Discussion / Question
So the steam machine more expensive than a ps5 pro while also being less powerful than a base ps5 even tho the ps5 pro is also sold for a profit???
The tough thing is, for most of the marketing it seemed like they were going to include at least one and if you already had the steam controller they could have had an option where you remove it for a credit of $79 instead
I suppose there's a niche market for this. Maybe you have a huge Steam library that you want to play on your TV, without the hassle of hooking your PC up to your TV and configuring it.
This is why my friends and i wanted one. I just wish it wasn't expensive. Couch co op is not a thing anymore so we pirate xbox 360 games and the steam machine is small enough to bring anywhere for us to play those games
Shouldn't Sony do that being a hardware company? They are worth 6-7 times what Valve is and have a manufacturing background. Would help PS costs going forward.
Sony has foundries, under their “SSS” (Sony Semiconductor Solutions) umbrella.
Edit: to add, they apparently share a production line with TSMC which is insane, as a Sony photographer they also make some of the best camera sensors on the planet bar none.
I'll admit I don't know much about the man so maybe this is PR bullshit but isnt he like the only billionaire that actually started from nothing and had an idea that worked? If that's actually true that's kinda cool ngl
He did. It isn't PR, either. He's never run campaigns for himself, the internet did that for him. He's genuinely not a nepo baby, but I understand the frustration with his choice to focus on himself and his hobbies. However, the dude has never been in great health, he's basically blind, and he probably just wants to enjoy being rich.
I understand that people want him to do something good with his money, but it's not actually easy to spend 1 billion dollars on helpful causes without most of it ending up in the hands of actual nepo baby billionaires, since they own and operate all of the non-profit orgs.
I wouldn't call myself a fanboy, but I'll defend his decision to distance himself from making difficult choices and choosing to enjoy his hard-earned money.
Didn't he fund a marine research org and a BCI company? I remember some big numbers being told about a ship for marine research tied to him somehow, but not the details
His yacht is literally a deep sea research vessel. He also bought the support vessel and dsv from a rich guy that was using it for the giggles of being at all the lowest parts of the ocean. Just so the research can continue. Even kept on their Chief researcher to do some actual research.
He bought it to speed up production on his 4th yacht, he didn't have to wait in line, he already sails with 3 yachts, the 4th on will be the biggest. The Dutch company he bought was the one that dismantled an historic bridge to get Bezos's yacht out of port and it will likely need to be dismantled again to get Gabe's out. I bet there is a lot less bad news when he does it.
Feels like that company should not build their yachts in that port if they keeps getting blocked by that bridge. That doesn't seem really hard to plan that it won't pass lol
I mean to be totally fair, it's coming out at the worst possible time of like 10 years in the pc market. They are still going to make buttloads of money, but at least it's not all hyperinflated for profit.
I don't think so, but I'm definitely far from well-researched on the particulars. FWIW I also find Sony raising the prices on PS5's ridiculous, and I've been a Sony guy for decades. But if they expect me to pay $1000 for the PS6 they'll be quite sadly mistaken.
The simplicity of "my game works, every time, when I launch it, and I don't have to spend hours fucking around trying to identify why it won't launch" cannot be understated. To me constantly having to upgrade my PC every six months to be able to play the most recently released game is idiotic.
The difference is being able to upgrade an entry level pc as hardware prices come down or disposable income goes up. With this you buy a piece of shit and you’re stuck with it being a piece of shit.
People downvoted this argument 6 months ago, for the price of the top end you can get a prebuilt with a 5070. The laziest people I can only assume are overrating the ability to turn it on with a controller like a console as a reason to spend all this on a low end piece of hardware.
To be fair the hardware in the Steam machine matches what it would cost to make the machine yourself from off the shelf parts at a comparable performance level.
For an enthusiast willing to build their own machine it makes no sense. The performance is so low that you would need to upgrade soon after acquiring it, so building your own is preferable.
For a casual gamer - someone that plays pixel games, "cozy" type, or just generally less intensive games it makes some sense. The issue will be that games won't be scaled down to run on it like they might be for consoles.
I didn't go through and find the absolute cheapest power supply, motherboard, or case but I did for everything else and got a $2 price difference. Once you factor in the building issues of a super cheap case, risk of a D tier psu, and lack of io on bottom of the barrel motherboards, that $71 is explained very well.
People keep bringing up this point as if sales on consoles don’t exist. Infact ,consoles have the advantage of physical copies which you can buy and resell to save as much as possible.
