> Why a randomized reservation order?
[...] we wanted to create a system that would be less frustrating and more fair for everyone. A launch that starts at a specific day and time tends to reward bots, people with fast internet connections, talented gaming fingers for quick F5/refresh reactions, and those who can schedule their life around that moment. By accepting reservation signups over the course of a few days, without any incentive to be first, we're hoping to take away some of that friction.
Yeah, this is a promising solution to scalping. Previously, if you had only small numbers of consoles available at launch, scalpers and their bots would claim a large share of them. With Valve's new policy, that share is reduced to s/g, where s is the number of verified Steam accounts controlled by scalpers and g is the number of legit gamer accounts. Since s is likely to be much less than g, s/g is close to zero, and scalping is dramatically curtailed. Almost all of the initial batch of consoles will go to legit gamers.
This is also possible because they are only selling through their website, while other consoles go through retailers.
I'd actually prefer a retailer just for doing this over one that was first come first serve.
When the Xbox 360 came out decades ago, the store I got mine from did this. They had like 10 consoles and there were like 200 people there. They did a raffle for the consoles and I got to buy one. It felt like I won the Xbox even though I still had to pay for it.
It's surprising that the whole Western world is discovering the threat of organized or scripted scalping just now, when it's been a problem in places like Japan for over a decade. Account age requirements, lotteries, quick subject matter quizzes to chase away hired line-sitters, hidden ID code on tickets to ban scalpers on auction site pics, randomized queues for sales page etc etc has all been in use for years. It's been so commonplace that various city-run COVID free vaccine programs had different forms of them.
And the soccer WC went the opposite direction, by encouraging scalping, giving it an official avenue, and taking a cut of the profits. Now only rich people get to enjoy a sport meant for the masses, yay.
> Now only rich people get to enjoy a sport meant for the masses, yay.
By and large, the masses have always experienced football on a TV screen. (though removing lower price tickets from such public sport events is still bad)
Actually, rich people and not so rich people who don't mind borrowing more than they can afford. I'm not rich by any means and there are much worse of than me dumping a couple months salary for the "experience". Not that there is a problem with it if that's what you enjoy. A bit over the top for my taste though.
Well, there is a genuine problem with the WC that reselling solves. It's unclear till a few days before what team will be in which match. That said, I'd prefer the solution where tickets don't go on sale till it's clear which teams are in the match.
To be fair, if FIFA wanted to maximize profits, they should auction tickets off instead of allowing scalpers to eat the delta between sales price and real value.
Does it solve scalping? It seems like there is still money in sighing up with the goal to resell. Granted this is better in that I don't have to race the scalpers.
Till the sales price matches the market value scalping will exist. The best way to address that is a vickery auction. Till then scalping will continue.
"Customers must meet the following criteria to be able to sign up:
You must have a Steam account in good standing.
You must have made a purchase on Steam prior to April 27th 2026.
Limit one signup per household. We will use payment method, shipping address, and other information to eliminate multiple entries."
I mean, go for it. Do you really want to risk getting stuck with a $1100 device that you have to now offload (and pay the associated fees)?
The corollary to this lottery will ensure that people who want Steam Machines day 1 actually get them at cost. So not only does this negatively impact the supply-side of scalping, but it also impacts the demand-side.
Scalping exists because the sales price is significantly lower than the market value. Just do a Vickery auction and scalping is gone. Because it's avickery auction the price likely wouldn't be totally ludicrous either. If there is a batch of 10,000 units sold the price would be the 10,001th highest bid.
I assume scalpers are often much better at getting through a heavily contested purchase flow (eg the recent steam controller release) due to tools like bots, general experience, and being able to dedicate 20 minutes or more to sitting at a computer constantly refreshing a browser window.
This way it's just a random draw and (I think?) the number of accounts scalpers can enter with is limited because they need to be established. So it might not solve scalping, but it could be a significant improvement.
DDOS server when not making direct purchase. If there is a financial incentive the process is automated to generate maximum value for the scalper. In our modern age scalpers are not going to be waiting.
Biggest impediment would be changes to purchase process. Run one live user through and repeat for how many bots you want to buy more.
Agreed with your comment on this being better. I just found a scalper sitting at a PC for 20 minutes waiting to buy pretty funny.
Maybe, but I don't think it's totally outrageous to say the very first batch of these you can only buy if you had an account for at least 15 years or you must have spent at least $1000 over its lifetime. Then after that first batch it's free for all.
Spamming account creation won't work, because accounts need to have been created in April or earlier. They also verify address, payment method etc. to reduce double-dipping.
There's probably more to it than that, and Valve just isn't telling us all the details.
It's likely they are weighting accounts that have a lot of (recent) game activity and game purchases as well. Plus, they have access to hardware information via their hardware survey, etc.
If that's what you actually wanted then Valve could just sell them at auction and at least have the money going to the company actually making the thing instead of a useless middleman.
Moreover, that's what happens anyway. If you get one of the slots and you value the difference between what you paid and the "real" (resale) price more than you value having the console, you can still sell it. But then more of the money goes to ordinary customers rather than rewarding people who snipe with bots etc.
I would also point out that you can build a PC to run SteamOS with approximately the same specs for approximately the same price, so it's not clear who is going to be paying a significant premium over the sticker price instead of doing that if they don't get a slot.
That is precisely what Valve should do. It is unfortunate that we need scalpers, simply because companies are bizarrely unwilling to adjust their pricing based on market conditions.
Scalping also actively damages the pricing, which is part of the product. Valve wants to sell this product at a specific price, which is targeted to an audience. By scalping and ultimately changing the price, you are hurting both the consumer, who now pays more, and the company, who doesn't see a cent of this increase and is now failing its target.
Scalping also damages the demand for the product, since it creates a submarket that is volatile and unpredictable.
Scalping is a bad thing because by basically any measure, a market with scalping is worse for everybody involved than one with scalping. Except for scalpers, who make money off it by making it worse for everybody else. Which is why scalpers are bad people.
Scalping provides the service of exchanging money for time, means, and/or luck. People who have no time to camp, no botting tools or skills, etc can exchange their money instead.
Scalping is a natural "black" market which always pops up to satisfy market demand whenever artificial restrictions are placed on the market.
Even in this case, there will be scalpers providing for people with more money than luck, who want a day one steam machine.
You are right. Basic economic theory says nothing about distribution of value, only about creation of the most value. I don't know why your comment is grey.
But... perhaps these guys are playing a longer game? Reputation has value as well and from other comments this move seems to boost reputation significantly.
Something that only benefits people with the most disposable income is a bad thing. I will preach from any platform that I have that scalpers are shit people.
You're right. It's not just aboutwillingness to pay, but also how much someone deserves to own a Steam Machine, which we determine by their ability to pay.
It's not a perfect system, but money is how we as a society determine how to allocate scarce resources. People labor under the promise that having additional money will give them an advantage in this type of situation.
I don't get why companies don't take advantage of the demand.
For example: Start the bidding at BASE_PRICE (BP) + 2400. Then reduce the price by $1 every 3mins over the course of 5 days. Until the BP is met and then just carry on queuing.
You could buy it early if you want it that much or just wait an extra couple of days and end up in the queue at the BP.
I don't know if it would create pressure on that second it ticks over to the BP, so then its BP+1 - well I guess the nash equilibrium would be pushed up.
I would love to see a generalized FOSS reservation system that could be used for just about anything that would help address the issues Valve listed. It could be as simple as a short lived deployment (1,3,7,14 days) that writes out the entries to a Google Sheets. I have encountered so many people trying to come up with their own approach to this problem that I think it would be worth solving. Maybe I can find time to work on it later this year.
It's not worse than a traditional launch, but it's also not much better. Make 1,000 Steam accounts, which are entirely free, and you get 1,000 times more chances of getting one than others.
To be fair I don't think they'll be scalped a lot because the price isn't attractive already and alternatives are plenty.
I'll be intrigued to see if this is true. The experience of the Steam Controller may not translate to the Steam Machine. The Steam Controller is a unique controller. The Steam Frame is a unique VR headset. Obviously not the only thing in their space, but at least a unique combination of features that may make it more valuable than other things in the space.
But the Steam Machine is really just a PC with a couple of neat features. If you are willing to overpay a scalper for a Steam Machine, it seems much more reasonable to suggest that maybe you should just take that same amount of money and buy a machine where that money translates into power rather than scalper profit. After it became clear that the Steam Machine was going to be hit hard by the price increases, I just bought a machine that was pure AMD. Where it is living I don't care if it's a little cube or not, nor do I care about the LED bar, and the integrated puck wasn't a big deal when I just use the current one as a charger too. For just a bit more money than the Steam Machine it's about 50% more powerful on all relevant fronts, and I may upgrade to a 9070XT (current latest-gen AMD card) which isn't an option on the Steam Machine. And since I bought that machine the same machine is now nearly $100 more expensive itself.
Paying a scalper for the controller at least makes some sense. Perhaps the same for the Steam Frame. But of the three things Valve is releasing this year, I'm not sure it makes sense to pay a scalper an extra 50% for a Steam Machine. In that scenario, you're not really paying that extra for the machine as a whole; you're paying extra for those "couple of neat features" alone, the form factor, the integrated controller puck, the LED on the front, whatever else is specifically about the Steam Machine and not a true statement about any machine with SteamOS or Bazzite installed. You need to want one of those things really, really badly to overpay that much. The value proposition is quite different.
Of course, this is a very analytical take on what may be a primary-emotional decision for some people. We'll see.
But it's not an additional Steam Machine, it's a potential additional Steam Machine. In expectation, I'm sure it's more like 1/1000th of a Steam Machine.
sadly there's sites dedicated to buying accounts of all sorts (reddit, x, steam, etc...) that use an escrow-type system so both parties have little risk
It's basically super easy and trivial to buy verified accounts for many many platforms
>You must have made a purchase on Steam prior to April 27th 2026.
>Limit one signup per household. We will use payment method, shipping address, and other information to eliminate multiple entries.
Seems like they have chosen some reasonable options here. 2 months ago having purchase and trying to detect households. Likely also including phone number, Steam Guard client and family sharing.
Steam accounts newer than April do not qualify, plus I think you need to have spent at least $5 to qualify for the reservation queue (i.e. not community limited)
Do you really think a fresh steam account will have equal footing? I'd be surprised if that was the case.
Even Nintendo has been setting fairly strict requirements to pre-order some of their products, like requiring 50 hours of playtime on the original switch to pre-order the Switch 2
I am more surprised there's people lining up to buy this when it's genuinely cheaper to get a used PC off a local marketplace. I feel like this is unnecessary as I am pretty sure they'll be able to fill it in one shipment.
A huge number of people would rather pay a few hundred bucks more to have a plug and play appliance with a warranty from a reputable company show up on their doorstep. They don’t have to learn anything about hardware, or how to install Linux. It just works.
Some people are happy to save the money and take the risk on used hardware.
The Steam Machine is for the former, Steam the platform is for the former and the latter.
convenience and being an early bird is an odd combination, also there's plenty of builds although less power efficient on amazon and then there's the playstation 5.
Again, convenience is something that people value. Most people do not understand gaming PC builds. Even many gamers. They don’t want to. They want to play games, not build computers. A lot of people don’t want to get something from Amazon from some fly by night company that is going to need a few hours to configure, and might not run games they thought it would.
Convenience and being an early adopter are hardly at odds with each other. If anything, these people are early adopters because they want the convenience of not dealing with pc builds. People that already have gaming PCs and love that hobby aren’t going to line up to buy something that they enjoy making, or that they know enough about to feel comfortable buying used from Craigslist.
