This is nice.
> 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.
> 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!
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."
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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'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.
Lies, they just want to protect themselves from the German Tank Problem [0] type of analysis.
But this is not nice:
> This item is not available for purchase in your region
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)
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.
[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...
[1]: https://www.pcgamer.com/gaming-industry/dutch-non-profit-set...
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.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not commenting on the value, but rather the markets ability to handle it.
> 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.
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.
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.
This is glorious
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.
The random reservation order takes the scalping issue out of the fulfillment part and into allocation making it a lot harder on the scalper.
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?
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.
We're truly screwed if things don't calm down at least a little....
Unfortunately, valve (and we consumers) have to recalibrate our understanding of which prices qualify as "insulting".
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.
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.
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.
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.
That’s great.
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.
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).
Rather odd to talk about an as yet unreleased product failing in the past tense.
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.
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.
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.
https://www.newegg.com/Gaming-Desktop-PC/SubCategory/ID-3742
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).
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 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.
That's why I'd love an interview with Steam's legal head. Sounds like they'd have some wild stories to share.
I won’t buy it
But wow what a nice communication
That’s gonna look great on post mortem report
I'm pretty sure the price increase is exclusively caused by LLMs.
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/
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.
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.
Even without buying you can send Linux gaming signals by playing on Linux and participating in the hardware survey.
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
> This item is not available for purchase in your region
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).
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.
Is there any actual data on this? I know people don't like scalpers but I wonder what the actual percentage is.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
Maybe it'll become a cheaper entry-level machine in a couple of years if they can keep producing them.
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.
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.
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.
On Stellaris: I remember having a pretty good experience (not stellar) playing on a 2012 AMD FX-8350 desktop cpu. The six year old midrange laptop cpu Ryzen 4650u smokes that desktop cpu.
https://www.cpubenchmark.net/compare/1780vs3766/AMD-FX-8350-...
Just to draw out the fact that with the Steam machine you will have a better Stellaris experience than what I had 7-8 years ago. (Because I assume even better performance than this laptop class cpu)
My thoughts go more on the question if 15GB ram 8GB VRAM is enough for the next 7 years. And if Steam verified will all be split up, and become more confusing, between the 3 different devices they have.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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)
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.
edit: I don't particularly care for Google Sheets, just the idea of solving the underlying problem.
It places it in same league as PS Portal and PS5
Wired Xbox 360 controllers (and most of their off brand alternatives) have a non-removable USB-A cable.
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.
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
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.
You're describing Every Computer Ever.
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.
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.
No doubt the price was lower before this hardware shortage, but the $800 is not a reliable number afaik.
Valve could have priced this at 5k and probably found a couple thousand buyers, and if they only made a few thousand boxes they could claim it sold out then too. This thing is DOA in terms of having any major success or impact on the gaming market when I can walk down to my neighborhood PC store and either build a better PC myself for less money (at off the shelf markups no less!!!) or get a pre-built with better specs that costs less. I could buy a P5Pro and a Switch 2 combined for less money than the 2TB version, and the PS5Pro has 2tb as well!
Its actually mind boggling that Valve is coming in with a less economic product that a fucking hand-built premade at my local PC store.
In fact you could literally just buy a separate PS5 and Macbook Neo and spend less than most Steam Machine configurations, so even the "it's also a computer" selling point is not that big of a deal.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_on_arrival#:~:text=In%20a...
Even if I didn't have a Steam Library, I wouldn't buy the PS5 anyway: no Steam Sales there. And Steam Sales are a godsend.
Why would I re-buy all the games I own?! The vast majority of people one-and-done games and movies. There are a handful they go back to, and that's it.
CHILDREN replay games cycling through them ad-infimum because their entire concept of time is like 3x less than we've been waiting for the next GTA.
And they don't have money! Adults are the majority of the market now.
Any other behavior from adults, who are seriously time constrained, is niche. And that's fine if someone wants to spend their adult time on earth replaying games, but let's be honest. It's niche.
No? You can plan all your PS4 (and regular PS5) games. Plus some PS3 and PS One (IIRC) other games.
My old Ryzen 3700X gaming PC has 16GB of RAM and 8GB of VRAM (RTX 2070 Super) and there isn't any game that runs better on it than my Xbox Series X. And the GPU in the Steam Machine is slightly worse than an RTX 2070 Super.
I stopped PC gaming about a decade ago and my current daily driver is a Macbook. I periodically play games on my a PS5 or XBOX, but there are a ton of great games on my Steam wishlist.
I feel like I'm the exact target market for this (although I'm not going to buy at this price point at this time). I don't want to bother with Windows and would love a 'console' allowing me to play most Steam games without a lot of hassle.
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.
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.
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.
but youre exactly the target market for this it sounds like
I think you could kind of get there with a gaming pc that boots up steam big picture immediately? but it would feel hacky vs this for sure
With this thing you could buy it and then install your favorite Linux distro on it and never give Valve another dime. If they ate the cost, businesses would buy them up as the best value for the compute and they're not buying Steam games.
That article is from 8 months after it released. Notably it doesn't count the Digital Edition, but I doubt it also got sold at a loss for that much longer.
> Limit one signup per household. We will use payment method, shipping address, and other information to eliminate multiple entries.
For the Steam Controller that's very clearly at least partly what's going on. Valve's "we didn't expect the demand!" schtick is getting pretty hard to buy when they clearly expected around the same expectations for V2 as for V1. PC gaming usage has grown massively since the first controller came out.
Jokes aside, I figured out techniques to avoid buying all together, which is great. I already spent plenty.
if you sampled 100 blackberry customers at random, they'd absolutely hate a software keyboard
and so on
I can already stream any steam game on any android and iphone out there
We're also nearing PS6 time in the next year or two. It's already six years old.
I live in Melbourne, and our population is larger than that of all NZ so I get why they kind of get forgotten, but it still sucks.
All I've seen is that everyone is doing at cost nowadays. The PS4 Pro was the last subsidized console.
$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 think it's partly because, on console, the sellers / devs have an incentive to reduce the price of physical copies, because they need to compete with used copies. They killed used copies on PC, so they don't need to compete with that market.
Even if a game takes 5 hours that’s 2500 hours
That’s mind blowing to me
Valve often boasts that they have a very high Rev / Employee number.
It’s more about 1000 scalpers buying two or three to immediately resell. There are entire discords and communities around this with thousands of members.
We'll see actual outrage when the masses defer new smartphone upgrades due to price bumps.
Ecomm orders want to drop to the distribution center as soon as possible, which means you can't wait until you have a whole bunch of them just so you can analyze which addresses are on multiple orders. You would either need to 1) detect this in the warehouse systems (I spent my career working on these, so I can say with high certainty that is almost definitely Not going to happen, especially if they go through a 3PL) OR 2) you have to cancel orders after they have already dropped to the warehouse (which means wasted labor in the best-case scenario).
None of that is worth the effort to a company who is fundamentally still getting paid the same for the product regardless of if the purchaser is a scalper or not.
Fusion festival is a Psytrance festival. It's nothing like Burning Man (a DIY community driven festival).
For the American's it would be closer to Electric Forest or Lost Lands (but with good music).
I feel like I'm having a slow day XD
Another way would be to auction of X amount of units, then those with cash can pay through the nose directly and again, the company gains and by that, so do normal consumers on a breadline, as it would help reduce the cost quicker down the line for the rest of the purchasers.
This way it's just a random draw and (I think?) the number of accounts scalpers can enter with is limited because they need to be established. So it might not solve scalping, but it could be a significant improvement.
Capitalism really does create a perverse incentive here, and when there's significant margin at play, there's an opportunity.
