I am a person who will look at the Steam Machine and cry

I don't think the problem is that there aren't people in the market for it, but more that increasingly products that used to be meant for the average middle class are now perks for wealthier individuals - to the point where I think if there's a collapse of the AAA gaming industry is because there's not enough wealthy people time to accommodate for all the titles.

Like GTA VI is speculated to release at around 90$, and any AAA game that will drop around that time will probably have a bad release.

But regarding the steam machine, it's just yet another example that this product isn't at the reach of "the people", it's yet another luxury item.

Not because Valve wanted to, but because this new standard of scalping, hoarding and squeezing the most out of the market is having repercussions across industries.

The sad thing is that Valve used to be on the other side of the fence, at least for some products, it seemed like it was aimed to be accessible for gamers in a pro-consumer way (not all of course, that would be impossible).

In the end even Valve had to fall in line with the rest, and it's just sad to witness it.

So let people grief, they're not just grieving Valve, but also the last hope of a group that still thought there was a counter culture company in the current state of a greedy world, where shared holders value is more important than customers.

Except others have done the same comparison to current PC prices and still found a ~50% markup.

You can also stream games from your powerful PC to the mini PC using Steam, so specs are not as important.

In the US, unemployment is at 4.3%.

> Have you ever tried to build and maintain a shuttle PC yourself? It's obnoxious.

The benefit of a SFF PC you made yourself it that it doesn’t use proprietary hardware like the Steam Machine, is easily repaired and easily upgraded.

Exactly. This is going to be perfect for my kid as he enters his teenage years. I dont want to mess with building one for him.

If you want to maintain the PC (replace or upgrade parts) the Steam Machine seems like a worse choice over a mini-ITX build. The price for the two is comparable.

If you want a console I agree, it's expensive but you can leverage your existing library and use sales, so not too bad if you buy a lot of games.

Are the cheap gaming PCs off of Craigslist here in the room with us right now?

Snark aside, the second hand market is off the rails, too... The Steam Machine is cheaper than any DIY gaming PC I can build right now, even from parts off of OLX... And unlike the one I'd make, the Steam Machine will get the Steam Deck treatment as far as optimisation and certification (as in Runs on the Deck) goes.

The entitlement of the gaming “community” is next to none.

I did what you said last year and it’s been a delight.

I think SteamOS itself also now officially supports you installing it on any PC. (Ah, actually that's mentioned in this post even.)

Yes, or and hear me out, go ahead and shell out the extra $200 or so as a "hassle fee," if you get the Steam Machine you're much more guaranteed that everything else will just work.

I absolutely agree on your notion of "what is with this 'I need the shiny new thing for sake of having a shiny new thing.' "

Exactly - I just built myself a knockoff Steam Machine by putting Steam OS (might switch to Bazzite but so far real Steam OS is fine) on a $300 Mini PC and I'm super pleased with it. 16GB of RAM and a Ryzen 7640HS runs all of my library just fine, though to be fair, I'm not much of a AAA super modern high-graphics gamer. Doing a lot of emulation these days.

End-to-end (hardware, OS, UI software) support from a single vendor for a narrowly-configured gaming PC, with actual serious support in terms of software updates and such, not just "we'll maybe honor the warranty if it breaks", including for TV-attached use cases where PCs (windows or Linux, either) tend to be kinda wonky[0], was appealing enough to me that I planned to buy it day-1 if it was under $700, and probably would still have bought it up to $800, to replace my giant gaming tower with Bazzite on it, even though performance-wise it would be roughly a lateral move or slight downgrade. I was really looking forward to the day I took that thing out of my house, but now... nope, gonna be a while because a few billionaires bid PC hardware up to the Moon.

I'm not aware of a single other product on the market that offers what Valve's device does. Tons of companies offer gaming PCs and you can slap Bazzite on lots of them, but that won't get you everything the Steam Machine offers. It's, AFAIK, unique.

[0] "But I've been running a PC attached to a TV literally for decades..." yeah, you've probably been missing some HDMI features that you don't care about but others do, or had trouble with them, while any gaming console or media player will have those features and have few or no problems with them; do you have surround sound over HDMI to a proper audio receiver, with non-broken mode-switching depending on current output? Use CEC features to wake your PC from sleep? What's your color gamut like? I've done this before too, a lot, hell I did it all the way back when I needed a composite or S-Video out on my video card to make it happen, on a CRT TV before HDMI ports were really a thing. Really good support for the use case looks a lot different than what you usually get by just plugging a PC or laptop into a TV.

