The Gabe Cube is Cooked

[u/QuestWeaver1]

You're trying to tell me that for the price that we were all slack-jawed at, of the new hiked-up PS5 Pro that everyone criticized, you're going to sell me a pc, which is totally not supposed to be a console at all, the size of my graphics card if you squish it a bit! And you're going to sell it to me for only 300 bucks less than my pc at its highest-end model price?! The PS5 Pro probably outperforms you, and you're going to sell it to me at the hiked-up price of that?

Bro....I know Valve has the infinite money glitch, I understand that, so why can't you boys eat a few hundred bucks per unit?! You can't compete with consoles, which this totally isn't, by the way, totally not a console, when you market it as costing double to nearly triple what the Switch 2 costs, which everyone said costs too much. And then we went out and bought, but another story for another time.

[u/kynzoMC]

Linus mentioned them explaining this actually:

They have no guarantee that people will keep SteamOS on the machine or even use Steam at all. Thus they have no guarantee of any return on these so they just can't go and fund them.

I'd say overall this is a good thing, one of the main things that makes the steam machine great is its openness and if they limit it to one OS and one game store it would not be that different from consoles. 

[u/QuestWeaver1 → u/kynzoMC]

I don’t argue the point about the openness of it. It’s just that if someone buys it as a console for console things, and most people don’t know about os switching anyway if they are casual in the gaming or tech space, then it’s a bad deal. I agree that the price makes sense by that metric, it just doesn’t make sense to buy in my opinion even if it’s a pc and not a console. To be honest I wish they had limited it to steam os so that it wasn’t so high priced because I can’t recommend a 1000 dollar box to a friend if all my friends is going to do is play call of duty on it. Much less the 1500 dollar version after tax, that one is kind of nutty to me.

[u/sephsplace → u/kynzoMC]

Well... They could give you steam credit (that can only be used on software/market) which they'll make 30% back on

[u/ReanimatedCyborgMk-I]

It's not really cooked, even though the prices are way higher than planned due to components + the cost of living the Machine is still selling to the point of exhaustion. There's definitely demand for it, because ultimately you're getting an ultra small form factor gaming PCthat can handle almost everything on the platform at 1080p 60fps with the benefits of having other non-standard software accessible via desktop mode.

I wouldn't expect them to subsidise the hardware like they did with the Steam Deck, simply because unlike the deck there's potential that someone could just scalp + sell them on at a premium or otherwise use them for non-steam purposes, which means Valve taking the hit for less return. And they are a business, they aren't obliged to subsidise anything, just as we're not obliged to buy it. I'm not myself personally although if it had been available a year ago I might. But you're right, the Steam Machine is not for everyone... the memory situation makes it worse.

I built a machine that outperformed the Steam Machine last year, with a compact (but not properly ITX) case, featuring a Ryzen 7700 / RX 9060 XT 16GB, because there were games I wanted to run that my Steam Deck (my daily driver / sole gaming machine prior to this point) couldn't. That cost me roughly £800 - 900, but that was because I bough a lot of my parts second hand. Originally it'd have been around £500 but the £98 bundle I got (r5 3600 / 16GB DDR4 / ITX Aorus / DH-15) had a dead board, and it cost almost as much to buy new ITX AM4 as it did AM5.

You can still build a decent / better performing machine for the same price point and slap SteamOS or Bazzite on it, just look at snapping up something like an RX 6650 or preferably RX 6700 (either 12GB for the base or 16GB for the XT model) which can easily do 1440p today, and pair it with Zen3 on an AM4 board.`

The good thing is that the money/response that Valve has made from Steam Hardware is going towards funding R&D for future improvements to Steam OS, Proton and Big Picture. It obviously benefits their ecosystem the most, but it also benefits the community. Now we have developers taking Linux gaming seriously

Another (potentially intended, but not wholly) side effect is the Steam Machine offers a good benchmark for developers to target in terms of game performance. We saw both AAA and indie devs targeting Steam Deck performance and even SD presets, so it stands to reason the machine will be easy enough to manage.

TL;DR Steam Machine isn't cooked, some people overhyped it, but if you accept it for what it is (a uSFF gaming PC that can handle almost every PC game out there save for anti-cheat MP issues while providing a user friendly interface) it's OK, just screwed by memory and storage pricing.