I eventually did, and when it finally arrived at my doorman building I mentioned what was in the package to the doorman, and how happy I was to finally get my hands on it after the effort expended and he said "oh really? there's a guy on the 5th floor who's bought dozens of them - he sold me one at cost".
At the scale of the PS5 release (I don't know how many they first shipped in 2020, but they're at >80M sold now so undoubtedly X million in the first year) - would an address match intervention have been able to differentiate my order from the dozens of orders the scalper on the 5th floor had placed, presuming some cooperation from the doorman to allow for variance in the details of the shipping address the scalper used? I'm reasonably confident the answer is no and I would have been caught in the net that attempted to prevent the scalper from scalping.
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."So it really has to be done like Cybertruck early deliveries to 100% prevent scalping and flipping(the fact that Musk nails it...)
ultimately they are selling out inventory so it probably takes a lot of convincing to spend money on a cat and mouse game
But yeah the selection and availability is nowhere near the USA or even say.. Indonesia.
That said, I've never had a Steam Deck or tried to seriously game on Linux, so I may be out of touch with how much smoother the picture is in an all-Proton world.
(the laptop issue turned out to be something in the firmware asserting BC PROCHOT for some reason; for now we can periodically clear it with the ThrottleStop utility, but who knows what the actual underlying problem is)
PS5 hardware sales started generating profit in the first year. Only for the first few month the sales were "subsidised".
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-...
Valve doesn't need this to do well to survive. And you don't need a steam machine (or any >$1000 machine) to play PC games. Just wait it out or buy used hardware. Hell, even an rog ally x plays just about anything (and also supports steamOS), and you can still get that at reasonable prices.
Yet one is not like the other.
Valve staged a scene of two people playing a game like how most people play a game. Just like that, there are many small human touches to this Steam Machine page. The messy cable picture where they show off the led strip, the honest and plain FAQ. Etc.
We don't have to glaze Valve for doing this, but we can still appreciate it.
I mean, you could say this of I think pretty much literally any ad. Were you previously unaware of advertising?
Maybe they lowered to 16gb to reduce the price.
That said I would not trust this as a PSU for a computer which uses almost all the available power output and does not have it's own internal battery. Most USB-C chargers are not designed to run at 100% capacity for extended periods and could not handle sudden spikes over the rated capacity. Even for desktop PSUs you always want to get something that has a good headroom over the actual power draw for stability.
/s
Yeah I probably wasn’t going to then.
No steam sales on consoles after all
I would say I am the exception, but hardware survey says otherwise. There are a lot of people for whom the Steam Machine would be at worst a sidegrade.
My games have been working on my desktop from 10 years ago, the SteamDeck, my laptop and likely any future computer I buy that runs Linux.
Only the Nintendo store have games priced usually a bit higher.
Citation needed.
* PS3 games and the like require a 150+$ yearly subscription, and it's streaming for many of them. No thanks.
* No PS2/PSP/Vita compatibility, heck no emulation at all.
I have the Deck and I mostly use it to emulate Switch & PS2 games.
[pirate flag emoji].
Games from sources other than Steam are a bit more fiddly to get going, but it's far from impossible. Like Valve says, it's your computer.
> https://www.pcmag.com/news/sony-says-499-ps5-no-longer-sells...
If you are stuck to Windows there are some 3rd party efforts like https://github.com/ddeverill/SteamlessController
The last generation of steam controller still had a mode you could start it in where it would register as xinput device. Seems that's gone on the new generation.
(then again i always buy the most expensive SKU they offer so im very outside the target buyer profile for such)
You do that like 50 weeks a year. That's ~400 hours a year. 2,500 / 400 = 6.25 years.
My Steam account is 20 years old. Even if we doubled it to 5,000 hours, that's 250 hours a year. Roughly 5 hours a week on average.
That said, a lot of people just end up owning a lot of games on Steam through sales even though they may never play them or only put a few hours in them. I've got >200 games and yet over half have <2 hours of play time. A ton I've never installed, they just came bundled in sales with other games I did actually want. When you can buy a whole publisher's collection of games for like $20 on some crazy sale why not?
If you check out Humble Bundle, you can find bundles of games where you get 20-30 games for around $20. Many of them are charity bundles, like one I got to help people in the Turkey/Syria area affected by the 2023 earthquake. Those bundles mostly consist of keys redeemed on the Steam platform. I don't play first-person-shooters, so those are going to sit in my library unplayed & uninstalled.
If Alice and Bob live in the same apartment and try to buy Steam Machines, but Bob forgets to include his apartment number (everything gets dumped on a shared package room, after all), Alice will be confused when an automated email accuses her of fraud.
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.
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.
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.
This is how staged reaction looks like: https://www.residentialsystems.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/0...
The Steam's clip is actually nowhere near like that.
PCPartPicker Part List: https://pcpartpicker.com/list/3WkCdq
Price: $1021
Right now Producers and HQ don't want to support it because "theres no money there" and they're bolstered by a crew of developers who have only ever touched Windows who will reinforce the notion that Windows is all you need (because they've sunk their entire career into the platform).
I remember bringing this topic up a decade ago and basically being laughed out of the room, slowly those laughs will become uncomfortable silences, then token support from the passionate, then proper initiatives.
It takes time, yeah, but we're so much further today already than we were 10+years ago.
I'm curious because if a game requires anticheat that means there's an intention that I'd be playing with people who would cheat if they could. And I don't want to have anything to do with people like that. I don't really understand why anyone wants to spend their time playing games with assholes from the internet.
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") .
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.
If you want to venture into the FOSS DAW realm on Linux you have to go to LMMS and Ardour. I've played around with them, they're a little bare-bones, but they do work. Issue is I haven't been able to use them properly, because I just can't stand to look at them, they are afflicted with the medium-size open-source project curse of looking particularly horrid. I hope this isn't taken as an affront to any of the developers behind these projects, a DAW is a hard task, but I keep asking myself, out of the set of developers who work on these projects, is there really no one who feels the same way as me? Am I just afflicted with some weird pixel-peeping autism-esque disorder that makes me stare at the constantly-reocurring-throughout-all-FOSS-applications clump of jarringly gradient-ed grey buttons with white icons on them, their round corners contrasting with each other because they're clearly placed way too close together than they were meant to be? (I swear I see this in every mid-scale project using QT and older GTK!)
And I also need to confirm, this isn't just a "slight annoyance" for me, I have genuine issues when I have to concentrate on a project within some application that is suffering from the FOSS UI affliction, my mind wanders to looking at those buttons again, or those #00FF00 greens, or at some label that has clearly seeped a few pixels downwards out-of-alignment with the button it was placed in...
Ugh, I know I have some issues for sure, but I know someone else has to care about this too? It's the main reason why I fail at using non-textual FOSS software, and have to resort to Logic Pro or Ableton!
Sorry for the rant, I had to get it out of me. I wish I had more time in a day, then perhaps I could go to these projects and help out with UI, but I have a feeling my proposals will be rejected, even if I had the time to make them, I have found most FOSS developers are quite happy with how their UI usually looks like, including many people here on this forum.
The Mac mini costs $600.
I got my deck fixed after the warranty period, for example, with very little fuss. They even payed for the shipping of the broken device to them
A relic from “Hard Disk Drive”, which was about two persistent storage technologies ago.
I got the Steam Deck on release. It was a near solid device for me from the get go. Only had the occasional crash/reboot, but I wouldn't describe it as having been clunky.
The only PC peripheral I have with USB-A is a mouse dongle when I'm lazy and don't connect bluetooth - and that one I connect to the monitor.
All others are usb-c.
All my cables I would connect to my home PC/macbook are USB C. IE bluetooth adaptor, sd card adaptor, external ssd, mouse/keyboard, a soundbar etc.
