good wifi/bluetooth. It really wouldn't compare for living room usage.
In order to get anywhere near the size of the Steam Machine, you'd have to exceed its costs.
This device does sit between mac-mini-esq lower power devices and compact enthusiast builds and, like the Steam Deck, it's an attempt to build a new segment. That said, if you think paying $1000 for this kind of hardware is some kind of exception, I think you should go take a look at what you can get on the prebuilt gaming PC market. You get a little less because the Steam Machine has a small footprint, but if you're looking for a nice little machine you don't overpay by much.
If you look at how extremely overpriced console hardware typically gets away with being, this is not a bad deal if the system is durable, relatively quiet and there are good games well optimised for it. The deal is sweetened by the fact that you will be eventually be able to upgrade the RAM and storage easily and for cheap if/when prices eventually come down from the current AI insanity levels.
To me it's not even the comparison with builds that's damning; it's the comparison with handhelds and other mini PCs. Most people excited by this probably have a Steam Deck or another handheld, so they have to be into playing a very specific slice of games that can run slightly better than the handheld.
For example, Forza 6 on high 1080p is 60 for SM vs 40 for high end handhelds and 30 for SD. Even at the original price, is it really worth $750? Not to mention that many handhelds and mini PCs also have USB4 ports that one could attach a retired GPU to get 60fps+ @ very high 2k, but the Steam Machine has no such port and only one NVMe slot.
So this is for people who are allergic to the existing solutions (plugging in your handheld, using Moonlight) or just like the brand, but I know it's going to still sell out. I just don't want to hear about extensibility, eco-friendliness, or cost effectiveness from a certain segment of gamers after this.
For people who are already throwing money at Valve on a monthly subscription and might otherwise have bought something from Sony or Microsoft, or more likely, will also buy something from Sony or Microsoft.
Who knows, maybe once the AI bubble has burst they will surprise us with a replacement mainboard for this second gen. If they want to keep it in sale as long as the Steamdeck it would make sense to offer gamers a simple way to upgrade their existing machine when Steam's ecosystem is already open to all sides. Maybe they'll even outsource that mainboard upgrade to ASUS, MSI or others. Once we see a teardown we can make a better prediction.
The PS5 Pro has 16 GB unified memory, the Steam Machine is 16GB + 8GB. That'll be where some of the price difference comes from. But most likely comes from Sony locking in long term contracts before price insanity.
Different value props. The target audience for this already has an extensive Steam catalogue. To buy a PS5 Pro is going to require re-buying all of your games for it.
Also, you can build a decent PC for $1049, but getting it into a decent form/noise factor is going to ratchet that price up. Add in the proprietary CEC stuff that Valve has done for it and it's not as terrible as it seems.
Well, and you pay 120$/year for the privilege to play games online on that PS5. That is one of the reasons SONY can subsidize the PS5 unit price and sell under cost. Valve is not in that position, because people would buy it as office PC replacement.
> For reference, the PS5 Pro has more than twice the number GPU CUs, an 8-core CPU, a 2TB SSD, a controller, and costs $899.
PS5 Pro had a launch price of $700, which already felt steep. How is $900 not even worse value? Even if it's "better" than the Steam Machine, let's not pretend that it's actually a good value for the hardware.
Right, but it’s a PS5, not a PC - you’re paying less for the privilege of letting Sony 100% control what you use the device for, including not being able to play your own games that you’ve paid for. Try doing that on a PC. Try checking your email on your PS5, or steaming the media of your choice.
Can I serve my media library off of my NAS with the PS5? I am legit asking because I just got on the list hoping to use this thing as my home entertainment system
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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
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
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
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!
So awesome. If I needed/wanted a gaming PC or "family TV" gaming machine, I'd snag this for sure. I've had the Steam Deck since launch and it's really quite well-executed and I've logged hundreds of hours on it. SteamOS is totally decent and the level of polish has been continually improved. The price for the Machine is totally acceptable considering the market currently, particularly considering these [0][1][2] would be my options if I had $1500 CAD to spend on a gaming PC right now -- all machines with 8gb VRAM GPUs and 16GB of RAM.
Yeah. I don't think they're gouging, I totally understand how expensive RAM and storage and GPUs are, but...oof. I just can't justify it as a 'fun' purchase.
I mean, can the market really handle any of these prices? If we're truly stuck with these increasing prices for another year or so, whole sectors might get "restructured", including gaming, simply because people cannot afford the devices they depend on.
Yeah. But they’re only other choices to just sit on it for a few more years, which point they would need to put different hardware in and it would just increase costs.
This may be the best option of a couple of terrible ones.
Same, I could have maybe justified $600 to my wife, $800 would be really pushing it. But 1k+ with a controller? There's no way when we have other things to save for. I am sure young single people will still buy it and it will sell out, but my Series X was $550 a few years ago and ill enjoy that in my living room for a while longer.
I've tried various iterations of a gaming HTPC over the years, and they've all been pretty miserable. That lack of any reasonable or stable CEC solution this whole time so far has honestly been an oversized anchor this whole time. And I think Valve is doing a bit of a disservice not advertising it more.
Yep, and I feel many commenters in this thread are comparing value propositions only in terms of specs. I’ve built a number of Mini-ITX cases, from 5L to 20L, and they are a pain to work with and maintain. In some cases it’s impossible to make a reasonable filtered airflow, so dust builds up very fast, and a teardown to do clean up is pretty annoying. Steam Machine looks very straightforward to maintain. And it’s also tiny and quiet.
Same here, I know why it costs as much as it does, and that doesn't deter me. I want it for my living room, and to just mess around with. Will enter the lottery and hope my number gets picked!
I'm skeptical that they have working CEC. The steam deck, for example, does not. It also doesn't work reliably with many TVs. I'll believe it when I see it.
Surprised that they have 4 USB-A and only 1 USB-C. With their power profile, Steam Machine should be powerable by a single USB-C cable on extended power range which should reduce the need for the power supply altogether and greatly simplify mechanical as well as thermal design, although the power electronic design would be more complex as a result.
I would also be expecting Wifi 7 support as well as unified memory considering they ordered custom AMD silicon. Understandable that it is a rather conservative design for their first generation though.
Xbox 360 controllers (and their knock-offs) are still extremely common choices for PC gamers who want a controller. Xbox because they have good windows plug-and-play, 360 because there are still plenty of $20-ish dollar ones available, as opposed to the ~$40-50 range for the Xbox One controllers.
Wired Xbox 360 controllers (and most of their off brand alternatives) have a non-removable USB-A cable.
Steam machine uses about 200W. Can you even buy any 240W pd power bricks. Quick search on amazon shows that all that advertise 240w can only output 140w max on single cable
GamerNexus found out that an equivalent DIY machine would cost $979 in parts only to give a perspective on the pricing. It would probably be bigger too due to the discrete GPU.
From reading posts on X/Twitter, I got the feeling that PC Gaming enthusiasts truly believed this was going to compete with console gaming and those players would flock to the utopia that is Steam OS and managing hardware. At this price I believe its way too expensive to temp console gamers and Steam supporters will probably balk about the specs to price ratio.
The main market to me is going to be ibuypower people, so a console gamer who wants to jump to PC but doesn't want to self build.
I've been screwing around on pcpartpicker on and off for today, and I don't see a clean way to get steam machine specs for less than $800 if you build it yourself, and closer to $900 if i'm being honest (and in no way will it be SFF).
I think the big thing will be if steam can commit to this like the deck and get better performance over time. Consoles out perform their hardware thanks to lots of optimization, enforced by knowing you're stuck with/always going to have the same specs.
The steam machines success to me pivots completely on if they can capture a market of customers who want to jump from console and don't want to become hardware savvy (which has not gotten as easy as it should).
Compatibility and performance in the next 6 months is going to determine a lot.
And all those consoles (save the Switch maybe) are heavily subsidized by those companies to compete at that artificial price point.
According to LTT Valve made the conscious decision NOT to subsidize the Steam Machine to let the market compete. I very much respect that and will be willing to pay the premium because of that and:
- using my purchase to vote for/encourage the growth of the Linux ecosystem.
- as a PC gamer I'm already highly invested in the Steam platform with all of my other gaming purchases.
The PS5 (which is realistically the main competitor) has the caveat that to get even something as basic as multiplayer you need to pay a $10-20 monthly subscription, so you can multiply that by however many months you plan to own it and add it to the price.
I'd like to factor in the cost of games, but then my Steam library might be a little bigger than the average... Am I willing to pay €60 for a game? Rarely. Am I willing for the spring/summer/winter sale on Steam? Yes!
Idk why anyone thought this would be a "PC console killer" type of product. Consoles are subsidized because they act as the entry point to closed hardware/software ecosystems. You can't do that with a general purpose PC because it's an open ecosystem by definition.
But there are economic benefits to an open ecosystem. The Steam Machine has a gigantic back catalog of games that can be had for cheap. You also probably already have all the peripherals you'll need for it. And of course they don't charge for online play.
That last part alone makes up for the cost after just 2-3 years.
My steam deck is underpowered as a living room gaming PC.
Wish it was cheaper but would look forward to a “just works” experience including sleep/instant game resume.
Add my thousands of already owned Steam games and it makes me excited for a great couch gaming experience. It’s the reason I don’t get a PS5/Switch cause I don’t wanna rebuy all the games and they are not on sale as much.
I was wondering if this would be a worthwhile upgrade to my Legion Go Z1 Extreme.
Sounds like it's in the same vicinity for graphics power. Not worth $1k for a tiny bit more RAM.
I do wonder if this will give me any useful presets, in the same way the Steam Deck does. I have no interest in tweaking graphics settings one at a time.
Have you tried Steam Remote Play? It allows your desktop to render games and stream it to your Steam Deck that's connected to your TV. Or to any other device really.
Hope the Frame is available for pre-order soon as well! I know I’m going to pay more than the HW was worth a year ago because of “AI”, but I’m really looking forward to that one.
It's funny how this (imo) almost feels like an inherently inert topic to discuss:
Is it dumb of them to do this? Not really, they got unlucky with the timing and they already designed the machines. Selling them below cost to subsidize steam-sales would probably create bad incentives for them.
What will this mean for Valve's future? Nothing, they're still a relatively lean company with a money machine.
Will this dissuade them from creating hardware in the future? Probably not, the Steamdeck was really succesfull and they've got more than enough resources to do a few failed experiments.
>Selling them below cost to subsidize steam-sales would probably create bad incentives for them.
They could have sweetened the deal somehow, though. Maybe owners get a discount on games or something. It was bad timing, but it's not like they can't afford to take a bit of a hit for good will.
Your mileage may vary, but I've never gotten reasonable performance out of Crossover. I have a decked out Mac for development and most of the games I've tried in Crossover still need you to turn the settings to damn near lowest possible.
If Mac Minis were viable for gaming, everyone would get one. Unfortunately, Crossover has very spotty support and GPTK starts fraying at the seams on CPU-heavy titles.
The upcoming Steam Frame will be the real make-or-break moment for ARM PC gaming. Up until now, nobody has seriously attempted to make ARM work for the "Steam Deck" segment of users.
The prices I think a lot of us expected. I know Valve is being pressured by the market, but I can't imagine buying one for this price, even if I'm really excited for the Steam Machine. That said, the Steam Deck is now so expensive I don't think I can justify replacing mine when it breaks.
I hope this is successful, like it or not this might be one of the best ways that Linux can reduce the Microsoft Windows monopoly. I would actually go as far as to say that it has to succeed.
An unfortunate series of events that this thing ended up with these specs at 1,049.00. It was supposed to be cheap and cheerful. At first Steam took an opportunistic deal to buy up a bunch of near-obsolete-already chips from AMD to build a low-cost box around. Then years of delays and an explosion in DRAM and SSD prices and here we are.
4 year old chip design on an equivalently old process node, not that unlike nvidia selling 2-3 year old chips as the spark. Thanks to AI boom, consumer market really just getting the warmed-over leftovers here from AMD and NVDIA.
> We think of Steam Machine as an extension of PC gaming, not as a console.
But is that really so bad? I don't want to say 'sell it at a loss' but loss leaders don't need to bankrupt their companies in order to do their job.
If you sold them at or below cost then people would figure out how to buy 100's and make server farms out of them. Particularly for this hardware. The awkwardness of the hardware being made up for by the subsidy from the manufacturer. But pricing them at break-even would still be good business.
The pricing is all out of sorts. Close to $500 more expensive than a PS5 for worse performance. I understand this is a PC and you can do other things with it, but if you're buying a gaming device to play games this is a horrible value.
If that's the cost of a _working_, well supported and _viable_ open platform, than so be it. People, especially the ones here at hacker news, ought to give way more value to this, else we lose it all.
Yes, so many people were claiming that it will be around that price point. That seemed straight up delusional to me. Memory price has roughly quadrupled and 32GB DDR5 basically cost the same as the original cheapest steam deck.
Yes, Steam Machine is optimized for gaming, but it's still your PC. Install your own apps, or even another operating system. Who are we to tell you how to use your computer?
Insant buy for me because as an owner of a PS5 and Xbox One X, I’ve been using my Steam Deck a lot for gaming on TV using the dock. It works really well. This is just the dream version of that setup.
Similar here. I have the PS4 here and rarely even use PlayStation these days. Mostly it is just PC (now runing Linux even for gaming) and Steam Deck. I was thinking about upgrading to PS5 a year or two ago bu then did some calculations and it is more expensive then it looks at first (PlayStation+ is in practive not optional and it is 72 €/year at minimum, games are quite more expensive themselves than on the PC, and well there is a lot less choice in games). So I have basically just started moving my game library to Steam and PC (GoG and similar other sources store), just makes more sense with PC and now Steam Machine makes inot the a console form factor while still having all the power and freedom of PC. So yeah an easy decision to go with Steam Machine. Sure price of the hardware itself is not exactly very attractive but yeah not so much different to what is normal these days in PC hardware (fsck all these terrible "AI" slop scam bubble corporations). Would love to see a cheaper bare-bones edition without RAM and SSD inside but even without this I think Steam machine will be quite a nice replacement for PS4.
I was interested in the Steam machine, but I might not get one because I cannot log in to my Steam account, for no reason that I know. Steam's web-based process for resetting my password always gets stuck after successful completion of the captcha, regardless of which device or OS I use to do it, the accessible-to-Google procedures for getting past that blockage have not worked, and the email address that one could once use in this situation now just sends an autoreply that says no one is monitoring it anymore.
So I have exhausted all of the obvious routes for logging into my Steam account. Perhaps there are additional routes to discover, but I'm not particularly motivated to look for them at this point. If just getting logged in is this painful, I'm not particularly optimistic about the experience of buying or owning the thing.
I think this put this all in perspective for me. If Microsoft came out with this exact hardware (with Windows but still open and you could load SteamOS on it), at this price point, people mock Microsoft to death about how this product is a joke.
It’s called the Xbox and the reason it wasn’t at this price point is that Microsoft has the capital power to subsidize the cost at risk of the Xbox division not being profitable. Valve doesn’t have such freedoms on hardware it seems.
I could see myself buying the undeniably beautiful GabenCube at spec if the price were at or only slightly above SW2/PS5 level; as an additional device to play the outlier game that is exclusive to "PC" and Steam Deck / Macbook Pro not delivering enough oomph for it to run satisfactorily.
The only thing that I get with consoles that I don't get with the Steam Machine is a guarantee; a GUARANTEE that the games I buy will play on the system. If I but a game and it says PS5, I know it will play. A list of specs on the Steam Machine landing page does not absolve this for Valve.
On the Steam store they've done a great job with their certification program for the Steam Deck.
Also, I don't think their target market is people who don't own any Steam games yet. It's going to be people with already extensive back catalogues on Steam.
Now game devs can optimised their game for it and Steam Machine will get royal treatment. It's not unusual for a PS5 game to run slow on a PC with much better hardware due to not being optimised. The Nintendo switch is a great example, pretty old hardware but the games run well (for their intended experience).
Many people are complaining about the price but you can bring you entire steam game collection and even use as a PC if you want, I sold my PS5 once it became a useless brick cause Sony prevents you from running Linux.
Very late to the discussion, but many people see the price of the Steam Machine and balk at the high cost, even if they understand the reasoning. However, this isn't about the Steam Machine. Computing has just gotten more expensive. This is the new reality going forward, Steam Machine is just on the front edge of the wave. (Until, and if, RAM manufacturers catch up).
If Valve learned to operate on a proper schedule instead of Valve Time they would have been able to stockpile these parts and release with better prices.
back in 2019, I was thinking of getting an MBA and as part of the exploration, shadowed an MBA class at University of Washington for a day. It was so fun. One of the things they were discussing in the class that day was a case study of Valve, specifically around the Steam Machine. The team's consensus was that Valve was carefully arranging money in a barrel, lovingly soaking it in high octane gasoline, and was about to light a match.
Proton, the Steam machine, the Steam deck, etc. were probably never about making money. It's Valve's "Plan B".
They started with Proton after Microsoft suddenly made a move with the Windows store and also started bolting down Windows a bit. As with most things Microsoft that initiative quietly died over time. But at that time Valve probably couldn't afford to take any chances. It probably also made them realize they had build a castle on someone elses land.
If you are making money in the amounts Valve is, then even the simplest risk analyses is going to show that "Microsoft rug pulling you" is one of your few existential threats. Even though the probability is low or medium-ish at best, the impact is massive. Even anti-trust isn't going to save you. By the time Microsoft gets convicted, you are already dead. Just look at Netscape.
Valve makes it very very easy to be a PC gamer, and, importantly, slightly harder to be a PC gamer who buys games in places other than Steam.
Yes you can buy games on GoG or Epic and play them on a steam deck or a steam machine. But it's juuuuust enough faff to be annoying enough, that you'd rather just get them on steam. I know people (and am a person) who have rebought games they already own so they are on steam, to make playing between steam deck and desktop more reliable.
It's the same with the steam controller. You _can_ use it with games outside of steam, but it's enough of a faff that you find yourself avoiding it.
It's incredibly effective, and why they are an effective monopoly in PC gaming.
This only goes to show how MBAs are destructively myopic.
Valve understands that inextricably tying themselves to Windows is a long-term death sentence. SteamOS represents a lifeboat for when Microsoft goes full iOS and decides to lock down Windows in exchange for taking 30% of all software purchases. Valve has been taking this threat seriously since at least 2010, which is why they've been investing in Linux gaming. Both Steam Deck and the Steam Machine are further steps toward complete independence from Microsoft.
I think the steam machine is more important as a benchmark for 3rd parties developing their own Steam OS based systems. Although I am sure Valve would be happier if it was popular on its own merits too.
Can't you build or buy an equivalent (in performance) PC for cheaper? All with upgradable standard parts? I get the appeal of a small form factor, but I am afraid it may not sell well at this price.
I think you would struggle to NOT build a more performant PC for the same price.
https://pcpartpicker.com/list/brbFsK This is $50 more but it has 1TB of storage and a newer generation of both CPU and GPU and will absolutely destroy it.