People are paying for a sure thing. Used PCs and no name Amazon machines are not a sure thing.
You and I might see it differently as people fluent with computers. Reseating a ram stick that got jostled in shipping isnt scary to most people on this site. It is terrifying to most of the world though. Steam is going after people that want to use PC games, but not play hardware tech.
I get to support people that are very involved in making sure that a long list of x86 win32 software that I want to be able to run plays well with linux and osx (not-quite-directly, but the crossover folks are on it) - regardless of whether it's on steam or not. Plus general linux desktop work in the "make games play well" department.
I'm just (occasionally) vocal - i.e. overall a minority. Pretty sure there's way, way, _way_ more people that just quietly do this. I'd even say that the current market makes you appreciate such companies even more.
p.s. a bit of a windows fanboy as well - used to do drivers for it, kind of like the internals / driver model / etc... but I really dislike the path they've taken, and there's nothing else like it.
Finally, I have an old projector setup with an x360/x1x on it right now (hc4000 + diy frame w/ dark energy abyss + 758 v3 + lsr305 + some subs - rag-tag), so I have a good excuse as well :P
For €1039 you can even get a mini-ITX PC that fits nicely in your living room. Install SteamOS to get a similar experience. Only thing you will not get is the HDMI CEC functionality.
Every time I've seen a comment like this, the eventual parts list is about the same price, has large deviations, or re-uses existing hardware (or used hardware). Looking at all the subreddits, the general consensus seems to be the price is fine for the components, and (if you care) it's impossible to build anything with that form factor.
I am pleased to see hardware not being locked down as a selling point:
> Yes, Steam Machine is optimized for gaming, but it's still your PC. Install your own apps, or even another operating system. Who are we to tell you how to use your computer?
It feels very commonsense that you should be able to run whatever you want on the computer that you have purchased, but it is surprisingly uncommon.
Valve gets it. I very much want to support them and vote with my wallet. Unfortunately the Steam machine isn't a good fit for me. I will buy the frame in a heartbeat though. HMD with a FOSS OS? That's in its own class.
I like that we can write the story that Microsoft sold their software with the home computer on the idea of productivity at home while the actual incentive was entertainment, and valve ends up justifying buying gaming hardware with the incentive that it can do productivity.
They need to do that because, in some sense, they're competing with Gaming PCs, not really with Gaming consoles. Gaming consoles sell their consoles at a discounted price because they can recoup a lot of it when selling games. Steam can't have a markup on games because they share their marketplace with other PCs.
I would assume it also has to do with if not fundamentally manifesting from Steam being an organisation of technologists. They don't want to put out a project which has a worse operating system than their workstations.
You could still offer this, similar to the ad tier and ad free tier of a kindle, or a carrier locked phone.
$799 for a locked down version, $1049 for an unlocked version. Opportunity to pay $300 to unlock it later at any time. 5% discount on purchases on a locked device.
I would assume it also has to do with if not fundamentally manifesting from Steam being an organisation of technologists. They don't want to put out a project which has a worse operating system than their workstations.
But if they subsidize the hardware, non game users will purchase the hardware and use it for non game use-cases, where valve cannot recoupe the costs.
A interesting scenario would be to sell the hardware at cost, but include a 30% off ticket to the steam store (up to a few hundred dollars, in savings).
As long as you're running Zuck's spyware OS. The frame is a a linux box with fancy packaging and peripherals. You will be able to put arch on the frame and turn your new singular hobby into building drivers.
The urge to tear down the stack of cellphones I have and pull the boot flash chip hits me occasionally. It would be a substantial project, though, so I haven't done it. Yet.
You have to do things. You can't sit on project ideas forever while they become obsolete. A lot of things on my project ideas file became obsolete while I didn't do them, and that is sad. I even had enough time to do them but still wasted it on places like HN.
I know. It hurts to let things die in my project backlog. But there's so much of 'life' outside the project log that I don't have time. I have to prioritize.
I feel the 'don't waste time on HN' thing. I'm working on it, minimizing social media usage, minimizing non-productive screen time.
AFAIK there are signatures that are checked at the SoC level. In other words, it's not a write lock that can be bypassed by flashing the chips directly.
I do hope they will release drivers for the Steam Machine, otherwise the openness isn’t very useful. Or at least make it possible for others to make drivers by publishing specifications.
Edit, reply to bjord as I am rate limited: HDMI CEC, the chipset, GPU drivers, controller receiver etc.
Edit, reply to robhlt: Thanks! Hope we can get that ported to Windows
This is a weird thing to call out, when there's so much else to talk about (price, specs, etc) buuuuuut-
Check out the gameplay video partway down the page, where the two people are on the couch playing Cuphead. Right under "Your Steam library in more places."
It's just... a real clip of real people playing a real game and reacting in a real way. It's funny. I know it's stupid to call out, but how many exaggerated versions of this scene have you seen before? And Valve is smart enough to say "Let's just film two people playing a real game and snip a nice, realistic reaction shot from it."
I wasn’t going to say anything until I read this comment but that clip of the gameplay and the clip of the two people playing are not from the same source. The one showing the gameplay has a tower of books or possibly a jenga tower on the coffee table that doesn’t exist when seeing the gamers. It’s just editing magic and stitched together to have exactly the effect elicited by your comment.
If you're good at acting you can go up on stage with somebody you met two weeks ago and people will believe that you're family.
It's funny how it works. I took an iPhone selfie of myself as the character that I go out to do street photography as and my wife and my son are "you staged that!" but then I hand out my business cards with it and everybody else tells me it is a great photo.
I can appreciate that the direction for this commercial was "just play the game and we'll find a good 2 second cut". I'm just worried that I'm seeing people compliment an advertisement. It's the kind of overt emotional marketing I would hope we'd all scroll past looking for the technical specifications.
In any other commercial they'd be laughing and grinning ear to ear with their fakest smile instead of wincing from dieing in Cuphead. Definitely still staged but refreshingly so.
This one is admittedly very natural compared to how cringey they usually get in gaming ads. Which says more about the industry than about this particular clip.
I want to buy one just to raise the signal that Linux support is important.
When these machines were announced I switched to Fedora as a daily driver on my high end gaming rig.
It’s been awesome. I still have to go back to Windows for music production unfortunately. I may switch to Mac for that so I can completely abandon Windows.
I run an optical HDMI cable from my office to my TV and get to play games and use Linux in 77”.
It’s always fantastic to read a success story of migrating to Linux gaming from Windows. As Windows gets worse and worse there will be more people joining us.
Even without buying you can send Linux gaming signals by playing on Linux and participating in the hardware survey.
Seconding Reaper, great software. Renoise is also extremely fun to use if you’re comfortable with trackers (for midi input not that they track you) and you make electronic music
I bought my own version of a "Steam Machine" i.e. a mini-PC powered by an AMD APU for just €676 right before the RAM prices exploded.
It is an AOOSTAR GT37 which actually outclasses the €1,039 Steam Machine in most areas except graphics. One cannot blame Valve here though, the hyperinflation of RAM prices is too blame here.
AOOSTAR GT37 (€676 a few months ago [now vastly more expensive if you can still get one at all]) vs Steam Machine (€1039 right now)
CPU: 12x Zen 5 vs. 6 Zen4
Graphics: 16x RDNA 3.5 vs. 28 RDNA 3
RAM: 32 GB LPDDR5X vs. 16 GB DDR5 + 8 GB GDDR6
HDD: 1 TB vs. 512 GB (both NVMe-SSD)
I expect the Steam Machine to run graphically demanding FPS games quite a bit better due to the extra RDNA cores and faster VRAM. However it might actually be the inferior gaming machine for CPU/main RAM intense strategy or simulation games (e.g. Stellaris).
> However it might actually be the inferior gaming machine for CPU/main RAM intense strategy or simulation games (e.g. Stellaris).
On Stellaris I remember having a pretty good experience (not stellar) playing on a 2012 AMD FX-8350 desktop cpu. The six year old midrange laptop cpu Ryzen 4650u smokes that desktop cpu.
Just to draw out the fact that with the Steam machine you will have a better Stellaris experience than what I had 7-8 years ago. (Because I assume even better performance than this laptop class cpu)
My thoughts go more on the question if 15GB ram 8GB VRAM is enough for the next 7 years. And if Steam verified will all be split up, and become more confusing, between the 3 different devices they have.
LTT was only speculating, they did not know the actual price as far as I remember. (They had a video doing some educated guesses, or maybe a WAN show, can’t exactly recall).
No doubt the price was lower before this hardware shortage, but the $800 is not a reliable number afaik.
In their video today, they said they asked Valve the original pricing, and they said (paraphrasing) "we can't tell you exactly - but the increase we recently had on the steam deck is about how much the pricing for machine increased" - which is how they came up with the $800 number
Steam machine is a console:
- homogenous and standardised hardware
- vendor backed compatibility certification programme
- standardised OS with atomic, image based updates
- plug in, login and play your library potentially without touching a mouse or keyboard
- HDMI CEC out of box
- controller integration with instant sleep/wake (as seen on steam deck)
- operates quietly
Steam machine is a PC (not like a console):
- not priced as a loss leader
- runs any desktop OS
- it’s a PC
You can do all of this out of box, it’s turnkey, it’s primarily a console experience but a PC if you need it. My point was that comparing this to a prebuilt or BYO PC is like comparing a console to a PC. Different value prop.
I still think it's a great concept and a really accessible way to get a great computer. But I agree, I thought this was going to land in the $500 to $700 range. That said, I also bought a mini PC for $250, and that same PC is now going for $600. So I don't really think steam can be blamed for that
Plus GPU prices. They absolutely got screwed by their launch timing, unfortunately. And they’re not big enough to negotiate better terms though that probably isn’t really an option right now anyway.
I’m not sure I’d want this at $550, but maybe. At $1050 without controller it’s a solid no.
I’m sure some people will want it. I have no interest in maintaining a PC so if I wanted to play PC games this is probably how I would do it. But the price just absolutely kills it for me.
"killed" is a bit of a stretch. High prices on all gear is here to stay. This is the new normal. Unless that simply means that nobody buys consoles/pc's.
But you cant compare the price point with what it used to cost and imagine that its overpriced now and that people will seek alternatives. There aren't any cheaper alternatives.
You have evidence that they are going to go down? Not unless government policy steps in to pressure chip makers, or establish new markets. Corporations will use inflation, ai, et al to validate their record profits at the cost of the consumer. Monopolies or better put the mergers of companies over the last 40 years hasn’t lead to cheaper prices, it never was going to either.
Can you point to an example of this happening in the past? Where a supply shortage leads to price increases and "record profits", and the price never goes back down?
It almost certainly is. Once people get used to the higher prices, and the companies see that the units sell anyway, there is no meaningful incentive to lower costs again.
This has played out time and time again during every other supply-side shock. Once prices go up, they don't come back down.
That's not true. We've seen prices from supply shock go back down (the increase in hard drive prices when there were floods in Asia 10-15 years ago comes to mind as an example). It does take a while, but it will happen eventually.
Even then, prices stayed elevated for years. They never went back to pre-supply shock prices. Right around that time too the industry consolidated. WD bought Hitachi, Seagate bought Samsung's HDD business. It left a duopoly, so now there was no competitive pressure for a price war. Prices got locked in higher than pre-flood levels, intentionally.