I have several chinesium clones of dewalt batteries/tools, IE lights, compressors etc. They all have USB c output.
"most pc perihpials are USB-A" is not exactly correct for some time now. (not that I'm a fan.)
I have even connected 2 computers directly with an ethernet cable to rule out my networking gear and it was ok but very very far from perfect!
Not to mention the experience is clunky at best. Switching resolution, losing settings, dealing with encoding/decoding, etc.
Just to pick on someone, iBuyPower's cheapest "RDY" prebuilt gaming PC has 6 performance cores, 16GB RAM, 8GB VRAM RTX 5050, 1TB NVME, and costs $1200. Basically same specs as the Steam Machine, for a very similar price, but in a typical midtower instead of a sleek, compact cube
I see examples like this: https://www.bestbuy.com/product/cyberpowerpc-gaming-desktop-... ($1200)
The Steam Machine is $150 cheaper, less storage, and due to lower TDP going to perform more poorly. But... I want something I can hide behind my TV that is very quiet. Can you help me find towers like that?
At these prices, it's not going to convince console gamers/more casual gamers to move to Steam.
Steam Deck was also vastly more appealing at launch when the base model was £349 (64GB/LCD). It now starts at close to twice the price, £649 (512GB/OLED) despite the hardware being kind of old at this point.
What? This is so obviously incorrect that I'm not even sure how to respond to it.
Prices will continue to go up.
This has played out time and time again during every other supply-side shock. Once prices go up, they don't come back down.
You typically don't want to do this anyway in games. You're probably doing something wrong if you're reading textures/meshes on both the CPU and GPU.
> Don't forget about how much more RAM a general purpose OS like Steam OS can consume versus a gaming specific OS too.
SteamOS is meant to be a gaming specific OS first. It has a desktop environment but none of that loads unless you switch to desktop mode. That's just taking up some disk space while you play games.
they created a nasty gambling system with their loot boxes that exists outside controlled casino environments and which impacts young adults a lot.
PC: AMD Ryzen 5 7600X 4.7 GHz 6-Core ($170)
-
SM: AMD RDNA3 28CUs 8 GB
PC: AMD Radeon RX 7600 8 GB ($280)
-
SM: 16GB DDR5
PC: 2 x 8 GB DDR5-5600 CL40 ($225)
-
SM: 512GB NVMe SSD
PC: Samsung 870 Evo 500 GB 2.5" SSD ($283)
-
Other parts the PC will need:
- CPU Cooler ($18)
- Motherboard ($100)
- Case ($60)
- PSU ($60)
-
SM: $1,049
PC: $1,196
A interesting scenario would be to sell the hardware at cost, but include a 30% off ticket to the steam store (up to a few hundred dollars, in savings).
They're not, because they don't lock down the hardware to only Steam.
If they subsidized the cost, people could just buy them as general purpose computers and not buy steam games on them.
Valve would only be in a position to subsidize the hardware if they locked the hardware down to just the Steam store.
The Steam Machine is ultimately a mid-range gaming PC in a nicer form factor and a slight discount compared to building it yourself. I don't think anyone would pay 1.5x for a Steam Machine when they could just buy a regular PC for less. There's no capabilities the Steam Machine has that a regular PC doesn't, which limits the ability of scalpers to charge larger margins and thereby limits the motivation.
As for potentially impacting the wider PC hardware market? Well, retail scalpers are small fry compared to Altman, Bezos, Musk et al.
> You must have made a purchase on Steam prior to April 27th 2026.
Everyone else could get into the second round raffle for a chance to buy / place in line.
The payment addresses sound trickier to work around, but abusers can just invent a fake billing address; many payment methods neither receive nor validate this.
And even that isn't as icky as a short project I worked on for a major CC company. Still get the icks thinking about it, and I didn't continue beyond the 6mo contract.
(Though I guess someone in their family can enter the lottery for them.)
Let alone having to put the PC on the floor because it won't fit anywhere else in the living room.
Although I think the language in the response dialog will be nicer than accusing of fraud.
If the price is expected to fall over time, then the negotiated price is below market at the beginning and above market at the end. From the suppliers view, they take a loss in the early years that they recover later.
Apple probably pays a premium to shift this risk to the supplier. Besides that they don't take a loss just because prices tend to fall. They only lose if market prices fall more steeply than expected.
It's funny how it works. I took an iPhone selfie of myself as the character that I go out to do street photography as and my wife and my son say "you staged that!" but then I hand out my business cards with it and everybody else tells me it is a great photo.
At 2TB SSD, you should compare to the $1350 steam machine instead.
The GPU isn't exactly equivalent. Gamers Nexus puts it closer to RX6600 performance. But that ignores the RDNA3 improvements so I don't really have a good comparison for that.
They did announce SteamOS for general computers, so I don't expect game support to be too different.
The Steam Machine is about a 6" cube. That's ~3.5L in volume. This case is ~33.6L. 33.6 / 3.5 != 4.
If it’s something even less doable than that… well I’ll do without.
So if you want something small, it's a bit more expensive
And nobody is forcing you too.
> I don't really understand why anyone wants to spend their time playing games with assholes from the internet.
Maybe your experience and preference is not shared equally by all? HN users in particular to seem to struggle with this concept for some reason.
People are not vectors of real-valued numbers, and "mean person" is not a coherent concept. Does the average person have half a penis and half a vagina? Is their skin a tan-ish mocha brown? Do they have slightly but not really curly hair that is long in some parts and short in others? Incomplete epicanthic folds?
Any representation of people will be a randomly chosen sample, and not an attempt to visualize the blending of all people from the sample.
There are a lot of games out there where a group of friends parties up and then goes against other parties of friends out there. Sometimes I want to play with my friends against others instead of only against my friends. Its been a pretty common kind of game style for decades.
> I don't really understand why anyone wants to spend their time playing games with assholes from the internet.
Yeah, it'd be nice to somehow exclude those assholes who would cheat. Maybe if there was some kind of technology which could limit the ability for people to use cheats, some kind of "anti-cheat". It would probably have to be pretty low level in the system to properly enforce this "anti-cheating" integrity, maybe in the kernel and hardware level?
Also isn’t the case with Ardour that they essentially want you to pay for the binary because compiling it is a PiTA and there are no instructions on how to do so?
We all know why hardware has become unaffordable even if Valve hasn't spelled it out.
By and large, the masses have always experienced football on a TV screen. (though removing lower price tickets from such public sport events is still bad)
I'm so tired of people trying to pretend that limited tickets to an event billions of people want to attend ought to be available to poor people just because. If they sold for a penny, the resale market would eat them up and they'd still cost what they cost. If you'd bought them for $10, you'd instantly turn around and sell them for a few thousand to someone else.
I'm sorry no one prepared you for the fact that rare things have value, but perhaps some introductory economics classes, instead of TikTok-trite-internet-rage would be helpful.
I'd call it an electronic music festival (or a giant rave, because terms like "EDM festival" were invented by corporations to displace "rave" the same way "open source" was meant to sanitize "free software" and Fusion is not a corporate event). I wouldn't call it a psytrance festival - that's just what they play on one stage of many, and maybe the 3rd or 4th biggest. There's a stage run by people from Berghain that plays techno the whole time (my favorite), a drum-n-bass stage, a couple more electronic music stages that I'm not sure about the subgenre, some smaller stages where live rock and metal bands play, theater performances, some kind of car racing thing next to a circus-looking tent, neither of which I've visited. And what the heck is "the hotel"?
Biggest impediment would be changes to purchase process. Run one live user through and repeat for how many bots you want to buy more.
Agreed with your comment on random being better. I just found a scalper sitting at a PC for 20 minutes waiting to buy pretty funny.
You would have to tell the user “use the corrected/matched one only” though. Some sites offer the correction but don’t make you use it.