I'm sure you could get actually easily cheaper and better even, I haven't followed the market a lot lately.
Prebuilt are likely to be even better deals because they will use some cheap noname parts for the RAM and the PSU, which is mostly fine.
My first thought was "I wonder how this would work as a small-factor game dev machine" and lo and behold, there is a clip of someone working in Godot running a debug version of their game. Very cool to see Valve market this as Linux PC rather than strictly gaming.
Well, when they announced it (7 months ago) I got laughed out of the room when I said this will be at least 1k$ because of the RAM crisis, and people quoted famous Youtuber "Moores Law is Dead" that this thing has a 300$ BOM and will be 600$ max, probably just 450$...
I saw a bunch of reviews (written and YouTube). It seems that the Valve development team behind this product was disappointed by the final cost. If this machine was built 2-3 years ago, can anyone estimate how much cheaper the cost would be? I assume this biggest price hikes have come from memory (RAM) and storage (NVMe).
Not a lot of games play nice with crossover. I wish I could dual boot windows on this m3 mbp like I could on my old 2012 model. I feel like tf2 performance is actually worse on kegworks with the m3 pro than it was when I would dual boot windows 10 on the 2012 computer. So many lag spikes. A bunch of explosions will go off and the game will stall for a moment and you just get fragged. There are plenty of games that also won't let you play multiplayer at all due to anticheat not playing nice with wine.
"native" macos games on the m series aren't even that much better because they usually just run through a rosetta layer that seems to lock FPS at only 40. Fans will spin full bore because the game is so unoptimized.
So unfortunate with the timing, I wish they shelved it for a few years instead. At any other time this could've been the thing to entrench Steam, PC and Linux as finally THE gaming platform.
At this price and features it'll probably just be a footnote.
Man it's so unfortunate that this launch coincided with the component crisis, forcing the prices to be just outside the range of people that were debating between getting this and getting a console, it would've made so much more of an impact if the prices were $200 lower.
I wish there was a clear Mac Mini alt. With lots of drawbacks of the mac mini fixed e.g. a very simple way to connect to tablets (iPads, Androids tabs) as screen and ability to connect to any keypad and mouse, natively (I am sure a linux mini pc box will have that already - at least I may not need a "connector hardware").
I really like the idea of travelling around with my iPad but have a very small but sufficiently powerful computer tucked away in my bag (along with needed cables) if I need it (because, well, Apple is not going to let their iPads unleash their capabilities).
There are some around (even in my geography) but all of them seem to be half-heartedly done.
You could build the equivalent PC for quite a bit cheaper or a PS5 and 7 full price AAA games for the same price. No way this is a console-killer, but will be a nice novelty for Gaben fans for whom $1049 is not a significant amount of money.
Just today I was thinking about threading the needle on that and making my own Steam Machine with an AMD BC-250 board. Maybe I still will, it'd be a 10th the price and I do love to tinker.
Provides some of the worst value for money on the market ($1,049 with no controller, additional $70 for controller):
worse than the PS5 ($599), Xbox Series X ($599), Switch 2 ($449), and DIY PCs.
The deck is such a good console compared to the switch and switch 2 that I can’t be stop being happy that they released this now. How is Valve, a tiny company, doing so much better than Nintendo?
They're not. The Deck is hundreds of dollars more expensive than the Switch 2. The Switch 1 sold 155 million units, making it the second most popular console of all time. Switch 2 is also selling very well.
Most people don't know if they'll like the living-room PC gaming experience and at this price not enough people will even try. That's sad to me. It could be that with the right hardware and software the experience would be even better than a console, and if that happens then all the other good features of the Steam Machine (it's relative openness, the fact that you own it, etc) could shine. But without proving that people really like the experience, the rest is irrelevant, and lots of early adopters were just priced out of the experiment.
What if, in addition, a nominal fee was charged just to have a chance to purchase a Steam Machine? Let's say $3 (or whatever). Then, all that money is donated to an organization like Extra Life or Game for Love?
In that way, someone with 5000 scalper accounts knows they're going to be out $15k just to get in line. And everyone else who is trying to buy just one isn't sweating the nominal fee.
> Yes, Steam Machine is optimized for gaming, but it's still your PC. Install your own apps, or even another operating system. Who are we to tell you how to use your computer?
I will definitely be getting this regardless of price or specs. I'm no hard core gamer and I play Balatro, Vampire Survivors and occasional online Halo 2 with friends. This is perfect.
Too bad YouTube doesn't have a proper API for building 3rd party clients. I would love to build one and use it on my SteamDeck and on the big TV with the SteamMachine.
Interesting that its HDMI is 2.0 and not 2.1. Hopefully it's still possible (for those that really want) to connect modern 4K TVs at 120 hz via the DisplayPort 1.4 output.
I'll be getting one eventually either way, hopefully after the RAMpocalypce has ended, just because I enjoy collecting consoles and games, and I want to support Linux through SteamOS. I'm sure I can find a place for it in my life, but it's not something I need.
I wish they had a few different options with better specs. Or maybe a shell with the case/fan/mobo etc.. where you can just add CPU/GPU/RAM. I'd love that, and would be willing to pay extra to get something a bit more modern.
I want a Steam Machine for my living room, but these specs are just terrible for 2026. According to Digital Foundry, this $1200 machine is worse than a $500 6-year-old base PS5.
Yikes twice the price of a PS5 in Australia! I will still be buying one though. I'm looking forward to moving away from Sony after having a PlayStation in my living room for 16+ years. I really like Steam's ethics / how they treat their customers - and the steam deck (while under powered) has been fantastic.
Interesting that they went with AMD for GPU, but not too surprising. My experience with a nvidia 5060 on my laptop is that nvidia's drivers on linux still have no idea how to reliably wake from sleep. Fixing that just not the priority for them I guess - datacenter GPUs doing AI probably never sleep and just idle at 50 watts or whatever.
Because most PC peripherals (mice, keyboards, microphones, controllers, USB headphones, detachable hard drives) are still USB-A on the other end of their cable. Yes this is changing, but in this case I appreciate them acknowledging the reality on the ground and not creating a situation where there are many dongles afoot.
This seems very expensive for what a PC can do :(. A PC can be fully customizable with price ranges that are lower than the steam machine. The "hardcore console gamers" live on PS, and Xbox, and for "casual gamers", a Nintendo Switch would provide much better bang for you buck.
You can install a SteamOS-style console experience on any old PC, including handhelds or mini-pcs with integrated graphics. Bazzite is a great choice for that, even my RX560 handles it without issue.
> a Nintendo Switch would provide much better bang for you buck.
A secondhand Steam Deck would also be better value, but this isn't a value-focused product. The Steam Machine is Valve's second stab at the premium couch-based PC gamer market, this time with Proton and a bigger focus on controller usability for ordinary PC games.
Find me a PC in this form factor that is as well tested and supported as the steam boxes are, with the specs they are claiming to have, at this price. Its a little above the curve but a little is not a lot, and you get a fully supported Linux box at that price.
.....and if you think this is expensive just wait until the PS6 and new Xbox are released.
I'm not convinced this hardware is "an extension of PC gaming, not a console" when the hardware is generations out of date. To credit Microsoft, Sony, and other players, the reality is that unless you are "in the game" for decades, you HAVE to provide a convincing differentiator from the other console markets.
Steam had this with the Steam Deck and personally, I see the world moving to thin clients that play games via some remote desktop infrastructure. It makes no sense to buy this hardware even if it was 500-700 dollars.
In my opinion, it would've been worth the money to just buy a gaming PC, put it in a garage, hidden room, etc with the networking gear, then stream it over the network to a Steam Link or using Apollo/Artemis/Moonlight/Parsec; anything.
Tangential to this discussion: Steam is in the unique position to create a kernel anti-cheat. I know that's not popular. But they are the only ones with the install base AND ability to pull it off in a such a fashion that wouldn't be so god-awful. It's clear that multiplayer gaming isn't going to go away from kernel anti-cheat. It's also clear that developers are still going to target Windows-only with Steam Deck support as a best-kept basis.
I don't see the Steam Machine/Deck as a competitor until they solve the kernel anti-cheat portion. Until then, it can play games that are older, not popular, or single-player which is a valid market but not one that I am a part of, anyway.
EDIT:
S) It's not meant for you.
A) Sure. But you're telling me people are going to pay $1,050 to couch-potato games? I don't see that market and I'm not really sure how you would swing that.
S) But it's on-par with the PS5.
A) Which isn't a valid differentiator. The PS5 is 6 years old and not $1,050. Even if it was $600, that's not a good deal.
S) It can be a regular PC.
A) Sure. But you could also save money and put a regular PC behind or near your monitor or TV.
S) I just want to game on hardware that's good enough.
A) I get it, but there's so many cheaper options out there. Honestly, it'd be better value to get a Steam Deck, get a docking station, then hook that up to your TV than to buy this.
Dead-on-arrival doesn't mean that this doesn't serve a niche. The niches this serves just really cannot be this compelling. You cannot tell me you have $1,050 laying around just to spend on this machine that comes with 512GB of storage.
I don't get it. I don't get the market segment that does want this when there's so many better options on the market.
I think it's far from dead-on-arrival. I don't want to buy a PC, put it in a garage, etc. I want a little box I can easily hook up to my TV and play Steam games on. This scratches that itch. I'm old and want convenience. I know a lot of other people in my peer group who are going to pick one up too. Also I don't play any competitive games where I care about anti-cheat. I just want to play my RPG/JRPG's on a big screen and I want it to be plug-n-play.
Same here. My home computer only runs Windows because I play competitive online games. It would be incredible if Valve built some kind of certified, locked-down kernel, but I doubt that will happen.
The online discourse around this is also incredibly toxic, filled with utopians who don’t understand how serious cheating is in these games, or that kernel anti-cheat, while not perfect, is the best solution available today.
>In my opinion, it would've been worth the money to just buy a gaming PC, put it in a garage, hidden room, etc with the networking gear, then stream it over the network to a Steam Link or using Apollo/Artemis/Moonlight/Parsec; anything.
During covid, instead of getting second budget gaming PC, I setup janky multi-seat program (Aster), to split single windows machine where I could play locally and someone else could play on steamlink. There's so many games out there that you can run multiple instances simultaneously. Or simply stream desktops to media room paired with a good remote.
It was very janky, setup, streaming DRM (or not). But justifies world of spending on one highend system than multiple mid / tier. The Aster program was designed for low income nations where you split a single workstation into like 8+ substations (i.e. education). TBH if Valve sold a 2-3k steammachine super host that can stream multiple games to different thin client, and value proposition is this is the only entertainment unit for your entire house, I think it would pique interests. Maybe tile different streams into one client for splitscreen playing. Sell those controllers.
The hard truth is that as much as you think yourself as a "proper" gamer, this segment always has, always will, _not_ be the proper target segment. Don't forget that mobile gaming has more revenue than everything else… combined. They have a play on this, and as much expansive as it looks, it's mostly due to the hardware inflation, and compared to alternatives, it won't look bad at all. For the segments that matters.
> In my opinion, it would've been worth the money to just buy a gaming PC, put it in a garage, hidden room, etc with the networking gear, then stream it over the network to a Steam Link
Well if you scroll down the page, it's presented as a selling point of the machine
> In my opinion, it would've been worth the money to just buy a gaming PC, put it in a garage, hidden room, etc with the networking gear, then stream it over the network to a Steam Link or using Apollo/Artemis/Moonlight/Parsec; anything.
I'm someone who has built dozens of gaming PCs, and wired my house. I also have zero interest in doing the above... if I have to pay few hundred extra to get a Steam machine hooked up to a TV without all that hassle... I'll do that.
It's not the absolute best value for gaming. It's not horrible in current market conditions but it's also not targeting "best value for gaming" anywhere in the marketing materials. It's hardware that can play your Steam library on your TV. There are harder, less expensive ways to do that, as there have been for ages.
If you're a console gamer, there are less expensive, just as easy options to play console games, so it's definitely not suited for that market.
It's really only catering to people with disposable income that want a cute way to hook up a Steam-capable machine to a TV. It's not a huge market, nor is it a non-existent market.
It was probably a bigger market at $750 than $1050, but we can't have nice things.
> Steam is in the unique position to create a kernel anti-cheat
Valve has a long-term policy of being utter trash at game security.
> I know that's not popular. But they are the only ones with the install base AND ability to pull it off in a such a fashion that wouldn't be so god-awful.
Epic Games does fine (though they did it by purchasing an anticheat startup).
EDIT: Oh, you're talking about making an anti-cheat focused Linux kernel build? Meh, still would not trust Valve on that front given their long-standing policy of not giving a shit.
>It's just dead-on-arrival...the hardware is generations out of date
Some people say this same thing about the Nintendo Switch and its successor, but here we are, with the former closing in on highest selling console of all time, and the latter tracking above that.
My prediction was that they would bundle it with Steam store money or other games to bring the "end price" below a 1000 Euro, surprised to see I was wrong!
I feel like Framework really missed this boat with their desktop PC they released last year. They could have used that + a gamepad to have captured so much of this.
Dammit, I don’t think this is going to be as popular as the Steam Deck at this price. I hope they don’t shelf it and I can buy this in a few years for a reasonable price once the big AI labs go bankrupt.
Sadly I don't see that happening. Game devs have gotten used to having their cake and eating it too by developing for Windows and using Proton as a crutch to get the the Steam OS certification too. flibitijibibo was right: linux porters have probably gone out of business.
Budget reasons would be my guess. The USB-C port here is 10 gbit while the USB-A ports on the machine are USB 2.0(front) and 5gbit(rear) speeds.
While they could have and imo should have just put usb 2.0 C ports on it, users have an expectation that USB-C ports are fully functional high speed ports. On most machines you can plug something in to any USB-C port on a device and they all work the same.
> Yes, Steam Machine is optimized for gaming, but it's still your PC. Install your own apps, or even another operating system. Who are we to tell you how to use your computer?
I'd say that heavily depends on what you see as alternatives. For some the Steam Machine is filling an unmet need in the market, for others it's a more expensive gaming pc or gaming console.
As we are on HackerNews, there's a good chance that you can build / setup your own pc with better specs which you might want to look into and then decide.
Is there anything actually worth playing in the steam frame? The hardware looks incredible, but my understanding is that the current state of VR games is less than brilliant.
I'm not familiar with SteamOS and Valve hardware in general. Could I play something like Overwatch on this, and connect keyboard and mouse? Could I play other PC games like World of Warcraft?
It's just a Linux box, you can do anything that you can on any other Linux machine (including install Windows).
Linux more or less runs most Windows games. The ones that don't run are ones where the developer is going out of their way to make them not run - mostly with kernel-mode anti-cheats that just find themselves staring at the wrong kernel.
Steam makes that pretty seamless and Steam games "just work". For non-Steam games you need to do some tinkering, it's stuff that most people browsing this forum can do.
I like the idea, but I am worried that it's yet another step on the road towards personal multi-purpose tower PCs built part by part no longer being a thing.
For some reason I never considered this route, despite following the PS5 Linux developments... is there a specific reason that the XSX is harder to homebrew than the PS5?
It would be incredible to convert my dusty XSX to a linux box
Honestly, it seems pretty enticing for a PC-just-for-gaming-but-not-a-“gaming-PC”, if you get my meaning.
I have no need for it right now, but when the next big Windows-only game comes out, it’ll be pretty tempting. (The last Windows gaming I did was when The Elder Scrolls Online came out…)
I've built my own PC several times and am a hardcore Linux enthusiast.
However at this point in my life, the best gaming experience i get is from XBox live/online subscription. I got to the browser, click on a game and start playing without caring for anything else. The most complicated thing i have to do is connect an Xbox gamepad for games that require it (I prefer keyboard +mouse whenever possible).
I wish Steam had something like that for the games I've bought. I've got several games in the library, I cant play some of them because currently I have a Mac m4.
What is the appeal of Steam Machine as a dedicated gaming device? Isn't it going to be old in a few years and then you have to get rid of it because upgrading components isn't a viable option? Isn't that quite the opposite of anything that deserves to be associated with them term "hacker"?
> Isn't it going to be old in a few years and then you have to get rid of it because upgrading components isn't a viable option?
I expect to get the rest of this decade out of my Steam Deck so IDK, very different to my normal expectations for a computer. The Steam Deck also defines a floor that will allow compatible games to be very performant on the Steam Machine so I think that will help the Steam Machine have a decent lifespan.
I also think on some level we need to start resigning ourselves to getting 10+ years out of our computers!
Compact, convenient, console-like experience that pulls games from your existing steam library. Same niche as a normal console, just not locked down in the same sense. If it weren't for the price I'd consider one, but I'd rather limp along my existing systems for as long as possible (and it sounds like SteamOS support for broader systems is improving).
With current hardware prices, I'm not sure it'll be 'old' in gaming terms in a few years. I'm expecting the PS6 to be only a moderate upgrade over the PS5, not arrive for another year at least, and probabky take 5 years to overtake the PS5.
I doubt anyone's associating the Steam Machine with the term "hacker". The "hacker" type crowd already game on Linux, they're not the target audience here. This is for the normies, for people who want to play PC games with a console-like experience, without any hassles of manual setup and tweaking that the hacker crowd normally are into.
Honestly, it seems overpriced (as expected). But it's much smaller than PS5 and according the first reviews it runs much cooler. Still not my cup of tea.
I have doubts in their reservation process, though. I signed up for the controller reservation as soon as it started (after they just gave the first batch to scalpers) and it was mentioned that they prefer genuine accounts. My account is over 22 years old at this point and has regular transactions going on. Countless games with countless hours, almost daily activity. I even got the Index back in the day and still use it.
Anyway, upon registration I was informed that my account was "not eligible". You are welcome, I guess.
It is immutable and has versioned image releases (unlike Arch, which is mutable and rolling release).This adds stability, makes the system less prone to breakage, and easy to rollback (factory reset).
Ans of course, the biggest visible difference is that this boots directly into Steam big-picture mode, where you operate the UI using a controller (although it does support KB+mouse), which makes it ideal to use connected to a TV, like a regular gaming console.
SteamOS is highly customized and managed by Valve. It doesn't have the Arch repos or pacman. Updates to the OS come from Valve in large releases rather than per package. All apps installed either come through Steam or Flatpak.
So it's Arch in the same way Android could be called Linux.
Yup it is Arch Linux, that basically boots into Steam client with Big Picture mode. And if you switch to desktop mode you get a standard Linux with KDE Plasma desktop environment.
1050$ I am very sad about the price. Like orders of magnitude sad.
I would have hoped for ~600$ with the economic realities maybe 800$, but 1000$+ just feels like too much doesn't valve have like a multi-billion dollar muscle couldn't the folks make it a tad cheaper...
I guess we can only blame the current market conditions at the end of the day.
I don't think the goal here is to necessarily sell a bunch of hardware units, but to create a new product category of devices which buy games from steam, like the steam deck did with handheld gaming PCs.
