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> I hardly understand the headline. Steam machine is just a computer, and since it can be used for other stuff than playing games, then it can't have the cheap
by kouteiheika 11mo ago
> I hardly understand the headline. Steam machine is just a computer, and since it can be used for other stuff than playing games, then it can't have the cheap pricing of a console.
I don't understand this train of thought. It absolutely can have the cheap pricing of a console, as long as Steam is the default store, and the majority of users will use the console as-is and buy games on Steam.
Let me give a quick analogy: Google paid Apple 20B USD just to be the default search engine in Safari, even though users can easily change it. Defaults matter. The vast majority of people are not highly technical users who customize everything in-depth and seek out alternatives. The vast majority of people just use whatever is the default.
- jsheard 11mo ago> It absolutely can have the cheap pricing of a console Valve hasn't committed to a price yet, but they told Gamers Nexus that it'll be priced less like a console and more like an entry level computer (i.e. more expensive than a console).
- kouteiheika 11mo agoI didn't say it "will", I said it "can". And since pricing is not announced yet we have no idea what they will do in the end.
- johnnyanmac 11mo agoSega can also come back and announce a Dreamcast 2. I'd rather work on likelyhoods than dreams.
- jauntywundrkind 11mo agoWeird statement, because I can search for PS5 pro & see $750 price points, and entry level computers have been far far cheaper. Cheaper than Xbox series X at $650. Getting pretty solid laptops for a bit under $500 has been possible for many years now. But "entry level computer" has a very broad interpretation available. Could be higher for sure.
- jsheard 11mo agoI assumed they meant an entry level gaming computer, not something with potato-grade integrated graphics, but I agree it's vague.
- somenameforme 11mo agoYou can build an entry level gaming computer for under $400 easily. Here [1] is one example (parts list/link in the description). [1] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vecR26Nz_YA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vecR26Nz_YA
- jsheard 11mo agoThat build uses a 13 year old CPU from AliExpress, there's no accounting for taste but I think most entry level builds are aiming a little higher than that. Some newer games won't even try to run on a CPU of that vintage since it doesn't have AVX2 support.
- somenameforme 11mo agoIt was released in 2016 and does support AVX2. In general what matters when building a decent rig is aiming to balance performance to optimize against bottle necks. He demonstrated the system in various modern games, for instance running Delta Force at 4k/120FPS. And the CPU was scarcely getting touched - running at around 20%. You can spend a ton of money on a bleeding edge CPU and see 0 performance gain in almost all cases, because basically no modern games are CPU limited, or even remotely close to it, so you're sitting there with your overpriced CPU basically idling. ----- I think many people are out of the loop on PC costs and performance. The days where you needed some $1000+ bleeding edge rig to even begin to play the latest stuff are long gone. Since this thread is on consoles - an approximate PS5 equivalent video card is the RX 6700 XT which is like $200-$300, and that is, by far, the biggest expense.
- jsheard 11mo ago
- SchemaLoad 11mo agoThe main problem I see is that if this is any cheaper than it's hardware, people will buy 100s of them and stack them in server racks for CI runners or whatever. Generating only losses for Valve and making the hardware unavailable to gamers. It needs to either be at market rate or locked down to only be useful for gaming.
- lucyjojo 11mo agoyou don't remember playstation clusters? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PlayStation_3_cluster https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PlayStation_3_cluster that said, practically buying hundreds of them should prove to be quite difficult.
- crote 11mo agoThe PS3 was uniquely powerful, compared to its x86 peers. It wasn't just cheap - it provided the compute of 30 desktop computers in the space, power, and price envelope of one.
- solid_fuel 11mo agoI think the limitation on server gear these days is electricity price vs compute, with the hardware price being an up front investment but not dominating the lifetime cost. At least at this end of the price range - it's a consumer GPU, not an A100 or anything.
- pjerem 11mo agoIiuc, unlike Sony’s PS3 (which were bought and used like this), Steam is the unique distributor so it would be easy for them to not allow (or make really difficult to) buying thousands of machines. (Or they could sell it everywhere for higher price but the Machine would come with a non transferable Steam gift card.)
- crote 11mo agoI don't think they could possibly make it cheap enough for that - especially once you consider all the money being wasted on RGB/Bluetooth/a GPU you won't use. Messing around with weird consumer hardware in a datacenter context isn't exactly attractive. If all you need is some x86 cores, an off-the-shelf blade server approach gets you far more compute in the same space with far less hassle. Even if the purchase cost is attractive, TCO won't be.
- jimmydoe 11mo agoIt’s like android. You sell pixel at relatively high price but create a wave of other with cheaper alternatives, so you end up make money from being default store.
- johnnyanmac 11mo agoDefaults matter at scale. And as for scale, the Steam Deck has the most generous estimates at 7 million. For a side hustle that's great. For trying to compete with the scale of other consoles, that's not enough. Hardware is very hard to break into. You can't treat it like software and expect to dominate.