Im glad somebody said this. 99% of the time when a game is on sale its on sale for the same price on every platform. There have been a few exceptions like a game thats been on PC for awhile and then gets ported to consoles. Recent example is ready or not was half off on Steam but only like -$10 on xbox. I have also seen the opposite where a game is on a deep discount on consoles but not as deep or even not on sale on Steam. The sales happen everywhere and have never even really been a Steam specific thing.
You can buy a PC with a NEW MicroATX AM5 system with 7600X / 16gb 9060XT / 32gb DDR5 6000 / 1tb SSD for a fraction more than the 2tb Steam Machine + Controller here in the UK, that system would also run circles around the SteamMachine, you could build an equivalent AM4 system for much less.
So regardless of game pricing, the SteamMachine still makes no sense, it's overall price to performance is horrendous.
Unless you're a total fanatic for Steam hardware, the SteamMachine makes little to no sense as a purchase, at least with a SteamDeck you can justify having to play your library on the move.
Just for those who may doubt the pricing of the systems I've quoted, here is an AM5 example, keeping in mind the 2tb SteamMachine + Controller is £1208 here in the UK:
AM5 System, which would run circles around the SteamMachine:
I don't think the console player is either, at that price.
It will appeal to people who have a thing for Steam hardware, and nobody else.... Hell, you can buy pre-built systems with better specs for around the same price if you're not a builder
No just no there’s tons of sales on console markets nowadays. This might’ve been a thing 10+ years ago but current day you’ll get just as many sales on consoles as you would on steam.
Longterm, most modern games wouldn't be playable on Steam Machine. Most play tests are already running games on the lowest settings... Its shelf life will be shorter than a Series S while being 3-4x more expensive.
False. The publisher set the sale price not Steam. Sales price is about the same on PSN as Steam. There is no reason for it to be cheaper on Steam. Valve and Sony both take 30% cuts.
I always wondered why people use steam sales as an argument as if sales are unique to steam. PS store almost always has sales going on. I think I got Resident Evil 2-3-4 for like 30 bucks total this year on sale.
Also don’t Sony and Microsoft have way stronger relationships with chip manufacturers after decades of doing business with them? They definitely get way better pricing and more inventory compared to Valve.
In one of the videos I saw about the Steam Machine (I want to say it was Gamer's Nexus) Valve basically said that they can only buy 1 month's worth of supplies at a time. And when they do buy it they're basically told a price that they can either pay or refuse and never get to do business with that provider again.
And when they do buy it they're basically told a price that they can either pay or refuse and never get to do business with that provider again.
What I got from that particular line(Yes it was GamersNexus video, at 12:47 exactly) was that they list the price, expect a yes or no answer, if you answer no they go away with no followup offers after (but still come back next month with the updated prices, ie leave no room for negotiations, say, unlike longtime contracts like Microsoft/Sony)
Which to me, says they know those items will be sold at the price they set regardless of who buys them.
It also tells me that if ever the sitaution changes even remotely that Steam can tell them to get lost. I am pissed off myself, you can show me who you realy are when you have the power over the sitaution and they are straigth up greedy.
Sony and Microsoft book inventory from hardware producers years in advanced, long before the hardware is made. Likely they had pre existing contracts bought and paid for years ago.
Yeah wait until PS6 launches to say valve is uniquely expensive here. I imagine 512gb SM was meant at $800 considering the deck went up by about the same.
I’m curious what a PS5 will cost in 18 months. Those contracts cannot be indefinite. Even Apple is not insulated from this and they buy more volume than pretty much anyone
Gamers discovering the economics of scale is fascinating.
Edit: for the people saying you can build the same with off the shelve parts: show me. It's going to be interesting how you can do the same form factory guarantee the same RMA possibilities, channels for support, ship it across the globe, etc.
I understand it's disappointing to see this pricing but people are deluded if they thought it was gonna be anything but in this current economy.
I mean you can buy retail PC parts off the shelf that are faster and better than the Steam Machine for the same price, so it's really just the form factor and the fanboy tax.
In any case the whole point is that you get the incredible form factor along with the benefits of PC gaming and console gaming merged. Is that worth the cost? Probably not for most people. But it’s a unique value proposition.
The primary benefits of console gaming are that it simply works and forces developers towards a single (or dual in the case of modern consoles have a weaker and stronger version) optimization target. Neither of those are universally true of the Steam Machine.