If you don't, then yes, as a PC enthusiast I'm sad as well. But like, it's a little bit ironic to be complaining about RAM prices if you've got 5 sub-agents hacking away.
Also on a 2025 launch, but that 2023 mid-level hardware feels already pretty weak in 2026, especially for a console you're supposed to run 6-7 years into the future. Sure, it's as powerful as a base PS5 but that console is already 6 years old by now. So the valve box is a pain to justify jumping in unless you're a big valve fan and don't want to DIY a PC.
I don't know how much money they make from each unit but major profit is not the goal here. They want to sell more games to more casual people who don't even own a PC anymore.
It’s never, in EFL, “HOW…LIKE”
Next up is “make” vs “take” a decision.
Would it be difficult to make a PC with a similar power/performance profile?
Marketing is made so they you identify with the product or identify with an aspirational version of yourself. Gaming is seen as heavily male-dominated. Expanding that is smart.
(And yes, I know why you're asking and what answer you're looking for.)
Also in the way that the Ouya didn’t succeed at - their kickstarter tagline was “Cracking open the last closed platform: the TV”. I actually had completely forgotten about the Ouya, but the wording of your comment made me go look it up.
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/ouya/ouya-a-new-kind-of...
I'm very curious what you and others think the average Steam user really looks like.
[1] https://www.xda-developers.com/mac-mini-m4-gaming-hands-on/
0.000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000001%
That's 248 zeroes after the decimal point.
I mean that for real: I’ve been impressed by the performance of the M4 Mini I own, but a gaming machine it is not
The wired controller is USB-A. The bluetooth controllers "are" USB-C... but came with A-to-C cables, not C-to-C.
Approximately every time I want to plug something in to my laptop that's not a charging cable for another device, it's USB-A.
I love it and use it a lot, but it's not a Nintendo Switch experience, at all.
More to the point, anything I'd want to plug in to a gaming machine, is usb a.
Like what? The only "specific" thing that comes to mind are the boot animations and the Decky plugins (which should work with all SteamOS-like distros).
All of the optimizations, "Steam Deck" graphics settings, controller mapping support, Linux-friendly anticheat and more works on any Linux PC. Almost nothing is bespoke to the Deck, by design.
I am semi-frequently annoyed that my laptop has 0 USB-A ports. At least give me one.
I even bet many mac users wished their device had a usb-a port or two in order to not be so dependent on adapters, hubs and docks.
> https://www.pcmag.com/news/sony-says-499-ps5-no-longer-sells...
Mainstream console pricing is a bloodbath enabled only by perverse financial incentives.
I feel like the problem is a very large number of rough edges and software bugs, hardware issues, etc. But it's so possible to stream over the local network with zero noticeable latency. Only if all the stars align and there are no bugs.
The chroma encoding is a little disappointing, but I don't think there's any way to bypass it, even at 1080p.
What are you trying to prove? That Microsoft has hardware pricing magic?
[0] https://www.techpowerup.com/342970/valve-claims-steam-machin...
https://bsky.app/profile/papapishu.bsky.social/post/3movfklq...
I’m not going to start posting a bunch of different computers and then have us get bogged down nitpicking the specs. Go look at a couple of vendors and compare prices. The steam machine is just not competitively priced IMO and you don’t need their hardware to get the same experience when bazzite exists and runs great. Plus they will probably do a major release steamOS for desktop again soon anyway so you can likely boot that up soon.
I'm already running Linux on the desktop. I don't use it for anything else, I have a MacBook for non-gaming. The desktop is due for an upgrade soon, and upgrading to a Steam Machine makes total sense to me. I don't have to deal with driver issues, and I get a supported config that will just work with my steam library. I might have to put my current SSD into a cage and add it as an external drive somehow, because I don't want to download a couple of TB of Steam library.
I don't give a shit about graphics quality - I play games for the gameplay not for the graphics, and mostly play strategy games anyway.
I already have a Deck and love that for travelling. A Machine as a non-travelling version of that would be great.
If that bubble pops like it seems to be threatening to do memory prices could drop back to their old levels give or take some sticky inflation.
I think it's fair for some of us to consider the resource usage of a core feature and not really accept "just don't use desktop mode" as a viable suggestion. Especially if half the pitch is "it's a mobile PC." You can't use many of the features it's capable of in gaming mode.
If you try to import a phone, you'll also have to pay additional fees to "activate" the IMEI, otherwise you won't be able to connect to local cellular providers.
valheim started with extremely poor steam deck performance, but at some point, the team did steam deck optimizations that got it humming nicely enough
Yes, but we are in the unique situation that we saw actually increasing prices for RAM and storage over time due to AI craze. You (or me) have no idea what Sony's markup on consoles is right now.
Also, my office here is absolutely covered in maps of just New Zealand, which always gives me a chuckle.
I feel the 'don't waste time on HN' thing. I'm working on it, minimizing social media usage, minimizing non-productive screen time.
The yardstick in European football has always been that an ordinary working person can go and see a game in the stadium. A fair amount of sports did until they got the privatization treatment.
[edit: to be clear they are not the norm, they are more expensive than buildings without one, but there are still lots of them that are not Trump Tower or other places for the absurdly wealthy]
I only know Fusion festival from the psytrance community so I didn't realize it was a multi genre festival, but that makes sense!
These sorts of things are pretty cheaply routed around for those making scalping into a volume business.
Sure you can probably lock things down so you catch the vast majority of these mechanisms, but not without impacting legitimate users. So it's a tradeoff of how much more of a hassle do you want to make things for legitimate customers vs. how much you want to lock out resellers.
You don't even really need a doorman in many buildings either. There will be a shared mail room (if you're lucky) where packages get dropped. If you work from home you just watch the UPS/Fedex tracking and run down the moment it gets delivered to snag it before anyone else sees it.
The few folks I know who did this sort of thing were less professionals making a living off it, and more someone who wanted to subsidize their gaming habit by grabbing 3 or 4 units and keeping one while flipping the rest. They'd just ship to friends/family. The folks buying 50 units at a time are pretty rare from what I can tell.
Most new gaming mice and keyboards sold in 2026 use USB A. Not to mention all the older ones that still work.
The CPU hard-throttles to 4 GHz after exactly 8 minutes of sustained load.
That's set the steam machine at either $650 or $800, depending on which interpretation you're using.
The RTX 5050 8 GB is 10-20% faster and the Intel 225F is significantly more powerful (a bit harder to get percentage ranges there since there aren't many 225 benchmarks).
The Steam Machine has been known to be roughly a Ryzen 5 3600 + RX 7600 M performance wise for a while and the release benchmarks have confirmed it; given Valve's statements that it would likely cost more than consoles before prices went haywire, I don't think the Steam Machine would ever have been priced competitively.
If you were to anticipate a failure for a soon to launch product, it is entirely appropriate to say “dead on arrival”. A similar metaphor might be calling the product “stillborn”.
Can you explain this chart?
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/historical-cost-of-comput...
Suppose you have a warehouse full of widgets. You bought them them for $450 each, and sell them for $500. You're really happy with this profit, and you can just keep selling them at $500...forever, right?
But then, I get my own warehouse and fill it with widgets that I bought at $400 each because I entered under better market conditions. And I really want to sell these widgets -- they aren't making me any money when they just sit there taking up space and burning rent.
So I price these widgets at $475, to attract customers. It works; the widgets are flying off the shelves. And they're being purchased by people who used to be your customers, and I'm making even more money per-unit than you are.
What's your next move? Do you want to keep losing customers to me, or do you want to adjust your price to be more competitive?
Yes? What's wrong with that? Then it's at least usable.
Many if not most people will buy the thing for $X, then complain that someone else scored the same item for $X - $100.