For the current DRAM situation, I can almost promise we'll never see $60-$90 RAM again. Maybe, 32GB won't cost you $500 eventually, but it'll cost you $250-$350 instead of $500. If the market can bear it, why would anyone get into a price war that's just a race to the bottom where no one wins?
Suppose you have a warehouse full of widgets. You bought them them for $450 each, and sell them for $500. You're really happy with this profit, and you can just keep selling them at $500...forever, right?
But then, I get my own warehouse and fill it with widgets that I bought at $400 each because I entered under better market conditions. And I really want to sell these widgets -- they aren't making me any money when they just sit there taking up space and burning rent.
So I price these widgets at $475, to attract customers. It works; the widgets are flying off the shelves. And they're being purchased by people who used to be your customers, and I'm making even more money per-unit than you are.
What's your next move? Do you want to keep losing customers to me, or do you want to adjust your price to be more competitive?
Price wars are a race to the bottom that everyone loses. In reality, such oligopolies follow a kinked demand curve.
A new entrant isn't guaranteed to now price at $475. They'll see the incumbent being successful at $500. Now they price at $499 rather than trigger a destructive price war. Companies collude on this quite frequently. When everyone keeps their prices high, all get to enjoy the big margins.
Outside of that, ok so you have a warehouse full of widgets you need to move fast. So you undercut, and sell out. If demand is still bigger than your supply, you're now out of capacity, customers are going back to buying for $500 from your competitor. That means you've mispriced your limited inventory, so now you raise your prices up to closer to $500 because it helps you control your capacity, and also you know the market can clearly bear it.
Anyway, those are obviously overly simplified scenarios prices rarely fall down dramatically because of tacit collusion. Its asymmetric price transmission ("Prices go up like rockets, but fall like feathers")
I'm not convinced this hardware is "an extension of PC gaming, not a console" when the hardware is generations out of date. To credit Microsoft, Sony, and other players, the reality is that unless you are "in the game" for decades, you HAVE to provide a convincing differentiator from the other console markets.
Steam had this with the Steam Deck and personally, I see the world moving to thin clients that play games via some remote desktop infrastructure. It makes no sense to buy this hardware even if it was 500-700 dollars.
In my opinion, it would've been worth the money to just buy a gaming PC, put it in a garage, hidden room, etc with the networking gear, then stream it over the network to a Steam Link or using Apollo/Artemis/Moonlight/Parsec; anything.
Tangential to this discussion: Steam is in the unique position to create a kernel anti-cheat. I know that's not popular. But they are the only ones with the install base AND ability to pull it off in a such a fashion that wouldn't be so god-awful. It's clear that multiplayer gaming isn't going to go away from kernel anti-cheat. It's also clear that developers are still going to target Windows-only with Steam Deck support as a best-kept basis.
I don't see the Steam Machine/Deck as a competitor until they solve the kernel anti-cheat portion. Until then, it can play games that are older, not popular, or single-player which is a valid market but not one that I am a part of, anyway.
I think it's far from dead-on-arrival. I don't want to buy a PC, put it in a garage, etc. I want a little box I can easily hook up to my TV and play Steam games on. This scratches that itch. I'm old and want convenience. I know a lot of other people in my peer group who are going to pick one up too. Also I don't play any competitive games where I care about anti-cheat. I just want to play my RPG/JRPG's on a big screen and I want it to be plug-n-play.
This runs SteamOS and is an officially supported platform that, if it has legs, will be something developers may want to target as a platform and make sure their games work a la Steam Deck verification.
There's also potential for community fixes for older games with issues. And easier troubleshooting cause you can just look up "fix for X game Steam Machine", or "does X game work on Steam Machine"
There are advantages to this over something generic, or building your own machine.
Yeah I understand I can get a much better gaming PC at much lower price point but that was kind of the point I was trying to make. I'm in a position where I'd happily pay more for convenience and I know many other people who feel the same way. I think there is a huge market here and this isn't a dead-on-arrival situation at all. Valve knows this.
There's also the kid factor if you're playing on the TV in the living room. Kids have a way of walking in at the worst time. As someone who enjoys violent titles, I get it.
Same here. My home computer only runs Windows because I play competitive online games. It would be incredible if Valve built some kind of certified, locked-down kernel, but I doubt that will happen.
The online discourse around this is also incredibly toxic, filled with utopians who don’t understand how serious cheating is in these games, or that kernel anti-cheat, while not perfect, is the best solution available today.
...and then you have hypervisor-based cheats, hardware cheats and whatnot. I'd say that AI flagging of suspicious cases + additional targeted scrutiny is the way forward - for competitive platforms, that is. That, and trust factor - I practically never get bad games when I play alone in cs:go/cs2 (~20k mmr eu, lem/smfc prior to that) - both in terms of somebody cheating and in terms of people that are full of themselves in one way or another. I'd say that combining these techniques should be very effective.
The hard truth is that as much as you think yourself as a "proper" gamer, this segment always has, always will, _not_ be the proper target segment. Don't forget that mobile gaming has more revenue than everything else… combined. They have a play on this, and as much expansive as it looks, it's mostly due to the hardware inflation, and compared to alternatives, it won't look bad at all. For the segments that matters.
I don't see a market of people who want to pay Valve $1,050 to play Steam games on a custom Linux machine with old hardware that won't support big name games that have kernel anti-cheat on them.
I really don't see the vision Valve is looking for here.
The age of hardware is getting less and less relevant though as time goes on. The differences between generations visually is getting pretty small and good enough doesn't need the latest most powerful features. It was designed to a benchmark of good enough graphics for a reasonable price then the price got blown up by AI datacenters prebuying years worth of production of memory with the insane firehose of money they're able to access.
> In my opinion, it would've been worth the money to just buy a gaming PC, put it in a garage, hidden room, etc with the networking gear, then stream it over the network to a Steam Link or using Apollo/Artemis/Moonlight/Parsec; anything.
I'm someone who has built dozens of gaming PCs, and wired my house. I also have zero interest in doing the above... if I have to pay few hundred extra to get a Steam machine hooked up to a TV without all that hassle... I'll do that.
It's not the absolute best value for gaming. It's not horrible in current market conditions but it's also not targeting "best value for gaming" anywhere in the marketing materials. It's hardware that can play your Steam library on your TV. There are harder, less expensive ways to do that, as there have been for ages.
If you're a console gamer, there are less expensive, just as easy options to play console games, so it's definitely not suited for that market.
It's really only catering to people with disposable income that want a cute way to hook up a Steam-capable machine to a TV. It's not a huge market, nor is it a non-existent market.
It was probably a bigger market at $750 than $1050, but we can't have nice things.
>It's just dead-on-arrival...the hardware is generations out of date
Some people say this same thing about the Nintendo Switch and its successor, but here we are, with the former closing in on highest selling console of all time, and the latter tracking above that.
I don't have one, but I assume it's a better Switch. All the existing games work on it, some with enhanced versions (but probably load times are better anyway, right?), and there's new games that only run on the Switch 2. Switch 1 releases are likely to dry up over time.
An unfortunate series of events that this thing ended up with these specs at 1,049.00. It was supposed to be cheap and cheerful. At first Steam took an opportunistic deal to buy up a bunch of near-obsolete-already chips from AMD to build a low-cost box around. Then years of delays and an explosion in DRAM and SSD prices and here we are.
4 year old chip design on an equivalently old process node, not that unlike nvidia selling 2-3 year old chips as the spark. Thanks to AI boom, consumer market really just getting the warmed-over leftovers here from AMD and NVDIA.
The PS5 Pro has 16 GB unified memory, the Steam Machine is 16GB + 8GB. That'll be where some of the price difference comes from. But most likely comes from Sony locking in long term contracts before price insanity.
Different value props. The target audience for this already has an extensive Steam catalogue. To buy a PS5 Pro is going to require re-buying all of your games for it.
Also, you can build a decent PC for $1049, but getting it into a decent form/noise factor is going to ratchet that price up. Add in the proprietary CEC stuff that Valve has done for it and it's not as terrible as it seems.
Right, but it’s a PS5, not a PC - you’re paying less for the privilege of letting Sony 100% control what you use the device for, including not being able to play your own games that you’ve paid for. Try doing that on a PC. Try checking your email on your PS5, or steaming the media of your choice.
Even if you only used your Steam Machine to play Steam games it's still probably a better deal. Multiplayer and cloud saves are free so you don't need something like PlayStation Plus. Games are generally cheaper and Steam sales make them even cheaper. You also don't lose access to older games if you get a better system.
Yes, Steam Machine is optimized for gaming, but it's still your PC. Install your own apps, or even another operating system. Who are we to tell you how to use your computer?"
I know what the Steam Machine is, I'm saying the compromise of the PlayStation being cheaper isn't a compromise because I simply don't care that my game console isn't a PC. I have a PC, and I don't want one connected to my TV anyway. I don't think I'm unusual in that regard and the market of people who want to check their email on their TV is pretty small!
You missed the point. If all I did was make phone calls on a $100 flip phone why would someone saying "oh but the $1000 iPhone can do so much more!" matter to me.
For reference, a PlayStation 5 is $600-650 for the base models (lower performance than Steam Machine) and $900 for the Pro model (likely higher performance). I know this is a PC and thus an open platform, but for most buyers in living room gaming, that's the competition. I don't think this will reach mass market success, but I'm not sure that was the goal. Who are they selling to?
Note: I ask as someone with a Steamdeck sitting on the desk in front of me and a custom-built computer under my TV running Linux.
I'm sure they were originally hoping for mass-market success, but given the RAM drought and ensuing pricing, I'm guessing the best possible outcome at this point would be to break roughly even and learn, so that they can put out a more competitive revision if and when prices ever return to Earth.
With Windows becoming increasingly hostile, I do think there's room for a hardware/software integrated "just works" offering in the Linux PC space. Plus software pricing is probably a lot more competitive than console (dunno, never had anything to do with consoles, but my impression has always been that hardware is a loss-leader there).
My guess are people who want to PC game but don't want to deal with building a PC themselves - there's a decent market of pre-built gaming PCs that this would be competitive with.
And there's a valid market there, but as someone who just spent half my Saturday morning debugging a CPU throttling issue on my kid's 2020-vintage Lenovo Legion laptop, I feel like a pre-built is in some ways the worst of both worlds, like you don't get the savings and fine-tuning that is something you assembled yourself, but you still get all the fun of debugging driver issues, weird performance stalls, and who knows what else.
That said, I've never had a Steam Deck or tried to seriously game on Linux, so I may be out of touch with how much smoother the picture is in an all-Proton world.
(the laptop issue turned out to be something in the firmware asserting BC PROCHOT for some reason; for now we can periodically clear it with the ThrottleStop utility, but who knows what the actual underlying problem is)
The Steam Deck is the closest thing the PC world has to a console (barring the Steam Machine, of course), and features near-console levels of hardware/software integration.
They make different performance playstation 5s?! What happenes to the console compatibility story? You used to expect any game to work on any console because they were all near identical.
It got messy but pretty much all ps4 games work on ps5, and all ps5 games run on the ps5 and ps5 pro. On Xbox, everything runs on series S and series X.
Indeed, they are hitting a weird spot, their pricing category is stuck in between people who just want to play without breaking the bank account, who will go for a PS5 or XBox, and hardcore gamers who will go directly for their own custom build PC
has that still been accurate in the last half decade?
indie devs have easy access to release on PS5, latest Xbox, Switch alongside Steam simultaneously
the subscription any of those users have (a prerequisite for online or multiplayer access) also comes with many many free games, games that are otherwise $4 - $25 without the subscription
people already in those ecosystems have been accumulating (unplayed) titles just like Steam users meme about, and as soon as they sign in on their new console all are available
Unlike a PS5, a PC has all the games that I want to play. And to drive home the irony, right now I'm actually using my Steam Deck to play a game that was originally for the PS3 (Valkyria Chronicles). Legitimately purchased, even!
