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Valve's communication around this release has redirected all rage towards Sam Altman rather than the Steam Machine.

The "rage" is largely surrounding the price, not the Machine hardware itself. The Deck sold like hotcakes at $400.

We'll see actual outrage when the masses defer new smartphone upgrades due to price bumps.

I'm pretty sure they would have loved to put a better GPU chip in but that would have cost too much extra in these mad days.

If there's anything good to be found about the Ramageddon, it's that people will hopefully keep using their perfectly good phones and other hardware a bit longer between upgrades.

That's the beauty of the "There are a variety of reasons" part, whatever you believe to be the reason, Valve seems to agree with you, biases or not.

The variety of reasons being Mark Zuckerberg, Sam Altman, Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, etc.

We all know why hardware has become unaffordable even if Valve hasn't spelled it out.

That's the thing, you care about celebrities, others about reality. If US didn't stop Korean companies from selling old manufacturing equipment to China, we'd still have RAM available, but Chinese one, so obviously every capitalist would rather blame individuals instead of the US government.

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.

We do still have Chinese manufactured RAM available, it's just that it's DDR4 which is not compatible with a lot of the hardware made in the past years.

...which is also why both Intel and AMD are reviving some of their previous DDR4-based models: the current DDR5 offerings are increasingly unsellable because of the memory shortage.

China seems to be ramping up memory production anyway?

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.

"High demand" is not a concrete issue and blaming the purchasers seems so misdirected I'm almost convinced that argument originated from sockpuppets or something.

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?

If an industrial plant figures out a new way to turn fries into fuel and starts buying all the fries in the country at any price up to $50 a pound, I do blame them for the resulting price spike. This is not consumer demand.

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.

The large ai companies bought advance purchases of memory while the actual buildouts are massively lagging and will probably never materialize at even 70% of planned capacity for years. They are financed and motivated to create their own tulip craze disconnected with actual need

See the problem is they bought fries, that haven't been produced yet, with money that doesn't exist. For end users that do not want fries.

What the heck?

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.

The detail here is that the capital is fictive instead of liquid. It consists of companies pumping money in circles with promises of investments and orders. Most of that money will probably not change hands but in the mean time it is used collateral for other financial products and transactions.

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.

Products with Chinese made RAM can effectively only be sold in China due to US sanctions or threats thereof. It helps a bit because Chinese companies then buy less Korean RAM but not as much as it otherwise would be.

I dunno. Sanctions on RAM are really questionable, and even a 100% tariff would still be a huge price improvement.

Valve open silicon when?

I believe in you Gabe.

Yeah hat would be awesome. Some RISC-V processor or something like that. A man can dream :)

The MNT Station, currently in development, could very well be a fully-OSHW "Steam Machine": https://www.crowdsupply.com/mnt-research/mnt-station

What about the graphics processing capability? I see there are some modules with a GPU on them. Are they good enough to run 3D games that were released in the last 5 years?

I'm also happy with older games. I just don't know how powerful these GPUs are.

Depends which CPU module you get, but yeah it's not nearly as powerful as the new Steam Machine, surely. I mean, it's a step in the right direction and you can see people are playing many recent-ish (or lower-GPU-intensity) games, as discussed in this thread: https://community.mnt.re/t/mnt-reform-gaming-thread/608/110

Doesn't solve any problems that are causing the price crunches. The problem is largely RAM and NAND pricing, which no small shop is going to spin up a fab to create. Making your own SoC would do little to alleviate the price issues.

Don't forget Trump and Hormuz!

Most of the general, watered down tone of Corporate America that we love to hate comes from the legal department, usually at the late-stage point when they make all the decisions in a company: product, business, launches, strategy, direction, etc. Everything needs to run through legal, and they have a final say on everything, including every public communication.

That's why I'd love an interview with Steam's legal head. Sounds like they'd have some wild stories to share.

I have a feeling it would have cost drastically less if we didn't have a RAM / storage crisis, which is really sad.

there's probably ~$150 in the ram and ~$100 in the SSD alone, not to mention everything else. we gotta have data-centers though because, uh.. well, we gotta have em.

To a large extent, all these datacenters are being built because people want tokens. Do you use something like Opus or GPT5.5 for coding? Well, you're part of the demand.

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.

If someone is using heavily underpriced tokens I don't blame them much either. They're not funding the hardware purchases, super-investors that want to control the AI world are.

I’ve seen from a couple of places that a valver has commented that they can’t say exactly what the original price goal was, but that you can get an idea from the price increase of the steamdeck (~$200 usd)

That wouldve put the steam machine somewhere around the $800 mark for the base edition, which would’ve been so, so much sweeter of a value proposition.

I feel bad for them running into this shortage right before launch. Steam Machine was announced before all this.

The original price should have been in $700-800 range, pre-RAM and storage pricing escalation, which would have changed the equation drastically. I even considered getting it as a mostly streaming box for a living room, intending to play only the lighter games on device. But for the announced price and after delays, it just doesn't make sense financially. As is, you're grossly overpaying for the level of GPU performance Steam Machine offers.