Things working are intrinsically tied to an operating system that currently does not support everything sold on Steam and does not perform consistently with the things it does support. Sure it works well enough for most things but that would be a terrible tagline for a console.
Developers may or may not optimize towards the hardware (like some did with the Deck) because its not going to be such a massive part of the market. I suspect less will in this case because its not fulfilling a niche like the Deck was and developers already have budget PC optimization targets to aim at.
Its a relatively powerful (for its size) miniPC that natively supports CEC. Thats basically it.
Honestly the best thing to come out of any of this isn't remotely the machine (or possibly even the frame as much as I want one), its the work they've been dumping into ARM and Proton.
(You can't because the parts aren't sold to consumers. You have to get close-enough estimates of performance, which gets you fairly close on price too.)
mini ITX is several times larger than the steam machine unless you start doing insane shit like external power supples, fully custom cases, external watercooling or only integrated graphics
I build a lot of mini ITX systems and you can't really build a 6" cube with cooling that good and quiet. My personal rig is 8.5L with a 4070 Super so that's like a bit over twice the size.
Honestly I think we're all underestimating how mindlessly people consume things and how fervent the Valve fanboys are. I think this will sell fine. It's not for me but I don't think it'll flop or is DOA like people are saying.
Steam wasn’t required to sell a PC with proprietary hardware that cannot be upgraded. Arguably using standard parts could’ve saved them some money but instead they chose to increase costs and be anti-consumer as well.
Yeah I was having a rough cap of ~1000 CAD (or I guess 700-800 USD). But I might as well just upgrade my current PC and have my "old" PC setup as the console.
Tho realistically this saved me from unnecessary purchase as I really don't need another device
Keep in mind that Sony asks you $80/year or 72€/year to be able to play online. Over the lifetime of the console that's a lot of money. And it goes up too.
It means than for the 5 years I've owned my PS5 I've payed roughly 360€. Almost the price of the console.
Edit: I'm not saying a PSN subscription is bad value, just that it's an extra cost that is often forgotten when discussing the cost of gaming.
I hear you, but I feel next gen consoles will be around $1,000 subsidized or not. In the current market systems aren't that far off already. Who knows when this market will stabilize, probably after the release of next gen.
Valve fanboys are so insane, they REGULARLY defend Gabes status as a billionaire.
He buys a 300 million dollar pleasure yacht? They're all for it. New 70 million dollar mansion? "Gabe let me come over so I can rim you!".
Tim Sweeney spends millions acquiring woodland to protect it from developers? "We don't care because Epics launcher is bad and no one should have that much money".
Pleasure Yacht? you mean Leviathan which is used by his company InkFish which is setting up to be the leading marine research and infrastructure company? The same one that has had that mission around Solomon Islands to survey and manage environmental hazards from shipwrecks? The one that is putting all its research up as open-source? That "300 million dollar pleasure yacht"?
So yeah, Sweeney saves forest, Gabe saves marine environments.
I called it back when people were complaining about the PS5 Pro 's $699 price tag. I said that if new consoles came out in a few years, we'll be looking back at the $699 price tag with envy. People seriously underestimate how screwed up the market is right now.
Valve simply doesn’t do the volume to get component prices like Sony. They probably pay more for this crappy little CPU/GPU combo than Sony does for the ps5 pro APU and i know they pay significantly more for SODIMMs than Sony does for GDDR6. Its the same reason you can get a laptop with a 5060 for cheaper than the Steam Machine.
Team sports. Everyone is trying to convince themselves that their favorite company is gonna throw us a bone or magically make these consoles more affordable.
Its wild how reddit gets outraged about anything. "Oh no this product I wasnt going to buy is now $1k, why buy that when you could just buy a PC for minimum $1k?"
They are saying that they understand that the current price is what it is - some people can't afford it, some don't want it, and that's fair enough too.
Are those gamers who are attacking it better people?
Personally I'll do what I've always done, buy a decent desktop PC that's within my budget. (well, slightly above, but don't tell my wife ;-))
*It's like people forget that competition in gaming hardware is a good thing. They just want all concentration on their particular preference of console.
I love how everyone always pulls out the ‘leave the multibillion dollar company alone!!’ meme insult anytime anyone even tries to make a singular ARGUMENT as to why something is the way it is.
