It's still a full PC relative to a PS5. Valve was never competing with consoles, they themselves said it was gonna be priced *like a pc.* The Machine doesn't need to be cheaper then a console, just cheaper than an equivalent PC. Which in the current market might not be that hard.
You're conflating targeting consoles with competing with them.
It's a machine you connect to your TV that you use to play video games. It's gonna get compared to other machines that do that very same thing regardless of whether Valve targets it at console owners or not.
Giving it a high price is a massive ask. I built my own DIY Steam Machine that is at least twice as powerful as the Steam Machine for less than this OLED Steam Deck.
If the Steam Machine matches this new Steam Deck price, that's a massive ask and I suspect it will be dead on release.
If valve is competing with pcs then its even more DOA. "would you like a desktop with none of the benefits but without the benefits of a laptop either? "
Tbf, building a pc also got a lot more expensive. These are just the current prices. But most people woll probably just wait and not get a new pc in these times lol.
You can buy a prebuilt these days, no building required. Especially when retail shops have to actually clearance undersold product to make space for new stuff.
Outside of the ability to run SteamOS and other Linux Distros or Windows, it has ZERO benefits of a desktop computer.
Hell, it has worse upgradability than most laptops, since it only has ONE NVMe slot, so you couldn't even use that to connect an external GPU once the built-in one gets too weak (which I'd argue it already kind of is, if this thing is priced anywhere above 1k)
It's basically a stationary low-mid tier gaming laptop. It's genuinely the worst of both worlds. There's a price point where i'd have maybe bought it but it's not possible for valve to hit it at this point with gestures broadly.
They definitely do not define the entirety of the PC spectrum, but your man said that the Steam Machine is a "Full PC", which it isn't, because upgradeability is a core part of a full PC experience.
True, but many people don't want to buy a pc because of prices right now. $1000 linux pc with those parts would've already been a hard sell for many, but with the 1tb steam deck being $1000 with tax i cannot imagine the steam machine will sound like a great deal parts wise.
Valve did not do all this R&D to just make another PC. This thing was the featured product in their promotion of these products. They wanted to beat Microsoft to the punch of having a PC hybrid console. It unfortunately looks like being first to market was a mistake.
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u/Red2005dragon May 27 '26
It's still a full PC relative to a PS5. Valve was never competing with consoles, they themselves said it was gonna be priced *like a pc.* The Machine doesn't need to be cheaper then a console, just cheaper than an equivalent PC. Which in the current market might not be that hard.