Now that Bloodborne is "on PC" (wink wink) there's kinda no reason to own a PS4 or PS5 in my opinion. Persona 5 was the only other holdout, but now P5R has a great PC-native release.
Hope the Frame is available for pre-order soon as well! I know I’m going to pay more than the HW was worth a year ago because of “AI”, but I’m really looking forward to that one.
I've tried various iterations of a gaming HTPC over the years, and they've all been pretty miserable. That lack of any reasonable or stable CEC solution this whole time so far has honestly been an oversized anchor this whole time. And I think Valve is doing a bit of a disservice not advertising it more.
A lot of machines ship with secure boot locked to Microsoft's key. Usually there's a way to turn it off, otherwise you need the shim loader Microsoft signed in 2015 whose signature has just expired and who knows if Microsoft will sign it again.
Yeah. I don't think they're gouging, I totally understand how expensive RAM and storage and GPUs are, but...oof. I just can't justify it as a 'fun' purchase.
Yeah. But they’re only other choices to just sit on it for a few more years, which point they would need to put different hardware in and it would just increase costs.
This may be the best option of a couple of terrible ones.
Insant buy for me because as an owner of a PS5 and Xbox One X, I’ve been using my Steam Deck a lot for gaming on TV using the dock. It works really well. This is just the dream version of that setup.
Surprised that they have 4 USB-A and only 1 USB-C. With their power profile, Steam Machine should be powerable by a single USB-C cable on extended power range which should reduce the need for the power supply altogether and greatly simplify mechanical as well as thermal design, although the power electronic design would be more complex as a result.
I would also be expecting Wifi 7 support as well as unified memory considering they ordered custom AMD silicon. Understandable that it is a rather conservative design for their first generation though.
USB C ports cost a lot more, needing extra controller chips and special HCIs. USB-A, especially 2.0, is dead cheap. I would've expected more than 3 though? Standard consoles used to support 4 controllers, plus you'd probably want a mouse and keyboard at the same time if it's also a PC. I guess it's fine if you're assumed to be using wireless controllers.
My steam deck is underpowered as a living room gaming PC.
Wish it was cheaper but would look forward to a “just works” experience including sleep/instant game resume.
Add my thousands of already owned Steam games and it makes me excited for a great couch gaming experience. It’s the reason I don’t get a PS5/Switch cause I don’t wanna rebuy all the games and they are not on sale as much.
I'm looking at the performance stats streaming a game to my living room PC right now, and total latency is about 4-5ms, which would be unnoticeable even on a 120hz TV.
I played Celeste using Steam Link from my PC over wifi to an Nvidia Shield and it worked good about 99% of the time. Is the tech perfect? No, but it does work great a lot of the time.
Its not too bad. I played through animal well, a platformer, which requires quite a few tricky jumps, but I did connect the controller to my PC instead. Adequate for most couch gaming but I wouldn't play cs2 or similar competitive game with a controller anyway.
I wish they had a few different options with better specs. Or maybe a shell with the case/fan/mobo etc.. where you can just add CPU/GPU/RAM. I'd love that, and would be willing to pay extra to get something a bit more modern.
I want a Steam Machine for my living room, but these specs are just terrible for 2026. According to Digital Foundry, this $1200 machine is worse than a $500 6-year-old base PS5.
It's funny how this (imo) almost feels like an inherently inert topic to discuss:
Is it dumb of them to do this? Not really, they got unlucky with the timing and they already designed the machines. Selling them below cost to subsidize steam-sales would probably create bad incentives for them.
What will this mean for Valve's future? Nothing, they're still a relatively lean company with a money machine.
Will this dissuade them from creating hardware in the future? Probably not, the Steamdeck was really succesfull and they've got more than enough resources to do a few failed experiments.
Well, when they announced it (7 months ago) I got laughed out of the room when I said this will be at least 1k$ because of the RAM crisis, and people quoted famous Youtuber "Moores Law is Dead" that this thing has a 300$ BOM and will be 600$ max, probably just 450$...
The prices I think a lot of us expected. I know Valve is being pressured by the market, but I can't imagine buying one for this price, even if I'm really excited for the Steam Machine. That said, the Steam Deck is now so expensive I don't think I can justify replacing mine when it breaks.
The pricing is all out of sorts. Close to $500 more expensive than a PS5 for worse performance. I understand this is a PC and you can do other things with it, but if you're buying a gaming device to play games this is a horrible value.
Yes, so many people were claiming that it will be around that price point. That seemed straight up delusional to me. Memory price has roughly quadrupled and 32GB DDR5 basically cost the same as the original cheapest steam deck.
The only thing that I get with consoles that I don't get with the Steam Machine is a guarantee; a GUARANTEE that the games I buy will play on the system. If I but a game and it says PS5, I know it will play. A list of specs on the Steam Machine landing page does not absolve this for Valve.
On the Steam store they've done a great job with their certification program for the Steam Deck.
Also, I don't think their target market is people who don't own any Steam games yet. It's going to be people with already extensive back catalogues on Steam.
Yes, Steam Machine is optimized for gaming, but it's still your PC. Install your own apps, or even another operating system. Who are we to tell you how to use your computer?
back in 2019, I was thinking of getting an MBA and as part of the exploration, shadowed an MBA class at University of Washington for a day. It was so fun. One of the things they were discussing in the class that day was a case study of Valve, specifically around the Steam Machine. The team's consensus was that Valve was carefully arranging money in a barrel, lovingly soaking it in high octane gasoline, and was about to light a match.
Proton, the Steam machine, the Steam deck, etc. were probably never about making money. It's Valve's "Plan B".
They started with Proton after Microsoft suddenly made a move with the Windows store and also started bolting down Windows a bit. As with most things Microsoft that initiative quietly died over time. But at that time Valve probably couldn't afford to take any chances. It probably also made them realize they had build a castle on someone elses land.
If you are making money in the amounts Valve is, then even the simplest risk analyses is going to show that "Microsoft rug pulling you" is one of your few existential threats. Even though the probability is low or medium-ish at best, the impact is massive. Even anti-trust isn't going to save you. By the time Microsoft gets convicted, you are already dead. Just look at Netscape.
Yeah people forget about it now because it ended up being a failure and Microsoft rolled it back a couple years later, but Windows 8 was basically an attempt by Microsoft to take over software distribution on Windows. They made an entirely new API (WinRT) as the main API for the platform, and all WinRT software had to be distributed via the Windows Store. The existing Win32 software could only be run inside the "Desktop" app, and the flagship Windows 8 device, the Surface, could only run WinRT software. This is when Valve started supporting Linux and came out with the first generation of Steam Machines.
This only goes to show how MBAs are destructively myopic.
Valve understands that inextricably tying themselves to Windows is a long-term death sentence. SteamOS represents a lifeboat for when Microsoft goes full iOS and decides to lock down Windows in exchange for taking 30% of all software purchases. Valve has been taking this threat seriously since at least 2010, which is why they've been investing in Linux gaming. Both Steam Deck and the Steam Machine are further steps toward complete independence from Microsoft.
We know they've been kicking the idea around since the first line up and I believe pretty decent leaks saying they were working on it were out around 2019.
Prices and I mean the price tag will never come down again. That was an exception for technology and gadgets for a few decades but I'm not sure it will happen again.
Semiconductors always go through boom and bust cycles - so say stock market analysts. But I'm not sure how long they typically are? (This is a boom not a bust for them)
If you want a steam controller included. You can use also PS4/PS5 or Xbox controllers easily on linux (and thus steamOS) nowadays. I use a Ps5 controller on my setup, even though I never had a ps4 or ps5.
Can't you build or buy an equivalent (in performance) PC for cheaper? All with upgradable standard parts? I get the appeal of a small form factor, but I am afraid it may not sell well at this price.
This is the #1 argument for buying a Steam Machine IMO.
You can achieve a lot by specifically optimizing your game for a particular machine and Valve has such extreme market power that every game studio releasing on PC will make sure that their game looks and runs great on the Steam Machine.
This machine is more limited than I expected e.g. only 8 GB VRAM, however because of Valve's market power all game studios will see 8 GB VRAM as the new limit. Every game will now aim to look and run great with only 8GB VRAM.
As a poor gamer, I truly appreciate Valve setting such a low standard for gaming PC hardware. Game studios were certainly already looking at 16 GB VRAM + 32 GB RAM as the new standard for AAA games. That is now history.
there is patch on linux where you can mark which allocated vram is important or something and then when you do it with games they have the full 8GB the rest goes to system ram i think, this makes games on linux run like 30+ fps vs Windows on systems with only 8GB VRAM,
Not being able to run adequately (even with tuned down graphics options) on 8GB of VRAM was already going to be an issue for most PC game devs. According to Valve's last hardware survey, a quarter of players only have 8GB, and another 15-20% of players have less than that.
I would be extraordinarily surprised if this were true. Let's be real: This is going to be a tiny volume product. Big for Linux gaming, but tiny in the grand scheme of things. Certainly minuscule compared to Windows gaming, or the PS4/5.
It could have been something, but the target market is precisely the market that will look at the price and say "Nah".
And as one point of clarification, game makers by and large still aren't targeting Linux. This machine works via the absolutely excellent, almost magical Proton (https://github.com/valvesoftware/proton) that lets you run most of your Windows library on Linux, largely seamlessly.
Of course my prediction depends on the success of the Steam Machine, but I expect it to be highly successful, just like the Steam Deck, another piece of Valve hardware game studios have been pretty much forced to optimize for due to its success.
I disagree that the target market won't accept the price. I see the target market as less technical people, who don't care about hardware specs, but just want to play Steam games without issues.
The price is in the same region as an iPhone, and if you care enough about PC gaming to buy a gaming PC at all, you are certainly willing to spend at least as much money on it as you spent on your phone.
Plus support and packaging. Can you make your own PC of equivalent specs in that size case? Would it have swappable face plates you’ll probably be able to buy on Amazon?
I think you would struggle to NOT build a more performant PC for the same price.
https://pcpartpicker.com/list/brbFsK This is $50 more but it has 1TB of storage and a newer generation of both CPU and GPU and will absolutely destroy it.
I'm sure you could get actually easily cheaper and better even, I haven't followed the market a lot lately.
Prebuilt are likely to be even better deals because they will use some cheap noname parts for the RAM and the PSU, which is mostly fine.
For me, size and aesthetics play a role. A PC like that is huge and, imo, much uglier. I know a lot of people do not care but I am sure I am also no the only one.
It's not huge, it's a mid-tower (admittedly, not a pretty one). But the real benefit is that it is upgradable. Basically you are trading off user serviceability for "it just works" and the form factor.
Another thing the Steam machine has is HDMI-CEC support, which is nice if you intend to use this with a TV, perhaps with KDE Plasma Bigscreen. But $1000 is rather steep for a console/HTPC.
You can get a Miniforums PC with the Radeon 780m for $699 US, but I don't think the graphics performance is on par with the SteamBox. I'm not sure on the reliability of these tiny PC's either
Sadly I don't see that happening. Game devs have gotten used to having their cake and eating it too by developing for Windows and using Proton as a crutch to get the the Steam OS certification too. flibitijibibo was right: linux porters have probably gone out of business.
