The Steam Machine doesn't have a single exclusive, therefore it will not sell, no matter its price point.

This also remains true for Apple! I don't care about performance. At all. I write text in a terminal! I only care about the hardware working as expected, out of the box, without having to tinker with bullshit. And Steam provides a platform that fulfills this, every time!

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 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.

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.

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

Only place I saw 2.5G actually be beneficial is Wi-Fi 6E/7 for the APs.

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 yet steam's indie library far outpaces what all other consoles indie games combined provide. Also you get access to a vast amount of games distributed independently and other stores that the PC ecosystem has available.

> 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

I don't think most PC gamers like being told every month what games they have to play in order to maximize their subscription value. They view it as wasting 100$ yearly just to have the ability to play online along other features that are free on PC.

> 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

That's a legit improvement from the console platforms but since it was only a change made in the previous gen you can only go back a single generation for now. On steam your library might encompass stuff sold three generations ago and if you are willing to take advantage of PC gaming outside steam you can go as far back as the invention of video games itself with emulators.

I constantly encounter indie games that are only on PC, for example Satisfactory, Chained Together, Last Call BBS

Steam is still way better for indie stuff

If you check out Humble Bundle, you can find bundles of games where you get 20-30 games for around $20. Many of them are charity bundles, like one I got to help people in the Turkey/Syria area affected by the 2023 earthquake. Those bundles mostly consist of keys redeemed on the Steam platform. I don't play first-person-shooters, so those are going to sit in my library unplayed & uninstalled.

If the price was not upset by the RAM debacle it would have been a very attractive offer, no subscription and more upgradable. I still think in time when the market calms down and supply is less constrained it will reach that price point, even at its current price it's not a completely unreasonable offering for a family member especially with the ability to share your existing steam library.

Denuvo and other DRM also exists though.

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.

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.

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.

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.

They buy up ALL the stocks. Then puts them on auction sites after supply had hit as close to zero as possible. That's not how economics work by the books.

Fusion festival is a Psytrance festival. It's nothing like Burning Man (a DIY community driven festival).

For the American's it would be closer to Electric Forest or Lost Lands (but with good music).

    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."

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.

[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Queen%27s_race

I feel like I'm having a slow day XD

Ecomm orders want to drop to the distribution center as soon as possible, which means you can't wait until you have a whole bunch of them just so you can analyze which addresses are on multiple orders. You would either need to 1) detect this in the warehouse systems (I spent my career working on these, so I can say with high certainty that is almost definitely Not going to happen, especially if they go through a 3PL) OR 2) you have to cancel orders after they have already dropped to the warehouse (which means wasted labor in the best-case scenario).

None of that is worth the effort to a company who is fundamentally still getting paid the same for the product regardless of if the purchaser is a scalper or not.

ultimately they are selling out inventory so it probably takes a lot of convincing to spend money on a cat and mouse game

If Alice and Bob live in the same apartment and try to buy Steam Machines, but Bob forgets to include his apartment number (everything gets dumped on a shared package room, after all), Alice will be confused when an automated email accuses her of fraud.

So it really has to be done like Cybertruck early deliveries to 100% prevent scalping and flipping(the fact that Musk nails it...)

It’s more about 1000 scalpers buying two or three to immediately resell. There are entire discords and communities around this with thousands of members.

> Limit one signup per household. We will use payment method, shipping address, and other information to eliminate multiple entries.

I eventually did, and when it finally arrived at my doorman building I mentioned what was in the package to the doorman, and how happy I was to finally get my hands on it after the effort expended and he said "oh really? there's a guy on the 5th floor who's bought dozens of them - he sold me one at cost".

At the scale of the PS5 release (I don't know how many they first shipped in 2020, but they're at >80M sold now so undoubtedly X million in the first year) - would an address match intervention have been able to differentiate my order from the dozens of orders the scalper on the 5th floor had placed, presuming some cooperation from the doorman to allow for variance in the details of the shipping address the scalper used? I'm reasonably confident the answer is no and I would have been caught in the net that attempted to prevent the scalper from scalping.

Capitalism really does create a perverse incentive here, and when there's significant margin at play, there's an opportunity.

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.

The price of this steam machine is a rounding error away from the build it yourself DIY price. It's not marked up, this is just what PC components actually cost these days :/

actually, show me any PC like that...

I get your cynicism it would just go to billionaire shareholders, but profit itself isnt the enemy, greed is.

