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Steam Machine launches today

store.steampowered.com

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Re: Steam Machine launches today

#501

Post by strix_varius »

veber-alex wrote: post #382
sudobash1 wrote: post #103

I am pleased to see hardware not being locked down as a selling point: > 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 feels very commonsense that you should be able to run whatever you want on the computer that you have purchased, but it is surprisingly uncommon.

I don't understand, what is so special about this? They are selling a x86 PC. All x86 PCs sold by everyone are open and you can install whatever you want. It's commodity hardware packaged into a small box. There is nothing special here. Trying to sell it as it if Valve are more consumer friendly here is nonsense.

> All x86 PCs sold by everyone are open and you can install whatever you want.

What exactly do you think an Xbox is? PS4 & PS5?

Re: Steam Machine launches today

#502

Post by bitmasher9 »

deburo wrote: post #479
branon wrote: post #428

I respect what Valve is doing here and I loved the Steam Deck but a prebuilt desktop PC with 16 GB system memory and 512 GB storage for $1,000+ is insulting. Those are specs that belong on a laptop or a lowend console offering like the Series S. I think this product is going to be hamstrung by its attempts to present as a midpoint between a PC and a console. The way this is being achieved seems to be by selling a dev…

The disk and memory prices are very high right now. Perhaps they could do a disk-less, memory-less variant.

I was a bit confused by the term “disk” until I realized you’re talking about NVMe.

A relic from “Hard Disk Drive”, which was about two persistent storage technologies ago.

Re: Steam Machine launches today

#503

Post by minraws »

1050$ I am very sad about the price. Like orders of magnitude sad.

I would have hoped for ~600$ with the economic realities maybe 800$, but 1000$+ just feels like too much doesn't valve have like a multi-billion dollar muscle couldn't the folks make it a tad cheaper...

I guess we can only blame the current market conditions at the end of the day.

Re: Steam Machine launches today

#505

Post by SXX »

oh_no wrote: post #370
tmoertel wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, this is a promising solution to scalping. Previously, if you had only small numbers of consoles available at launch, scalpers and their bots would claim a large share of them. With Valve's new policy, that share is reduced to s/g , where s is the number of verified Steam accounts controlled by scalpers and g is the number of legit gamer accounts. Since s is likely to be much less than g , s/g is close to zero,…

so i think you're a bit off. it's s/g but g is legit accounts who want to buy the steam machine. we could say it's 5000 scalper accounts, and 50000000 gamer accounts. but it's not 5000/50000000, it's like 4500/20000. which isn't bad! but scalpers will still be way over-represented, because they'll be trying to buy it when most steam accounts won't. now one fuzz factor is the queue system, as you're not putting down m…

Scalpers can be damned because Valce might just deprioritize accounts in lottery unless they already spent money on Steam and play games.

Re: Steam Machine launches today

#507

Post by drnick1 »

iLoveOncall wrote: post #20
drnick1 wrote: post #15

Can't you build or buy an equivalent (in performance) PC for cheaper? All with upgradable standard parts? I get the appeal of a small form factor, but I am afraid it may not sell well at this price.

I think you would struggle to NOT build a more performant PC for the same price. https://pcpartpicker.com/list/brbFsK This is $50 more but it has 1TB of storage and a newer generation of both CPU and GPU and will absolutely destroy it. I'm sure you could get actually easily cheaper and better even, I haven't followed the market a lot lately. Prebuilt are likely to be even better deals because they will use some cheap…

I would have probably picked an Intel B580 for the additional VRAM (at $250), and a case with better airflow like the Bequiet Pure Base 501, but your point stands.

Re: Steam Machine launches today

#508

Post by gorjusborg »

archagon wrote: post #404
veber-alex wrote: post #382

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't understand, what is so special about this? They are selling a x86 PC. All x86 PCs sold by everyone are open and you can install whatever you want. It's commodity hardware packaged into a small box. There is nothing special here. Trying to sell it as it if Valve are more consumer friendly here is nonsense.

I think what's special here is: 1) Full compatibility with SteamOS. You won't have to fiddle with drivers/hardware/whatever to get it working[1]. 2) The physical hardware is maximally condensed, more so than you'd be able to do yourself with a SFF build. I'd have definitely considered this if I wasn't already doing my own SFF stuff. Gaming on the Deck is a delight and I'd love that console-esque experience for my pri…

I'd word your first point a bit more strongly:

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.

Re: Steam Machine launches today

#509

Post by jitl »

sudobash1 wrote: post #103

I am pleased to see hardware not being locked down as a selling point: > 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 feels very commonsense that you should be able to run whatever you want on the computer that you have purchased, but it is surprisingly uncommon.

and it makes Steam Deck the best console ever made.

i picked up Darksiders 3 a few weeks ago to play on my deck. at some point i realized i was pretty underleveled but i didn’t wanna grind.

so, opened chatgpt in desktop mode and uploaded my save, asked it to write me a script to set my souls/xp/money to whatever number. it analyzed the save and spat out a bash/python script. after a chmod +x it worked flawlessly. done from bed took like 15 mins to figure it out end to end.

no other what other (handheld) console in history combines the depth of library, the slick console experience, and also lets you chmod +x.

Re: Steam Machine launches today

#510

Post by lucius_verus »

jauntywundrkind wrote: post #12

I'm tempted to go order yet another BC-250, even though I haven't gotten the first one going. Sure the Machine is considerably more modern, has great new features, probably vastly better power efficiency (even though it's only 6nm vs 7nm surprisingly). But 288GB/s memory bandwidth? Versus the BC-250's 448GB/s? https://www.techpowerup.com/gpu-specs/steam-machine-gpu.c437... https://www.techpowerup.com/gpu-specs/playst…

I got impatient waiting for the Steam Machine to come out and grabbed a BC-250 on ebay that was already set up with a case, fan, and power supply. Works great for reasonably demanding games (CONTROL, Elden Ring, etc.).

Now that I see the final price of the Steam Machine, I'm gonna be recommending the BC-250 more strongly.

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