I don't think we could ever expect a specific gaming PC to compete with the volume sold of gaming consoles that have exclusives people really, really want to play.
Disappointing to see the release and still no implementation of multi-user sign on for local multiplayer games (like all true consoles).
As I noted when announced, it's something that doesn't get headlines, but a real barrier for enjoyment for a console-like PC. Hate being stuck with 'guest 1' and 'guest 2' or whatever. Many games want each player to progress and without true multi sign on, it just doesn't work. Hence games dropping local multiplayer on PC.
A question for both developers & gamers – why are we continuing to push hardware capacity upward to untenable costs? 2013 games are awesome, I still play them. Why not continue targeting that capability and sell $250 consoles instead of $1250 consoles?
The problem is that the market has basically bifurcated. In the Indie space, people want novelty, and that's too risky for AAA (even 10 year old AAA) scale games. Over in the modern AAA space, you've got a more reliable user base (in that they're more eager to buy slight changes to the same game over and over), but you're competing more on "Wow" factor. And ever-better graphics have been a pretty easy way to convert investment into "wow", without much risk (compared to changing game mechanics more, which might kill your golden goose).
I find it far more plausible that AI-assisted game dev will help indies catch up in scale to 10 year old AAA than the modern AAA studios deciding to throw in the towel on the graphics arms race.
Valve could have made a $2-$3K rig that outperforms other consoles for 4K gaming but I'm glad they didn't. It's genuinely unfortunate the components market went crazy at the same time.
I hope this and the steam deck-likes continue to be successful and incentivize developers to optimize their games for last-gen and portable hardware. I think the "steam deck compatible" certification has already been fairly good for that.
My 2021 machine is still more powerful (apart from the GPU maybe, but that one is from 2022 and has 12GB memory) and I can't justify buying this for that amount.
Would've loved to have a dedicated machine for gaming, but alas.
One disappointment: you have to have already made a purchase, which doesn't help if owning a Steam OS machine is the first time you will be buying and playing anything from Steam.
I really don’t get the bellyaching about the price. They are going to sell as many of these as they can make, so there is no sense in subsidizing the price. Maybe in the future they will, especially if Windows continues on it’s current trajectory.
DOA lol, I built a computer 6 years ago for less with 64GB of DDR5. I can't imagine anyone buying this. Maybe they can hold out for 5 years and add some more ram and sell it for 25% in true Steam fashion.
Sorry Valve. I know its not really your fault but I refuse to give you my money this time. Instead I'm executing plan B: converting my Steam Deck into a workstation. It's the best hardware I have and while it can't play everything smoothly what it can run well is practically endless.
The Japan situation is so fucking weird. Why can I only buy Steam hardware from a website that someone seems to have set up on a weekend, and where half the inventory is out of stock…?
Small, quiet, underpowered and some games you can’t play because of stupid kernel level anti cheat and expensive. Not quite DOA but not the hyped thing I was looking for.
Man...I'm certainly glad a happened to build a gaming beast rig in January of 2025. The RAM alone (64GB DDR5) would cost nearly as much as the entire rig now.
Yeah I can feel you. I built mine just a few months before that terrible "AI" slop bubble scam hypte started. The only mistake I regret now is that I only went with 32 GiB of memory and said to myself I can upgrade later to 64 GiB if I need more. Well luckily most of the time I don't but yeah sometimes it could come in handy. Not for games but for other work. Ah well, still happy I was lucky to do it before the AIpocalypse
I hope they will release a version with a replaceable CPU and GPU. For a company that does so well on repair ability I don’t understand why they solder everything on the board. I prefer a mini-ITX system where I can easily change the components.
Thanks to Valve, I've now been using Omarchy as my operating system for months now. Gaming just works on Linux now. It's crazy, used to be a pipe dream!
I'm buying the Steam Machine as well to game on the couch. Give me 4k 60fps and that's all I need. The Steam Controller is also fantastic shape on my hands, very comfortable.
Gaming just works for me with Steam and Ubuntu. Steam no longer filters out Linux games to its own category, it simply assumes most games work now (and they do!).
I know they will sell, but at this price point I don't understand who is supposed to be the target for this.
Either you want a gaming computer, and you'll get a much better one that can be upgraded in the future for the same price, or you want a console, and you'll never pay a grand for it.
I'll probably buy one. It's small so it fits under my TV, fits in with my furniture. Since it's all vertically integrated I know I can just connect it to the TV and it'll boot quickly and work well, and it has all my Steam games. I value my time and lack of frustration more than a few hundred dollars.
I want a simple UNIX workstation that "just works". Apple broke this promise to me with Tahoe, where horrific design decisions compounded the bugs on essential peripherals (Tahoe began spinning up and down my external raid array to sleep constantly, for no reason, making extremely loud noises as the drives repeatedly if it's idle, forcing me to constantly touch files in a while loop over dozens of partitions -- also I have a few petabyte of storage and it now takes ages to mount every reboot, as now with Tahoe Spotlight indexing is done as part of the mounting process and I can't opt out of this behavior and I'm in a warzone where power outages necessitating shutdowns are frequent). I have since used a docked Steam Deck as my daily driver and everything I want just works! It's now my UNIX desktop OS of choice. I've been on the Mac since OS X but Tahoe was so bad that now I consider an operating system designed for wasting time gaming a more serious and less disruptive option to my daily workflow. Heck of a job you're doing, Tim Apple!
I think there's a middle ground of people who just are not interested in building or upgrading a gaming computer (or just don't like their typical form factor in the ready to go out of the box gaming PCs) but also don't want the completely closed off ecosystem of a console.
I think if the Xbox ended up being more like the Steam Machine (i.e. more like a PC) then this middle ground that the Steam Machine sells to would probably go away as I don't think the group of folks who care that it's Linux based is high enough to support production.
I thought about it, but don't think I'll push the button. I have a falcon nw gaming rig in my living room right now running windows / steam big picture and an NVIDIA 3060Ti -- and it's .. fine, but long in the tooth. I wouldn't mind a more console-ish hardware experience for steam gaming, and compared to a new falcon box, this thing is cheap. I experimented with just running SteamOS on the falcon hardware a few years ago, but it was a little fussy, and I wanted to also use the system for local inference, and, and, and.
All that said, I don't think this is a good value. I'm presuming if I did a little work SteamOS 3 would be workable for me, and I have significantly more RAM, and possibly a better GPU? Not exactly sure where the GPU falls out, but I definitely believe I could buy a better GPU for less than the new box.
If it gets preferred shipment for the controller, you could buy it and sell the box and keep the controller. :) I think my controller ship date is estimated in 2027 right now.
Prebuilt machines have a terrible reputation, I could see people wanting this for a PC that you don't need hardware expertise to boot up. If you're reading this you could probably pick out your own parts and assemble them for cheaper, but for people who want a console-style plug-and-play type experience I could see the market for it.
Pricey, but so is any other sort of electronic entertainment hardware these days.
do you know fans or people who don't like to tinker computers?
take a sip at GamingOnLinux community... they don't seem to care about stuff running perfectly on Proton and not natively or that Gabe is buying another 600 million USD yatch. they love the Steam ecosystem more than developers crafting games and abiding to 30% of fees that are a clear sign of monopoly power
I wanted a gaming computer (read: an airgapped system that I could install arbitrary software on without fear), and I was sick to death of Microsoft's bullshit and resolved to never buy a Windows machine again, so I've been using a docked Steam Deck as my main gaming rig. It's performed far better than I imagined on the software side (has never failed to run any game in my library, though some have required minor settings tweaks), though the hardware is a little on the lighter side, which is perfectly acceptable for a handheld, but if the Steam Machine had been available at the time I'd probably have gone for that instead.
I feel like there's a midrange of "not particularly techy" gamers who will strongly appreciate - "I don't care about putting anything together, I just want to place PC games like a console."
I bet at least 90% of people buying this connect it to WiFi and never think about connection speed again!
Personally... my internet is only 300 Mbps. My WiFi connection is roughly on par with 1GbE. I have a very small pool of 2.5GbE capable devices, but overall I'm just not fussed about making the switch.
i'm in, i think prices are gonna suck anyway, i own a playstation and that shit sucks, i want to do more couch co-op with my partner and the steam library opens up so much indie games
For comparison - cloud gaming such as Nvidia's Geforce NOW is at ~20$/mo for 4k resolution with a monthly subscription one can cancel anytime.
That's what, ~4-5 years of gaming on a superior GPU without the headaches of hardware failures or upfront cost of 1000$?
Yikes Valve. The only folks buying gaming PCs these days are people eeking out an advantage in competitive 3D shooters or folks unaware of how far cloud gaming has come.
Cloud gaming is nowhere near the same experience as playing locally. There are a lot of games where milliseconds matter; it's big enough for me and my friends to try Geforce NOW and say, "No, this isn't good enough for a lot of games." You are kind of saying, "the bus only costs $4 a day, that's 30 years of using a car."
No matter how superior the GPU, the latency from streaming will never be able to compete if you're outside of a major hub.
I couldn't imagine playing a game by streaming inputs to a server 30ms away, which then streams those inputs another 30ms to the game server, and then having that round trip.
Wow that LTTlabs article was damning. The language is optimistic but this thing can’t possibly move steamdeck-numbers of units at $1100+ with that performance. DOA if you ask me.
Honestly tempted to buy a couple for relatives, who do some phone gaming and one who owns a 3DS they use, and see if they find anything interesting in PC gaming. Also make it a decent media center of course too.
Last I checked the idle power consumption of the BC-250 was on the higher side to make me not want to use it as a media center, though that could be my PSU. No hardware decode/encode (yet) either.
And lack of DRM makes a PC in general a mediocre experience for official streaming services if you want more than 720p streaming. If you care about that.
I got impatient waiting for the Steam Machine to come out and grabbed a BC-250 on ebay that was already set up with a case, fan, and power supply. Works great for reasonably demanding games (CONTROL, Elden Ring, etc.).
Now that I see the final price of the Steam Machine, I'm gonna be recommending the BC-250 more strongly.
Are you using the stock cooler? I’m going with an AIO for the APU, but I worry that the little heatsinks I’m planning for the VRMs aren’t going to cut it.
Circa 2013 you could get a Steam Machine (made by Alienware/Dell) - the Alienware Alpha - for something like $300. Granted they were clearing them out at that time, but $300 was a no-brainer when consoles cost about the same and had significantly weaker hardware.
Now we're expected to pay almost 2x the cost of a current-gen console for what is probably near-identical console performance? Doesn't make sense. I appreciate Valve being in the hardware business and I understand that inflation/the AI bubble are hurting PC components but a grand for this is a terrible value. I mean let's see what the benchmarks look like, but "Semi-custom AMD Zen 4 6C / 12T" sounds like what's in the PS5 and Xbox One. Actually those have 8C/16T CPUs.
The 2013 Steam Machine is as different from this device as it could possibly be. Proton didn't exist back then and Steam Input was still in (relative) infancy.
> Why a randomized reservation order? [...] we wanted to create a system that would be less frustrating and more fair for everyone. A launch that starts at a specific day and time tends to reward bots, people with fast internet connections, talented gaming fingers for quick F5/refresh reactions, and those who can schedule their life around that moment. By accepting reservation signups over the course of a few days, without any incentive to be first, we're hoping to take away some of that friction.
This is nice.
Yeah, this is a promising solution to scalping. Previously, if you had only small numbers of consoles available at launch, scalpers and their bots would claim a large share of them. With Valve's new policy, that share is reduced to s/g, where s is the number of verified Steam accounts controlled by scalpers and g is the number of legit gamer accounts. Since s is likely to be much less than g, s/g is close to zero, and scalping is dramatically curtailed. Almost all of the initial batch of consoles will go to legit gamers.
I've never understood why anti-scalpers just don't work backwards from shipping address. Are these scalpers all really keeping hundreds of actual physical addresses they can receive packages at? Like if you see the limited product has 100 orders going to the same building, or apartment, or whatever then flag it before it goes out. Limit PO Boxes, etc.
Sure they can find mules to buy+receive one and then sell to the scalper, but the more steps you put in the better. Same for the people scamming Sam's club by buying memberships, ordering limited items, then refunding the membership. Just lock orders to members older then >1yr and make sure it only ships to the actual physical address attached to the membership. Flag multiple memberships at the same address.
I've run a modest shipping op and the second I saw even a couple orders of the same product going to the same address I would halt it and do additional verification.
so i think you're a bit off. it's s/g but g is legit accounts who want to buy the steam machine.
we could say it's 5000 scalper accounts, and 50000000 gamer accounts. but it's not 5000/50000000, it's like 4500/20000. which isn't bad! but scalpers will still be way over-represented, because they'll be trying to buy it when most steam accounts won't.
now one fuzz factor is the queue system, as you're not putting down money to get in line i expect a lot of people who wouldn't otherwise sign up will, in case they decide to buy one when given the chance. so we might have 40000 gamer sign ups, but only 50% will pull the trigger. this also gives scalpers an out should the resale not be worth it.
(obviously all numbers made up)
This is also possible because they are only selling through their website, while other consoles go through retailers. I'd actually prefer a retailer just for doing this over one that was first come first serve.
Fusion Festival (happening this week), aka European Burning Man (but not exactly) does this.
Does it solve scalping? It seems like there is still money in sighing up with the goal to resell. Granted this is better in that I don't have to race the scalpers.
Till the sales price matches the market value scalping will exist. The best way to address that is a vickery auction. Till then scalping will continue.
> scalpers and their bots would claim a large share of them
Is there any actual data on this? I know people don't like scalpers but I wonder what the actual percentage is.
I would be careful granting that s is less than g. There are lots of incentives other than scalping for people to create extra illegitimate accounts on Steam, and one individual can often control hundreds of bots, whereas a legitimate user almost never has more than one or two accounts.
Japan has done this for concert tickets for years. It works great.
Scalping? What kind of scalping market will there be at these prices?
It's surprising that the whole Western world is discovering the threat of organized or scripted scalping just now, when it's been a problem in places like Japan for over a decade. Account age requirements, lotteries, quick subject matter quizzes to chase away hired line-sitters, hidden ID code on tickets to ban scalpers on auction site pics, randomized queues for sales page etc etc has all been in use for years. It's been so commonplace that various city-run COVID free vaccine programs had different forms of them.
Scalping is much easier to solve, people just wouldn't like it: Lock the device to the purchasing Steam account for a year.
So what you’re saying is we should see an increase in account hijacks and spamming account creation as scalpers now try to optimize for max s.
Show me the incentive structure and…
Scalping is a good thing, because it gets consoles in the hands of those who want them the most, as evidenced by willingness to pay.
Interesting, as it sounds like a lottery reservation system, which is kinda a neat way to deal with many issues.
I'm always supprised that companies don't do a tiered price release, offer it at 200% price, you get it, 150%, you lower down the list and then 100% lottery time, that way they gain from those who can afford to pay more(maybe able to subsidise other sales later and price cuts down the line). Why feed scalpers when you can coin it directly and then offer a lower price to those who are prepared to wait a few more months or so.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sortition
In governance, sortition is the selection of public officials or jurors at random, i.e., by lottery, in order to obtain a representative sample.[1][2][3]
In ancient Athenian democracy, sortition was the traditional and primary method for appointing political officials, and its use was regarded as a principal characteristic of democracy.[4][5] Sortition is often classified as a method for both direct democracy and deliberative democracy.
In my limited experience of seeing Dutch auctions in practice it actually has the opposite of the intended effect, as the people that are willing to pay the highest are also the people that will have a way to profit, just on a lesser scale.
For example, Panini (sports card manufacturer) did Dutch auctions on boxes of new card sets during the peak of pandemic collectible mania. The majority of customers that were willing to pay the highest prices on Panini's website were card breakers, which are people/companies that sell "spots" in livestream box openings (i.e. customers buy the right to all cards containing players from a certain sports team before the box is opened).
While it sounds nice in principal, it basically just means cashed up people get it first. But there is also the fun side of it becoming a status symbol I guess. Drive up future demand.
It also reduces the DDoS effect of telling all your customers to repeatedly hit your web servers at a specific day & time.
I would be curious how the public would react to a Dutch auction, where Valve launches the console at a $10,000 price tag, and every ~hour drops the price by $100 until they are sold out. It creates the illusion that buyers are "breaking the line" when buying high, so it's their fault (not valves) for the high selling price. This would also eliminate scalpers.
The problem with a dutch auction is if you don't know how a dutch auction functions, it looks like you're getting royally screwed. That's why they're usually reserved for professional settings.
This basically makes the vendor the scalper, and the public would react accordingly.
> This is nice
But this is not nice:
> This item is not available for purchase in your region
I moved to New Zealand recently from the US and am now seeing that everywhere. A lot of the time some local ecommerce platform imports the Australian version of most electronics with a markup, but we don't have official retailers for a lot of products, most notably Pixel phones. Also no Apple stores, though there are official retailers for Apple products.
> Why a randomized reservation order?
Lies, they just want to protect themselves from the German Tank Problem [0] type of analysis.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_tank_problem
> they just want to protect themselves from the German Tank Problem type of analysis
How could you estimate that when they don't let you know your position in the queue (with or without randomisation)?
> we'll send you an email with the option to purchase. You'll then have 72 hours to complete the purchase.
I thought about this, and can not tell if you are being serious or not. I can see arguments for either.
I would love to see a generalized FOSS reservation system that could be used for just about anything that would help address the issues Valve listed. It could be as simple as a short lived deployment (1,3,7,14 days) that writes out the entries to a Google Sheets. I have encountered so many people trying to come up with their own approach to this problem that I think it would be worth solving. Maybe I can find time to work on it later this year.
Seems weird to base a FOSS reservation system on... Google Sheets?
Would love to know if you decide to work on this, or if otherwise, want to collaborate. feel free to email me hello@mannan.is - or maybe I'll begin work on this before you and we can share notes
edit: I don't particularly care for Google Sheets, just the idea of solving the underlying problem.
This is how tickets for sports and concerts should always be sold.
Entertainment tends to compare with airline tickets, except that with air travel, there are regular flights and competition. There is no such thing as a single flight from Paris to New York on one Saturday at 9pm on a window of a few years.
This would also be a very good idea for university course selection systems
Exactly, get the devices in the hands of real users instead of ebay traders trying to get rich.
That's pretty cool!
I am more surprised there's people lining up to buy this when it's genuinely cheaper to get a used PC off a local marketplace. I feel like this is unnecessary as I am pretty sure they'll be able to fill it in one shipment.
People value convenience differently.
A huge number of people would rather pay a few hundred bucks more to have a plug and play appliance with a warranty from a reputable company show up on their doorstep. They don’t have to learn anything about hardware, or how to install Linux. It just works.
Some people are happy to save the money and take the risk on used hardware.
The Steam Machine is for the former, Steam the platform is for the former and the latter.