Society has found out money is a good way to encourage/discourage certain behavior in a predictable, deterministic, and quantifiable way. It really sucks that it has to be money, and maybe this can be solved with some other universal token that cannot be bought with wealth but equitably distributed some other way.

For example the dynamic fees in express lanes in California aren't really for the purposes of paying for the roads. They dynamically adjust it such that the traffic in the lane is operating at peak efficiency. Too few people using it obviously reduces throughput, so the price cheapens to have people using it, and too many people using it causes a collapse in efficiency so the price increases. Having some kind of adjustable cost on it lets the control system appropriately change the demand to keep it efficient.

Given that people are going to spend money anyway it seems more honest and reasonable to direct this money to the party that makes the thing by letting it to run auction.

You can get it at the lower price, you just have to wait. The same happens with loads of digital devices. On release day the price is higher.

If it helps you can separate it and have the first a 'ticket' in line to buy the product for the regular price. You just reserve your spot with the auction. The queue price just drops over time.

Another way would be to auction of X amount of units, then those with cash can pay through the nose directly and again, the company gains and by that, so do normal consumers on a breadline, as it would help reduce the cost quicker down the line for the rest of the purchasers.

For the Steam Controller that's very clearly at least partly what's going on. Valve's "we didn't expect the demand!" schtick is getting pretty hard to buy when they clearly expected around the same expectations for V2 as for V1. PC gaming usage has grown massively since the first controller came out.

But yeah the selection and availability is nowhere near the USA or even say.. Indonesia.

I live in Melbourne, and our population is larger than that of all NZ so I get why they kind of get forgotten, but it still sucks.

https://bsky.app/profile/papapishu.bsky.social/post/3movfklq...

Yeah I probably wasn’t going to then.

This has played out time and time again during every other supply-side shock. Once prices go up, they don't come back down.

Prices will continue to go up.

No way players will ever accept microtransactions...

Ok, Asia is doomed but no way western players will ever accept microtransactions...

No way...

Just to pick on someone, iBuyPower's cheapest "RDY" prebuilt gaming PC has 6 performance cores, 16GB RAM, 8GB VRAM RTX 5050, 1TB NVME, and costs $1200. Basically same specs as the Steam Machine, for a very similar price, but in a typical midtower instead of a sleek, compact cube

At these prices, it's not going to convince console gamers/more casual gamers to move to Steam.

Steam Deck was also vastly more appealing at launch when the base model was £349 (64GB/LCD). It now starts at close to twice the price, £649 (512GB/OLED) despite the hardware being kind of old at this point.

I see examples like this: https://www.bestbuy.com/product/cyberpowerpc-gaming-desktop-... ($1200)

The Steam Machine is $150 cheaper, less storage, and due to lower TDP going to perform more poorly. But... I want something I can hide behind my TV that is very quiet. Can you help me find towers like that?

No steam sales on consoles after all

What? This is so obviously incorrect that I'm not even sure how to respond to it.

What do you mean? Most PC's have mixed memory configurations.

"...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.

To be fair, all the latest generation consoles are near 100% backwards compatible with their respective last gen. This has historically been more tricky due to architecture changes but it seems like all consoles have converged into more or less bog-standard prebuilt computers so it's less of an ask.

But still, I trust my Steam library to last longer than anything I've bought digitally on consoles.

You typically don't want to do this anyway in games. You're probably doing something wrong if you're reading textures/meshes on both the CPU and GPU.

> Don't forget about how much more RAM a general purpose OS like Steam OS can consume versus a gaming specific OS too.

SteamOS is meant to be a gaming specific OS first. It has a desktop environment but none of that loads unless you switch to desktop mode. That's just taking up some disk space while you play games.

Only the Nintendo store have games priced usually a bit higher.

My games have been working on my desktop from 10 years ago, the SteamDeck, my laptop and likely any future computer I buy that runs Linux.

I would say I am the exception, but hardware survey says otherwise. There are a lot of people for whom the Steam Machine would be at worst a sidegrade.

* PS3 games and the like require a 150+$ yearly subscription, and it's streaming for many of them. No thanks.

* No PS2/PSP/Vita compatibility, heck no emulation at all.

Citation needed.

People love talking about console exclusives, but every game from before 2013 is basically a PC exclusive.

They're not, because they don't lock down the hardware to only Steam.

If they subsidized the cost, people could just buy them as general purpose computers and not buy steam games on them.

Valve would only be in a position to subsidize the hardware if they locked the hardware down to just the Steam store.

Yes, but we are in the unique situation that we saw actually increasing prices for RAM and storage over time due to AI craze. You (or me) have no idea what Sony's markup on consoles is right now.