Interesting that its HDMI is 2.0 and not 2.1. Hopefully it's still possible (for those that really want) to connect modern 4K TVs at 120 hz via the DisplayPort 1.4 output.
Interesting that they went with AMD for GPU, but not too surprising. My experience with a nvidia 5060 on my laptop is that nvidia's drivers on linux still have no idea how to reliably wake from sleep. Fixing that just not the priority for them I guess - datacenter GPUs doing AI probably never sleep and just idle at 50 watts or whatever.
Because most PC peripherals (mice, keyboards, microphones, controllers, USB headphones, detachable hard drives) are still USB-A on the other end of their cable. Yes this is changing, but in this case I appreciate them acknowledging the reality on the ground and not creating a situation where there are many dongles afoot.
I'm not familiar with SteamOS and Valve hardware in general. Could I play something like Overwatch on this, and connect keyboard and mouse? Could I play other PC games like World of Warcraft?
It's just a Linux box, you can do anything that you can on any other Linux machine (including install Windows).
Linux more or less runs most Windows games. The ones that don't run are ones where the developer is going out of their way to make them not run - mostly with kernel-mode anti-cheats that just find themselves staring at the wrong kernel.
Steam makes that pretty seamless and Steam games "just work". For non-Steam games you need to do some tinkering, it's stuff that most people browsing this forum can do.
Note that the "just" is overlooking that it's more locked down than a typical Linux box, in that the OS filesystem is read-only and all app installs live in userland (though you can turn off the read-only behavior). For what it's worth I'm very much a fan of it as a default for a mass-market machine, but you'll run into weird gotchas if you want to do "programmer stuff" with it.
This seems very expensive for what a PC can do :(. A PC can be fully customizable with price ranges that are lower than the steam machine. The "hardcore console gamers" live on PS, and Xbox, and for "casual gamers", a Nintendo Switch would provide much better bang for you buck.
You can install a SteamOS-style console experience on any old PC, including handhelds or mini-pcs with integrated graphics. Bazzite is a great choice for that, even my RX560 handles it without issue.
> a Nintendo Switch would provide much better bang for you buck.
A secondhand Steam Deck would also be better value, but this isn't a value-focused product. The Steam Machine is Valve's second stab at the premium couch-based PC gamer market, this time with Proton and a bigger focus on controller usability for ordinary PC games.
Find me a PC in this form factor that is as well tested and supported as the steam boxes are, with the specs they are claiming to have, at this price. Its a little above the curve but a little is not a lot, and you get a fully supported Linux box at that price.
.....and if you think this is expensive just wait until the PS6 and new Xbox are released.
So unfortunate with the timing, I wish they shelved it for a few years instead. At any other time this could've been the thing to entrench Steam, PC and Linux as finally THE gaming platform.
At this price and features it'll probably just be a footnote.
I like the idea, but I am worried that it's yet another step on the road towards personal multi-purpose tower PCs built part by part no longer being a thing.
What is the appeal of Steam Machine as a dedicated gaming device? Isn't it going to be old in a few years and then you have to get rid of it because upgrading components isn't a viable option? Isn't that quite the opposite of anything that deserves to be associated with them term "hacker"?
> Isn't it going to be old in a few years and then you have to get rid of it because upgrading components isn't a viable option?
I expect to get the rest of this decade out of my Steam Deck so IDK, very different to my normal expectations for a computer. The Steam Deck also defines a floor that will allow compatible games to be very performant on the Steam Machine so I think that will help the Steam Machine have a decent lifespan.
I also think on some level we need to start resigning ourselves to getting 10+ years out of our computers!
With current hardware prices, I'm not sure it'll be 'old' in gaming terms in a few years. I'm expecting the PS6 to be only a moderate upgrade over the PS5, not arrive for another year at least, and probabky take 5 years to overtake the PS5.
Compact, convenient, console-like experience that pulls games from your existing steam library. Same niche as a normal console, just not locked down in the same sense. If it weren't for the price I'd consider one, but I'd rather limp along my existing systems for as long as possible (and it sounds like SteamOS support for broader systems is improving).
Small, quiet, underpowered and some games you can’t play because of stupid kernel level anti cheat and expensive. Not quite DOA but not the hyped thing I was looking for.
For some reason I never considered this route, despite following the PS5 Linux developments... is there a specific reason that the XSX is harder to homebrew than the PS5?
It would be incredible to convert my dusty XSX to a linux box
I know they will sell, but at this price point I don't understand who is supposed to be the target for this.
Either you want a gaming computer, and you'll get a much better one that can be upgraded in the future for the same price, or you want a console, and you'll never pay a grand for it.
I'll probably buy one. It's small so it fits under my TV, fits in with my furniture. Since it's all vertically integrated I know I can just connect it to the TV and it'll boot quickly and work well, and it has all my Steam games. I value my time and lack of frustration more than a few hundred dollars.
I want a simple UNIX workstation that "just works". Apple broke this promise to me with Tahoe, where horrific design decisions compounded the bugs on essential peripherals (Tahoe began spinning up and down my external raid array to sleep constantly, for no reason, making extremely loud noises as the drives repeatedly if it's idle, forcing me to constantly touch files in a while loop over dozens of partitions -- also I have a few petabyte of storage and it now takes ages to mount every reboot, as now with Tahoe Spotlight indexing is done as part of the mounting process and I can't opt out of this behavior and I'm in a warzone where power outages necessitating shutdowns are frequent). I have since used a docked Steam Deck as my daily driver and everything I want just works! It's now my UNIX desktop OS of choice. I've been on the Mac since OS X but Tahoe was so bad that now I consider an operating system designed for wasting time gaming a more serious and less disruptive option to my daily workflow. Heck of a job you're doing, Tim Apple!
I thought about it, but don't think I'll push the button. I have a falcon nw gaming rig in my living room right now running windows / steam big picture and an NVIDIA 3060Ti -- and it's .. fine, but long in the tooth. I wouldn't mind a more console-ish hardware experience for steam gaming, and compared to a new falcon box, this thing is cheap. I experimented with just running SteamOS on the falcon hardware a few years ago, but it was a little fussy, and I wanted to also use the system for local inference, and, and, and.
All that said, I don't think this is a good value. I'm presuming if I did a little work SteamOS 3 would be workable for me, and I have significantly more RAM, and possibly a better GPU? Not exactly sure where the GPU falls out, but I definitely believe I could buy a better GPU for less than the new box.
If it gets preferred shipment for the controller, you could buy it and sell the box and keep the controller. :) I think my controller ship date is estimated in 2027 right now.
I think there's a middle ground of people who just are not interested in building or upgrading a gaming computer (or just don't like their typical form factor in the ready to go out of the box gaming PCs) but also don't want the completely closed off ecosystem of a console.
I think if the Xbox ended up being more like the Steam Machine (i.e. more like a PC) then this middle ground that the Steam Machine sells to would probably go away as I don't think the group of folks who care that it's Linux based is high enough to support production.
Prebuilt machines have a terrible reputation, I could see people wanting this for a PC that you don't need hardware expertise to boot up. If you're reading this you could probably pick out your own parts and assemble them for cheaper, but for people who want a console-style plug-and-play type experience I could see the market for it.
Pricey, but so is any other sort of electronic entertainment hardware these days.
do you know fans or people who don't like to tinker computers?
take a sip at GamingOnLinux community... they don't seem to care about stuff running perfectly on Proton and not natively or that Gabe is buying another 600 million USD yatch. they love the Steam ecosystem more than developers crafting games abiding to 30% fees that are a clear sign of monopoly power
I wanted a gaming computer (read: an airgapped system that I could install arbitrary software on without fear), and I was sick to death of Microsoft's bullshit and resolved to never buy a Windows machine again, so I've been using a docked Steam Deck as my main gaming rig. It's performed far better than I imagined on the software side (has never failed to run any game in my library, though some have required minor settings tweaks), though the hardware is a little on the lighter side, which is perfectly acceptable for a handheld, but if the Steam Machine had been available at the time I'd probably have gone for that instead.
As an adult with kids, why would I want to spend my scarce time and energy building my own machine, installing and configuring shit when I can just buy this that is guaranteed to work well. Yeah, when I was 18 I'd probably do it myself, but I just don't have the patience for bullshit anymore.
I feel like there's a midrange of "not particularly techy" gamers who will strongly appreciate - "I don't care about putting anything together, I just want to place PC games like a console."
Wow that LTTlabs article was damning. The language is optimistic but this thing can’t possibly move steamdeck-numbers of units at $1100+ with that performance. DOA if you ask me.
Thanks to Valve, I've now been using Omarchy as my operating system for months now. Gaming just works on Linux now. It's crazy, used to be a pipe dream!
I'm buying the Steam Machine as well to game on the couch. Give me 4k 60fps and that's all I need. The Steam Controller is also fantastic shape on my hands, very comfortable.
I assume they are referring to the general tide of improvements valve has brought to gaming working generically on linux, and that they are using omarchy to experience it
His blog is a mix of zealous out-of-touch and unloved techbro shit and the most rancid far-right essays possible. Trust me, he's earned it.
It makes me feel insane that people just skip over this stuff. The guy is openly citing "people" like Tommy Robinson yet he's still a popular and respected distro guy? I'm going to commit a crime.
All good, not knowing this stuff about the guy I didn't connect it to 1488. It parsed as a strangely botched i18n or a16z type of abbreviation. Searching also gave me nothing but I might have X blocked.
Be a little more fair to Omarchy's strengths. It stitches together many things that work really well together. Hyperland is terrific for example and going back to windows/mac feels ancient in comparison. It's a good thing someone built omarchy.
That's the exclusive work of the Hyprborean dev (who himself is another giant crock of shit who I wish just wouldn't wake up ever again one day).
You can install it on your normal, average Arch installation anyways. Don't need to rip everything out from the root just for a pre-configured meme distro. It's not as if Omarchy had hard forks of all the software it steals, anyways. It really is just dotfiles.
Omarchy is a fine starting-point for ricing, but I generally agree with the sentiment that it's a LARP distribution for people that feel warm-fuzzies when they use a TWM. I don't think I could recommend Omarchy to other developers without insulting their intelligence, it's very much on the same level as other novelty distros like Regolith and Archlabs.
Gaming just works for me with Steam and Ubuntu. Steam no longer filters out Linux games to its own category, it simply assumes most games work now (and they do!).
Man...I'm certainly glad a happened to build a gaming beast rig in January of 2025. The RAM alone (64GB DDR5) would cost nearly as much as the entire rig now.
A question for both developers & gamers – why are we continuing to push hardware capacity upward to untenable costs? 2013 games are awesome, I still play them. Why not continue targeting that capability and sell $250 consoles instead of $1250 consoles?
Valve could have made a $2-$3K rig that outperforms other consoles for 4K gaming but I'm glad they didn't. It's genuinely unfortunate the components market went crazy at the same time.
I hope this and the steam deck-likes continue to be successful and incentivize developers to optimize their games for last-gen and portable hardware. I think the "steam deck compatible" certification has already been fairly good for that.
I hope they will release a version with a replaceable CPU and GPU. For a company that does so well on repair ability I don’t understand why they solder everything on the board. I prefer a mini-ITX system where I can easily change the components.
i'm in, i think prices are gonna suck anyway, i own a playstation and that shit sucks, i want to do more couch co-op with my partner and the steam library opens up so much indie games
I did some math, supposedly the complete install of the latest Call of Duty game is a 200GB download[0]. At 1gbps we're talking 26 minutes of downloading. At 2.5gbps we're talking 10 minutes of downloading. I'm honestly surprised game downloads have become so massive but are those 16 extra minutes really going to change anything?
