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Comment by NelsonMinar | Hacker News Reader

As the article says, "The only way that they could mess this up is with the pricing. ... I'd expect the pricing to be super aggressive." The price to beat is the $400-$500 price point of PS5 and XBox. I'm guessing Valve is going to have a very hard time matching that. We'll know soon enough.

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All they have to do is market the fact you don't have to pay for online.

PS5 + 3 years of PS Plus = $740

Steam Machine = $700

Add/remove more years of PS Plus if the SM turns out to be more/less expensive.

If you add the fact that games on PC are usually cheaper and have sales more often then it's a no brainer, but that won't convince the FIFA and COD players.

Plus a game catalog that stretches back some 30 years?

And +X years, because you could write your own games for it and install them without begging for permission from Valve.

More like 50 years if you consider emulators (RetroArch is available on Steam).

It doesn't even need to be available on Steam to be fair. You can run whatever games you want. You could even run a Nintendo Switch emulator if you want

True. And that is the strength of the PC platform, its openness and being able to run whatever you want.

This system won't run FIFA, GTA Online, Battlefield, Valorant or CoD, it's a nonstarter for many.

Sure you don't need to subscribe to PS+, but that's somewhat easier to swallow since PS+ gives you games with the subscription.

I'm still interested in this for playing older games but I have a Steam Deck and it still isn't remotely as seamless as my Switch or PS5.

> This system won't run FIFA, GTA Online, Battlefield, Valorant or CoD, it's a nonstarter for many.

That's largely known now but still a bummer. I wonder if anything will ever change in this area and if Valve will be able to pressure game editors or create an anti-cheat so good and for any platform to be able to change something.

Valve can't even do it for cs2 on windows.

Don't see why they'd risk it. They already had to reduce their cut just to attract players like Activision and Take Two onto their platform.

Also, making anti cheat on Linux feels like the most Anti-Linux thing to do. But I don't play many multiplayer games, so I have no skin in the game.

Steam Machine is just a PC. You can dual boot or use a VM or use Wine/Proton .

It can be involved but it's certainly possible

Why not? You can just install windows on it.

"Just", YMMV.

It has a custom motherboard for example, which may or may not be supported by Microsoft.

Windows works in SteamDeck, so I think it seems highly likely that Valve will provide the drivers for this device as well.

*yet

>All they have to do is market the fact you don't have to pay for online.

All Sony and MS have to do it market that it can't play GTA6 at launch.

All Valve has to do is bundle it with Half-Life 3.

Or Fortnite, Genshin Impact, Roblox, Marvel Rivals or any other popular live service game. Which are the games most people care about now.

Roblox is playable thanks to the efforts of the VinegarHQ team who created the Sober wrapper

They don't even necessarily have to beat the PS5/Xbox. I already own the former but sometimes lament not being able to play the many, many PC exclusives out there (or at least nothing released in the past 10+ years since my daily driver laptop has poor specs). Just recently I was wondering whether one of those all-in-one Lenovo desktop boxes would have decent enough specs to play current-gen PC games at halfway decent settings, and my guess is that they don't, but I don't want to go through the hassle of building a PC and definitely don't want a tower with a huge footprint.

Turns out the Steam Machine is exactly what I'm looking for.

Exactly. I have both PS5 and Xbox One X, but I still connect my Steam Deck to TV to play Hades II because the game hasn't come out on those two consoles yet.

I bought a steam deck to play Age of Wonders 4. Briefly got sucked into playing a Skyrim again.

They told press that it wouldn’t be console pricing and would match entry level PC. I think it’s going to be $800

800 is probably already too much for the compromises you need to make. You happily make those compromises for a handheld due to its nature. But a desktop is a harder sell.

Is that the price point of those anymore? I see 550 ish for the base ps5 with a disc drive and closer to 750 for the pro.

I don't expect them to match either in volume but it seems like microsoft is already backing out of the dedicated console hardware space tho

I think that realistically, Valve probably only need to be on par with the top of Sony’s offering hardware wise. The ability to have Steam integration on the machine (including the large amount of subpar but very cheap games) will prompt at least some movement. I’d say $800 is probably the high-end of reasonable for price point. I can certain say I’d rather just buy my kids a StreamBox than have to deal with them want full capability PCs.

I agree. Steam's prices on sales are still mostly unmatched by consoles.

Even if it is a "pricier" PS5-like machine, I'd still buy it and I bet I'd make up the difference in less than a year with just the sales games (including older games I can't play on either console).

I think most of the critiques for this are from people expecting this to be aimed at PC gamers.

I don't think it is. I think it's aimed at people that actually DON'T want to bother with building, buying, upgrading PCs, but still want to play cheap games, older games.

To this day, I can't make my PC turn on with a controller (and I've tried). Making a PC wake up as fast as a Steam Deck from sleep? Impossible.

Those little things will all add up to make this a very nice option for the non-hardcode PC game crowd.

Valve is going to steal a lot of users from console, mostly Xbox. Not PC Gaming enthusiast.

Totally. SteamOS is everything here.

$699 (maybe 799 for a more premium model) seems to be a good compromise given what it would take to build a sufficiently similar PC while being close enough to the PS5/Switch. Xbox is practically dead.

I don’t think it needs to compete on price directly, if it can deliver the polish of a console. It can also play up the angle of being a full blown computer.

You can tell XBox is cooked because Halo was released on the PS5.

I think the steam machine will be 999 given they said "priced as a pc". I hope to be wrong, because at 700 it's insta buy for me.

With the specs these devices have I don't think it's far-fetched to assume that pricing will be competitive. Maybe they will charge a bit extra if they tout all the extra stuff you can install on the Machine vs Xbox as a selling point, which they are kind of doing, to justify a slightly higher price point.

Hard disagree with that claim. The truth is anyone with a PC and a steam machine basically already has a Steam Machine. Steam doesn't need to sell at a loss like most consoles. Their only real goal is to prove that there's nothing a console can do that a PC can't do.

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