Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

I don’t need a Steam Machine

brainbaking.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 283 posts

Re: I don’t need a Steam Machine

#51

Post by komali2 »

A lot of notes about Switch 2 on there.

I'm a Nintendo fanboy. Untold thousands from my wallet to their pockets over the last 30 years. NES on up, we've had every console except the virtual boy and specific iterations of mobile consoles (e.g switch but not switch lite). 512gb sd in the switch to fit all the games I bought on it. My house has 5 3DSs in it, which I maintain to this day is the best console ever made.

Sadly though I'll not spend another dollar on a Nintendo product for the rest of my life. Their aggressive targeting of emulation developers and their litigiousness in general I believe is harmful to the videogame industry.

Nintendo imo makes some of the best games ever made, but that's ok, there's still lots of other really good ones that run on my steam deck or my PC, and I can do whatever I want with the save files for those games, play them on my own terms.

Re: I don’t need a Steam Machine

#52

Post by Philip-J-Fry »

exitb wrote: post #42
yoz-y wrote: post #24

Back during Covid I bought a PC tower just to play PC games. Later I also bought a PlayStation because the couch experience is better. If the steam machine was available I’d definitely opt for that instead of both. If steam continues the way it is, it will be hard for me to justify having a gaming PC and a console instead of just one machine.

Note that there’s no secret sauce regarding Steam Machines. Once you put Bazzite, ChimeraOS or Jovian Nix on your PC, it can provide a great couch experience.

The secret sauce for me is that it is a complete out of box experience. You'll boot it and sign into steam and that's it. Like, sure you can get little PCs off Amazon or build your own micro-atx system with more performance. But I just wanna buy something and have it done for me. I want to buy a system that developers know is kind of a "base" spec.

If the Steam Machine becomes the base configuration that most games start targeting, then I think everyone will benefit from it.

Re: I don’t need a Steam Machine

#53

Post by tetha »

mariopt wrote: post #12

Steam Machines can become an existencial crisis for PlayStation and Xbox. A “console” that I can use as a PC? I am in 100%. You’ll get the world biggest game library at a discount, this is why I sold my PlayStation after spending 200 euros and watching it becoming useless. I also suspect a lot of game devs will optimize for steam machine and finally we’ll get a console like experience on PC. Don’t let the “low specs”…

> Don’t let the “low specs” fool you, it has the same specs or better as 70% of steam users.

We are also out of the rat race of hardware requirements of the 90s. I'm on a 7 year old system and if you're not chasing to max out the latest AAA game on launch, that thing can run a lot of games. It's mainly storage and RAM for modded minecraft or Satisfactory that's a bit of a mess atm. Though RAM prices are spicy at the moment, jeez.

Similar, my dad has my system from 10 years ago or more, and the only real snag for his strategy games is now a DX12 requirement.

Re: I don’t need a Steam Machine

#54

Post by rvz »

mariopt wrote: post #12

Steam Machines can become an existencial crisis for PlayStation and Xbox. A “console” that I can use as a PC? I am in 100%. You’ll get the world biggest game library at a discount, this is why I sold my PlayStation after spending 200 euros and watching it becoming useless. I also suspect a lot of game devs will optimize for steam machine and finally we’ll get a console like experience on PC. Don’t let the “low specs”…

> Steam Machines can become an existencial crisis for PlayStation and Xbox.

Not really. An existential crisis to System76, Framework computer and all the other Linux computer companies.

> A “console” that I can use as a PC? I am in 100%. You’ll get the world biggest game library at a discount, this is why I sold my PlayStation after spending 200 euros and watching it becoming useless.

No different to getting a regular PC but this time you can just buy a high performance state of the art GPU like the NVIDIA RTX 5090 and it runs all your games at 4K @ 120 FPS instead of 60.

> I also suspect a lot of game devs will optimize for steam machine and finally we’ll get a console like experience on PC.

Proton is the software that is doing the optimizations. However once you want to run a highly anticipated game like Battlefield 6 and your friends are playing it on their Windows PCs and consoles on day 1, the Steam Machine is left behind waiting for compatibility updates.

> Don’t let the “low specs” fool you, it has the same specs or better as 70% of steam users.

2020 specs in 2026 isn't really good for convincing 70% of Windows PC gamers or console players either.

The real test is when the next generation Xbox or Playstation arrives, will the Steam Machine outsell them?

> Given Valve gave money to a lot of open source maintainers , it’s also great for Linux.

We will see if that is enough to convince Steam players to run SteamOS instead of Windows or consoles. but so far it is totally underpowered and you might as well get a Windows PC + Nvidia RTX 5090 which runs all your games well including the highly anticipated ones.

No thanks and no deal.

Re: I don’t need a Steam Machine

#56

Post by imiric »

mariopt wrote: post #12

Steam Machines can become an existencial crisis for PlayStation and Xbox. A “console” that I can use as a PC? I am in 100%. You’ll get the world biggest game library at a discount, this is why I sold my PlayStation after spending 200 euros and watching it becoming useless. I also suspect a lot of game devs will optimize for steam machine and finally we’ll get a console like experience on PC. Don’t let the “low specs”…

I don't think it's an existential crisis for console manufacturers, but it's certainly part of a shift in how we think about "consoles".

Microsoft has seen the writing on the wall for years now, and they've expanded their library to run across platforms. The Xbox as we knew it is effectively dead.

Sony and Nintendo are still holding on to the legacy concept, and trying to lure people into their walled garden, but even their hardware is essentially a general purpose PC that happens to be locked down in software.

So I suspect we'll see one last traditional "console" generation with the PS6 and whatever Nintendo makes next, and after that the concept of a single-purpose machine will fizzle out. Nintendo will probably be the last to give in, since they have the strongest first-party IPs to make that feasible, but eventually they'll follow suit as well.

Re: I don’t need a Steam Machine

#58

Post by ibizaman »

I was going through the list, nodding as I read all the reasons, agreeing with them all. But also thinking each time I’ll get one anyway. I guess I agree with the last sentence of the post haha. If anything, I’ll justify this by saying I want to choose with my money and encourage this further. But that’s really just to give me good conscience.

Re: I don’t need a Steam Machine

#59

Post by AlienRobot »

avyeed_desa wrote: post #49

Why can't i just shake the feeling that Steam Machines will Valve's gateway to release Half-Life 3 as a Steam Machine title exclusive? Furthermore, HL will only be Linux exclusive, at least for the first few months to put pressure on Sony, MS and Nintendo and the GTA6 launch.

Why it feels like "this year will be the year of Linux desktop" didn't sound absurd enough for you so you went and upgraded the idea to "HL3 will be a Linux exclusive."

Re: I don’t need a Steam Machine

#60

Post by safety1st »

zmmmmm wrote: post #45

What's truly crazy is the VR headset is the same architecture as the Steam Machine. As in, it's a completely open Linux system you can wear on your face . They are literally telling the community to go nuts and hack it and install whatever you want on there. If there's any time for people who believe in open systems and open software to step up and buy the hell out of something, this it it. It will be very interestin…

The Frame announcement was certainly the one that blew my mind. A VR headset with an ARM CPU which runs a full fledged Linux operating system, can play x86 games via Proton, and can sideload Android APKs? What? Man, those guys have been busy.
Post reply on HN