Valve Officially Opens Pre-Orders for Steam Machine with Prices Ranging from $1,049 to $1,428

Peter_Brosdahl

Peter_Brosdahl

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Valve has at long last, granted it’s been under a year since announcing the Steam Machine, revealed pricing for its PC console. The sticker shock is strong with the base model going for $1,049, which has a 512 GB SSD for storage and does not include a controller, or the $1,428 flagship 2 TB model […]

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Oh, I am curious to know what the sell through is like. Here's hoping valve has a hit and if not that the scalpers get reamed.
 
I don't understand all they hype. It's a branded PC box running Linux (Proton) to play PC games.

I'm not the intended market audience, I guess.
 
I wish the rumor of a higher speced box to justify the price were true. It was a hard sell at the rumored $799, it's sure to bomb @$1,050 with no controller.
 
I just don't know when it comes to how this has played out and where it will sit six months to a year from now. What I mean is the obvious, that at $699-$799 it would've been a pretty big hit. Meanwhile, thinking about it from the perspective of somebody who wants to buy something that's all setup ready to do what its marketed for, the $1K still might not be DOA if theres enough out there who feel that way.

Think of it this way: how long has Apple marketed machines that were subpar on a technical level but designed to do a few things well, and that was enough to have some pay through the roof? The sales numbers will tell a part of the story but the rest will come later on down the road from those who bought one. In some ways it's the same story of a prebuilt vs what an enthusiast could build but a slight twist in branding with Steam's name thrown in. Will that matter enough to draw customers who just want to play games?
 
I honestly have no idea what the value of a machine like this is in today's market. Everything has changed so much since mining bubble, then Covid, and continues to change with AI.

Off the cuff, i can say - that's a lot of cash for a glorified Steam console. I was interested, but not at this price point, at least right now.

But... I mean, a year from now, in hindsight, we could easily be looking back and thinking what a great deal this was. A good chance the next gen of consoles comes out at similar price points.
 
Brian_B said:
A good chance the next gen of consoles comes out at similar price points.
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This right here is very true.

Kind of why I got my 5090 now... I just don't see it dropping in price any time soon when servers with a couple AI cards in them are running 90k a pop WITH steep discounts.
 
The only market segment this is viable for are PC gamers who already have a sizeable steam library and want a secondary system to play games in the living room on a TV. But the specs seem to weak to satisfy most enthusiasts.

At this point this is just an expensive gimmick made for no-one.
 
MadMummy76 said:
The only market segment this is viable for are PC gamers who already have a sizeable steam library and want a secondary system to play games in the living room on a TV. But the specs seem to weak to satisfy most enthusiasts.

At this point this is just an expensive gimmick made for no-one.
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seems like a demo of steam OS.

Expect 3rd party solutions by Asus, Lenovo et al in 2 yrs time
 
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Just load steam OS maybe?
 
Someone on [H] made their own using an AMD BC-250. They said: "I got a BC250 card, 3d printed case, PSU, 500GB SSD, and 8bitDo controller for under $300. Throw Bazzite on it, and you essentially have a steam machine. You trade off Zen2 vs Zen4 cores, and RDNA2 vs RDNA3 CU's, but it's also 1/4 the price and requires some tinkering which isn't for everybody." (source)
 
And for all this money, you don't even get guaranteed dual channel RAM. And Valve is downplaying the drawbacks of single channel RAM performance.
 
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