I get to support people that are very involved in making sure that a long list of x86 win32 software that I want to be able to run plays well with linux and osx (not-quite-directly, but the crossover folks are on it) - regardless of whether it's on steam or not. Plus general linux desktop work in the "make games play well" department.
Meanwhile, MS is trying to push copilot again.
if i was 10 years younger, sure I’d build my own. my roommates and i build our own gaming PCS, router, nas, home theater pc, we ran our own ethernet through the house. we ran openbsd on the router and freebsd on the nas, for fun.
i’ve changed. i really do not want to spend any extra time on yak shaving outside the job.
i am happy to pay $1500 for someone i trust with a fantastic track record to do it for me. plus its so cute!!! it will look great in my new apartment with the red faceplate. most gaming things are not cute.
In Australia, it wouldn't even need to be a used PC. The Steam Machine is $1600 AUD here, you can get a brand new gaming PC for that. Not a particularly amazing machine of course, but you can walk into a shop and buy it right now.
It is neither cheaper or easier to get this build?
For €1039 you can even get a mini-ITX PC that fits nicely in your living room. Install SteamOS to get a similar experience. Only thing you will not get is the HDMI CEC functionality.
Living in Japan, most popular concerts are handled this way. It really really sucks to not get a ticket, and it sucks even more that we need to do it this way because of scalpers. But hey, if it means I overall have a better chance of getting tickets (at list price at that), hey, I guess it is worth it.
I wish there were better ways of defeating scalpers.
It's not worse than a traditional launch, but it's also not much better. Make 1,000 Steam accounts, which are entirely free, and you get 1,000 times more chances of getting one than others.
To be fair I don't think they'll be scalped a lot because the price isn't attractive already and alternatives are plenty.
The account has to have bought something on steam before April 27th. They also are verifying addresses via the accounts.
> Are there any criteria for signing up?
> Customers must meet the following criteria to be able to sign up:
> You must have a Steam account in good standing.
> You must have made a purchase on Steam prior to April 27th 2026.
> Limit one signup per household. We will use payment method, shipping address, and other information to eliminate multiple entries.
>You must have made a purchase on Steam prior to April 27th 2026.
>Limit one signup per household. We will use payment method, shipping address, and other information to eliminate multiple entries.
Seems like they have chosen some reasonable options here. 2 months ago having purchase and trying to detect households. Likely also including phone number, Steam Guard client and family sharing.
Steam accounts newer than April do not qualify, plus I think you need to have spent at least $5 to qualify for the reservation queue (i.e. not community limited)
Do you really think a fresh steam account will have equal footing? I'd be surprised if that was the case.
Even Nintendo has been setting fairly strict requirements to pre-order some of their products, like requiring 50 hours of playtime on the original switch to pre-order the Switch 2
I don't get why companies don't take advantage of the demand.
For example: Start the bidding at BASE_PRICE (BP) + 2400. Then reduce the price by $1 every 3mins over the course of 5 days. Until the BP is met and then just carry on queuing.
You could buy it early if you want it that much or just wait an extra couple of days and end up in the queue at the BP.
I don't know if it would create pressure on that second it ticks over to the BP, so then its BP+1 - well I guess the nash equilibrium would be pushed up.
Holy fuck, not everything in this life needs to be profit maximized.
Because it damages the brand and many people will remember the product as being heavily overpriced and never come back.
Because public image matters. Steam has built a reputation for being customer friendly. Coming up with a Byzantine pricing system for your highly anticipated new hardware will not be well received by the steam users. The extra short term earning will be a drop in the bucket compared to what steam is already making from taking 30% off most game sells, but the reputation damage will linger forever.
The funny thing is, someone paying $3,400 for a Steam Machine would be an idiot.
Internally, it's equivalent to a mid-grade PC from 2018. You're not playing AAA games in 4K on this thing.
Because they want to maximize longterm profitability and believe (which makes sense to me) this approach would harm that
because the less wealthy get mad about it
Because long-term this destroys goodwill.
Most companies need customers that don't hate their guts, that's why they don't do this
> Steam Machine, like our other hardware products, is made up of many components that we source from manufacturers around the world. The price at which we sell our hardware is a direct result of the cost of these components. We felt like we had a good understanding of how those costs might change over time when we first started sourcing them for Steam Machine back in 2023. That understanding was born from the many years of data we all have about the evolution of PC hardware prices – primarily, that it tends to get cheaper over time as new technology arrives.
> Over the past year or so, that has changed quickly and significantly, most visibly for RAM and storage components. There are a variety of reasons, all of which are affecting hardware products everywhere. The overall effect is that our original goal for the price of Steam Machine is no longer viable. So the prices we're sharing today reflect the state of the world for manufacturing; or, more accurately, it reflects the price of the components as we've secured them over the past 6 months.
Take notes about the tone, the communication style, the honesty that you can feel by reading those words. There are no problem that can’t be alleviated (if not solved) with good communication to your customer, and you can bet that Steam knows damn well theirs!
Valve's communication around this release has redirected all rage towards Sam Altman rather than the Steam Machine.
That's the beauty of the "There are a variety of reasons" part, whatever you believe to be the reason, Valve seems to agree with you, biases or not.
The "rage" is largely surrounding the price, not the Machine hardware itself. The Deck sold like hotcakes at $400.
We'll see actual outrage when the masses defer new smartphone upgrades due to price bumps.
Don't forget Trump and Hormuz!
Most of the general, watered down tone of Corporate America that we love to hate comes from the legal department, usually at the late-stage point when they make all the decisions in a company: product, business, launches, strategy, direction, etc. Everything needs to run through legal, and they have a final say on everything, including every public communication.
That's why I'd love an interview with Steam's legal head. Sounds like they'd have some wild stories to share.
I have a feeling it would have cost drastically less if we didn't have a RAM / storage crisis, which is really sad.
The original price should have been in $700-800 range, pre-RAM and storage pricing escalation, which would have changed the equation drastically. I even considered getting it as a mostly streaming box for a living room, intending to play only the lighter games on device. But for the announced price and after delays, it just doesn't make sense financially. As is, you're grossly overpaying for the level of GPU performance Steam Machine offers.
I’ve seen from a couple of places that a valver has commented that they can’t say exactly what the original price goal was, but that you can get an idea from the price increase of the steamdeck (~$200 usd)
That wouldve put the steam machine somewhere around the $800 mark for the base edition, which would’ve been so, so much sweeter of a value proposition.
there's probably ~$150 in the ram and ~$100 in the SSD alone, not to mention everything else. we gotta have data-centers though because, uh.. well, we gotta have em.
This is why Apple locks in supplier prices years in advance.
Apple is also an absolutely enormous company. Even if Valve wanted to lock in prices, they're simply too small for RAM manufacturers to notice on their radar, unfortunately.
Computer hardware prices tend to go down over time so in general this is a pretty bad strategy. Of course in rare times like these it can pay off.
That would only works until it doesn't. The suppliers got supplier too and those in turn have their own supplier. I don't know about any specific contract but I bet there's a force majeure or price excluding input cost somewhere.
I love it
I won’t buy it
But wow what a nice communication
That’s gonna look great on post mortem report
> There are a variety of reasons, all of which are affecting hardware products everywhere.
I'm pretty sure the price increase is exclusively caused by LLMs.
Is that the coupon code that brings it down to a competitive price?
I totally get where they’re coming from but sadly it doesn’t change the fact that $1100+ is a tough sell for the benchmarks they’re hitting.
They know it's a tough sell. Fortunately for everyone in the market, you can still find used CPUs/GPUs/RAM pretty easily and save a decent amount if you're ok with building your own.
Valve doesn't need this to do well to survive. And you don't need a steam machine (or any >$1000 machine) to play PC games. Just wait it out or buy used hardware. Hell, even an rog ally x plays just about anything (and also supports steamOS), and you can still get that at reasonable prices.
Given the price of components right now, I don’t know. 1k for that small of a form factor seems acceptable. It’s a nice addition to the living room, could likely play a role in cancelling expensive video streaming subscriptions. Might also run some local LLMs. Seems decent.
Still, how does a PS5 cost half, and arguably, has better/fast hardware? I can't imagine Sony selling them at a loss.
The PS5 can only play games that you pay Sony a tax to play. The steam machine can play any game, including those bought outside Steam and thus without paying valve a tax.
This means the PS5 is subsidised, whereas Valve hardware does not tend to be. They have confirmed that internally all divisions must be roughly profitable/break-even.
Why can’t you imagine it? The console makers have been selling at a loss for 3 maybe 4/5 decades.
Edit: looks like it took 10 million PS5s to break even. The article is 5 years old I wonder if it’s true in 2026.[2]
> The existing industrial arrangement at the time was that of a bundled console-plus-cartridge business model, where the console manufacturer (say, Atari with its VCS/2600) sold the console at a loss and cross-subsidized it with the money made on cartridges sold with a huge profit margin.[1]
[1] https://thereader.mitpress.mit.edu/how-nintendo-bled-atari-g...
[2] It took Sony years to stop losing money on PS3 sales, but the company stopped selling the PS4 at a loss around six months after its debut in 2013. The PS5 has taken ever so slightly longer, but it’s clearly not repeating the costly exercise of the PS3 despite early reports suggesting Sony was struggling with PS5 pricing due to expensive parts.
[2] https://www.theverge.com/2021/8/4/22609150/sony-playstation-...
The base PS5 does not have better hardware. Though the PS5 Pro outperforms the Steam Machine and is still cheaper than it..
They were originally sold at a loss, then became per-unit profitable at some point, and now they might be eating a loss on them again. But they lock in hardware prices years in advance.
PS5 has a lot parts in high volumes negotiated years in advance so they can leverage lower prices than valve. Valve ships like 10% max of the volumes that Sony sells.
I am pleased to see hardware not being locked down as a selling point:
> Yes, Steam Machine is optimized for gaming, but it's still your PC. Install your own apps, or even another operating system. Who are we to tell you how to use your computer?
It feels very commonsense that you should be able to run whatever you want on the computer that you have purchased, but it is surprisingly uncommon.
Valve gets it. I very much want to support them and vote with my wallet. Unfortunately the Steam machine isn't a good fit for me. I will buy the frame in a heartbeat though. HMD with a FOSS OS? That's in its own class.
Even though I balked at the Steam Deck prices on the recent inventory restock, as they were up ~30% presumably due to the same hardware shortages, I got one anyway. Prices won't drop anytime soon and if any for-profit organization has earned my loyalty, its Valve.
When I used it I was somewhat incredulous that I could simply exit Steam mode have an actual Linux desktop environment, where I could literally do what I wanted. It was my computer, a proper general purpose computing machine, and it was (willingly* in my control. No sneaky root needed.
Color AR is a thing Frame doesn't support so sadly it's behind the times and I can't go back
And yet Steam Controller somehow only works with Steam...
One can still be a billionaire and not use shady tactics.
They need to do that because, in some sense, they're competing with Gaming PCs, not really with Gaming consoles. Gaming consoles sell their consoles at a discounted price because they can recoup a lot of it when selling games. Steam can't have a markup on games because they share their marketplace with other PCs.
Can you point me to any statement that any current console is being sold at a loss?
All I've seen is that everyone is doing at cost nowadays. The PS4 Pro was the last subsidized console.
Steam has a very high markup compared to its competitors like Epic Games Store.
You could still offer this, similar to the ad tier and ad free tier of a kindle, or a carrier locked phone.
$799 for a locked down version, $1049 for an unlocked version. Opportunity to pay $300 to unlock it later at any time. 5% discount on purchases on a locked device.
I would assume it also has to do with if not fundamentally manifesting from Steam being an organisation of technologists. They don't want to put out a project which has a worse operating system than their workstations.
I like that we can write the story that Microsoft sold their software with the home computer on the idea of productivity at home while the actual incentive was entertainment, and valve ends up justifying buying gaming hardware with the incentive that it can do productivity.
It's also convenient since they're now facing multiple anti-trust lawsuits.[1]
[1]: https://www.pcgamer.com/gaming-industry/dutch-non-profit-set...
That is why the frame will be the most interesting to the people on HN. A VR PC you can do whatever u want with.
At a price point of 10k if we extrapolate to its release.
Except without color AR it will not as many of the interesting things HNers want to do require it.
You can install whatever apk you want on your Oculus Quest.
And I like knowing that I will own the hardware long term. I have so many bricks at home with great hardware and locked boot loaders.
The urge to tear down the stack of cellphones I have and pull the boot flash chip hits me occasionally. It would be a substantial project, though, so I haven't done it. Yet.
I got a Steam Deck for my son. Docking it to an external monitor with mouse and keyboard in desktop mode is just running a nice desktop Linux with KDE Plasma by default. I showed him the basics and it's perfectly usable for his school needs. And he can still put it in his bag and play Skyrim on a train ride.
Reminds me of the PS3 and its OtherOS feature.
and it makes Steam Deck the best console ever made.
i picked up Darksiders 3 a few weeks ago to play on my deck. at some point i realized i was pretty underleveled but i didn’t wanna grind.
so, opened chatgpt in desktop mode and uploaded my save, asked it to write me a script to set my souls/xp/money to whatever number. it analyzed the save and spat out a bash/python script. after a chmod +x it worked flawlessly. done from bed took like 15 mins to figure it out end to end.
no other what other (handheld) console in history combines the depth of library, the slick console experience, and also lets you chmod +x.
Out of curiosity, why didn't you just ask chatgpt to modify the save file directly?
chmod +x makes it executable. Also, at this point just use a trainer
The steam deck is way too under-powered to be "the best console". Best handheld, maybe, if you really value portability.
That’s a depressing tale
You write this on the forum where often in apple-based topics folks here defend locked down system ie on phones for themselves as something actually superior. Its often paid PR or folks to deep in the topic to have objective opinions (or simply employees/shareholders) but still, I've had that talk few times and downvotes were flying left and right.
I’m fine with both. My phone and my “console experience that’s more open than an xbox” are wildly different scenarios, for which I have different needs and expectations.
There are alternatives for both, if/when I ever want them.
You’re comparing apples to oranges and complaining none of them are tomatoes. Not a valid argument by any stretch of the imagination.
I do hope they will release drivers for the Steam Machine, otherwise the openness isn’t very useful. Or at least make it possible for others to make drivers by publishing specifications.
Edit, reply to bjord as I am rate limited: HDMI CEC, the chipset, GPU drivers, controller receiver etc.
Edit, reply to robhlt: Thanks! Hope we can get that ported to Windows
For HDMI CEC they've already published their user-space daemon: https://gitlab.steamos.cloud/holo/linux-cec
drivers for what else, exactly? valve is already regularly upstreaming work in major open source linux drivers (and has been for a long time)
for example: https://www.phoronix.com/news/Valve-Old-AMD-Linux-Love-Song
I mean it's a PC, you can install whatever your want on a PC.
Yes, a Personal computer as opposed to Apple's computer.
Xbox Series S/X, PS5 and both Switches are pretty much commodity hardware.
Nobody has even hinted that it would be nice to have a 3rd party store or the ability to run whatever OS on them freely.
I keep wondering why.
Probably because it's very niche. Talking to many friends, and an increasing number of posts on various console subreddits, there's lots of comments from PC gamers that embraced the console life due to it's simplicity. This has increased since the PS5 Pro released - "Close to PC-level graphics, without the PC-level costs and mucking around with settings"
There is a certain appeal to this for many people that hacking it to run your own OS isn't really sought after.
I guess you weren't listening because all of them have healthy homebrew communities and people defeating the DRM.
I'm not sure if you're being dishonest or just ignorant of the console hacking scene.
I don't understand, what is so special about this?
They are selling a x86 PC. All x86 PCs sold by everyone are open and you can install whatever you want.
It's commodity hardware packaged into a small box. There is nothing special here.
Trying to sell it as it if Valve are more consumer friendly here is nonsense.
Every console on the market right now is locked-down proprietary garbage, that's the basic reality. The PlayStation 5, the Xbox One, they are also technically x86 PCs as they run on x86 processors, but they are specifically locked down to prevent any use outside of their narrow use cases that are optimized to make them money. Valve is really the only company that's developing proper consoles with a custom operating system and custom AMD chips while not locking down the hardware, despite the strong incentives of locking people into paying them 30% forever and preventing access to competing game stores
The PS5 and Xbox are also very close to being an x86 PC, but you're not installing your own OS on there even though there are few technical hurdles if the manufacturer removed the mechanisms to prevent that.
It supports HDMI CEC, it has a built in dedicated radio for the steam controller, it ships with Steam OS, and will receive support from Valve.
If you are comfortable building a custom PC and fixated on the spec sheet sure, it's not that exciting. But there are some rough edges with PC couch gaming that are sanded off with this machine.
> All x86 PCs sold by everyone are open and you can install whatever you want.
What exactly do you think an Xbox is? PS4 & PS5?
I think what's special here is:
1) Full compatibility with SteamOS. You won't have to fiddle with drivers/hardware/whatever to get it working[1].
2) The physical hardware is maximally condensed, more so than you'd be able to do yourself with a SFF build.
I'd have definitely considered this if I wasn't already doing my own SFF stuff. Gaming on the Deck is a delight and I'd love that console-esque experience for my primary gaming PC as well.
[1]: Incidentally, it looks like they're working on broader support. Sweet! https://www.theverge.com/games/953411/valve-steamos-desktop-...
I think it's because if it was someone else (e.g. Epic), they would have locked down the hardware and sold it like a console or smartphone where you can only install things from their app store.
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."
If you sampled 100 steam players at random, it would look nothing like that.
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.
Yeah those people are definetly not a realistic sample of the average Steam user. I wonder why they chose them in particular.
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") .
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.
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.
I don't get it. It's a quite typical commercial clip. Just perhaps less dramatic. What's special about that clip?
That's basically how I looked playing Cuphead with my wife except I think there was a bit more swearing coming from her
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.
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.
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.
For the inevitable minisforum machines comparisons - it's not as bad for Valve as it seems. You can't just add a dedicated GPU to a cheap miniPC with an integrated graphics- power delivery and airflow will have to be different, and you may be surprised to find out that even the cheapest mini PCs with dedicated graphics aren't significantly cheaper than a Steam machine (if at all).
And then my personal experience with these cheap no-brand mini-computers is that their Linux compatibility is spotty, BIOS updates are non-existend, quality control is severely lacking, and you have basically no support. They are also often pretty loud, overheat and die within a year or two. If something doesn't work properly, you are on your own- the manufacturer will have forgotten about this model in a couple of months, and user base is so low that it's unlikely someone will find a workaround.
So comparatively, a Steam Machine would be much preferable to me, considering that it will likely work out of the box with no compatibility issues, will have a typical valve support (which, judging by Steam Deck, is quite fair), is well-built and near silent.
The problem is once the price crosses a thousand, I'd rather add, say, 500 eur, and get a much more powerful machine. I see a point for the cheapest bottom of the barrel gaming pc/handheld (which would be 700-750) with many performance tradeoffs, but this doesn't look like a good enough upgrade from that. A 12+ GB RTX4070-class videocard, 24-32GB of RAM and maybe even an 8-core CPU for $1500+ would likely be more usable in the current market
> For the inevitable minisforum machines comparisons
It appears the Steam Machine is much more powerful than what a typical mini desktop pc would offer, while staying cool and quiet.