Personally, I'm rarely "surprised" by a need to play a specific game that I don't already have downloaded/installed so I can just tell Steam to download the game in advance. But if I were to be in such a surprise scenario, we're talking the difference between popping on one youtube video while I wait or popping on two youtube videos while I wait. In both scenarios, I am waiting for a small but not insignificant amount of time... now if we could get 10gbps that'd be a game changer. I wouldn't even context switch for a 2.6 minute wait.
If given the option I would trade the LED strip to not wait any longer than absolutely necessary. That's approximately the difference we're talking in BoM cost.
Now, I don't want to overstate it: it's simple disappointment. I'm still interested in the machine, as is.
I use this feature to reduce Valve's egress bill, but local transfers do seem slower than downloading from the internet. I'm not sure why. I have one device hardwired to my network switch. Maybe Steam is bottlenecked on poorly optimized disk IO code?
This is it, basically. It's a little annoying having to plan installations or wait [for ~$5 reduction in BoM]. 2.5GbE is very accessible; my LAN is 10 and WAN is 2.
With the 'Game File Transfer over Local Network' feature in Steam, you don't need a fast internet connection; 'just' another system on the LAN that can serve the files.
Fairly common for those with full-powered gaming desktops and Steam Decks, and soon, Steam Machines.
The UK isn't exactly cheap, but the >1gbit packages tend to be in the 70 USD per month range, maybe uptowards $100 a month by the time you get to 5Gbit on the more traditional providers (sky for example)
For comparison - cloud gaming such as Nvidia's Geforce NOW is at ~20$/mo for 4k resolution with a monthly subscription one can cancel anytime.
That's what, ~4-5 years of gaming on a superior GPU without the headaches of hardware failures or upfront cost of 1000$?
Yikes Valve. The only folks buying gaming PCs these days are people eeking out an advantage in competitive 3D shooters or folks unaware of how far cloud gaming has come.
Cloud gaming is nowhere near the same experience as playing locally. There are a lot of games where milliseconds matter; it's big enough for me and my friends to try Geforce NOW and say, "No, this isn't good enough for a lot of games." You are kind of saying, "the bus only costs $4 a day, that's 30 years of using a car."
No matter how superior the GPU, the latency from streaming will never be able to compete if you're outside of a major hub.
I couldn't imagine playing a game by streaming inputs to a server 30ms away, which then streams those inputs another 30ms to the game server, and then having that round trip.
Honestly tempted to buy a couple for relatives, who do some phone gaming and one who owns a 3DS they use, and see if they find anything interesting in PC gaming. Also make it a decent media center of course too.
Are you using the stock cooler? I’m going with an AIO for the APU, but I worry that the little heatsinks I’m planning for the VRMs aren’t going to cut it.
I don't think we could ever expect a specific gaming PC to compete with the volume sold of gaming consoles that have exclusives people really, really want to play.
This is nice.
By and large, the masses have always experienced football on a TV screen. (though removing lower price tickets from such public sport events is still bad)
Till the sales price matches the market value scalping will exist. The best way to address that is a vickery auction. Till then scalping will continue.
The corollary to this lottery will ensure that people who want Steam Machines day 1 actually get them at cost. So not only does this negatively impact the supply-side of scalping, but it also impacts the demand-side.
This way it's just a random draw and (I think?) the number of accounts scalpers can enter with is limited because they need to be established. So it might not solve scalping, but it could be a significant improvement.
Biggest impediment would be changes to purchase process. Run one live user through and repeat for how many bots you want to buy more.
Agreed with your comment on this being better. I just found a scalper sitting at a PC for 20 minutes waiting to buy pretty funny.
Show me the incentive structure and…
Pre-creating "sleeper" accounts is a common way of circumventing this, though it does require a degree of long term thinking/planning.
>Limit one signup per household. We will use payment method, shipping address, and other information to eliminate multiple entries."
It's not just an account with an age, they have to have made a purchase. And shipping address + payment info also help eliminate duplicates.
It's likely they are weighting accounts that have a lot of (recent) game activity and game purchases as well. Plus, they have access to hardware information via their hardware survey, etc.
Moreover, that's what happens anyway. If you get one of the slots and you value the difference between what you paid and the "real" (resale) price more than you value having the console, you can still sell it. But then more of the money goes to ordinary customers rather than rewarding people who snipe with bots etc.
I would also point out that you can build a PC to run SteamOS with approximately the same specs for approximately the same price, so it's not clear who is going to be paying a significant premium over the sticker price instead of doing that if they don't get a slot.
Scalping also actively damages the pricing, which is part of the product. Valve wants to sell this product at a specific price, which is targeted to an audience. By scalping and ultimately changing the price, you are hurting both the consumer, who now pays more, and the company, who doesn't see a cent of this increase and is now failing its target.
Scalping also damages the demand for the product, since it creates a submarket that is volatile and unpredictable.
Scalping is a bad thing because by basically any measure, a market with scalping is worse for everybody involved than one with scalping. Except for scalpers, who make money off it by making it worse for everybody else. Which is why scalpers are bad people.
Scalping is a natural "black" market which always pops up to satisfy market demand whenever artificial restrictions are placed on the market.
Even in this case, there will be scalpers providing for people with more money than luck, who want a day one steam machine.
As an adult I have rarely wanted things as badly as I did when I was a kid. But I can sure outbid them.
I think you might actually be maximally wrong, as those with means have plenty of entertainment options compared to those without.
But... perhaps these guys are playing a longer game? Reputation has value as well and from other comments this move seems to boost reputation significantly.
It's not a perfect system, but money is how we as a society determine how to allocate scarce resources. People labor under the promise that having additional money will give them an advantage in this type of situation.
For example: Start the bidding at BASE_PRICE (BP) + 2400. Then reduce the price by $1 every 3mins over the course of 5 days. Until the BP is met and then just carry on queuing.
You could buy it early if you want it that much or just wait an extra couple of days and end up in the queue at the BP.
I don't know if it would create pressure on that second it ticks over to the BP, so then its BP+1 - well I guess the nash equilibrium would be pushed up.
To be fair I don't think they'll be scalped a lot because the price isn't attractive already and alternatives are plenty.
> Are there any criteria for signing up?
> Customers must meet the following criteria to be able to sign up:
> You must have a Steam account in good standing.
> You must have made a purchase on Steam prior to April 27th 2026.
> Limit one signup per household. We will use payment method, shipping address, and other information to eliminate multiple entries.
But the Steam Machine is really just a PC with a couple of neat features. If you are willing to overpay a scalper for a Steam Machine, it seems much more reasonable to suggest that maybe you should just take that same amount of money and buy a machine where that money translates into power rather than scalper profit. After it became clear that the Steam Machine was going to be hit hard by the price increases, I just bought a machine that was pure AMD. Where it is living I don't care if it's a little cube or not, nor do I care about the LED bar, and the integrated puck wasn't a big deal when I just use the current one as a charger too. For just a bit more money than the Steam Machine it's about 50% more powerful on all relevant fronts, and I may upgrade to a 9070XT (current latest-gen AMD card) which isn't an option on the Steam Machine. And since I bought that machine the same machine is now nearly $100 more expensive itself.
Paying a scalper for the controller at least makes some sense. Perhaps the same for the Steam Frame. But of the three things Valve is releasing this year, I'm not sure it makes sense to pay a scalper an extra 50% for a Steam Machine. In that scenario, you're not really paying that extra for the machine as a whole; you're paying extra for those "couple of neat features" alone, the form factor, the integrated controller puck, the LED on the front, whatever else is specifically about the Steam Machine and not a true statement about any machine with SteamOS or Bazzite installed. You need to want one of those things really, really badly to overpay that much. The value proposition is quite different.
Of course, this is a very analytical take on what may be a primary-emotional decision for some people. We'll see.
I guess you could find somebody online and buy their account, but surely this would be a slow and unreliable process.
It's basically super easy and trivial to buy verified accounts for many many platforms
>Limit one signup per household. We will use payment method, shipping address, and other information to eliminate multiple entries.
Seems like they have chosen some reasonable options here. 2 months ago having purchase and trying to detect households. Likely also including phone number, Steam Guard client and family sharing.
Even Nintendo has been setting fairly strict requirements to pre-order some of their products, like requiring 50 hours of playtime on the original switch to pre-order the Switch 2
A huge number of people would rather pay a few hundred bucks more to have a plug and play appliance with a warranty from a reputable company show up on their doorstep. They don’t have to learn anything about hardware, or how to install Linux. It just works.
Some people are happy to save the money and take the risk on used hardware.
The Steam Machine is for the former, Steam the platform is for the former and the latter.
Convenience and being an early adopter are hardly at odds with each other. If anything, these people are early adopters because they want the convenience of not dealing with pc builds. People that already have gaming PCs and love that hobby aren’t going to line up to buy something that they enjoy making, or that they know enough about to feel comfortable buying used from Craigslist.
People are paying for a sure thing. Used PCs and no name Amazon machines are not a sure thing.
You and I might see it differently as people fluent with computers. Reseating a ram stick that got jostled in shipping isnt scary to most people on this site. It is terrifying to most of the world though. Steam is going after people that want to use PC games, but not play hardware tech.
Meanwhile, MS is trying to push copilot again.
p.s. a bit of a windows fanboy as well - used to do drivers for it, kind of like the internals / driver model / etc... but I really dislike the path they've taken, and there's nothing else like it.
Finally, I have an old projector setup with an x360/x1x on it right now (hc4000 + diy frame w/ dark energy abyss + 758 v3 + lsr305 + some subs - rag-tag), so I have a good excuse as well :P
Every time I've seen a comment like this, the eventual parts list is about the same price, has large deviations, or re-uses existing hardware (or used hardware). Looking at all the subreddits, the general consensus seems to be the price is fine for the components, and (if you care) it's impossible to build anything with that form factor.
> Yes, Steam Machine is optimized for gaming, but it's still your PC. Install your own apps, or even another operating system. Who are we to tell you how to use your computer?
It feels very commonsense that you should be able to run whatever you want on the computer that you have purchased, but it is surprisingly uncommon.
$799 for a locked down version, $1049 for an unlocked version. Opportunity to pay $300 to unlock it later at any time. 5% discount on purchases on a locked device.
A interesting scenario would be to sell the hardware at cost, but include a 30% off ticket to the steam store (up to a few hundred dollars, in savings).
I feel the 'don't waste time on HN' thing. I'm working on it, minimizing social media usage, minimizing non-productive screen time.
Edit, reply to bjord as I am rate limited: HDMI CEC, the chipset, GPU drivers, controller receiver etc.
Edit, reply to robhlt: Thanks! Hope we can get that ported to Windows
for example: https://www.phoronix.com/news/Valve-Old-AMD-Linux-Love-Song
Nobody has even hinted that it would be nice to have a 3rd party store or the ability to run whatever OS on them freely.
I keep wondering why.
I'm not sure if you're being dishonest or just ignorant of the console hacking scene.
But for consoles it's just crickets.
We shouldn't need to "defeat the DRM", it should be allowed full stop.
Check out the gameplay video partway down the page, where the two people are on the couch playing Cuphead. Right under "Your Steam library in more places."