But thats my perspective, which obviously I feel like is closer to the truth on the ground, wouldn't claim it's some universal truth though.
I expect there are plenty of people who would in fact, not do that.
At many income levels and budgets, gaining $1k from selling a ticket helps a lot less than losing $1k from buying a ticket hurts.
Plus many people aren't rational economic actors and would keep the $10 ticket and enjoy the show even if it doesn't make economic sense.
And you think it’s ok for rich people to swoop in, appropriate the attire and vibe of the sport and working class people just need to suck it up because they’re poor? The people who made the sport what it is now can’t enjoy it? The people who STILL make the sport what it is?
Disgusting.
The solution Valve came up with is quite brilliant.
Not everything must be race to the bottom. Not everything should be a fucking market.
If only rich snobs and people with poor financial control can afford your tickets, that will be the type of fan you’ll retain.
The corollary to this lottery will ensure that people who want Steam Machines day 1 actually get them at cost. So not only does this negatively impact the supply-side of scalping, but it also impacts the demand-side.
Might be acceptable collateral damage, but it’d exclude some people.
It wouldn't be surprising if Valve's efforts at integrating the unit (putting the relevant chips on a single board, eliminating anything unnecessary, and improving cooling) could shave a significant amount of power.
Tangentially, I wouldn't use kernel level anti-cheats, but if Valve's solution is indicative of the SotA in userspace anti-cheat solutions, there's a lot of room for improvement.
>Marketing is made so they you identify with the product or identify with an aspirational version of yourself. Gaming is seen as heavily male-dominated. Expanding that is smart.
This is the most simple and probably accurate explanation. Companies like to make money, untapped markets look like money.
The problem is that then, the current audience, who is primarily male, can raise concerns about the marketing not catering to them anymore.
There's a political arm who doesn't like that at all, and they will not only attempt to enforce collective delusion to dismiss the whole thing (what do you mean? everybody plays videogames, playerbase is split 50/50 pretty much!), but invalidate the very idea that a primarily male audience can have grievances about being catered to.
This makes them look insane and alienates the original audience politically speaking, and ironically, makes the original audience look bigoted, which puts consumers off.
This dance has been going on for like a decade and a half at this point and it's only recently that signs of it dying down have started to show. I can only hope.
Dolphin is Linux native. Works fine except for the huge input lag using GameCube controllers (via wii u adapter which is the only solid way), which means I can't really use it. Known issue with some driver, I tried a kmod to overclock it but no dice.
Unfortunately I usually meet gopnik and niño rata in Dota and CSGO and not typical young nerds from Seattle
It was a fun idea, even though I mostly just used it as an emulator box.
The controllers were neat but a bit janky, I always had issues w/ the batteries.
This is a completely nonsensical assumption. If you find three firefighters and one unknown person at a table playing cards, what do you think the probability that the fourth person turns out to be a firefighter is?
In 2026 the single most useful port to add to my Macs would be USB-A, with no close competition. On any device with 2+ USB-C ports, it'd easily be worth sacrificing a USB-C to get a USB-A.
With that in mind, I maintain that this stuff is very very far from perfect.
> The RTX 5050 8 GB is 10-20% faster
yeah... like I said, basically the same? but if you're determined to split hairs, then that 10-20% faster is also 10-20% more expensive ($1050 vs $1200), so it's still a wash either way. But when "just" a 5060 Ti 8gb (supposedly a $380 GPU) is then 50% faster than the 5050... Clearly the steam machine and 5050 are playing in the same ball pit here. They're doing the same gaming experience
Though that’s kind of cheating considering it’s basically a monopoly at this point
It's not huge, it's a mid-tower (admittedly, not a pretty one). But the real benefit is that it is upgradable. Basically you are trading off user serviceability for "it just works" and the form factor.
Another thing the Steam machine has is HDMI-CEC support, which is nice if you intend to use this with a TV, perhaps with KDE Plasma Bigscreen. But $1000 is rather steep for a console/HTPC.
[1]: https://www.gamingonlinux.com/anticheat/ [2]: https://partner.steamgames.com/doc/steamdeck/proton
It's not my point, but I don't think you're giving a strong rebuttal either.
However, at the price of $1130 for Steam Machine + controller, you might as well buy the Mac mini and a PS5 on top for $1250.
It just seems like a poor deal.
The best argument I have heard is that people already have large Steam libraries, but then again, those people typically already own a gaming PC.
I did not love the v1 Steam Controller, but it's easy to use with other controllers.
Maybe in the future. There should be a new generation of Mac Mini's soon, further extending the performance lead of Apple chips.
Maybe once Fable is back or the next OpenAI model releases, we could take a look at implementing a compatibility layer to translate DirectX games to Metal.
Even if that should yet be out of reach, such a project may become more feasible if AI progress keeps up.
Open up Roblox and see the sheer amount of loot boxes via Robux with Pay 2 Win items, battle passes, daily rewards, etc.
Counter Strike meanwhile has item skins which don't impact the game. They aren't more OP, in fact, most of the time they give you a disadvantage.
Counter Strike is an 18+ game. Kids shouldn't be on this anyways.
To be fair, all the latest generation consoles are near 100% backwards compatible with their respective last gen. This has historically been more tricky due to architecture changes but it seems like all consoles have converged into more or less bog-standard prebuilt computers so it's less of an ask.
But still, I trust my Steam library to last longer than anything I've bought digitally on consoles.
"...and it's a PC
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's not just a gaming console.
Most devices have a cable that’s fully replaceable so you can choose to use C to C or C to A but basically everything has usb C on the device end.
You need to build within the same constraints.
Also, it's $71 more thanjdiy according to GN.
Steam machine is a PC (not like a console): - not priced as a loss leader - runs any desktop OS - it’s a PC
You can do all of this out of box, it’s turnkey, it’s primarily a console experience but a PC if you need it. My point was that comparing this to a prebuilt or BYO PC is like comparing a console to a PC. Different value prop.
Okay, but the commenter I replied to said neither of those things. They didn't say "it'll be DOA", or even "it's DOA", but rather "killed this product on arrival". Despite my previous knowledge of the "dead on arrival" idiom, I found this particular wording strange due to its use of past tense, so I wrote a comment expressing that.
If you disagree, that's fine, but you've chosen an extraordinarily unproductive way to express that disagreement.
Once the price has already dropped more than ten times, and the site says when the next price drop is, people will figure it out well enough.
I'm also happy with older games. I just don't know how powerful these GPUs are.
I know it's hard to imagine in the US, what with our quarterly-profit-maximizing corruption, but it is possible to be corrupt and still have to balance long-term concerns like "keep the graft flowing".
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[1] or authorities taking action, but that usually comes after the marks/customers/voters/whatever speaking up loud enough, unless by “taking action” you mean “taking a piece of the action” by way of being corruptible themselves.
[2] from those who do, or might in future, play along with the current race-to-buy-at-fixed-teered-rates system.
that's not to say I don't like Valve's solution - I agree, it is very nice
I don't fear dying in a car accident. I dread the certainty that one day I'll be 80 and all I'll have left are memories, everything and everyone I ever loved will be gone (unless I have children which is very unlikely at this point), the world will be completely alien to me, and there's absolutely nothing I can do to prevent this - apart from dying even sooner which is even worse.
I think there are ways most people cope with this knowledge most of the time so they don't go crazy. I get why so many elites are obsessed with preventing aging.