Gamers Nexus review: https://youtu.be/66QzlDewigE
>which, judging by Steam Deck, is quite fair
I love my Steam Deck but let's not forget that it took a solid 2-3 years for it to really become a somewhat turnkey, stable experience. They shipped it in a near-beta state. Flipping between gaming/desktop mode induced a fail state probably 30% of the time until a year ago, docking to TV's can still be very frustrating (aspect ratio and latency are almost always wonky until you tinker with it a fair bit) and isn't nearly as smooth a transition as with the switch, there used to be a VERY frustrating lockout where if your deck wanted to update and you weren't on your home network it wouldn't log in, just all sorts of really frustrating points of friction.
Again I love my deck, it's an incredible and capable device. But it was very clunky those first 2-3 years. It really only matured in the last 12-18mo or so. Hopefully the SM is a stronger experience day/week/month 1.
I want to buy one just to raise the signal that Linux support is important.
When these machines were announced I switched to Fedora as a daily driver on my high end gaming rig.
It’s been awesome. I still have to go back to Windows for music production unfortunately. I may switch to Mac for that so I can completely abandon Windows.
I run an optical HDMI cable from my office to my TV and get to play games and use Linux in 77”.
Something feels awesome about that.
The Steam Machines raises the bar on PC Console gaming.
Because:
- GPUs don't support HDMI CEC by default, nor does the operating system offer it
- Suspend mode on motherboards often suck
- Many game controllers with 2.4Ghz don't properly import USB Wake events. Or the motherboard didn't implement it properly
I see the Steam Machine as an expensive open source concept car that moves the needle for us PC gamers.
I also work in music production (for video games) and fully switched to Linux + FOSS about a year ago.
I'd say it is a lot more doable if you make electronic styles of music. Harder if you make classical styles, as many of the big sample libraries don't support Linux yet.
Just in case you're interested, here's a list of everything I use: https://johnoestmannmusic.com/tooling/
You are lucky. A lot of the games I play with friends use kernel level anticheat crap that doesn't work on Linux
It’s always fantastic to read a success story of migrating to Linux gaming from Windows. As Windows gets worse and worse there will be more people joining us.
Even without buying you can send Linux gaming signals by playing on Linux and participating in the hardware survey.
I too want to buy one to support the ecosystem, but sadly, Valve doesn't want me to.
> This item is not available for purchase in your region
Ditto.
I use Macs for work and PC for games, and this little box seems a good opportunity to play The Legend of Linux on a desktop or a couch, and make it true.
A much better way to raise that signal, is to use that money to buy native Linux games instead.
Let me guess, DAWs? Have you tried Reaper (FOSS) or Bitwig Studio (commercial)?
How do you use a controller with your TV? Do you route USB over there as well?
Please buy pinephone instead.
I imagine Valve Software wanted to release the Steam Machine for $549-$699. The great RAM hoarding of 2025-2026 killed this product on arrival sadly.
According to LTT the original price was in the $800 range, but thanks to Sam Altman it increased to what we saw today.
I bought my own version of a "Steam Machine" i.e. a mini-PC powered by an AMD APU for just €676 right before the RAM prices exploded.
It is an AOOSTAR GT37 which actually outclasses the €1,039 Steam Machine in most areas except graphics. One cannot blame Valve here though, the hyperinflation of RAM prices is too blame here.
AOOSTAR GT37 (€676 a few months ago [now vastly more expensive if you can still get one at all]) vs Steam Machine (€1039 right now)
CPU: 12x Zen 5 vs. 6 Zen4 Graphics: 16x RDNA 3.5 vs. 28 RDNA 3 RAM: 32 GB LPDDR5X vs. 16 GB DDR5 + 8 GB GDDR6 HDD: 1 TB vs. 512 GB (both NVMe-SSD)
I expect the Steam Machine to run graphically demanding FPS games quite a bit better due to the extra RDNA cores and faster VRAM. However it might actually be the inferior gaming machine for CPU/main RAM intense strategy or simulation games (e.g. Stellaris).
Plus GPU prices. They absolutely got screwed by their launch timing, unfortunately. And they’re not big enough to negotiate better terms though that probably isn’t really an option right now anyway.
I’m not sure I’d want this at $550, but maybe. At $1050 without controller it’s a solid no.
I’m sure some people will want it. I have no interest in maintaining a PC so if I wanted to play PC games this is probably how I would do it. But the price just absolutely kills it for me.
I don't know what you mean by 'killed.' It'd be sold out faster than hot cakes.
"killed" is a bit of a stretch. High prices on all gear is here to stay. This is the new normal. Unless that simply means that nobody buys consoles/pc's.
But you cant compare the price point with what it used to cost and imagine that its overpriced now and that people will seek alternatives. There aren't any cheaper alternatives.
I still think it's a great concept and a really accessible way to get a great computer. But I agree, I thought this was going to land in the $500 to $700 range. That said, I also bought a mini PC for $250, and that same PC is now going for $600. So I don't really think steam can be blamed for that
> killed this product on arrival sadly.
Rather odd to talk about an as yet unreleased product failing in the past tense.
Over $1000 for a machine with only half a terabyte of storage, especially for gamers, is just brutal.
Why dead on arrival though? If you want to buy the same kind of pc, price is the same.
You can buy a PS5, of course, but that's a different walled garden.
If you are in the market for a 3k pc, sure do it, but if you are in the market for a 1k pc, why not a steam machine?
I'm simply impressed they're releasing at all. This has to be literally the worst 6 month time window in the last 20+ years to launch a new computing device at scale and have to build the vendor contracts and inventory from zero.
I'd like to buy one, but its a bit pricey for those specs. $1600 AUD?
I respect what Valve is doing here and I loved the Steam Deck but a prebuilt desktop PC with 16 GB system memory and 512 GB storage for $1,000+ is insulting. Those are specs that belong on a laptop or a lowend console offering like the Series S.
I think this product is going to be hamstrung by its attempts to present as a midpoint between a PC and a console. The way this is being achieved seems to be by selling a device with the specifications of a console but the price tag of a PC.
Valve already did the "this is a lowend device and that's okay" thing with the Steam Deck, and got away scot-free because nobody expected a handheld and people didn't have a ton of preconceived notions. The Deck was also a better value since it was (prior to the price hike) priced reasonably for its specifications.
The desktop PC and/or living room console modalities are both significantly more stratified. People have solidly defined expectations about price-to-performance-to-usability ratios in both of these sectors, and I worry this doesn't go far enough in any particular direction to meet the demands of either market.
Leaves me wondering who exactly this is for.
I don't disagree that this device is very likely too expensive to sell well.
But! The price is not insulting. You can built a slightly faster PC for a little less, but that PC would be ~10 times larger, it would be louder, it would lack features like HDMI-CEC and good wifi/bluetooth. It really wouldn't compare for living room usage.
In order to get anywhere near the size of the Steam Machine, you'd have to exceed its costs.
This device does sit between mac-mini-esq lower power devices and compact enthusiast builds and, like the Steam Deck, it's an attempt to build a new segment. That said, if you think paying $1000 for this kind of hardware is some kind of exception, I think you should go take a look at what you can get on the prebuilt gaming PC market. You get a little less because the Steam Machine has a small footprint, but if you're looking for a nice little machine you don't overpay by much.
If you look at how extremely overpriced console hardware typically gets away with being, this is not a bad deal if the system is durable, relatively quiet and there are good games well optimised for it. The deal is sweetened by the fact that you will be eventually be able to upgrade the RAM and storage easily and for cheap if/when prices eventually come down from the current AI insanity levels.
Here, try your hand at assembling one much cheaper at the same performance:
https://pcpartpicker.com/
To me it's not even the comparison with builds that's damning; it's the comparison with handhelds and other mini PCs. Most people excited by this probably have a Steam Deck or another handheld, so they have to be into playing a very specific slice of games that can run slightly better than the handheld.
For example, Forza 6 on high 1080p is 60 for SM vs 40 for high end handhelds and 30 for SD. Even at the original price, is it really worth $750? Not to mention that many handhelds and mini PCs also have USB4 ports that one could attach a retired GPU to get 60fps+ @ very high 2k, but the Steam Machine has no such port and only one NVMe slot.
So this is for people who are allergic to the existing solutions (plugging in your handheld, using Moonlight) or just like the brand, but I know it's going to still sell out. I just don't want to hear about extensibility, eco-friendliness, or cost effectiveness from a certain segment of gamers after this.
People who are willing to spend $71 on not having to build it themselves. That's the premium according to GNs best-effort like-for-like build.
It's been a while since I built a PC but that price seems very fair
My 15 year old Mac Mini has the same amount of RAM as this machine in 2026. I bought it used around 7-8 years ago for 200 EUR.
The disk and memory prices are very high right now. Perhaps they could do a disk-less, memory-less variant.
> Those are specs that belong on a laptop or a lowend console offering like the Series S.
Unfortunately, valve (and we consumers) have to recalibrate our understanding of which prices qualify as "insulting".
For people who are already throwing money at Valve on a monthly subscription and might otherwise have bought something from Sony or Microsoft, or more likely, will also buy something from Sony or Microsoft.
The consumerist mindset accepts this device.
Nope. Just built a pc this Jan. Ram and GPU prices are insane.
This is what you get for the price. Maybe a 100-50 max difference.
I've been looking at building a TV box for a while and this was the number it was hitting
Who knows, maybe once the AI bubble has burst they will surprise us with a replacement mainboard for this second gen. If they want to keep it in sale as long as the Steamdeck it would make sense to offer gamers a simple way to upgrade their existing machine when Steam's ecosystem is already open to all sides. Maybe they'll even outsource that mainboard upgrade to ASUS, MSI or others. Once we see a teardown we can make a better prediction.
I blame Sam Altman and all the other AI bros for this and everything else in consumer tech increasing in price
The thing I'm most excited about here (other than Yay! Valve!) is that this will bleed towards making projects like Bazzite even better.
I know the price for PC parts is terrible these days, but $1049 for a 6-core 16GB RAM, with a 512GB SSD, and no controller, is a terrible value.
For reference, the PS5 Pro has more than twice the number GPU CUs, an 8-core CPU, a 2TB SSD, a controller, and costs $899.
The PS5 Pro has 16 GB unified memory, the Steam Machine is 16GB + 8GB. That'll be where some of the price difference comes from. But most likely comes from Sony locking in long term contracts before price insanity.
Different value props. The target audience for this already has an extensive Steam catalogue. To buy a PS5 Pro is going to require re-buying all of your games for it.
Also, you can build a decent PC for $1049, but getting it into a decent form/noise factor is going to ratchet that price up. Add in the proprietary CEC stuff that Valve has done for it and it's not as terrible as it seems.
Well, and you pay 120$/year for the privilege to play games online on that PS5. That is one of the reasons SONY can subsidize the PS5 unit price and sell under cost. Valve is not in that position, because people would buy it as office PC replacement.
PS5 sells at a loss & makes up the difference collecting rent on a closed system. With Steam you're buying an open system.
> For reference, the PS5 Pro has more than twice the number GPU CUs, an 8-core CPU, a 2TB SSD, a controller, and costs $899.
PS5 Pro had a launch price of $700, which already felt steep. How is $900 not even worse value? Even if it's "better" than the Steam Machine, let's not pretend that it's actually a good value for the hardware.
Not that it matters as much for a gaming console but the PS5 Pro CPU is definitely the slower one.
It makes more sense to focus on its value as a console platform than its price as a PC.
The lower the price, the more boxes sell, hopefully making the platform large enough for publishers to target.
The higher the price, the better specs the box can afford, increasing the platform's longevity.
The hidden value you don't see in the specs is that publishers will target this platform specifically for a certain amount of time.
For reference compare it to a PC.
Right, but it’s a PS5, not a PC - you’re paying less for the privilege of letting Sony 100% control what you use the device for, including not being able to play your own games that you’ve paid for. Try doing that on a PC. Try checking your email on your PS5, or steaming the media of your choice.
Can I serve my media library off of my NAS with the PS5? I am legit asking because I just got on the list hoping to use this thing as my home entertainment system
> For reference, the PS5 Pro has more than twice the number GPU CUs, an 8-core CPU, a 2TB SSD, a controller, and costs $899.
Will it run my Steam library of games or do I need to also pay 5000$ again with inflated prices?
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.
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).
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
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.
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....
Reviews are saying it’s actually similar to base PS5 in performance.
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.
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.
Playstation price is also increasing FYI
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
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
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
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.
A PlayStation 5 also requires you now to be online every so often (30 days?) for even your single player games.
More properly, this is competing with prebuilt gaming PCs, surely?
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.
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)
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!
So awesome. If I needed/wanted a gaming PC or "family TV" gaming machine, I'd snag this for sure. I've had the Steam Deck since launch and it's really quite well-executed and I've logged hundreds of hours on it. SteamOS is totally decent and the level of polish has been continually improved. The price for the Machine is totally acceptable considering the market currently, particularly considering these [0][1][2] would be my options if I had $1500 CAD to spend on a gaming PC right now -- all machines with 8gb VRAM GPUs and 16GB of RAM.
[0] https://www.memoryexpress.com/Products/MX00135058
[1] https://www.canadacomputers.com/en/armoury-gaming-desktops/2...
[2] https://www.canadacomputers.com/en/gaming-desktop-pcs/275404...
I understand why it costs that much, but it's too much.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not commenting on the value, but rather the markets ability to handle it.
Yeah. I don't think they're gouging, I totally understand how expensive RAM and storage and GPUs are, but...oof. I just can't justify it as a 'fun' purchase.
I mean, can the market really handle any of these prices? If we're truly stuck with these increasing prices for another year or so, whole sectors might get "restructured", including gaming, simply because people cannot afford the devices they depend on.
Yeah. But they’re only other choices to just sit on it for a few more years, which point they would need to put different hardware in and it would just increase costs.
This may be the best option of a couple of terrible ones.
Same, I could have maybe justified $600 to my wife, $800 would be really pushing it. But 1k+ with a controller? There's no way when we have other things to save for. I am sure young single people will still buy it and it will sell out, but my Series X was $550 a few years ago and ill enjoy that in my living room for a while longer.
I'm tempted even at this price.
I've tried various iterations of a gaming HTPC over the years, and they've all been pretty miserable. That lack of any reasonable or stable CEC solution this whole time so far has honestly been an oversized anchor this whole time. And I think Valve is doing a bit of a disservice not advertising it more.
Yep, and I feel many commenters in this thread are comparing value propositions only in terms of specs. I’ve built a number of Mini-ITX cases, from 5L to 20L, and they are a pain to work with and maintain. In some cases it’s impossible to make a reasonable filtered airflow, so dust builds up very fast, and a teardown to do clean up is pretty annoying. Steam Machine looks very straightforward to maintain. And it’s also tiny and quiet.
Same here, I know why it costs as much as it does, and that doesn't deter me. I want it for my living room, and to just mess around with. Will enter the lottery and hope my number gets picked!
I'm skeptical that they have working CEC. The steam deck, for example, does not. It also doesn't work reliably with many TVs. I'll believe it when I see it.
> who are we trying to tell you how to use your computer?
Valve is still great.
Yeah. Hope they never change.
Isn’t this industry standard? How many PCs have locked boot loaders?
Edit, reply to Rohansi as I am rate limited, I’m talking about gaming PCs not consoles.
I know many people keep pointing at PS5 as the competition, but I'll throw this in:
I can buy a game on PC and play it on the go, I don't have to buy anything else.
The Steam Deck+a PC places Steam in a different league than the PS5 (for now).
Nintendo Switch 2 is way closer, however the games are different (I don't love Nintendo games).
Finally for those of us with a big Steam library and kids, buying a Steam machine or a Steam Deck means I will spend ZERO on games (I can confirm)
Until the next Steam sale. Steam Summer Sale is coming up!
> The Steam Deck+a PC places Steam in a different league than the PS5 (for now).
It places it in same league as PS Portal and PS5
Surprised that they have 4 USB-A and only 1 USB-C. With their power profile, Steam Machine should be powerable by a single USB-C cable on extended power range which should reduce the need for the power supply altogether and greatly simplify mechanical as well as thermal design, although the power electronic design would be more complex as a result.
I would also be expecting Wifi 7 support as well as unified memory considering they ordered custom AMD silicon. Understandable that it is a rather conservative design for their first generation though.
Why is it surprising? This is essentially a pre-built PC in a small form factor and most PC peripherals are USB-A.
A USB-C PD power supply which supports 130W is probably gonna be more expensive than whatever power supply they're using now...
Xbox 360 controllers (and their knock-offs) are still extremely common choices for PC gamers who want a controller. Xbox because they have good windows plug-and-play, 360 because there are still plenty of $20-ish dollar ones available, as opposed to the ~$40-50 range for the Xbox One controllers.
Wired Xbox 360 controllers (and most of their off brand alternatives) have a non-removable USB-A cable.
These are USB3-A, so USB3-A to USB-C cables will properly work at full potential for any of your USB-C peripherals.
It's a bummer if have none of these cables around, but it's still more elegant than adapting USB3-A stuff to USB-C.
Steam machine uses about 200W. Can you even buy any 240W pd power bricks. Quick search on amazon shows that all that advertise 240w can only output 140w max on single cable
GamerNexus found out that an equivalent DIY machine would cost $979 in parts only to give a perspective on the pricing. It would probably be bigger too due to the discrete GPU.
So you'd save $150-$200 building it yourself, around 15-20%. Seems reasonable to me.
For reference to the current prices of consoles:
Nintendo Switch 2 $449.99
Xbox Series S (512GB/1TB) $379.99 – $449.99
Xbox Series X (1TB) $649.99
PlayStation 5 Slim (Digital) $599.99
PlayStation 5 Slim (Disc) $649.99
PlayStation 5 Pro $899.99
From reading posts on X/Twitter, I got the feeling that PC Gaming enthusiasts truly believed this was going to compete with console gaming and those players would flock to the utopia that is Steam OS and managing hardware. At this price I believe its way too expensive to temp console gamers and Steam supporters will probably balk about the specs to price ratio.
The main market to me is going to be ibuypower people, so a console gamer who wants to jump to PC but doesn't want to self build.
I've been screwing around on pcpartpicker on and off for today, and I don't see a clean way to get steam machine specs for less than $800 if you build it yourself, and closer to $900 if i'm being honest (and in no way will it be SFF).
I think the big thing will be if steam can commit to this like the deck and get better performance over time. Consoles out perform their hardware thanks to lots of optimization, enforced by knowing you're stuck with/always going to have the same specs.
The steam machines success to me pivots completely on if they can capture a market of customers who want to jump from console and don't want to become hardware savvy (which has not gotten as easy as it should).
Compatibility and performance in the next 6 months is going to determine a lot.
