This is why I would never make it in business. I just don't see the consumer case for buying a Steam Machine. They're too expensive for the console niche they're intended to occupy.
You can get a better deal on some consoles at the moment, but I wouldn't count on that to last. The Switch 2 has a price increase scheduled. The Xbox line has a price increase scheduled. PlayStation did one earlier this year. Rather than being a permanent situation this feels like everything going up, just irregularly rather than smoothly, so sometimes one thing feels like a better deal, sometimes another, but it's not obvious that any of them are much better on a longer time frame. If you're looking out at the console versus Steam Machine and thinking the consoles look better for your use case, you don't already have one, and you're interested in one of them, I suggest moving sooner rather than later.
The Steam Machine is what got noticed, and earthed a lot of anger about prices, but it's not particularly out of line or especially expensive. The whole market is screwed up.
This is part of the controller, not the Machine. Unless you mean software integration, then it's on SteamOS and the Steam client, both of which can run on custom hardware.
"Steam Controller's wireless adapter is built right into Steam Machine for direct pairing. "
It has dedicated hardware for pairing with Steam Controllers without needing a puck adapter plugged into a USB port.
I promptly admit I may have misunderstood something though.
The puck comes with the controller. You connect a cable to it. Do you mean there's a whole puck inside the machine?
Or is "puck" now shorthand for a wireless controller adaptor? What about the actual physical puck, with the cable and the magnets?
The Steam Machine has the 2.4GHz dongle part as well as a Bluetooth adapter.
Which I suppose I'd add to point out I'm not a "Steam Machine partisan"... I was interested but bailed out about 3 months ago, before the price was even announced.
As for HDMI CEC, the machine I bought has an AMD 9060XT in it, and HDMI CEC seems to work fine. I didn't do much to make it happen. Maybe I flipped a switch to turn it on in the UI, but that was it. I've had a couple of people ask me why it works and all I can say is I don't know, because I didn't do much (if anything) to turn it on.
Valve very obviously isn't enjoying a fat margin on Steam Machines, but they're not a public company so profit is profit. And people who buy Steam Machines are more encouraged to buy games on Steam and pay that nice juicy 30%.
Clearly not for everyone, but for someone like me who wants a more powerful box than the Steam Deck or Switch under a TV, yet hates the locked-down nature of the traditional console makers (which are just slowly getting worse, viz. Sony's announcement to kill physical media and the control it brings owners).
- games on steam are very often discounted, that makes it way, way cheaper in the long term than a console
It's easily worth the price.
Factor in the amount of quality games you can get for cheap on Steam then it's not even expensive compared to other consoles. Switch games are ludicrously expensive for example.
We can debate if it’s the most efficient use of money for a technical person, but it’s indisputable that many people get enough value to pay for the prebuilt.
First option:
* 35 litre case (~10 times bigger than the SteamMachine) * ~250W power draw (vs. ~185W SteamMachine) * 32-36 dBA (vs. ~23 dBA SteamMachine)
Second option:
* 35 litre case (~10 times bigger than the SteamMachine) * ~285W power draw (vs. ~185W SteamMachine) * 32-36 dBA (vs. ~23 dBA SteamMachine)
Third option:
* 19.2 litre case (~5.5 times bigger than the SteamMachine) * ~295W power draw (vs. ~185W SteamMachine) * 34-38 dBA (vs. ~23 dBA SteamMachine)
Fourth option:
* 19.2 litre case (~5.5 times bigger than the SteamMachine) * ~275W power draw (vs. ~185W SteamMachine) * 32-35 dBA (vs. ~23 dBA SteamMachine)
Physical size is definitely a bigger concern, nothing can beat the Steam Machine. But I do prefer the long and thin design like the PlayStation series has always used. It's easier to fit that on the shelves inside a TV stand that were designed to hold cable boxes and DVD players or it can fit upright behind a TV. I'm not sure if I actually have room to put a Steam Machine behind my TV without it overhanging the edge a bit.
As for loudness, that's a bit more subjective. It depends on how far away you are from the PC and how loud you play sound or if you're using a headset. Just totally based on my experience, games that are very quiet are usually the low-resource indie games that wouldn't be pushing my GPU to max fan speed anyway. The games I have that really push my GPU tend to have pretty loud sound design.
Loudness might be subjective, but if we're trying to compare builds, they should at least be in the same ballpark.
Looking at this article, they seem to only care about one dimension of this product: cost. It would have been far more interesting if they explored: cost, performance, size, heat (by proxy of power consumption), and loudness.