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Comment by yoz-y | Hacker News Reader

Back during Covid I bought a PC tower just to play PC games. Later I also bought a PlayStation because the couch experience is better. If the steam machine was available I’d definitely opt for that instead of both.

If steam continues the way it is, it will be hard for me to justify having a gaming PC and a console instead of just one machine.

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Yeah I think what they'll miss is a small tool to stream your games to your TV (well maybe it's already possible ?) because the drawback of having just 1 machine as PC and console is that it can't be both at your desk and in next to your TV

There's a Steam app on my Samsung smart TV that I think can do this, with a USB-controller connected to a USB-port on the TV. Haven't tried it though.

But I think the best way to do it is to have a cheap PC (or maybe an Android TV device or something?) connected to your TV. You can stream games to it from your gaming PC in the other room: https://store.steampowered.com/remoteplay

Do you mean Steam Remote Play and Steam Link?

Rightttt steam link, as I wrote this I wasn't sure it existed already or not. Perfect !

I've fixed that with a long HDMI cable and wireless controller. It works great.

The main issue which has kept me at the desk for games, however, is that I'm way too used to keyboard & mouse and the controller experience is frustrating.

Note that there’s no secret sauce regarding Steam Machines. Once you put Bazzite, ChimeraOS or Jovian Nix on your PC, it can provide a great couch experience.

The secret sauce for me is that it is a complete out of box experience. You'll boot it and sign into steam and that's it. Like, sure you can get little PCs off Amazon or build your own micro-atx system with more performance. But I just wanna buy something and have it done for me. I want to buy a system that developers know is kind of a "base" spec.

If the Steam Machine becomes the base configuration that most games start targeting, then I think everyone will benefit from it.

I expect that steam machine will have better controller support. I found wireless controller support on Windows (both for ps4 and Xbox controllers) seriously lacking.

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