And if someone better than me wants to check my PC Part picker work: https://pcpartpicker.com/list/HCtXkD
I've got $766 for CPU/MB/HDD/GPU/RAM.
And all those consoles (save the Switch maybe) are heavily subsidized by those companies to compete at that artificial price point.
According to LTT Valve made the conscious decision NOT to subsidize the Steam Machine to let the market compete. I very much respect that and will be willing to pay the premium because of that and:
- using my purchase to vote for/encourage the growth of the Linux ecosystem.
- as a PC gamer I'm already highly invested in the Steam platform with all of my other gaming purchases.
Just round up the penny for the more honest price.
Nintendo Switch 2 $450
Xbox Series S (512GB/1TB) $380 – $450
Xbox Series X (1TB) $650
PlayStation 5 Slim (Digital) $600
PlayStation 5 Slim (Disc) $650
PlayStation 5 Pro $900
Steam Machine 512GB: $1050
Steam Machine 2TB: $1350
The PS5 (which is realistically the main competitor) has the caveat that to get even something as basic as multiplayer you need to pay a $10-20 monthly subscription, so you can multiply that by however many months you plan to own it and add it to the price.
Switch 2 performs very well for the price. It is getting the same games as PS5 etc.
I'd like to factor in the cost of games, but then my Steam library might be a little bigger than the average... Am I willing to pay €60 for a game? Rarely. Am I willing for the spring/summer/winter sale on Steam? Yes!
Idk why anyone thought this would be a "PC console killer" type of product. Consoles are subsidized because they act as the entry point to closed hardware/software ecosystems. You can't do that with a general purpose PC because it's an open ecosystem by definition.
But there are economic benefits to an open ecosystem. The Steam Machine has a gigantic back catalog of games that can be had for cheap. You also probably already have all the peripherals you'll need for it. And of course they don't charge for online play.
That last part alone makes up for the cost after just 2-3 years.
My steam deck is underpowered as a living room gaming PC.
Wish it was cheaper but would look forward to a “just works” experience including sleep/instant game resume.
Add my thousands of already owned Steam games and it makes me excited for a great couch gaming experience. It’s the reason I don’t get a PS5/Switch cause I don’t wanna rebuy all the games and they are not on sale as much.
If you already have a powerful desktop PC in your house, streaming via Sunshine/Moonlight is pretty much perfect these days.
I was wondering if this would be a worthwhile upgrade to my Legion Go Z1 Extreme.
Sounds like it's in the same vicinity for graphics power. Not worth $1k for a tiny bit more RAM.
I do wonder if this will give me any useful presets, in the same way the Steam Deck does. I have no interest in tweaking graphics settings one at a time.
Have you tried Steam Remote Play? It allows your desktop to render games and stream it to your Steam Deck that's connected to your TV. Or to any other device really.
Hope the Frame is available for pre-order soon as well! I know I’m going to pay more than the HW was worth a year ago because of “AI”, but I’m really looking forward to that one.
Since it’ll have a mobile SoC with baked in memory I’m hoping that the price won’t be too inflated!
No need to rush:
> In an effort to improve the purchase experience and limit resellers, we're implementing a reservation system.
> Starting right now, you can sign up for the Steam Machine model/bundle you're interested in.
> If you're busy now, no problem: You can sign up anytime before Thursday June 25th at 10 a.m. Pacific.
> At that time, we will close signups and do a one-time randomization to determine the reservation and waitlist order.
I was expecting $1200 for the base model, so $1,049 without a controller is nice to see.
Having to enter a lottery to buy one makes it feel like Valve doesn’t have new stock in the pipeline for the foreseeable future.
Eh, it was the exact same system for the Switch 2 and no one I know waited more than a week for theirs.
Given it requires a Steam login of a certain age to register, I suspect this is just to limit the scalpers.
It's funny how this (imo) almost feels like an inherently inert topic to discuss:
Is it dumb of them to do this? Not really, they got unlucky with the timing and they already designed the machines. Selling them below cost to subsidize steam-sales would probably create bad incentives for them.
What will this mean for Valve's future? Nothing, they're still a relatively lean company with a money machine.
Will this dissuade them from creating hardware in the future? Probably not, the Steamdeck was really succesfull and they've got more than enough resources to do a few failed experiments.
>Selling them below cost to subsidize steam-sales would probably create bad incentives for them.
They could have sweetened the deal somehow, though. Maybe owners get a discount on games or something. It was bad timing, but it's not like they can't afford to take a bit of a hit for good will.
It is interesting to know how it compares in terms of performance to 500$ Mac Mini with Crossover?
Of course Crossover support is worse than Proton, so it will not be viable alternative in real gaming scenarios. But Proton is made by Crossover team.
And Apple hardware is 2x cheaper.
Due to the memory and storage crisis, you actually cannot buy the $500 mac mini anymore. It starts at $799
Your mileage may vary, but I've never gotten reasonable performance out of Crossover. I have a decked out Mac for development and most of the games I've tried in Crossover still need you to turn the settings to damn near lowest possible.
If Mac Minis were viable for gaming, everyone would get one. Unfortunately, Crossover has very spotty support and GPTK starts fraying at the seams on CPU-heavy titles.
The upcoming Steam Frame will be the real make-or-break moment for ARM PC gaming. Up until now, nobody has seriously attempted to make ARM work for the "Steam Deck" segment of users.
The prices I think a lot of us expected. I know Valve is being pressured by the market, but I can't imagine buying one for this price, even if I'm really excited for the Steam Machine. That said, the Steam Deck is now so expensive I don't think I can justify replacing mine when it breaks.
At least it's repairable so unless you break the motherboard you can probably fix it.
I hope this is successful, like it or not this might be one of the best ways that Linux can reduce the Microsoft Windows monopoly. I would actually go as far as to say that it has to succeed.
That's my hope as well. I don't need/want a Steam Machine, but I want it to succeed, especially if it forces better support for anti-cheat.
Maybe it'll become a cheaper entry-level machine in a couple of years if they can keep producing them.
An unfortunate series of events that this thing ended up with these specs at 1,049.00. It was supposed to be cheap and cheerful. At first Steam took an opportunistic deal to buy up a bunch of near-obsolete-already chips from AMD to build a low-cost box around. Then years of delays and an explosion in DRAM and SSD prices and here we are.
4 year old chip design on an equivalently old process node, not that unlike nvidia selling 2-3 year old chips as the spark. Thanks to AI boom, consumer market really just getting the warmed-over leftovers here from AMD and NVDIA.
> We think of Steam Machine as an extension of PC gaming, not as a console.
But is that really so bad? I don't want to say 'sell it at a loss' but loss leaders don't need to bankrupt their companies in order to do their job.
If you sold them at or below cost then people would figure out how to buy 100's and make server farms out of them. Particularly for this hardware. The awkwardness of the hardware being made up for by the subsidy from the manufacturer. But pricing them at break-even would still be good business.
The pricing is all out of sorts. Close to $500 more expensive than a PS5 for worse performance. I understand this is a PC and you can do other things with it, but if you're buying a gaming device to play games this is a horrible value.
If that's the cost of a _working_, well supported and _viable_ open platform, than so be it. People, especially the ones here at hacker news, ought to give way more value to this, else we lose it all.
If you have hundreds of Steam games you bought through sales events, then that changes the calculus a bit.
I think a lot of people expected it to be in the ~$600 price range, maybe ~$800 at worst. RAM prices made it quite expensive...
It’s not just the ram now, it’s also the storage. A double whammy.
Yes, so many people were claiming that it will be around that price point. That seemed straight up delusional to me. Memory price has roughly quadrupled and 32GB DDR5 basically cost the same as the original cheapest steam deck.
Yes, Steam Machine is optimized for gaming, but it's still your PC. Install your own apps, or even another operating system. Who are we to tell you how to use your computer?
This is glorious
Insant buy for me because as an owner of a PS5 and Xbox One X, I’ve been using my Steam Deck a lot for gaming on TV using the dock. It works really well. This is just the dream version of that setup.
Similar here. I have the PS4 here and rarely even use PlayStation these days. Mostly it is just PC (now runing Linux even for gaming) and Steam Deck. I was thinking about upgrading to PS5 a year or two ago bu then did some calculations and it is more expensive then it looks at first (PlayStation+ is in practive not optional and it is 72 €/year at minimum, games are quite more expensive themselves than on the PC, and well there is a lot less choice in games). So I have basically just started moving my game library to Steam and PC (GoG and similar other sources store), just makes more sense with PC and now Steam Machine makes inot the a console form factor while still having all the power and freedom of PC. So yeah an easy decision to go with Steam Machine. Sure price of the hardware itself is not exactly very attractive but yeah not so much different to what is normal these days in PC hardware (fsck all these terrible "AI" slop scam bubble corporations). Would love to see a cheaper bare-bones edition without RAM and SSD inside but even without this I think Steam machine will be quite a nice replacement for PS4.
I was interested in the Steam machine, but I might not get one because I cannot log in to my Steam account, for no reason that I know. Steam's web-based process for resetting my password always gets stuck after successful completion of the captcha, regardless of which device or OS I use to do it, the accessible-to-Google procedures for getting past that blockage have not worked, and the email address that one could once use in this situation now just sends an autoreply that says no one is monitoring it anymore.
So I have exhausted all of the obvious routes for logging into my Steam account. Perhaps there are additional routes to discover, but I'm not particularly motivated to look for them at this point. If just getting logged in is this painful, I'm not particularly optimistic about the experience of buying or owning the thing.
Steam Support can probably get it sorted.
I think this put this all in perspective for me. If Microsoft came out with this exact hardware (with Windows but still open and you could load SteamOS on it), at this price point, people mock Microsoft to death about how this product is a joke.
> with Windows but still open and you could load SteamOS on it
You're describing Every Computer Ever.
It’s called the Xbox and the reason it wasn’t at this price point is that Microsoft has the capital power to subsidize the cost at risk of the Xbox division not being profitable. Valve doesn’t have such freedoms on hardware it seems.
With those unfortunate specs a used PS5 + Steam Deck OLED is the better deal to me.
HDR on that screen is just something to behold and UHD-BD drive is the cherry on top.
https://github.com/streetpea/chiaki-ng
I could see myself buying the undeniably beautiful GabenCube at spec if the price were at or only slightly above SW2/PS5 level; as an additional device to play the outlier game that is exclusive to "PC" and Steam Deck / Macbook Pro not delivering enough oomph for it to run satisfactorily.
Expensive, but corrected for inflation, around the price of a ps3 at launch, and the ps3 was sold as a loss leader when it came out
“starting with the SteamOS 3.8 release, you can put together your own Steam Machine using whatever PC parts you want”
That’s great.
But, will it properly support NVIDIA GPUs? That’s was the biggest pain point for years.
$1049 for the base package? Much better than I thought it was going to be. I figured minimum $1200.
I mean, it is $1200 if you want a controller included
The only thing that I get with consoles that I don't get with the Steam Machine is a guarantee; a GUARANTEE that the games I buy will play on the system. If I but a game and it says PS5, I know it will play. A list of specs on the Steam Machine landing page does not absolve this for Valve.
On the Steam store they've done a great job with their certification program for the Steam Deck.
Also, I don't think their target market is people who don't own any Steam games yet. It's going to be people with already extensive back catalogues on Steam.
Now game devs can optimised their game for it and Steam Machine will get royal treatment. It's not unusual for a PS5 game to run slow on a PC with much better hardware due to not being optimised. The Nintendo switch is a great example, pretty old hardware but the games run well (for their intended experience).
Many people are complaining about the price but you can bring you entire steam game collection and even use as a PC if you want, I sold my PS5 once it became a useless brick cause Sony prevents you from running Linux.
True. But if it doesn't work, a refund is quick and easy
Very late to the discussion, but many people see the price of the Steam Machine and balk at the high cost, even if they understand the reasoning. However, this isn't about the Steam Machine. Computing has just gotten more expensive. This is the new reality going forward, Steam Machine is just on the front edge of the wave. (Until, and if, RAM manufacturers catch up).
What a great machine it would've been without these stupid prices we have now...
If Valve learned to operate on a proper schedule instead of Valve Time they would have been able to stockpile these parts and release with better prices.
https://poshmark.com/listing/Valve-Steam-DeckHDMI-64-GB-Blac...
back in 2019, I was thinking of getting an MBA and as part of the exploration, shadowed an MBA class at University of Washington for a day. It was so fun. One of the things they were discussing in the class that day was a case study of Valve, specifically around the Steam Machine. The team's consensus was that Valve was carefully arranging money in a barrel, lovingly soaking it in high octane gasoline, and was about to light a match.
Proton, the Steam machine, the Steam deck, etc. were probably never about making money. It's Valve's "Plan B".
They started with Proton after Microsoft suddenly made a move with the Windows store and also started bolting down Windows a bit. As with most things Microsoft that initiative quietly died over time. But at that time Valve probably couldn't afford to take any chances. It probably also made them realize they had build a castle on someone elses land.
If you are making money in the amounts Valve is, then even the simplest risk analyses is going to show that "Microsoft rug pulling you" is one of your few existential threats. Even though the probability is low or medium-ish at best, the impact is massive. Even anti-trust isn't going to save you. By the time Microsoft gets convicted, you are already dead. Just look at Netscape.
Valve makes it very very easy to be a PC gamer, and, importantly, slightly harder to be a PC gamer who buys games in places other than Steam.
Yes you can buy games on GoG or Epic and play them on a steam deck or a steam machine. But it's juuuuust enough faff to be annoying enough, that you'd rather just get them on steam. I know people (and am a person) who have rebought games they already own so they are on steam, to make playing between steam deck and desktop more reliable.
It's the same with the steam controller. You _can_ use it with games outside of steam, but it's enough of a faff that you find yourself avoiding it.
It's incredibly effective, and why they are an effective monopoly in PC gaming.
Why is the gasoline high octane in your metaphor? It's not like it's going to burn better.
This only goes to show how MBAs are destructively myopic.
Valve understands that inextricably tying themselves to Windows is a long-term death sentence. SteamOS represents a lifeboat for when Microsoft goes full iOS and decides to lock down Windows in exchange for taking 30% of all software purchases. Valve has been taking this threat seriously since at least 2010, which is why they've been investing in Linux gaming. Both Steam Deck and the Steam Machine are further steps toward complete independence from Microsoft.
this Steam Machine hadn’t been announced back then? Not even the steam deck, which has been a massive success.
I think the steam machine is more important as a benchmark for 3rd parties developing their own Steam OS based systems. Although I am sure Valve would be happier if it was popular on its own merits too.
With the scalping issue, the issue isn't whether can we detect scalpers to which anti scalping mechanism has the lowest false positive cost to it?
The random reservation order takes the scalping issue out of the fulfillment part and into allocation making it a lot harder on the scalper.
Can't you build or buy an equivalent (in performance) PC for cheaper? All with upgradable standard parts? I get the appeal of a small form factor, but I am afraid it may not sell well at this price.
You pay a premium for “it just works”.
Only about 65 dollars cheaper for a comparable build and it wouldn't be small.
Can you still, in 2026?
I think with reasonable and somewhat common sales and picking right machine probably could find even better prebuild. Size not withstanding.
I think you would struggle to NOT build a more performant PC for the same price.
https://pcpartpicker.com/list/brbFsK This is $50 more but it has 1TB of storage and a newer generation of both CPU and GPU and will absolutely destroy it.
I'm sure you could get actually easily cheaper and better even, I haven't followed the market a lot lately.
Prebuilt are likely to be even better deals because they will use some cheap noname parts for the RAM and the PSU, which is mostly fine.
My first thought was "I wonder how this would work as a small-factor game dev machine" and lo and behold, there is a clip of someone working in Godot running a debug version of their game. Very cool to see Valve market this as Linux PC rather than strictly gaming.
It's even worse value for productivity, though, because the CPU is purposely throttled to prevent overloading the thermal solution and the PSU.
Well, when they announced it (7 months ago) I got laughed out of the room when I said this will be at least 1k$ because of the RAM crisis, and people quoted famous Youtuber "Moores Law is Dead" that this thing has a 300$ BOM and will be 600$ max, probably just 450$...
I really appreciate Gabe's approach of treat the user as THE USER not the thing we are trying to use.
Very tired of every interaction with every tech company and subscription service making me feel used rather than served.
I saw a bunch of reviews (written and YouTube). It seems that the Valve development team behind this product was disappointed by the final cost. If this machine was built 2-3 years ago, can anyone estimate how much cheaper the cost would be? I assume this biggest price hikes have come from memory (RAM) and storage (NVMe).
around 800 usd according to LTT’s video (near the end)
Crazy. A Mac Mini costing nearly half as much as based on the released benchmarks, the same performance playing games with Crossover.
Not a lot of games play nice with crossover. I wish I could dual boot windows on this m3 mbp like I could on my old 2012 model. I feel like tf2 performance is actually worse on kegworks with the m3 pro than it was when I would dual boot windows 10 on the 2012 computer. So many lag spikes. A bunch of explosions will go off and the game will stall for a moment and you just get fragged. There are plenty of games that also won't let you play multiplayer at all due to anticheat not playing nice with wine.
"native" macos games on the m series aren't even that much better because they usually just run through a rosetta layer that seems to lock FPS at only 40. Fans will spin full bore because the game is so unoptimized.
Will Crossover survive the dropping of Rosetta 2 that is coming?
The Verge: Nearly twice the price of PS5 for PS5 performance.
That’s rough.
Rough but true. This has PMF but not at this price.
Component pricing is bad. As even Valve can't get half of the hardware while other half is semi-custom...
And this likely goes on until AI really dies or stabilises...
So unfortunate with the timing, I wish they shelved it for a few years instead. At any other time this could've been the thing to entrench Steam, PC and Linux as finally THE gaming platform.
At this price and features it'll probably just be a footnote.
Sad about the price. Maybe it comes down some day.
Given the current state of the global market it will likely take a few years for prices to come down
Prices coming down? In this economy?
Interesting with the memory. It is 16GB plus an additional 8GB for graphics, or is it just 16GB with 8GB reserved for graphics?
16GB DDR5 + 8GB GDDR6
It is 16GB plus an additional 8GB for graphics.
What a sad time to be buying a gaming PC, it seems that my 7yo rig bought for the same price is just as powerful.
I say, be happy this means your 7 year old pc will be future proof for longer!
Related ongoing thread:
Steam Machine game testing - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48632989 - June 2026 (19 comments)
Man it's so unfortunate that this launch coincided with the component crisis, forcing the prices to be just outside the range of people that were debating between getting this and getting a console, it would've made so much more of an impact if the prices were $200 lower.
I wish there was a clear Mac Mini alt. With lots of drawbacks of the mac mini fixed e.g. a very simple way to connect to tablets (iPads, Androids tabs) as screen and ability to connect to any keypad and mouse, natively (I am sure a linux mini pc box will have that already - at least I may not need a "connector hardware").