It's just... a real clip of real people playing a real game and reacting in a real way. It's funny. I know it's stupid to call out, but how many exaggerated versions of this scene have you seen before? And Valve is smart enough to say "Let's just film two people playing a real game and snip a nice, realistic reaction shot from it."
I'm very curious what you and others think the average Steam user really looks like.
if you sampled 100 blackberry customers at random, they'd absolutely hate a software keyboard
and so on
This is how staged reaction looks like: https://www.residentialsystems.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/0...
The Steam's clip is actually nowhere near like that.
It's funny how it works. I took an iPhone selfie of myself as the character that I go out to do street photography as and my wife and my son are "you staged that!" but then I hand out my business cards with it and everybody else tells me it is a great photo.
It’s never, in EFL, “HOW…LIKE”
Next up is “make” vs “take” a decision.
When these machines were announced I switched to Fedora as a daily driver on my high end gaming rig.
It’s been awesome. I still have to go back to Windows for music production unfortunately. I may switch to Mac for that so I can completely abandon Windows.
I run an optical HDMI cable from my office to my TV and get to play games and use Linux in 77”.
Something feels awesome about that.
Even without buying you can send Linux gaming signals by playing on Linux and participating in the hardware survey.
It is an AOOSTAR GT37 which actually outclasses the €1,039 Steam Machine in most areas except graphics. One cannot blame Valve here though, the hyperinflation of RAM prices is too blame here.
AOOSTAR GT37 (€676 a few months ago [now vastly more expensive if you can still get one at all]) vs Steam Machine (€1039 right now)
CPU: 12x Zen 5 vs. 6 Zen4 Graphics: 16x RDNA 3.5 vs. 28 RDNA 3 RAM: 32 GB LPDDR5X vs. 16 GB DDR5 + 8 GB GDDR6 HDD: 1 TB vs. 512 GB (both NVMe-SSD)
I expect the Steam Machine to run graphically demanding FPS games quite a bit better due to the extra RDNA cores and faster VRAM. However it might actually be the inferior gaming machine for CPU/main RAM intense strategy or simulation games (e.g. Stellaris).
On Stellaris I remember having a pretty good experience (not stellar) playing on a 2012 AMD FX-8350 desktop cpu. The six year old midrange laptop cpu Ryzen 4650u smokes that desktop cpu.
https://www.cpubenchmark.net/compare/1780vs3766/AMD-FX-8350-...
Just to draw out the fact that with the Steam machine you will have a better Stellaris experience than what I had 7-8 years ago. (Because I assume even better performance than this laptop class cpu)
My thoughts go more on the question if 15GB ram 8GB VRAM is enough for the next 7 years. And if Steam verified will all be split up, and become more confusing, between the 3 different devices they have.
No doubt the price was lower before this hardware shortage, but the $800 is not a reliable number afaik.
https://bsky.app/profile/papapishu.bsky.social/post/3movfklq...
https://bsky.app/profile/papapishu.bsky.social/post/3movfklq...
No way players will ever accept microtransactions...
Ok, Asia is doomed but no way western players will ever accept microtransactions...
No way...
Steam machine is a PC (not like a console): - not priced as a loss leader - runs any desktop OS - it’s a PC
You can do all of this out of box, it’s turnkey, it’s primarily a console experience but a PC if you need it. My point was that comparing this to a prebuilt or BYO PC is like comparing a console to a PC. Different value prop.
I’m not sure I’d want this at $550, but maybe. At $1050 without controller it’s a solid no.
I’m sure some people will want it. I have no interest in maintaining a PC so if I wanted to play PC games this is probably how I would do it. But the price just absolutely kills it for me.
Yeah I probably wasn’t going to then.
But you cant compare the price point with what it used to cost and imagine that its overpriced now and that people will seek alternatives. There aren't any cheaper alternatives.
Prices will continue to go up.
Can you explain this chart?
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/historical-cost-of-comput...
This has played out time and time again during every other supply-side shock. Once prices go up, they don't come back down.
For the current DRAM situation, I can almost promise we'll never see $60-$90 RAM again. Maybe, 32GB won't cost you $500 eventually, but it'll cost you $250-$350 instead of $500. If the market can bear it, why would anyone get into a price war that's just a race to the bottom where no one wins?
Suppose you have a warehouse full of widgets. You bought them them for $450 each, and sell them for $500. You're really happy with this profit, and you can just keep selling them at $500...forever, right?
But then, I get my own warehouse and fill it with widgets that I bought at $400 each because I entered under better market conditions. And I really want to sell these widgets -- they aren't making me any money when they just sit there taking up space and burning rent.
So I price these widgets at $475, to attract customers. It works; the widgets are flying off the shelves. And they're being purchased by people who used to be your customers, and I'm making even more money per-unit than you are.
What's your next move? Do you want to keep losing customers to me, or do you want to adjust your price to be more competitive?
A new entrant isn't guaranteed to now price at $475. They'll see the incumbent being successful at $500. Now they price at $499 rather than trigger a destructive price war. Companies collude on this quite frequently. When everyone keeps their prices high, all get to enjoy the big margins.
Outside of that, ok so you have a warehouse full of widgets you need to move fast. So you undercut, and sell out. If demand is still bigger than your supply, you're now out of capacity, customers are going back to buying for $500 from your competitor. That means you've mispriced your limited inventory, so now you raise your prices up to closer to $500 because it helps you control your capacity, and also you know the market can clearly bear it.
Anyway, those are obviously overly simplified scenarios prices rarely fall down dramatically because of tacit collusion. Its asymmetric price transmission ("Prices go up like rockets, but fall like feathers")
Retailers are mostly free to offer things at whatever prices they want. But the market has more power than you may think to correct it.
I'm not convinced this hardware is "an extension of PC gaming, not a console" when the hardware is generations out of date. To credit Microsoft, Sony, and other players, the reality is that unless you are "in the game" for decades, you HAVE to provide a convincing differentiator from the other console markets.
Steam had this with the Steam Deck and personally, I see the world moving to thin clients that play games via some remote desktop infrastructure. It makes no sense to buy this hardware even if it was 500-700 dollars.
In my opinion, it would've been worth the money to just buy a gaming PC, put it in a garage, hidden room, etc with the networking gear, then stream it over the network to a Steam Link or using Apollo/Artemis/Moonlight/Parsec; anything.
Tangential to this discussion: Steam is in the unique position to create a kernel anti-cheat. I know that's not popular. But they are the only ones with the install base AND ability to pull it off in a such a fashion that wouldn't be so god-awful. It's clear that multiplayer gaming isn't going to go away from kernel anti-cheat. It's also clear that developers are still going to target Windows-only with Steam Deck support as a best-kept basis.
I don't see the Steam Machine/Deck as a competitor until they solve the kernel anti-cheat portion. Until then, it can play games that are older, not popular, or single-player which is a valid market but not one that I am a part of, anyway.
Even buying an old tiny micro PC that's 10th gen Intel would've been a cheaper buy.
There's also potential for community fixes for older games with issues. And easier troubleshooting cause you can just look up "fix for X game Steam Machine", or "does X game work on Steam Machine"
There are advantages to this over something generic, or building your own machine.
lmao bring up the wife factor, please.
We are devs here. We can have and build gaming PCs I hope?
Yes I will gatekeep.
Yes it is the best as I can get and play anything I want.
They will buy a PS5, Switch or Xbox.
If you know PC gaming you will just get a gaming desktop. With newer hardware.
"No wireless? Less space than a Nomad? Lame"
The online discourse around this is also incredibly toxic, filled with utopians who don’t understand how serious cheating is in these games, or that kernel anti-cheat, while not perfect, is the best solution available today.
I really don't see the vision Valve is looking for here.
I would, admittedly, be interested in an anticheat that reboots the machine for deck into a secure mode.
The GPU is on par with the 3060 12GB and RX 7000 series GPUs which are older.
The PS5 is six years old! This is a brand new machine!
The Steam Survey is a better indicator of what you should target vs. something like the Steam Machine or Deck IMO.
Wait, really? I looked at the specs and saw like 2/3 the CUs of a PS5.
I'm someone who has built dozens of gaming PCs, and wired my house. I also have zero interest in doing the above... if I have to pay few hundred extra to get a Steam machine hooked up to a TV without all that hassle... I'll do that.
It's not the absolute best value for gaming. It's not horrible in current market conditions but it's also not targeting "best value for gaming" anywhere in the marketing materials. It's hardware that can play your Steam library on your TV. There are harder, less expensive ways to do that, as there have been for ages.
If you're a console gamer, there are less expensive, just as easy options to play console games, so it's definitely not suited for that market.
It's really only catering to people with disposable income that want a cute way to hook up a Steam-capable machine to a TV. It's not a huge market, nor is it a non-existent market.
It was probably a bigger market at $750 than $1050, but we can't have nice things.
Some people say this same thing about the Nintendo Switch and its successor, but here we are, with the former closing in on highest selling console of all time, and the latter tracking above that.
Look at the PS2. Incredible games on bespoke custom harware.
We didnt know how good we had it.
4 year old chip design on an equivalently old process node, not that unlike nvidia selling 2-3 year old chips as the spark. Thanks to AI boom, consumer market really just getting the warmed-over leftovers here from AMD and NVDIA.
For reference, the PS5 Pro has more than twice the number GPU CUs, an 8-core CPU, a 2TB SSD, a controller, and costs $899.
Also, you can build a decent PC for $1049, but getting it into a decent form/noise factor is going to ratchet that price up. Add in the proprietary CEC stuff that Valve has done for it and it's not as terrible as it seems.
Will it run my Steam library of games or do I need to also pay 5000$ again with inflated prices?
"...and it's a PC
Yes, Steam Machine is optimized for gaming, but it's still your PC. Install your own apps, or even another operating system. Who are we to tell you how to use your computer?"
It's not just a gaming console.
Note: I ask as someone with a Steamdeck sitting on the desk in front of me and a custom-built computer under my TV running Linux.
With Windows becoming increasingly hostile, I do think there's room for a hardware/software integrated "just works" offering in the Linux PC space. Plus software pricing is probably a lot more competitive than console (dunno, never had anything to do with consoles, but my impression has always been that hardware is a loss-leader there).
https://www.newegg.com/Gaming-Desktop-PC/SubCategory/ID-3742
That said, I've never had a Steam Deck or tried to seriously game on Linux, so I may be out of touch with how much smoother the picture is in an all-Proton world.
(the laptop issue turned out to be something in the firmware asserting BC PROCHOT for some reason; for now we can periodically clear it with the ThrottleStop utility, but who knows what the actual underlying problem is)
valheim started with extremely poor steam deck performance, but at some point, the team did steam deck optimizations that got it humming nicely enough
And I've paid full retail price for maybe two of them, the vast majority is from 50-90% sales. You don't get those for the PS5 that much.
I also don't have any need for a "Gaming PC", what I've always wanted is a console but with my Steam games. This is it.
I can't see anyone other than enthusiasts buying it over a normal console or Windows laptop.
I’m not the target but I can see the point.
indie devs have easy access to release on PS5, latest Xbox, Switch alongside Steam simultaneously
the subscription any of those users have (a prerequisite for online or multiplayer access) also comes with many many free games, games that are otherwise $4 - $25 without the subscription
people already in those ecosystems have been accumulating (unplayed) titles just like Steam users meme about, and as soon as they sign in on their new console all are available
I've tried various iterations of a gaming HTPC over the years, and they've all been pretty miserable. That lack of any reasonable or stable CEC solution this whole time so far has honestly been an oversized anchor this whole time. And I think Valve is doing a bit of a disservice not advertising it more.