That doesn't disprove my point though. Prices are still higher as a baseline than before the supply side shock. Prices raise to a "new normal" and consumers adapt, removing pressure to lower back down to pre-shock levels.
wholesale egg prices have actually plummeted, yet retail prices have only drifted slowly downward incrementally, and have not reached the previous baseline. Its asymmetric price transmission, and its a documented economic phenomenon. "Prices go up like rockets, and fall like feathers"
For the current DRAM situation, I can almost promise we'll never see $60-$90 RAM again. Maybe, 32GB won't cost you $500 eventually, but it'll cost you $250-$350 instead of $500. If the market can bear it, why would anyone get into a price war that's just a race to the bottom where no one wins?
A new entrant isn't guaranteed to now price at $475. They'll see the incumbent being successful at $500. Now they price at $499 rather than trigger a destructive price war. Companies collude on this quite frequently. When everyone keeps their prices high, all get to enjoy the big margins.
Outside of that, ok so you have a warehouse full of widgets you need to move fast. So you undercut, and sell out. If demand is still bigger than your supply, you're now out of capacity, customers are going back to buying for $500 from your competitor. That means you've mispriced your limited inventory, so now you raise your prices up to closer to $500 because it helps you control your capacity, and also you know the market can clearly bear it.
Anyway, those are obviously overly simplified scenarios prices rarely fall down dramatically because of tacit collusion. Its asymmetric price transmission ("Prices go up like rockets, but fall like feathers")
Can you hack it together in theory, get something working but making sacrifices left and right? Sure. But why would Valve want to do that? Use experience would be incredibly bad.
But give it time. There will be a standalone driver for Windows eventually, either from Valve or from the community.
Also sorry that we send you our trash from Cadburies in tassie.
It could have been something, but the target market is precisely the market that will look at the price and say "Nah".
And as one point of clarification, game makers by and large still aren't targeting Linux. This machine works via the absolutely excellent, almost magical Proton (https://github.com/valvesoftware/proton) that lets you run most of your Windows library on Linux, largely seamlessly.
It's in fact one of the least powerful handhelds (of the x86 class.)
> Somehow Cyberpunk 2077 ran really well on it.
With significant dropping of settings across the board, with 30-40fps at best and frequent drops into sub <20fps during the action.
That may count as "really well" depending on your definition I suppose. I wouldnt tolerate it, but i'm sure many would/do.
You can achieve a lot by specifically optimizing your game for a particular machine and Valve has such extreme market power that every game studio releasing on PC will make sure that their game looks and runs great on the Steam Machine.
This machine is more limited than I expected e.g. only 8 GB VRAM, however because of Valve's market power all game studios will see 8 GB VRAM as the new limit. Every game will now aim to look and run great with only 8GB VRAM.
As a poor gamer, I truly appreciate Valve setting such a low standard for gaming PC hardware. Game studios were certainly already looking at 16 GB VRAM + 32 GB RAM as the new standard for AAA games. That is now history.
I can accept that as a contributing cause but the main cause is the small number of companies that are buying all the ram. Even if there was more supply they'd still be screwing up the prices.
> The National Center for Supercomputing Applications had already built a cluster based on the PlayStation 2.
It's like watching millionaires discussing that nowadays poor people can't afford to go on a rocket to space.
I often feel these comments are made by people whose preferred games are not ruined by cheaters. This is happening right now in Arc Raiders, and it's really sad to watch. The developer, Embark, is now investigating using KLAC to reduce the number of cheaters.
IMHO there isn't a realistic "typical gamer stereotype" anymore
sure you can pick any of the past stereotypes and will find people like that, even many, but it's not "most" or even "a slim majority"
Games, and with that Steam, have spread through all of society and Steam is the most wide spread platform for it.
So whatever anecdotal data you have based on your local environments selection bias is probably not "overall representative", just a slice of one of the many many different kinds of people playing games bought from steam.
Good - at parity with a PS5 Pro or XBSX in the latest AAA titles.
Great - better than PS5 Pro or XBSX in the latest AAA titles.
A piece of hardware that runs a basket of popular higher-end games at close to 60fps is generally what people look for. If you know you wanna run DF you can use much cheaper hardware, but if you wanna run "games" you wanna check that your target pc performs good enough on a selection of games.
At some point you need to face the reality of it not happening.
But still, Roblox should do a better job regulating the games on its platform
Before that, I played Psychonauts 1.
We forget how many insanely good, solid games existed even in just the PS3 era.
The SD doesn't seem to support AV1 decoding, the resolution streaming resolution won't go to 4k despite forcing it in the settings, and the most annoying issue, if the framerate is not set to 90fps, there is 30ms of additional streaming latency. Which means, if I connect it to my 60fps living room tv, it will add 30ms of latency.
Then there are a bunch of minor issues, no virtual monitor, having to manually swap settings to windowed mode and hope the game offers the correct resolution for my TV (since my gaming rig is on an ultrawide), having to leave the gaming pc on and unlocked.
Apparently Apollo or Moonlight will solve some of the annoying issues, but I'm kind of soured on the streaming experience at this point. Streaming on the SD should Just Work.
I don’t really understand the point of this comment. Shouldn’t we operate under the assumption that it will work? Is there something particular problematic about the 5050?
Also, AMD GPU’s are still very affordable and totally viable. I have a 9070 and I love it.
I wish that Apple would throw a few nickels that way; Apple Silicon is almost wasted without a decent games library. It would realistically be my only computer if that were the case.
It's telling that depending on who I talk to, they go "it's a PC, not a console" or "it's a console, not a PC." It's neither and it's both. It brings the PC's flexibility to a console experience, but for $1100 is that enough? It won't be as turnkey as a console (steam deck showed they can't quite get there) and it's hundreds more than one.
Looking at the chart, it seems to be the case that every sharp increase in price has been followed by a sharp decrease in price.
Just for fun, here's the same chart adjusted for inflation: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=1WXWZ
A great example of the target audience are the people who've been playing games on the Steam Deck, but want something with a bit more oomf without the hassle of building a PC. I am not in that demographic! But I have a friend who is. He's quite happy to pay more for convenience. He already has a gaming laptop, but I can see him getting this to replace his ancient Steam Link.
And in both machines a similar percentage of their price is caused by these components.
Yes, but we're talking about the ports on the Steam Machine, so the host end is what matters. And gaming peripherals are likely even more skewed towards USB A, because Macs are not the main target for that.
Wine is wine, yes, but CodeWeavers is not Valve. Mac gaming is niche. The budgets involved are incomparable. Expect it to take weeks to months for hotfixes applied in days to Proton to filter through to CrossOver.
(This is my lived experience: HD2 patch 28th April broke wine compatibility, Proton had a hotfix in a day or two, CrossOver had a preview that partially fixed it May 11th and a release that fully fixed it June 9th; it was unplayable from April 28th to June 9th, longer if you count the stuttering issue that it suffered since March.)
The future of gaming on a Mac is also made less certain by the upcoming obsolescence of Rosetta. AFAICT Apple won't just pull it out completely, but they're clearly uninterested in supporting it long term, so over time the experience of trying to get x86 games to run on ARM Macs will worsen.
(I think I'll aim for a DIY PC build in 2027 in the hopes memory prices decline by then, but it's a faint hope!)
You need to provide a compelling argument why it is different this time.
The counter-argument is pretty basic:
RAM companies are currently selling as much as they can at high prices. This leads to investment in building new factories.
At some point the supply of new RAM will match the demand for it. When that occurs companies can increase profit by cutting prices to gain market share.
What's more, all the RAM companies have slightly different estimates of what the demand is. This leads to different levels of investment in new factories. Some will over-invest in new factories and the only way they can make their investment back is by increasing market share.
The final factor is new entries in the market. Chinese RAM manufactures can already produce DDR4 RAM (but only small amounts of DDR5). They can both increase supply of DDR4 RAM and are aggressively chasing DDR5 capabilities.
TL;DR: The profit motive is too strong for companies to artificially keep prices high once demand drops.
What do you mean?