I really like the idea of travelling around with my iPad but have a very small but sufficiently powerful computer tucked away in my bag (along with needed cables) if I need it (because, well, Apple is not going to let their iPads unleash their capabilities).
There are some around (even in my geography) but all of them seem to be half-heartedly done.
Wondering how it’d benchmark against https://www.tuxedocomputers.com/en/TUXEDO-Nano-Pro-Gen14-AMD... in an even smaller form factor and similar price range for specs.
"This item is not available for purchase in your region"
This is such a bummer. I live in the European Economic Area (EEA)
We have too good consumer protection laws for Valve. Makes my view of them negative, so I'll go elsewhere when I can.
looks like DOA from reviews
Are they crazy to ask for this price? Few months ago I have bought a minipc with amd 8845hs 8/16c, 32GB RAM, 512GB NVME for €519
Can you check how much that mini pc costs today?
You could build the equivalent PC for quite a bit cheaper or a PS5 and 7 full price AAA games for the same price. No way this is a console-killer, but will be a nice novelty for Gaben fans for whom $1049 is not a significant amount of money.
Just today I was thinking about threading the needle on that and making my own Steam Machine with an AMD BC-250 board. Maybe I still will, it'd be a 10th the price and I do love to tinker.
This is Framework level pricing.
Provides some of the worst value for money on the market ($1,049 with no controller, additional $70 for controller): worse than the PS5 ($599), Xbox Series X ($599), Switch 2 ($449), and DIY PCs.
Framework provides adequate price to value, what are you saying?
This doesn't have the best value
Good luck playing PC games on PS5 or Xbox Series X.
The deck is such a good console compared to the switch and switch 2 that I can’t be stop being happy that they released this now. How is Valve, a tiny company, doing so much better than Nintendo?
They're not. The Deck is hundreds of dollars more expensive than the Switch 2. The Switch 1 sold 155 million units, making it the second most popular console of all time. Switch 2 is also selling very well.
Switch 2 is faster, lighter and cheaper than Steam Deck.
Most people don't know if they'll like the living-room PC gaming experience and at this price not enough people will even try. That's sad to me. It could be that with the right hardware and software the experience would be even better than a console, and if that happens then all the other good features of the Steam Machine (it's relative openness, the fact that you own it, etc) could shine. But without proving that people really like the experience, the rest is irrelevant, and lots of early adopters were just priced out of the experiment.
I like this randomized reservation approach.
What if, in addition, a nominal fee was charged just to have a chance to purchase a Steam Machine? Let's say $3 (or whatever). Then, all that money is donated to an organization like Extra Life or Game for Love?
In that way, someone with 5000 scalper accounts knows they're going to be out $15k just to get in line. And everyone else who is trying to buy just one isn't sweating the nominal fee.
I'm genuinely asking.
They already require you to have made at least one purchase on Steam before April.
> Yes, Steam Machine is optimized for gaming, but it's still your PC. Install your own apps, or even another operating system. Who are we to tell you how to use your computer?
Valve gets it
I will definitely be getting this regardless of price or specs. I'm no hard core gamer and I play Balatro, Vampire Survivors and occasional online Halo 2 with friends. This is perfect.
Too bad YouTube doesn't have a proper API for building 3rd party clients. I would love to build one and use it on my SteamDeck and on the big TV with the SteamMachine.
Interesting that its HDMI is 2.0 and not 2.1. Hopefully it's still possible (for those that really want) to connect modern 4K TVs at 120 hz via the DisplayPort 1.4 output.
That's likely because the HDMI Forum don't allow open source HDMI 2.1. [0]
That said, there are signs that it's coming to the AMD drivers. [1] [2]
[0] https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2024/02/hdmi-forum-to-amd-no...
[1] https://www.techpowerup.com/348723/amd-readies-full-open-sou...
[2] https://www.fosslinux.com/157755/hdmi-2-1-on-linux-complete-...
The DisplayPort 1.4 instead of 2.1 is also interesting. The RX7000 series came with DisplayPort 2.1.
DisplayPort 1.4 should be enough to do 4K@120hz. Not enough bandwidth for HDR at the same time though
I wish it was available in my country.
there are re-shipping services that will re-ship the item to you for an extra fee. The fee can be quite high though.
Oof. Great machine. Wrong price.
I'll be getting one eventually either way, hopefully after the RAMpocalypce has ended, just because I enjoy collecting consoles and games, and I want to support Linux through SteamOS. I'm sure I can find a place for it in my life, but it's not something I need.
I wish they had a few different options with better specs. Or maybe a shell with the case/fan/mobo etc.. where you can just add CPU/GPU/RAM. I'd love that, and would be willing to pay extra to get something a bit more modern.
I want a Steam Machine for my living room, but these specs are just terrible for 2026. According to Digital Foundry, this $1200 machine is worse than a $500 6-year-old base PS5.
They released it. Companion cube.
Yikes twice the price of a PS5 in Australia! I will still be buying one though. I'm looking forward to moving away from Sony after having a PlayStation in my living room for 16+ years. I really like Steam's ethics / how they treat their customers - and the steam deck (while under powered) has been fantastic.
I hope they will add the expected performances for a given game on the store pages, just like the required specs are specified.
Unfortunate for them on the pricing of components. This won't do so well (right now), but I think the Frame will exceed expectations.
Naw. I think they'll sell every single one they're able manufacture for the next couple years. The pre-order list will probably fill most of those.
From last year:
Steam Machine - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45903404 - Nov 2025 (1514 comments)
For balance:
I don’t need a Steam Machine - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45943992 - Nov 2025 (272 comments)
Interesting that they went with AMD for GPU, but not too surprising. My experience with a nvidia 5060 on my laptop is that nvidia's drivers on linux still have no idea how to reliably wake from sleep. Fixing that just not the priority for them I guess - datacenter GPUs doing AI probably never sleep and just idle at 50 watts or whatever.
It was kind of expected since Steam Deck (obviously) had an AMD APU, and AMD works much better with mainstream Linux projects in general.
valve themselves also personally employ multiple major contributors to the amd linux drivers
https://www.phoronix.com/news/AMD-Marek-Joins-Valve
Why so many USB-A ports and only one USB-C?
Because most PC peripherals (mice, keyboards, microphones, controllers, USB headphones, detachable hard drives) are still USB-A on the other end of their cable. Yes this is changing, but in this case I appreciate them acknowledging the reality on the ground and not creating a situation where there are many dongles afoot.
This seems very expensive for what a PC can do :(. A PC can be fully customizable with price ranges that are lower than the steam machine. The "hardcore console gamers" live on PS, and Xbox, and for "casual gamers", a Nintendo Switch would provide much better bang for you buck.
You can install a SteamOS-style console experience on any old PC, including handhelds or mini-pcs with integrated graphics. Bazzite is a great choice for that, even my RX560 handles it without issue.
> a Nintendo Switch would provide much better bang for you buck.
A secondhand Steam Deck would also be better value, but this isn't a value-focused product. The Steam Machine is Valve's second stab at the premium couch-based PC gamer market, this time with Proton and a bigger focus on controller usability for ordinary PC games.
Find me a PC in this form factor that is as well tested and supported as the steam boxes are, with the specs they are claiming to have, at this price. Its a little above the curve but a little is not a lot, and you get a fully supported Linux box at that price.
.....and if you think this is expensive just wait until the PS6 and new Xbox are released.
It's just dead-on-arrival.
I'm not convinced this hardware is "an extension of PC gaming, not a console" when the hardware is generations out of date. To credit Microsoft, Sony, and other players, the reality is that unless you are "in the game" for decades, you HAVE to provide a convincing differentiator from the other console markets.
Steam had this with the Steam Deck and personally, I see the world moving to thin clients that play games via some remote desktop infrastructure. It makes no sense to buy this hardware even if it was 500-700 dollars.
In my opinion, it would've been worth the money to just buy a gaming PC, put it in a garage, hidden room, etc with the networking gear, then stream it over the network to a Steam Link or using Apollo/Artemis/Moonlight/Parsec; anything.
Tangential to this discussion: Steam is in the unique position to create a kernel anti-cheat. I know that's not popular. But they are the only ones with the install base AND ability to pull it off in a such a fashion that wouldn't be so god-awful. It's clear that multiplayer gaming isn't going to go away from kernel anti-cheat. It's also clear that developers are still going to target Windows-only with Steam Deck support as a best-kept basis.
I don't see the Steam Machine/Deck as a competitor until they solve the kernel anti-cheat portion. Until then, it can play games that are older, not popular, or single-player which is a valid market but not one that I am a part of, anyway.
EDIT:
S) It's not meant for you.
S) But it's on-par with the PS5. S) It can be a regular PC. S) I just want to game on hardware that's good enough. Dead-on-arrival doesn't mean that this doesn't serve a niche. The niches this serves just really cannot be this compelling. You cannot tell me you have $1,050 laying around just to spend on this machine that comes with 512GB of storage.I don't get it. I don't get the market segment that does want this when there's so many better options on the market.
I think it's far from dead-on-arrival. I don't want to buy a PC, put it in a garage, etc. I want a little box I can easily hook up to my TV and play Steam games on. This scratches that itch. I'm old and want convenience. I know a lot of other people in my peer group who are going to pick one up too. Also I don't play any competitive games where I care about anti-cheat. I just want to play my RPG/JRPG's on a big screen and I want it to be plug-n-play.
"For a Linux user, you can already build such a system yourself quite trivially..."
"No wireless? Less space than a Nomad? Lame"
Same here. My home computer only runs Windows because I play competitive online games. It would be incredible if Valve built some kind of certified, locked-down kernel, but I doubt that will happen.
The online discourse around this is also incredibly toxic, filled with utopians who don’t understand how serious cheating is in these games, or that kernel anti-cheat, while not perfect, is the best solution available today.
I think calling the hardware generations out of date when it performs on par with a PS5 on new games is a bit inaccurate.
I would, admittedly, be interested in an anticheat that reboots the machine for deck into a secure mode.
>In my opinion, it would've been worth the money to just buy a gaming PC, put it in a garage, hidden room, etc with the networking gear, then stream it over the network to a Steam Link or using Apollo/Artemis/Moonlight/Parsec; anything.
During covid, instead of getting second budget gaming PC, I setup janky multi-seat program (Aster), to split single windows machine where I could play locally and someone else could play on steamlink. There's so many games out there that you can run multiple instances simultaneously. Or simply stream desktops to media room paired with a good remote.
It was very janky, setup, streaming DRM (or not). But justifies world of spending on one highend system than multiple mid / tier. The Aster program was designed for low income nations where you split a single workstation into like 8+ substations (i.e. education). TBH if Valve sold a 2-3k steammachine super host that can stream multiple games to different thin client, and value proposition is this is the only entertainment unit for your entire house, I think it would pique interests. Maybe tile different streams into one client for splitscreen playing. Sell those controllers.
The hard truth is that as much as you think yourself as a "proper" gamer, this segment always has, always will, _not_ be the proper target segment. Don't forget that mobile gaming has more revenue than everything else… combined. They have a play on this, and as much expansive as it looks, it's mostly due to the hardware inflation, and compared to alternatives, it won't look bad at all. For the segments that matters.
> In my opinion, it would've been worth the money to just buy a gaming PC, put it in a garage, hidden room, etc with the networking gear, then stream it over the network to a Steam Link
Well if you scroll down the page, it's presented as a selling point of the machine
> I see the world moving to thin clients that play games via some remote desktop infrastructure.
You can barely code in such an environment to a satisfactory degree. You want to stream 4k games with low latency?
> In my opinion, it would've been worth the money to just buy a gaming PC, put it in a garage, hidden room, etc with the networking gear, then stream it over the network to a Steam Link or using Apollo/Artemis/Moonlight/Parsec; anything.
I'm someone who has built dozens of gaming PCs, and wired my house. I also have zero interest in doing the above... if I have to pay few hundred extra to get a Steam machine hooked up to a TV without all that hassle... I'll do that.
It's not the absolute best value for gaming. It's not horrible in current market conditions but it's also not targeting "best value for gaming" anywhere in the marketing materials. It's hardware that can play your Steam library on your TV. There are harder, less expensive ways to do that, as there have been for ages.
If you're a console gamer, there are less expensive, just as easy options to play console games, so it's definitely not suited for that market.
It's really only catering to people with disposable income that want a cute way to hook up a Steam-capable machine to a TV. It's not a huge market, nor is it a non-existent market.
It was probably a bigger market at $750 than $1050, but we can't have nice things.
> Steam is in the unique position to create a kernel anti-cheat
Valve has a long-term policy of being utter trash at game security.
> I know that's not popular. But they are the only ones with the install base AND ability to pull it off in a such a fashion that wouldn't be so god-awful.
Epic Games does fine (though they did it by purchasing an anticheat startup).
EDIT: Oh, you're talking about making an anti-cheat focused Linux kernel build? Meh, still would not trust Valve on that front given their long-standing policy of not giving a shit.
>It's just dead-on-arrival...the hardware is generations out of date
Some people say this same thing about the Nintendo Switch and its successor, but here we are, with the former closing in on highest selling console of all time, and the latter tracking above that.
My prediction was that they would bundle it with Steam store money or other games to bring the "end price" below a 1000 Euro, surprised to see I was wrong!
16 Gb system ram... i'd bet that they originally planned it with 32.
Note that you can order more storage but not more RAM. Although that may also be to force vendors to target this exact architecture.
Also: oooh internal power supply! Someone thought about elegance too.
You can upgrade the ram yourself.
I feel like Framework really missed this boat with their desktop PC they released last year. They could have used that + a gamepad to have captured so much of this.
Dammit, I don’t think this is going to be as popular as the Steam Deck at this price. I hope they don’t shelf it and I can buy this in a few years for a reasonable price once the big AI labs go bankrupt.
Might be the first hardware Valve has priced correctly. All previous hardware was underpriced leaving it unavailable for months/years on end.
The biggest win for me from this product is pushing developers to release on Linux.
Sadly I don't see that happening. Game devs have gotten used to having their cake and eating it too by developing for Windows and using Proton as a crutch to get the the Steam OS certification too. flibitijibibo was right: linux porters have probably gone out of business.
Why all USB-A ports instead of USB-C? (I counted 4 USB-A and just one USB-C.)
Budget reasons would be my guess. The USB-C port here is 10 gbit while the USB-A ports on the machine are USB 2.0(front) and 5gbit(rear) speeds.
While they could have and imo should have just put usb 2.0 C ports on it, users have an expectation that USB-C ports are fully functional high speed ports. On most machines you can plug something in to any USB-C port on a device and they all work the same.
Because most peripherals that are likely to be used with it are still USB-A. Things like mice and keyboards and gamepads and headphone and whatnot.
> Yes, Steam Machine is optimized for gaming, but it's still your PC. Install your own apps, or even another operating system. Who are we to tell you how to use your computer?
Indeed, thankful for that.
well, is there a better alternative for the money? I'm asking because i'm in the market for this
I'd say that heavily depends on what you see as alternatives. For some the Steam Machine is filling an unmet need in the market, for others it's a more expensive gaming pc or gaming console.
As we are on HackerNews, there's a good chance that you can build / setup your own pc with better specs which you might want to look into and then decide.
"Internal power supply, AC power 110-240V"
I wonder if they mean that? Japan is 100V.
I lost access to my 10y old steam account due to their 2fa app getting auto-removed from my iPhone.
I couldnt produce 10y visa statements from another country i lived in.
Since then I just dont use steam, shame cause i like the hw
Is there anything actually worth playing in the steam frame? The hardware looks incredible, but my understanding is that the current state of VR games is less than brilliant.
If AI is so good, then why don't we have perfect compatibility layers between OS's for games yet?
I'm not familiar with SteamOS and Valve hardware in general. Could I play something like Overwatch on this, and connect keyboard and mouse? Could I play other PC games like World of Warcraft?
Yes you can connect keyboard and mouse; Overwatch (https://www.protondb.com/app/2357570) and WoW (https://appdb.winehq.org/objectManager.php?sClass=version&iI...) should both work well, as do the vast majority of single-player games. Some multiplayer games with particularly invasive anti-cheat may not, so if you have anything else in mind best to check before buying.
It's just a Linux box, you can do anything that you can on any other Linux machine (including install Windows).
Linux more or less runs most Windows games. The ones that don't run are ones where the developer is going out of their way to make them not run - mostly with kernel-mode anti-cheats that just find themselves staring at the wrong kernel.
Steam makes that pretty seamless and Steam games "just work". For non-Steam games you need to do some tinkering, it's stuff that most people browsing this forum can do.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48633563
Not sure who the target audience is for this.. indie gamers? But yeah I saw the news piece about the 750$ before memory craziness set in, still a lot.
We have pricey PCs, consoles and other electronics, but at least we have AI
It was never about us.
More information here: https://youtu.be/66QzlDewigE?is=WC9vt6LBtdWFPqfp
Worth watching for the Steam OS problems part
I like the idea, but I am worried that it's yet another step on the road towards personal multi-purpose tower PCs built part by part no longer being a thing.
the title is misleading, somebody could think that a startup launched a new steam based machine after the Hormuz closure
What's the competition in the gaming-capable pre-built mini-PC category? How does it compare to these on price/performance?
I have a Series X with a very similar spec just sitting there collecting dust. I hope one day it will run linux like the PS5 and run Steam lol.
For some reason I never considered this route, despite following the PS5 Linux developments... is there a specific reason that the XSX is harder to homebrew than the PS5?
It would be incredible to convert my dusty XSX to a linux box
They should include the (entire) Valve game library for free with purchase for the first 6 months to drive adoption.
Honestly, it seems pretty enticing for a PC-just-for-gaming-but-not-a-“gaming-PC”, if you get my meaning.
I have no need for it right now, but when the next big Windows-only game comes out, it’ll be pretty tempting. (The last Windows gaming I did was when The Elder Scrolls Online came out…)
anyone talking about hw performance is not the intended market. if you have a gaming pc, like building systems, etc, you are not the intended market.
this is for folks who want steam games in their living room and dont want to build their own system.
I've built my own PC several times and am a hardcore Linux enthusiast.
However at this point in my life, the best gaming experience i get is from XBox live/online subscription. I got to the browser, click on a game and start playing without caring for anything else. The most complicated thing i have to do is connect an Xbox gamepad for games that require it (I prefer keyboard +mouse whenever possible).
I wish Steam had something like that for the games I've bought. I've got several games in the library, I cant play some of them because currently I have a Mac m4.
Starts at $1049
I would love to see Valve release a cheaper bare-bones edition without RAM and SSD.
I was hoping that Steam Machine + Steam Frame would be around 1000€ or there about.
I think Apple Mac Mini's prices make since now, only if you can install Linux on them
Steam Deck is probably better value
What is the appeal of Steam Machine as a dedicated gaming device? Isn't it going to be old in a few years and then you have to get rid of it because upgrading components isn't a viable option? Isn't that quite the opposite of anything that deserves to be associated with them term "hacker"?