Waited until when? 2028?

> The writing is on the wall.

This thing is going to sell out.

If prices go back to normal, v2 of this product will be great. This version, at these specs, at this point in time would only be a buy if it was good value (like $500). People will buy them all anyway.

I predict it sells out

> Everywhere I see reviews of it on the internet,

Gaming reviews have diverged from reality. Everything is about finding controversy and something to be angry about. Gaming journalism and social media are extremely toxic, but not really indicative of average gamers or consumers any more.

> The writing is on the wall. This thing is going to flop.

I would bet that it's going to be oversubscribed and sell out.

I'm sure that the steam machine will sell out just because A) it's a small batch B) It's Valve C) It's a neat form factor.

But as someone who was originally going to pick one up (thinking it was going to be a great little gaming PC powerhouse), seeing it come in close to last in most of the GamersNexus benchmarks was pretty disheartening (pulling 20-50FPS at 1080p on most recent games).

I was hoping that they were going to bring a console mindset to PC building to create something that exceeded what a DIY-er could do with off the shelf parts. But the fact you can make a faster DIY machine for cheaper right now feels...eh, what's the point?

My guess is they sell the first few batches, then Steam Machine goes on a small vacation for a few years while they wait for prices to come back down.

> The writing is on the wall. This thing is going to flop.

No. They've made just enough to sell out and drive demand.

> Are people really this enamored by "the thought of buying new thing," as opposed to, like, thinking about whether they'll use it?

Yes. I know rationally it's overpriced and underpowered but a tiny part of me still wants to own it, just because. It's a shiny black box.

Fun projection, there are three steam decks amongst my roommates, all three of them use is basically daily.

I'm in the "steam deck that I never use" camp but it's because I've been too lazy to take a Saturday to repurpose it into a dedicated console piracy device, it turns out I hate playing basically any PC game "on the go" (their touchpad-thingies seem to please some people as a mouse replacement but I find them entirely unusable), and it's just weak enough that I've found it worth keeping my old gaming PC around for now for 1080p+ gaming at OK quality & frame rate (and if I've got that plugged in, why plug in the steam deck?)

For me the Steam Deck proved to me that Linux gaming was viable (finally! I've been trying since the days of Unreal Tournament being a current game and having an official Linux binary, LOL) and that I like the idea of an official Valve device, but that I needed a little more power and a desktop-alike form factor to reach a point of "good enough" for me (well, portable would still be fine, I just wouldn't use it that way so it'd be better if I didn't have to pay for the extra parts or have the added complexity and jank-risk of a dock)

Like if my gaming PC broke I would't replace it (at least not for quite a while) but I would plug my Steam Deck into my monitor and start using it again, it's not that the device is wholly useless to me. It just wasn't quite a fit for what I do & want, it turns out. I do use my gaming PC, and that's what a Steam Machine would have replaced. I even have Bazzite on there so I for-sure would have used the Steam Machine, as I basically have a somewhat rougher-edged (and way bigger, with obnoxious "gamer light" horse-shit all over because that's hard to avoid for some reason) version of it already.

... holy shit, why are they so high used, I'd never have guessed?! Thank you for pointing this out, as someone with a Steam Deck I almost never use and a desktop gaming PC running bazzite that I do use, a lot, but wanted to replace with a Steam Machine, I'll probably do exactly his.

There's a video somewhere in this Library of Babel of some Palestinian kids who got a chance to visit New York (when Palestinian kids were still allowed to enter the USA, leave their occupied nation, and not be genocided to death).

Obviously they looked at all the skyscrapers with bewilderement.

My university offers locations such as India for the semester abroad, but most people rather go somewhere else.

Usually the people in low income/developing countries that engage in student exchange programs are upper middle class and beyond and have lives no much different from their peers in developed western societies.

People in western societies tend to ignore that developing countries are not merelly poorer but also generally marked by extreme wealth and income inequality. The rich and the upper middle class for all practical effects live like the citizens of developed countries, it is just that there are less of them compared to the general population.

I wish I could look forward and say, "prices will go down again" I don't see when or how. I hope I'm wrong.

Don't buy new. Get a 10 year old dual processor server tower on eBay with 128GB of RAM and a 1TB SSD.

It's cheaper than new and it'll do everything you need it to without even breaking a sweat.