2011: 2 TB HDD for $79.99 ($0.0000400 / MB).
2012: 2 TB HDD for $157.27 ($0.0000786 / MB).
2014: 4 TB HDD for $109 ($0.0000367 / MB)
2024: 8 TB HDD for $111.98 ($0.0000140 / MB)
https://web.archive.org/web/20250318110739/http://jcmit.net/...
https://www.thecpuguide.com/pc/disk-price-history-hdd-ssd-pr...
> They make about $20 per user annually and, assuming an active TV service life of five years, yield about $100 over the lifecycle of a main viewing room TV.
https://omdia.tech.informa.com/om030986/in-the-smart-tv-indu...
Look at monitor price drops (comparing the same tech). Same price drop curve.
They would maximize profit for this launch and in the process damage a reputation that is literally worth billions. Gamers are famously sensitive, and famously have a long memory for PR fuckups.
It's lovely here, but it's been a real shift vs having nearly every retailer available in my county and being able to go to NYC for a weekend on a whim.
I disagree that the target market won't accept the price. I see the target market as less technical people, who don't care about hardware specs, but just want to play Steam games without issues.
The price is in the same region as an iPhone, and if you care enough about PC gaming to buy a gaming PC at all, you are certainly willing to spend at least as much money on it as you spent on your phone.
Most games are tested on a steam deck nowadays.
Sure, but there's also the situation of all the people who are locals who don't need hotels and flights and food and etc.
Not to mention that the NSCA was just throwing spaghetti at the wall to see if it would prove useful when it came to the PS2,[0] and their setup never worked reliably.[1] The PS3 had several supercomputers made independently.[1][2][3]
[0] https://www.ncsa.illinois.edu/2003/05/27/playing-the-superco...
[1] https://www.warhistoryonline.com/war-articles/ps3-supercompu...
If the fries factory runs out of fries, would we blame consumers for buying too much, or the factory for not catching up with demand? Why sell stuff if it's not meant to be bought?
You and I both know, the poor will not do a damn thing.
Also, I know for a fact that plenty of working class people from England go to the World Cup. Fair enough, they’re wealthy by the standards of Brazilian favelas but that’s a broader issue. It still stings to see the price gouging that FIFA is enjoying this time round.
With the lottery, a good chunk of those systems are going those who would be willing to pay markup for them, but didn't. So the lottery does double-duty - it kills scalper supply and demand for scalped units.
If I pay high prices for your tickets and for travel to see you play in one of your limited selection of touring cities, sure, I might go. But if you tour again a few years later, I would rather see an artist I haven’t seen live yet.
Meanwhile if the tickets are affordable, I’ll try and go again. You’ll have my renewed interest every time.
Big question is whether they can make craching the anti-cheat it hard/unpredictable enough that the publishers will trust it. If the publishers release such a platform and someone releases a live distro that can crack it with 3 mouse clicks, that's a lot of wasted effort.
I have no idea how effective the Windows anti-cheat is, but I imagine that Linux tooling in general is going to make it harder to lock a user out of controlling their own machine.
To be clear, you have to pay to play certain games online. A lot of popular ones are free and general internet access does not cost anything.
A lot of folks also aren't all that interested in playing games online anyway.
except it very well might look quite like that. I happen to know such a case and I don't know that many people IRL.
Video Gaming became widely available roughly in the 90th in many of the places the steam machine is expected to mainly sell to (US/EU/CA/AU/UK/some other places, a lot of special cases). And most people who grew up with video games don't stop gaming. This means that Steam customers and gaming in general is not _at all_ anymore a hobby where most people fall under a small handful of stereotypes.
In turn statements along the line of yours are really quite meaningless and misleading. Steam has stopped being "just for nerds" or anything like that a long time ago.
And sure, things are probably different if you limit yourself to people active on steam forums, that place has a very different bias and using it as basis can lead to huge misconceptions about how people who "use" steam generally live.
Lastly let's also take a moment to consider who this steam machine is advertised to:
- no children, doing so is a regulatory pain
- not young adults, in current times 1k is just too much for someone currently trying to see if they can move out of their parent's place
- so more adults with a stable job/income, which grew up with gaming or at least do game a lot (so mainly age group ~20-35)
- also excluding the kind of people which would anyway go for a 3+k gaming system even if prices where more normal (like a lot of tech enthusiasts with money, "pc masterace" gamers, etc.)
and if you consider that potential customer base the chance for a randomly sampled home (of the target customer audience) to look somewhat like that(1) just went up quite a bit.
And exactly this is also the group for which the clip is, because a major part of the clips "message" is something on the line of a vague combination of "It's a product for everyone"/"Not just for nerds"/"Not just for tech enthusiasts"/"No special tech knowledge needed to play". I.e. "hey person who might live in an apartment without any nerdy stuff, it's also for you, you don't need special tech skills or anything like that". And this is kinda the only group where such a clip might make a difference in weather or not they buy, most other customer groups either won't buy anyway or will make a decision based on spec and reviews...
So IMHO this is a very well chosen clip setting.
Funnily the room does contain a lot of the kind of "not perfectly fitting furniture" you find a lot IRL due to a combination of people not finding fits and replacing/adding furniture over time with slightly changes in taste. I wonder if that was intentional or if the studio provider just didn't care or hat issues finding the right sets of things them self.
---
(1): As in: It has no "nerdy" things, or tech enthusiasts things. And is "just" a "normal/boring" adult apartment taken a clip of shortly after it was cleaned.
But either way I don't understand your argument.
If you're picking 100 people, they won't share any trait. But how is that relevant to this video clip?
If you're picking a random living room where people are playing steam games, there's a reasonable chance it looks like the video clip. Why not? The odds are low you get someone looking exactly like that, but you can say that same sentence no matter who gets picked. Don't fall victim to the lottery paradox.
I couldn't afford to replace my current NVMe drives (which is why I'm very happy I set everything up with the Samsung 970 Pro, as they're 2-bit drives that will outlast even my grandchildren).
I actually had to RMA some RAM yesterday, and even that has gotten so expensive that it now costs more than my entire computer cost in 2020.
AMD GPU's are all still basically MSRP. You can get a 9070 for $600 off amazon right now.
Brands could do that - or an approximation of that by having an higher launch prize for the initial batch - yet they mostly don't.
Maybe the intent here is not keeping difference to themselves, and there's more brand value in not profiting from supply constraints, while being perceived as doing something about mass scalping.
Since most brands don't seem to agree with you, and if you just feel like you should be able to use your extra money to get lucky, you can still try to convince one of the lucky ones. I guess the few who might take it to eBay will charge even more for the privilege.
Not everything needs to be about efficient markets.
Could the kernel have something built in to help with this? Like it can tell a program that nothing else is looking at its memory. And then secure boot attests that the kernel isn't tampered with.
92% identify as male, 7% female.
https://sqmagazine.co.uk/steam-statistics/
I think that it's true that games are definitely being played by both males and females today, but I think that statistics is that mobile games skew female, and PC games skew male.
Or pick some player profiles at random, count how many girls vs guys you find (very easy to tell with high accuracy just by looking at the games they play, yes there are exceptions but they're actually quite rare, I promise you can get >90% accuracy after you do a few).
Steam user base is at least 3/4 male by user count, probably even more by play time.
If you only compare the hardware, that's true. Even if you don't consider all the other functionality that a PC has vs. a console, add all the different ways to get free and heavily discounted games on Steam/PC, and the results of that calculation might start to look very different.
Lower transfer rate means less shielding is needed for the cable as well as the overmold, and enables longer and more flexible cables, as extra shielding stiffens the cables.
Then it's just the same capacity, but without huge buyers. Still the prices won't come down...
If they built new factories now, they would just lose money to an investment that would not pay off.