> Isn't it going to be old in a few years and then you have to get rid of it because upgrading components isn't a viable option?
I expect to get the rest of this decade out of my Steam Deck so IDK, very different to my normal expectations for a computer. The Steam Deck also defines a floor that will allow compatible games to be very performant on the Steam Machine so I think that will help the Steam Machine have a decent lifespan.
I also think on some level we need to start resigning ourselves to getting 10+ years out of our computers!
Compact, convenient, console-like experience that pulls games from your existing steam library. Same niche as a normal console, just not locked down in the same sense. If it weren't for the price I'd consider one, but I'd rather limp along my existing systems for as long as possible (and it sounds like SteamOS support for broader systems is improving).
With current hardware prices, I'm not sure it'll be 'old' in gaming terms in a few years. I'm expecting the PS6 to be only a moderate upgrade over the PS5, not arrive for another year at least, and probabky take 5 years to overtake the PS5.
I doubt anyone's associating the Steam Machine with the term "hacker". The "hacker" type crowd already game on Linux, they're not the target audience here. This is for the normies, for people who want to play PC games with a console-like experience, without any hassles of manual setup and tweaking that the hacker crowd normally are into.
Do you usually want to upgrade components in a console?
Honestly, it seems overpriced (as expected). But it's much smaller than PS5 and according the first reviews it runs much cooler. Still not my cup of tea.
$1049 .. Damn.
Here's hoping my $135 BC-250 arriving tomorrow works without any issue.
Either way, congrats to Valve!
congrats to Valve on the launch!
I have doubts in their reservation process, though. I signed up for the controller reservation as soon as it started (after they just gave the first batch to scalpers) and it was mentioned that they prefer genuine accounts. My account is over 22 years old at this point and has regular transactions going on. Countless games with countless hours, almost daily activity. I even got the Index back in the day and still use it.
Anyway, upon registration I was informed that my account was "not eligible". You are welcome, I guess.
Do you have an active VAC ban? If not, it may be worth contacting them to ask why, they're quite responsive
So SteamOS is just arch linux?
I guess there are important differences?
It is immutable and has versioned image releases (unlike Arch, which is mutable and rolling release).This adds stability, makes the system less prone to breakage, and easy to rollback (factory reset).
Ans of course, the biggest visible difference is that this boots directly into Steam big-picture mode, where you operate the UI using a controller (although it does support KB+mouse), which makes it ideal to use connected to a TV, like a regular gaming console.
SteamOS is highly customized and managed by Valve. It doesn't have the Arch repos or pacman. Updates to the OS come from Valve in large releases rather than per package. All apps installed either come through Steam or Flatpak.
So it's Arch in the same way Android could be called Linux.
Yup it is Arch Linux, that basically boots into Steam client with Big Picture mode. And if you switch to desktop mode you get a standard Linux with KDE Plasma desktop environment.
I can't find anything that indicates the expected wait if you get in the reservation queue. Maybe I've been burned by too many Kickstarters.
I don’t understand why it doesn’t have a headphones jack…
The bus is not PCIe between the system and the GPU?
I was interested until I saw the price. Gonna pass on that.
weaker hardware than BC-250 compute card. volvo what is going on?
Is it supporting ReactOS as rumored?
1050$ I am very sad about the price. Like orders of magnitude sad.
I would have hoped for ~600$ with the economic realities maybe 800$, but 1000$+ just feels like too much doesn't valve have like a multi-billion dollar muscle couldn't the folks make it a tad cheaper...
I guess we can only blame the current market conditions at the end of the day.
Unfortunately, the only game that matters this year is GTA 6, and it only plays on consoles such as the PS5 and the Xbox.
So unless it releases on the Steam Machine or PC, then the sales of the Steam Machine are going to be really poor.
That is even with the price of the Steam Machine being more expensive as well. You might as well buy a PS5 Pro or Xbox at the point.
I'm gonna be real here. I think they should have cancelled this release.
The original NES cost $179 at launch, or about $550 today.
And for premium games we spent $45, or about $150 today.
Does anyone have a rundown of Steam OS?
My phone has 1tb storage since 2022...
thanks to sam altman and jensen huangs bubble this will cost 2500$ next year at this time
Yeah, I don't see this succeeding at these prices. Succeeding in a sense to come close to Switch 2 / PS5 (Pro) levels.
I don't think the goal here is to necessarily sell a bunch of hardware units, but to create a new product category of devices which buy games from steam, like the steam deck did with handheld gaming PCs.
I don't think we could ever expect a specific gaming PC to compete with the volume sold of gaming consoles that have exclusives people really, really want to play.
It was never going to do those numbers, regardless of price.
Disappointing to see the release and still no implementation of multi-user sign on for local multiplayer games (like all true consoles).
As I noted when announced, it's something that doesn't get headlines, but a real barrier for enjoyment for a console-like PC. Hate being stuck with 'guest 1' and 'guest 2' or whatever. Many games want each player to progress and without true multi sign on, it just doesn't work. Hence games dropping local multiplayer on PC.
The big problem isn't that this pc is weak, it's that games aren't well optimized
it would be nice if steam os could be downloaded officially
I don't understand the specs of this computer. At the end of the day, will this "Semi-custom CPU" and "Semi-custom GPU" run modern AAA games at 4K?
4k with upscaling is the promise.. don't know if it will hold
Steam Engine, surely?
A question for both developers & gamers – why are we continuing to push hardware capacity upward to untenable costs? 2013 games are awesome, I still play them. Why not continue targeting that capability and sell $250 consoles instead of $1250 consoles?
The problem is that the market has basically bifurcated. In the Indie space, people want novelty, and that's too risky for AAA (even 10 year old AAA) scale games. Over in the modern AAA space, you've got a more reliable user base (in that they're more eager to buy slight changes to the same game over and over), but you're competing more on "Wow" factor. And ever-better graphics have been a pretty easy way to convert investment into "wow", without much risk (compared to changing game mechanics more, which might kill your golden goose).
I find it far more plausible that AI-assisted game dev will help indies catch up in scale to 10 year old AAA than the modern AAA studios deciding to throw in the towel on the graphics arms race.
A question for the ages.
indie games community has joined the chat
You are describing indie games.
Valve could have made a $2-$3K rig that outperforms other consoles for 4K gaming but I'm glad they didn't. It's genuinely unfortunate the components market went crazy at the same time.
I hope this and the steam deck-likes continue to be successful and incentivize developers to optimize their games for last-gen and portable hardware. I think the "steam deck compatible" certification has already been fairly good for that.
Oof, that price point is rough. I hope this does well for them, but I'm not sure who this is for.
Sadly not a good fit for my needs.
My 2021 machine is still more powerful (apart from the GPU maybe, but that one is from 2022 and has 12GB memory) and I can't justify buying this for that amount.
Would've loved to have a dedicated machine for gaming, but alas.
I don’t know for who this is if you can easily build a better mini pc yourself for cheaper
It’s dead on arrival
This is gonna be such a litmus paper test for the most fervent valve suckers
One disappointment: you have to have already made a purchase, which doesn't help if owning a Steam OS machine is the first time you will be buying and playing anything from Steam.
I really don’t get the bellyaching about the price. They are going to sell as many of these as they can make, so there is no sense in subsidizing the price. Maybe in the future they will, especially if Windows continues on it’s current trajectory.
Is this US only?
According to Tom's Hardware, it's North America, the United Kingdom, the European Union, and Australia.
https://www.tomshardware.com/video-games/console-gaming/valv...
absolutely amazing value
DOA lol, I built a computer 6 years ago for less with 64GB of DDR5. I can't imagine anyone buying this. Maybe they can hold out for 5 years and add some more ram and sell it for 25% in true Steam fashion.
A Framework Desktop is the better deal and more capable machine IMO. Also upgradeable.
$1000 !!!
Sorry Valve. I know its not really your fault but I refuse to give you my money this time. Instead I'm executing plan B: converting my Steam Deck into a workstation. It's the best hardware I have and while it can't play everything smoothly what it can run well is practically endless.
The Japan situation is so fucking weird. Why can I only buy Steam hardware from a website that someone seems to have set up on a weekend, and where half the inventory is out of stock…?
I'd love to know how the demographics of steam's actual users compare against those represented on the marketing page (https://store.steampowered.com/hardware/steammachine).
Eagerly awaiting the steam engine release.
Damn, that's expensive for PS5 performance
Small, quiet, underpowered and some games you can’t play because of stupid kernel level anti cheat and expensive. Not quite DOA but not the hyped thing I was looking for.
I’d just like to buy steamOS and install it on my ryzen 9 desktop and my Ryzen laptop.
No need to wait and buy anything. Try any gaming focused Linux distributions and you can already have this. Check out CachyOS, Nobara, Bazzite ...
Man...I'm certainly glad a happened to build a gaming beast rig in January of 2025. The RAM alone (64GB DDR5) would cost nearly as much as the entire rig now.
Yeah I can feel you. I built mine just a few months before that terrible "AI" slop bubble scam hypte started. The only mistake I regret now is that I only went with 32 GiB of memory and said to myself I can upgrade later to 64 GiB if I need more. Well luckily most of the time I don't but yeah sometimes it could come in handy. Not for games but for other work. Ah well, still happy I was lucky to do it before the AIpocalypse
Related:
Steam Machine
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48632884
Associated announcement post: https://store.steampowered.com/news/group/45479024/view/6852...
Why isn't this URL included in this post?
I hope they will release a version with a replaceable CPU and GPU. For a company that does so well on repair ability I don’t understand why they solder everything on the board. I prefer a mini-ITX system where I can easily change the components.
Thanks to Valve, I've now been using Omarchy as my operating system for months now. Gaming just works on Linux now. It's crazy, used to be a pipe dream!
I'm buying the Steam Machine as well to game on the couch. Give me 4k 60fps and that's all I need. The Steam Controller is also fantastic shape on my hands, very comfortable.
Care to explain what Omarchy has to do with Valve?
Same. Gaming exclusively on Linux (openSUSE Tumbleweed) for the last 2 years or so and also loving the Steam Controller.
Gaming just works for me with Steam and Ubuntu. Steam no longer filters out Linux games to its own category, it simply assumes most games work now (and they do!).
I know they will sell, but at this price point I don't understand who is supposed to be the target for this.
Either you want a gaming computer, and you'll get a much better one that can be upgraded in the future for the same price, or you want a console, and you'll never pay a grand for it.
4 years old hardware and poor connectivity.
I'll probably buy one. It's small so it fits under my TV, fits in with my furniture. Since it's all vertically integrated I know I can just connect it to the TV and it'll boot quickly and work well, and it has all my Steam games. I value my time and lack of frustration more than a few hundred dollars.
I want a simple UNIX workstation that "just works". Apple broke this promise to me with Tahoe, where horrific design decisions compounded the bugs on essential peripherals (Tahoe began spinning up and down my external raid array to sleep constantly, for no reason, making extremely loud noises as the drives repeatedly if it's idle, forcing me to constantly touch files in a while loop over dozens of partitions -- also I have a few petabyte of storage and it now takes ages to mount every reboot, as now with Tahoe Spotlight indexing is done as part of the mounting process and I can't opt out of this behavior and I'm in a warzone where power outages necessitating shutdowns are frequent). I have since used a docked Steam Deck as my daily driver and everything I want just works! It's now my UNIX desktop OS of choice. I've been on the Mac since OS X but Tahoe was so bad that now I consider an operating system designed for wasting time gaming a more serious and less disruptive option to my daily workflow. Heck of a job you're doing, Tim Apple!
I think there's a middle ground of people who just are not interested in building or upgrading a gaming computer (or just don't like their typical form factor in the ready to go out of the box gaming PCs) but also don't want the completely closed off ecosystem of a console.
I think if the Xbox ended up being more like the Steam Machine (i.e. more like a PC) then this middle ground that the Steam Machine sells to would probably go away as I don't think the group of folks who care that it's Linux based is high enough to support production.
I thought about it, but don't think I'll push the button. I have a falcon nw gaming rig in my living room right now running windows / steam big picture and an NVIDIA 3060Ti -- and it's .. fine, but long in the tooth. I wouldn't mind a more console-ish hardware experience for steam gaming, and compared to a new falcon box, this thing is cheap. I experimented with just running SteamOS on the falcon hardware a few years ago, but it was a little fussy, and I wanted to also use the system for local inference, and, and, and.
All that said, I don't think this is a good value. I'm presuming if I did a little work SteamOS 3 would be workable for me, and I have significantly more RAM, and possibly a better GPU? Not exactly sure where the GPU falls out, but I definitely believe I could buy a better GPU for less than the new box.
If it gets preferred shipment for the controller, you could buy it and sell the box and keep the controller. :) I think my controller ship date is estimated in 2027 right now.
Prebuilt machines have a terrible reputation, I could see people wanting this for a PC that you don't need hardware expertise to boot up. If you're reading this you could probably pick out your own parts and assemble them for cheaper, but for people who want a console-style plug-and-play type experience I could see the market for it.
Pricey, but so is any other sort of electronic entertainment hardware these days.
do you know fans or people who don't like to tinker computers?
take a sip at GamingOnLinux community... they don't seem to care about stuff running perfectly on Proton and not natively or that Gabe is buying another 600 million USD yatch. they love the Steam ecosystem more than developers crafting games and abiding to 30% of fees that are a clear sign of monopoly power
I wanted a gaming computer (read: an airgapped system that I could install arbitrary software on without fear), and I was sick to death of Microsoft's bullshit and resolved to never buy a Windows machine again, so I've been using a docked Steam Deck as my main gaming rig. It's performed far better than I imagined on the software side (has never failed to run any game in my library, though some have required minor settings tweaks), though the hardware is a little on the lighter side, which is perfectly acceptable for a handheld, but if the Steam Machine had been available at the time I'd probably have gone for that instead.
I feel like there's a midrange of "not particularly techy" gamers who will strongly appreciate - "I don't care about putting anything together, I just want to place PC games like a console."
RIP
Mildly disappointed to see 1GbE when spending [at least] a thousand dollars. Stupid datacenters squeezing all the chips.
Interested in hear the justification why you would need more than 1GbE in a machine built specificly for gaming.
I bet at least 90% of people buying this connect it to WiFi and never think about connection speed again!
Personally... my internet is only 300 Mbps. My WiFi connection is roughly on par with 1GbE. I have a very small pool of 2.5GbE capable devices, but overall I'm just not fussed about making the switch.
cool
would be amazing.
no thank you.
i'm in, i think prices are gonna suck anyway, i own a playstation and that shit sucks, i want to do more couch co-op with my partner and the steam library opens up so much indie games
can i build a mini pc myself? probably but meh
"This item is not available in your region" :(
PS5 performance at PS5 Pro price to target Nintendo Switch demographic?
For comparison - cloud gaming such as Nvidia's Geforce NOW is at ~20$/mo for 4k resolution with a monthly subscription one can cancel anytime.
That's what, ~4-5 years of gaming on a superior GPU without the headaches of hardware failures or upfront cost of 1000$?
Yikes Valve. The only folks buying gaming PCs these days are people eeking out an advantage in competitive 3D shooters or folks unaware of how far cloud gaming has come.
Cloud gaming is nowhere near the same experience as playing locally. There are a lot of games where milliseconds matter; it's big enough for me and my friends to try Geforce NOW and say, "No, this isn't good enough for a lot of games." You are kind of saying, "the bus only costs $4 a day, that's 30 years of using a car."
No matter how superior the GPU, the latency from streaming will never be able to compete if you're outside of a major hub.
I couldn't imagine playing a game by streaming inputs to a server 30ms away, which then streams those inputs another 30ms to the game server, and then having that round trip.
60ms screen delay and 120ms total delay.
OK. What if I want to mod my singleplayer game? Or, God forbid, make mods for it?
yikes, you will own nothing and be happy.
Wow that LTTlabs article was damning. The language is optimistic but this thing can’t possibly move steamdeck-numbers of units at $1100+ with that performance. DOA if you ask me.
It's interesting how so many are complaining about price and how it's dead etc.
Yet it will still be out of stock for a long time.
The repeated insistence that a company can only possibly be successful if it reaches every human being on earth is killing the world.
A company that spins up a division, builds a product, sells 100k of them, and winds down is a success
Keep in mind this entire venture from Valve is also about ensuring they can't be made a vassal of Microsoft.
Honestly seems kind of pointless in an era of cloud gaming :)
What? Cloud gaming flopped years ago.
I'm tempted to go order yet another BC-250, even though I haven't gotten the first one going. Sure the Machine is considerably more modern, has great new features, probably vastly better power efficiency (even though it's only 6nm vs 7nm surprisingly). But 288GB/s memory bandwidth? Versus the BC-250's 448GB/s? https://www.techpowerup.com/gpu-specs/steam-machine-gpu.c437... https://www.techpowerup.com/gpu-specs/playstation-5-gpu.c348...
Honestly tempted to buy a couple for relatives, who do some phone gaming and one who owns a 3DS they use, and see if they find anything interesting in PC gaming. Also make it a decent media center of course too.
Last I checked the idle power consumption of the BC-250 was on the higher side to make me not want to use it as a media center, though that could be my PSU. No hardware decode/encode (yet) either.
And lack of DRM makes a PC in general a mediocre experience for official streaming services if you want more than 720p streaming. If you care about that.
I got impatient waiting for the Steam Machine to come out and grabbed a BC-250 on ebay that was already set up with a case, fan, and power supply. Works great for reasonably demanding games (CONTROL, Elden Ring, etc.).
Now that I see the final price of the Steam Machine, I'm gonna be recommending the BC-250 more strongly.
Are you using the stock cooler? I’m going with an AIO for the APU, but I worry that the little heatsinks I’m planning for the VRMs aren’t going to cut it.
Sigh. I've been in line for a Steam controller since May 8. Not a peep.
I dont have much hope in getting that, let alone this.
Circa 2013 you could get a Steam Machine (made by Alienware/Dell) - the Alienware Alpha - for something like $300. Granted they were clearing them out at that time, but $300 was a no-brainer when consoles cost about the same and had significantly weaker hardware.
Now we're expected to pay almost 2x the cost of a current-gen console for what is probably near-identical console performance? Doesn't make sense. I appreciate Valve being in the hardware business and I understand that inflation/the AI bubble are hurting PC components but a grand for this is a terrible value. I mean let's see what the benchmarks look like, but "Semi-custom AMD Zen 4 6C / 12T" sounds like what's in the PS5 and Xbox One. Actually those have 8C/16T CPUs.
The 2013 Steam Machine is as different from this device as it could possibly be. Proton didn't exist back then and Steam Input was still in (relative) infancy.
Can we use it for AI?
You have my permission. Just do not share any learnings. There is enough LLM trash around as is.
Summary - Get a PS5 Pro.
But I don't want a PS5.
I think most of people who wanted (me included) a steam machine are now between buying it or not buying anything at all.
As I was saying. With those specs, you might as well get a PS5 [0] even with a PS5 Pro it would still be cheaper than the Steam Machine.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45908208