> In an effort to improve the purchase experience and limit resellers, we're implementing a reservation system.
> Starting right now, you can sign up for the Steam Machine model/bundle you're interested in.
> If you're busy now, no problem: You can sign up anytime before Thursday June 25th at 10 a.m. Pacific.
> At that time, we will close signups and do a one-time randomization to determine the reservation and waitlist order.
Valve is still great.
Edit, reply to Rohansi as I am rate limited, I’m talking about gaming PCs not consoles.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not commenting on the value, but rather the markets ability to handle it.
This may be the best option of a couple of terrible ones.
I would also be expecting Wifi 7 support as well as unified memory considering they ordered custom AMD silicon. Understandable that it is a rather conservative design for their first generation though.
All my cables I would connect to my home PC/macbook are USB C. IE bluetooth adaptor, sd card adaptor, external ssd, mouse/keyboard, a soundbar etc.
I have several chinesium clones of dewalt batteries/tools, IE lights, compressors etc. They all have USB c output.
"most pc perihpials are USB-A" is not exactly correct for some time now. (not that I'm a fan.)
Wish it was cheaper but would look forward to a “just works” experience including sleep/instant game resume.
Add my thousands of already owned Steam games and it makes me excited for a great couch gaming experience. It’s the reason I don’t get a PS5/Switch cause I don’t wanna rebuy all the games and they are not on sale as much.
I have even connected 2 computers directly with an ethernet cable to rule out my networking gear and it was ok but very very far from perfect!
Not to mention the experience is clunky at best. Switching resolution, losing settings, dealing with encoding/decoding, etc.
I want a Steam Machine for my living room, but these specs are just terrible for 2026. According to Digital Foundry, this $1200 machine is worse than a $500 6-year-old base PS5.
Is it dumb of them to do this? Not really, they got unlucky with the timing and they already designed the machines. Selling them below cost to subsidize steam-sales would probably create bad incentives for them.
What will this mean for Valve's future? Nothing, they're still a relatively lean company with a money machine.
Will this dissuade them from creating hardware in the future? Probably not, the Steamdeck was really succesfull and they've got more than enough resources to do a few failed experiments.
Having to enter a lottery to buy one makes it feel like Valve doesn’t have new stock in the pipeline for the foreseeable future.
Given it requires a Steam login of a certain age to register, I suspect this is just to limit the scalpers.
That’s great.
Steam Machine game testing - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48632989 - June 2026 (19 comments)
Also, I don't think their target market is people who don't own any Steam games yet. It's going to be people with already extensive back catalogues on Steam.
That’s rough.
This is glorious
They started with Proton after Microsoft suddenly made a move with the Windows store and also started bolting down Windows a bit. As with most things Microsoft that initiative quietly died over time. But at that time Valve probably couldn't afford to take any chances. It probably also made them realize they had build a castle on someone elses land.
If you are making money in the amounts Valve is, then even the simplest risk analyses is going to show that "Microsoft rug pulling you" is one of your few existential threats. Even though the probability is low or medium-ish at best, the impact is massive. Even anti-trust isn't going to save you. By the time Microsoft gets convicted, you are already dead. Just look at Netscape.
Valve understands that inextricably tying themselves to Windows is a long-term death sentence. SteamOS represents a lifeboat for when Microsoft goes full iOS and decides to lock down Windows in exchange for taking 30% of all software purchases. Valve has been taking this threat seriously since at least 2010, which is why they've been investing in Linux gaming. Both Steam Deck and the Steam Machine are further steps toward complete independence from Microsoft.
You can achieve a lot by specifically optimizing your game for a particular machine and Valve has such extreme market power that every game studio releasing on PC will make sure that their game looks and runs great on the Steam Machine.
This machine is more limited than I expected e.g. only 8 GB VRAM, however because of Valve's market power all game studios will see 8 GB VRAM as the new limit. Every game will now aim to look and run great with only 8GB VRAM.
As a poor gamer, I truly appreciate Valve setting such a low standard for gaming PC hardware. Game studios were certainly already looking at 16 GB VRAM + 32 GB RAM as the new standard for AAA games. That is now history.
https://youtu.be/cUJGvKHdDRo?si=q7VrGGpP3mDlLhKl&t=28
It could have been something, but the target market is precisely the market that will look at the price and say "Nah".
And as one point of clarification, game makers by and large still aren't targeting Linux. This machine works via the absolutely excellent, almost magical Proton (https://github.com/valvesoftware/proton) that lets you run most of your Windows library on Linux, largely seamlessly.
I disagree that the target market won't accept the price. I see the target market as less technical people, who don't care about hardware specs, but just want to play Steam games without issues.
The price is in the same region as an iPhone, and if you care enough about PC gaming to buy a gaming PC at all, you are certainly willing to spend at least as much money on it as you spent on your phone.
https://pcpartpicker.com/list/brbFsK This is $50 more but it has 1TB of storage and a newer generation of both CPU and GPU and will absolutely destroy it.
I'm sure you could get actually easily cheaper and better even, I haven't followed the market a lot lately.
Prebuilt are likely to be even better deals because they will use some cheap noname parts for the RAM and the PSU, which is mostly fine.
It's not huge, it's a mid-tower (admittedly, not a pretty one). But the real benefit is that it is upgradable. Basically you are trading off user serviceability for "it just works" and the form factor.
Another thing the Steam machine has is HDMI-CEC support, which is nice if you intend to use this with a TV, perhaps with KDE Plasma Bigscreen. But $1000 is rather steep for a console/HTPC.
https://www.amazon.com/MINISFORUM-Desktop-Computer-Output-Gr...
And this likely goes on until AI really dies or stabilises...
Note that you can order more storage but not more RAM. Although that may also be to force vendors to target this exact architecture.
Also: oooh internal power supply! Someone thought about elegance too.
I couldnt produce 10y visa statements from another country i lived in.
Since then I just dont use steam, shame cause i like the hw
Steam Machine - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45903404 - Nov 2025 (1514 comments)
For balance:
I don’t need a Steam Machine - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45943992 - Nov 2025 (272 comments)
That said, there are signs that it's coming to the AMD drivers. [1] [2]
[0] https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2024/02/hdmi-forum-to-amd-no...
[1] https://www.techpowerup.com/348723/amd-readies-full-open-sou...
[2] https://www.fosslinux.com/157755/hdmi-2-1-on-linux-complete-...
https://www.phoronix.com/news/AMD-Marek-Joins-Valve
Linux more or less runs most Windows games. The ones that don't run are ones where the developer is going out of their way to make them not run - mostly with kernel-mode anti-cheats that just find themselves staring at the wrong kernel.
Steam makes that pretty seamless and Steam games "just work". For non-Steam games you need to do some tinkering, it's stuff that most people browsing this forum can do.
> a Nintendo Switch would provide much better bang for you buck.
A secondhand Steam Deck would also be better value, but this isn't a value-focused product. The Steam Machine is Valve's second stab at the premium couch-based PC gamer market, this time with Proton and a bigger focus on controller usability for ordinary PC games.
.....and if you think this is expensive just wait until the PS6 and new Xbox are released.
At this price and features it'll probably just be a footnote.
I expect to get the rest of this decade out of my Steam Deck so IDK, very different to my normal expectations for a computer. The Steam Deck also defines a floor that will allow compatible games to be very performant on the Steam Machine so I think that will help the Steam Machine have a decent lifespan.
I also think on some level we need to start resigning ourselves to getting 10+ years out of our computers!
It would be incredible to convert my dusty XSX to a linux box
Either you want a gaming computer, and you'll get a much better one that can be upgraded in the future for the same price, or you want a console, and you'll never pay a grand for it.
4 years old hardware and poor connectivity.
All that said, I don't think this is a good value. I'm presuming if I did a little work SteamOS 3 would be workable for me, and I have significantly more RAM, and possibly a better GPU? Not exactly sure where the GPU falls out, but I definitely believe I could buy a better GPU for less than the new box.
If it gets preferred shipment for the controller, you could buy it and sell the box and keep the controller. :) I think my controller ship date is estimated in 2027 right now.
I think if the Xbox ended up being more like the Steam Machine (i.e. more like a PC) then this middle ground that the Steam Machine sells to would probably go away as I don't think the group of folks who care that it's Linux based is high enough to support production.
Pricey, but so is any other sort of electronic entertainment hardware these days.
take a sip at GamingOnLinux community... they don't seem to care about stuff running perfectly on Proton and not natively or that Gabe is buying another 600 million USD yatch. they love the Steam ecosystem more than developers crafting games abiding to 30% fees that are a clear sign of monopoly power
I wonder if they mean that? Japan is 100V.
Here's hoping my $135 BC-250 arriving tomorrow works without any issue.
Either way, congrats to Valve!
I'm buying the Steam Machine as well to game on the couch. Give me 4k 60fps and that's all I need. The Steam Controller is also fantastic shape on my hands, very comfortable.
How'd the 14 sneak in here
dhh has been parroting tony robbins stuff and other vaguely white supremacist stuff on his blog.
His blog is a mix of zealous out-of-touch and unloved techbro shit and the most rancid far-right essays possible. Trust me, he's earned it.
It makes me feel insane that people just skip over this stuff. The guy is openly citing "people" like Tommy Robinson yet he's still a popular and respected distro guy? I'm going to commit a crime.
I'm glad I asked!
You can install it on your normal, average Arch installation anyways. Don't need to rip everything out from the root just for a pre-configured meme distro. It's not as if Omarchy had hard forks of all the software it steals, anyways. It really is just dotfiles.
indie games community has joined the chat
I hope this and the steam deck-likes continue to be successful and incentivize developers to optimize their games for last-gen and portable hardware. I think the "steam deck compatible" certification has already been fairly good for that.
Steam Machine
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48632884
Yet it will still be out of stock for a long time.
A company that spins up a division, builds a product, sells 100k of them, and winds down is a success
Keep in mind this entire venture from Valve is also about ensuring they can't be made a vassal of Microsoft.
can i build a mini pc myself? probably but meh
Personally, I'm rarely "surprised" by a need to play a specific game that I don't already have downloaded/installed so I can just tell Steam to download the game in advance. But if I were to be in such a surprise scenario, we're talking the difference between popping on one youtube video while I wait or popping on two youtube videos while I wait. In both scenarios, I am waiting for a small but not insignificant amount of time... now if we could get 10gbps that'd be a game changer. I wouldn't even context switch for a 2.6 minute wait.
[0] https://gameboost.com/blog/call-of-duty-bo7-download-size
Now I envy you living in a country where an internet uplink speed of > 1GbE exists for typical private households.
Now, I don't want to overstate it: it's simple disappointment. I'm still interested in the machine, as is.
Fairly common for those with full-powered gaming desktops and Steam Decks, and soon, Steam Machines.
That's what, ~4-5 years of gaming on a superior GPU without the headaches of hardware failures or upfront cost of 1000$?
Yikes Valve. The only folks buying gaming PCs these days are people eeking out an advantage in competitive 3D shooters or folks unaware of how far cloud gaming has come.
I couldn't imagine playing a game by streaming inputs to a server 30ms away, which then streams those inputs another 30ms to the game server, and then having that round trip.
60ms screen delay and 120ms total delay.
Honestly tempted to buy a couple for relatives, who do some phone gaming and one who owns a 3DS they use, and see if they find anything interesting in PC gaming. Also make it a decent media center of course too.
lol
I think most of people who wanted (me included) a steam machine are now between buying it or not buying anything at all.