(Of course under the premise that AI collapses or is saturated at some point. If that doesn't hold true then ex falso quodlibet!)
It’s just hard for me to be impressed by one of the weakest entries from both a performance and image quality point of view. It’s all subjective though so if others do find it impressive, all the power to them.
I actually think the SW2 port is the most “impressive” handheld experience I’ve seen so far. Given its a superior experience “out of the box” as it were.
No idea why you would read a comment in a thread specifically about the WC and think, "but boy, think how angry I could be if I decided this comment was about something else entirely?!"
I don't much blame the factory that's already running 24/7 for failing to catch up in the short term. I'm not going to insist they do the impossible, or that they should have forseen a demand spike that caught us all by surprise.
High demand and a long lead time product - you can’t spin up fabs overnight to adapt to demand.
This creates a period where the people with the largest amount of capital can out compete other buyers in the market.
This is the situation at play right now. Your model is too simple.
A female share of around 40-48% has held steady in this report since around 2007.
Quantic Foundry's research largely backs that women prefer more casual-genre games like match 3, with a mobile bent that wouldn't show up in Steam data: https://quanticfoundry.com/2017/01/19/female-gamers-by-genre...
But they also show a heavy preference for third-person MMOs that are also less likely to show up in Steam data: https://quanticfoundry.com/2023/01/27/perspective/
Doesn't Steam have a very long tail? Most played might not be very representative.
Maybe young men are just boring and all play mostly just a few games, while majority of players that are more diverse have their interests spread more evenly across others?
Giving a list price would make no sense in the case of an auction, in fact would be misleading, (maybe even illegal ??), and not just because of these issues.
Most people would bid the maximum that they can justify. That's like saying that only scalpers take part in auctions (easy counter example : eBay).
That's pretty much a dystopian scenario where you're unable to interact with any network services without using devices with software that's controlled and/or trusted by the service provider. Basically a grave threat to Free Software as a whole, the end of free reimplementations of things you rely on to connect with the society. We already have a glimpse of that on mobile phones controlled by Google and Apple, we don't need more.
There are kinds of games that actually rely on anticheats to be viable, but they're in the tiny minority and I don't think they're worth reorganizing the society over. Most just consider it a solution for problems caused by their incompetently designed netcode.
Loot boxes are not a fun mechanic. Loot boxes are not designed to entertain you or give you good value for your money. Loot boxes only exist to make you gamble with your money over something that could easily be sold as a single purchase item, or better yet, be rewarded in-game. Simple as that. It’s a gambling scheme. Always has been. Always will be.
Because they saved die space in silicon? Same reason the MacBook Neo only has a single USB 3 and a USB 2. It seems that their A-series Pro silicon only has hardware for a single USB 3, and their non-Pro silicon doesn't even have it at all. I highly doubt they are sparing pins from the connector, the complexity of making a special port variant for that far surely outweighs any potential savings.
Prices spike because all stock, current and future, is bought up with fictitious money, causing a plethora of issues around the world for all supply chains that include DDR in one way or another. Basically all form of electronics or electronics containing devices get more expensive, delayed, or even cancelled.
Life is already expensive and it is going to get more expensive fast.
That is what gets people on edge.
You can also look at computer monitors (which don’t have advertising and spyware) and see an enormous price drop.
Edit: I found this which estimates you can make about $100 in ads and data collection over the lifetime of a TV https://omdia.tech.informa.com/om030986/in-the-smart-tv-indu...
Also, I pointed to another comment that working class fans are the fans that make the game. Man U are famously followed by “the prawn sandwich brigade” and the top tier clubs are regularly mocked by others for being out-sung at their own stadiums.
For example, you could make tickets non-transferable, but refundable.
Anyways, just wanted to add that the steam machine and PCs killer differentiator: a truly open platform that no mac, ps5 and other consoles can offer. Do whatever you want, install whatever software you want, whatever OS you want. Break the rules, face the consequences. Live life like a living being, not as a slave to some corpo.
Because they have orderbooks 2 years (at least) into the future so know what demand is there - and they are demanding deposits for future orders.
It's easy to see if this is true. Look for news on new factories opening:
Micron: https://finance.yahoo.com/technology/ai/articles/micron-mu-p...
Samsung: https://www.kedglobal.com/korean-chipmakers/newsView/ked2026... (note this is doubling Samsung's memory production)
SK Hynix: https://finance.yahoo.com/sectors/technology/articles/sk-hyn...
In real world, sales tactics work. People can be influenced to pay more than they thought they're willing to pay. Scalpers know this and exploit this at scale. A Vickery auction gives basically zero opportunity to get talked up. People will bid at the "thought they're willing" price, and scalpers will outbid them. Then the same people who underbid on auction will go to eBay, see it listed at "influenced to pay more" price, and buy it for much more than they bid.
And yes; the vast majority of eBay auction bidders are indeed scalpers, whose day job is to look for cheap deals that they can resell for more. It's extremely rare in this day and age to actually take advantage of eBay bidding to buy in-demand stuff on the cheap. It's much easier when there's "buy now" option but you need to be fast and lucky because you're competing against scalpers here too. Of course things are different for stuff that few people want in the first place - scalpers are not interested in those because they're too hard to offload, so you get your fair chance.
But "covers for incompetently designed netcode" doesn't hold at all.
Netcode and cheat-resistance are mostly orthogonal. Netcode is latency-hiding — prediction, reconciliation, interpolation. Cheating is the client being an endpoint you don't control. You can have flawless netcode and still get wallhacked, because a wallhack touches the renderer, not the wire. You have to ship that data for the client to draw the level.
Server-side validation kills the cheats that surface as state: speedhacks, teleports, impossible positions; but it's blind to the ones that don't touch state at all. A wallhack reads memory the client holds. A vision aimbot runs on a second machine reading the screen- nothing crosses the network for the server to reject.[0]
That's why the kernel and attestation stuff exists. Not lazy devs papering over a bug: a class of cheat that server authority structurally can't reach, because the cheat never lies to the server.
I understand the dystopia argument, and it's a decent one. "Just write better netcode" isn't.
I'd humbly request that you spend time trying to actually grapple with the problem, there are some exceptionally well paid and talented programmers who are working on this non-stop in the large publishing houses (EA, Ubisoft, Tencent, Activision) who would do anything to avoid paying royalties to shitty software that breaks the performance and reliability of their games: yet for some reason year over year they can't seem to manage it.
Worth understanding why that is, instead of assuming incompetence or malice; perhaps its a harder problem than you think.
I take it you meant GP (as in, the post I was responding to - which to this post is actually GGP but I digress).
I don't think it is. Their reasoning is:
> there are reasons someone might want a 6" cube instead of a full PS5 and a mac mini. None of them are low price but they are reasons nonetheless.
Mine is that it is indeed price, only not the price of the hardware alone but rather the price of the ecosystem as a whole. Another aspect that I didn't cover is that a game that you buy today for PC will likely still work on whatever PC you have 20, 30 years from now. The same cannot be said for consoles.
I do agree with your second paragraph though! :)
How long does building a factory take?
If the demand grows with their production they can sell more units at the same price.
If demand goes down by a certain percentage, they sell more for less + they lost the investment into new factories.
It all is based on IFs and about personality, about "optimism" vs "pessimism"
I for one think that the AI bubble will "burst" at some point and I think that then there will be a lot of hardware to go by.
Time will be the judge of my abilities to replace the Oracle of Delphi.
In any case, I don't think "not wanting to make assumptions about people based on little to no information" really counts as "very rigorous standards".
You're welcome to, but those games precipitously lose players, because it's frustrating.
https://www.reddit.com/r/GTA/comments/1af8t12/online_isnt_fu...