>The original price should have been in $700-800 range, pre-RAM and storage pricing escalation

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.

What's most surprising is the benchmarks dont look too hot vs the PS5... which doesn't cost nearly as much.

Sony are masters of optimizations. Some of their PC ports run really well on the Steam Deck.

> There are a variety of reasons, all of which are affecting hardware products everywhere.

I'm pretty sure the price increase is exclusively caused by LLMs.

I totally get where they’re coming from but sadly it doesn’t change the fact that $1100+ is a tough sell for the benchmarks they’re hitting.

Given the price of components right now, I don’t know. 1k for that small of a form factor seems acceptable. It’s a nice addition to the living room, could likely play a role in cancelling expensive video streaming subscriptions. Might also run some local LLMs. Seems decent.

I love my steam deck and I just don’t see this working, but time will tell. If they sell 2-3mill units I’d consider that a wild success and that i was dead wrong. really hope I am. Steam machine will really change the game if it success

They know it's a tough sell. Fortunately for everyone in the market, you can still find used CPUs/GPUs/RAM pretty easily and save a decent amount if you're ok with building your own.

Valve doesn't need this to do well to survive. And you don't need a steam machine (or any >$1000 machine) to play PC games. Just wait it out or buy used hardware. Hell, even an rog ally x plays just about anything (and also supports steamOS), and you can still get that at reasonable prices.

I love it

I won’t buy it

But wow what a nice communication

That’s gonna look great on post mortem report

This is why Apple locks in supplier prices years in advance.

That would only works until it doesn't. The suppliers got supplier too and those in turn have their own supplier. I don't know about any specific contract but I bet there's a force majeure or price excluding input cost somewhere.

Places like Apple run their supply chains to ground. Literally in some cases, as they track sourcing of component materials back to the mines they are dug out of.

Computer hardware prices tend to go down over time so in general this is a pretty bad strategy. Of course in rare times like these it can pay off.

Presumably this is calculated into the contract.

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.

Do you think Apple locks in _current_ prices?

Apple is also an absolutely enormous company. Even if Valve wanted to lock in prices, they're simply too small for RAM manufacturers to notice on their radar, unfortunately.

Apple has been doing this since before they were an enormous company. When the iPod Nano was in the works, they bought like 3 years supply outright, to block their competitors.

Pre-iPhone and during the mechanical-disk iPod era, they were a very small and vulnerable entity.

If Apple locks supplier prices for years in advance, then why is it raising the prices of all its products? Just greed?

Is that the coupon code that brings it down to a competitive price?

Still, how does a PS5 cost half, and arguably, has better/fast hardware? I can't imagine Sony selling them at a loss.

PS5 has a lot parts in high volumes negotiated years in advance so they can leverage lower prices than valve. Valve ships like 10% max of the volumes that Sony sells.

Why can’t you imagine it? The console makers have been selling at a loss for 3 maybe 4/5 decades.

Edit: looks like it took 10 million PS5s to break even. The article is 5 years old I wonder if it’s true in 2026.[2]

> The existing industrial arrangement at the time was that of a bundled console-plus-cartridge business model, where the console manufacturer (say, Atari with its VCS/2600) sold the console at a loss and cross-subsidized it with the money made on cartridges sold with a huge profit margin.[1]

[1] https://thereader.mitpress.mit.edu/how-nintendo-bled-atari-g...

[2] It took Sony years to stop losing money on PS3 sales, but the company stopped selling the PS4 at a loss around six months after its debut in 2013. The PS5 has taken ever so slightly longer, but it’s clearly not repeating the costly exercise of the PS3 despite early reports suggesting Sony was struggling with PS5 pricing due to expensive parts.

[2] https://www.theverge.com/2021/8/4/22609150/sony-playstation-...

The PS5 can only play games that you pay Sony a tax to play. The steam machine can play any game, including those bought outside Steam and thus without paying valve a tax.

This means the PS5 is subsidised, whereas Valve hardware does not tend to be. They have confirmed that internally all divisions must be roughly profitable/break-even.

While you are technically correct, 99% of all games that are going to be played on this device are going to come from steam where they take a 30% cut.

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.

Steam Machine is PC. Attempt to answer why I should not buy subsidized PC for work, install whatever OS, not buy any game.

They were originally sold at a loss, then became per-unit profitable at some point, and now they might be eating a loss on them again. But they lock in hardware prices years in advance.

The base PS5 does not have better hardware. Though the PS5 Pro outperforms the Steam Machine and is still cheaper than it..

From the FAQs:

> Is this the Valve console? > > We think of Steam Machine as an extension of PC gaming, not as a console. > > The traditional console model is to sell hardware at a loss and make up the revenue with subscription services or by selling games that are locked-in to the hardware. We think this can make sense for a single business in the short term but that open ecosystems are better for customers over the long term. PC gaming's history proves this: The openness of the PC gaming space has enabled it to be the primary driver of hardware and software innovation for decades. > > The strength of PC gaming is the ability to play the games you want on the hardware you want. Steam Machine is a solution to these problems (and we think it's a great one), but it's not the only solution, and we don't want it to be.