[pirate flag emoji].

Games from sources other than Steam are a bit more fiddly to get going, but it's far from impossible. Like Valve says, it's your computer.

I have the Deck and I mostly use it to emulate Switch & PS2 games.

I even bet many mac users wished their device had a usb-a port or two in order to not be so dependent on adapters, hubs and docks.

I am semi-frequently annoyed that my laptop has 0 USB-A ports. At least give me one.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logitech_Unifying_receiver

Most new gaming mice and keyboards sold in 2026 use USB A. Not to mention all the older ones that still work.

The wired controller is USB-A. The bluetooth controllers "are" USB-C... but came with A-to-C cables, not C-to-C.

Approximately every time I want to plug something in to my laptop that's not a charging cable for another device, it's USB-A.

More to the point, anything I'd want to plug in to a gaming machine, is usb a.

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 say "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.

I'm very curious what you and others think the average Steam user really looks like.

Marketing is made so they you identify with the product or identify with an aspirational version of yourself. Gaming is seen as heavily male-dominated. Expanding that is smart.

(And yes, I know why you're asking and what answer you're looking for.)

People are not vectors of real-valued numbers, and "mean person" is not a coherent concept. Does the average person have half a penis and half a vagina? Is their skin a tan-ish mocha brown? Do they have slightly but not really curly hair that is long in some parts and short in others? Incomplete epicanthic folds?

Any representation of people will be a randomly chosen sample, and not an attempt to visualize the blending of all people from the sample.

Also in the way that the Ouya didn’t succeed at - their kickstarter tagline was “Cracking open the last closed platform: the TV”. I actually had completely forgotten about the Ouya, but the wording of your comment made me go look it up.

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/ouya/ouya-a-new-kind-of...

0.000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000001%

That's 248 zeroes after the decimal point.

Also isn’t the case with Ardour that they essentially want you to pay for the binary because compiling it is a PiTA and there are no instructions on how to do so?

If it’s something even less doable than that… well I’ll do without.

And nobody is forcing you too.

> I don't really understand why anyone wants to spend their time playing games with assholes from the internet.

Maybe your experience and preference is not shared equally by all? HN users in particular to seem to struggle with this concept for some reason.

There are a lot of games out there where a group of friends parties up and then goes against other parties of friends out there. Sometimes I want to play with my friends against others instead of only against my friends. Its been a pretty common kind of game style for decades.

> I don't really understand why anyone wants to spend their time playing games with assholes from the internet.

Yeah, it'd be nice to somehow exclude those assholes who would cheat. Maybe if there was some kind of technology which could limit the ability for people to use cheats, some kind of "anti-cheat". It would probably have to be pretty low level in the system to properly enforce this "anti-cheating" integrity, maybe in the kernel and hardware level?

I feel like the problem is a very large number of rough edges and software bugs, hardware issues, etc. But it's so possible to stream over the local network with zero noticeable latency. Only if all the stars align and there are no bugs.

The chroma encoding is a little disappointing, but I don't think there's any way to bypass it, even at 1080p.

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).

(then again i always buy the most expensive SKU they offer so im very outside the target buyer profile for such)

> https://www.pcmag.com/news/sony-says-499-ps5-no-longer-sells...

But for consoles it's just crickets.

We shouldn't need to "defeat the DRM", it should be allowed full stop.

they created a nasty gambling system with their loot boxes that exists outside controlled casino environments and which impacts young adults a lot.

If you are stuck to Windows there are some 3rd party efforts like https://github.com/ddeverill/SteamlessController

The last generation of steam controller still had a mode you could start it in where it would register as xinput device. Seems that's gone on the new generation.

So does the typical gamer who's not a nerd like GP. I'm not framing it as an insult, more like a reminder: we infamously ignore the power of brands and sensible defaults chosen for you.

The Steam Machine is the best of both worlds, yes, it is a plain PC and Valve is recognizing that. However, they are also selling a fully supported Linux gaming rig that plays many Windows games out of the box.

That might not excite everyone, but it does me.

Everyone loves to say the Xbox and PS4/5 are just like an x86 PC except for the fact they are missing a huge aspect of what makes a PC a personal computer. If the vendor locks you out of doing personal computing, it's not really a PC, is it? Refering to x86 as a PC is such an outdated way of thinking. I can go buy an ARM-based laptop and do more with it than an x86 console. Even an iPhone offers a more PC like experience than an x86 console. The Hubble Space Telescope runs a 486, does that make it a PC as well?