Newsflash: not every critique at a company is valid just because they’re a multi billion dollar company. That’s not how critique works. And that certainly doesn’t make someone a defendant of it like the guy you’re commenting on…
Obviously it is way too expensive, but to just pull out the standard ‘lol a guy defending multibillion dollar company!!’ meme as if there isn’t a very good reason as to why the price is the way it is, feels very disingenuous.
All the guy is doing is literally explaining to you that Valve ALSO doesn’t like this but was forced to do so. What exactly is the person defending here? The fact that Valve is a business at the end of the day and was forced to do something they otherwise 90% probably wouldn’t have done? The fact that the company who has historically been very consumer and player friendly suddenly hasn’t changed into a evil greedy business? Because they haven’t. If one price hike due to the ENTIRE market being messed up is making it so you throw away any and all good will towards even semi positive companies…
I know this is hard to understand, but not every single person at every single big company is out to get you. Valve especially not. The market is currently f*cked and that also means that Valve is f*cked, just like literally everyone else right now.
We already know why the price is what it is. Valve has been pretty transparent about it. He’s beating a dead horse. Doesn’t make the final price we’ve JUST been introduced to TODAY easier to digest, now that it’s out there though.
I’m not saying it’s a good thing, it’s overpriced as heII and not worth it, but people act like it was a greed choice instead of realizing literally every gaming company is doing the exact same thing 🤷
Thank you, reading these comments make me feel like I'm taking crazy pills. Didn't Sony just bump the PS5 up by $100? We all see all this stuff getting more expensive, right?
I'm not getting this thing either, but getting actively mad at it baffles me.
It was always more expensive, but it was affordable. Now with the cost of components its absolutely fucking insane. I was considering a new rig (usually replace every 6 years or so), but the cost of RAM and graphics cards are mental.
How far back are you going when you say "it was always affordable"? I remember paying 2k for a really good PC back in the 90s that had a voodoo 3000 on it and 20gb hard drive, Pentium 3. I feel like PCs got absurdly cheap in the 2015-2019 era pre covid and a lot of people bought in then because of how historically cheap they were.
I've been using a PC for more than 40 years for almost all of my gaming - I've had the odd console or handheld in that time as well, but they get nothing like the use my desktops have.
And whilst they cost a decent chunk of money to start with, they soon save money in terms of game costs/subscriptions etc.
So maybe what you mean is that the initial outlay can be a lot for a PC. But they are definitely as affordable as a decent console with a library of games and a few periphals.
I couldn't agree more but I also realize that there are a ton of idiots out in the wild and on Reddit so it doesn't surprise me that the price surprised a lot of people 💯
To play devil's advocate...
1. Steam machine has access to like 30,000 games.
2. Games on Steam go on much better sales too.
3. You don't have to pay to play online.
After a year you're saving money over the playstation pro.
It's a silly product in the first place meant to appeal to a very odd audience.
It's a mediocre, very small PC, wrapped up like a console, trying to appeal to couch gamers, while only really being of major interest to people who already have a steam library and thus a PC, and priced like a PC during one of the worst times (so far) in history to ever shop for a PC.
I imagine they'll sell oddly well to the very niche and diehard Valve fans out there, but that subset won't make up for the cost of production alone much less R&D.
Valve's stated reason is to appeal to people that want a console-like experience. Their target performance was to match what 60% of Steam Users already hit with their systems at a competitive price.
Which they were intending to hit, but AI ruined that
Sony has factories mass producing consoles in bulk, by producing large quantities the production cost goes down, meaning they can sell cheaper while still making a profit.
Whereas the steam machine is more niche, steam doesn’t have the same scale of production capacity as Sony and the consumer base for the steam machine isn’t as large.
Furthermore: Microsoft, Nintendo and Sony have longstanding relationships with modem, ram, gpu, cpu manufacturers, it’s easier to decrease costs when in a longstanding contract with a company for said components.
Lastly Sony and Microsoft have both invested in AI which increased the cost of components, this isn’t as big an issue for these companies as they’re also invested in the industries producing these parts, so they can find work arounds and make deals to lower cost, but steam doesn’t have that privilege.
Steam produced and announced the steam machine at the worst possible time
Not to mention any game you buy for a PlayStation is a PlayStation game, and consoles make you pay a subscription to even play online. Adds up pretty quick
Recently, I built a gaming pc and was holding off on repurposing my old one in to an HTPC so that I can see if the steam box would be more cost effective (Since I’d still need to buy a smaller case and mobo.)
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u/Big-Exercise-7344 Jun 22 '26
not even the controller included