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Steam Machine launches today

store.steampowered.com

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Re: Steam Machine launches today

#671

Post by brunoborges »

sailingparrot wrote: post #38

> Why a randomized reservation order? [...] we wanted to create a system that would be less frustrating and more fair for everyone. A launch that starts at a specific day and time tends to reward bots, people with fast internet connections, talented gaming fingers for quick F5/refresh reactions, and those who can schedule their life around that moment. By accepting reservation signups over the course of a few days, w…

This is how tickets for sports and concerts should always be sold.

Entertainment tends to compare with airline tickets, except that with air travel, there are regular flights and competition. There is no such thing as a single flight from Paris to New York on one Saturday at 9pm on a window of a few years.

Re: Steam Machine launches today

#672

Post by pseudosavant »

bryanlarsen wrote: post #161
pseudosavant wrote: post #72

I know the price for PC parts is terrible these days, but $1049 for a 6-core 16GB RAM, with a 512GB SSD, and no controller, is a terrible value. For reference, the PS5 Pro has more than twice the number GPU CUs, an 8-core CPU, a 2TB SSD, a controller, and costs $899.

The PS5 Pro has 16 GB unified memory, the Steam Machine is 16GB + 8GB. That'll be where some of the price difference comes from. But most likely comes from Sony locking in long term contracts before price insanity.

Unified memory is a lot more flexible and efficient though. You don't have to have assets loaded in RAM and also VRAM for the CPU/GPU to use them. Don't forget about how much more RAM a general purpose OS like Steam OS can consume versus a gaming specific OS too. The PS5 Pro also has an extra 2GB of DDR5 system RAM too.

My old Ryzen 3700X gaming PC has 16GB of RAM and 8GB of VRAM (RTX 2070 Super) and there isn't any game that runs better on it than my Xbox Series X. And the GPU in the Steam Machine is slightly worse than an RTX 2070 Super.

Re: Steam Machine launches today

#673

Post by Gigachad »

MBCook wrote: post #81
singingtoday wrote: post #55

I understand why it costs that much, but it's too much. Don't get me wrong, I'm not commenting on the value, but rather the markets ability to handle it.

Yeah. But they’re only other choices to just sit on it for a few more years, which point they would need to put different hardware in and it would just increase costs. This may be the best option of a couple of terrible ones.

My hope is this is just a soft launch that people who really want can get now, but that they revise it in the future to either be massively more powerful or much cheaper.

Re: Steam Machine launches today

#674

Post by Andrew_nenakhov »

sailingparrot wrote: post #38

> Why a randomized reservation order? [...] we wanted to create a system that would be less frustrating and more fair for everyone. A launch that starts at a specific day and time tends to reward bots, people with fast internet connections, talented gaming fingers for quick F5/refresh reactions, and those who can schedule their life around that moment. By accepting reservation signups over the course of a few days, w…

> Why a randomized reservation order?

Lies, they just want to protect themselves from the German Tank Problem [0] type of analysis.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_tank_problem

Re: Steam Machine launches today

#675

Post by bgdkbtv »

I will definitely be getting this regardless of price or specs. I'm no hard core gamer and I play Balatro, Vampire Survivors and occasional online Halo 2 with friends. This is perfect.

Too bad YouTube doesn't have a proper API for building 3rd party clients. I would love to build one and use it on my SteamDeck and on the big TV with the SteamMachine.

Re: Steam Machine launches today

#676

Post by not_a9 »

d3Xt3r wrote: post #541
raffael_de wrote: post #229

What is the appeal of Steam Machine as a dedicated gaming device? Isn't it going to be old in a few years and then you have to get rid of it because upgrading components isn't a viable option? Isn't that quite the opposite of anything that deserves to be associated with them term "hacker"?

I doubt anyone's associating the Steam Machine with the term "hacker". The "hacker" type crowd already game on Linux, they're not the target audience here. This is for the normies, for people who want to play PC games with a console-like experience, without any hassles of manual setup and tweaking that the hacker crowd normally are into.

> for people who want to play PC games with a console-like experience, without any hassles of manual setup and tweaking that the hacker crowd normally are into.

Until they want to play Fortnite/Roblox/whatever else.

Re: Steam Machine launches today

#677

Post by redox99 »

dathinab wrote: post #660
redox99 wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you sampled 100 steam players at random, it would look nothing like that.

and you might also end up with 100 people with punk hair stiles, or firefighters or whatever Games are so wide spread through all parts of society and Steam is the largest platform for them, sampling 100 people is fully non representive. Whatever stereotype of two people on a couch you pick, there are not just thousands but more like many 100,000ths to millions of people not matching the stereotype at all. I mean thi…

About 0.3% of people are firefighters in the US. The odds that you end up with 100 of them is:

0.000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000001%

That's 248 zeroes after the decimal point.

Re: Steam Machine launches today

#678

Post by not_a9 »

alexashka wrote: post #187

For comparison - cloud gaming such as Nvidia's Geforce NOW is at ~20$/mo for 4k resolution with a monthly subscription one can cancel anytime. That's what, ~4-5 years of gaming on a superior GPU without the headaches of hardware failures or upfront cost of 1000$? Yikes Valve. The only folks buying gaming PCs these days are people eeking out an advantage in competitive 3D shooters or folks unaware of how far cloud gam…

OK. What if I want to mod my singleplayer game? Or, God forbid, make mods for it?

Re: Steam Machine launches today

#679

Post by refulgentis »

jgon wrote: post #375
raincole wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know what you mean by 'killed.' It'd be sold out faster than hot cakes.

If you make 5 of a product and put a bunch of marketing behind it you can sell out too. People are going to use "selling out" as some sort of barometer of success but its like the lizard-man veto in politics. You'll always find some small percentage of people who will vote for the motion "the nation's leaders are a group of lizard people", but you can't use that as any sort of signal regarding the validity of the cla…

This is a good general theory, but generic and sort of reasons backwards from "actually it's not popular"

Re: Steam Machine launches today

#680

Post by Gigachad »

TiredOfLife wrote: post #575
YuechenLi wrote: post #89

Surprised that they have 4 USB-A and only 1 USB-C. With their power profile, Steam Machine should be powerable by a single USB-C cable on extended power range which should reduce the need for the power supply altogether and greatly simplify mechanical as well as thermal design, although the power electronic design would be more complex as a result. I would also be expecting Wifi 7 support as well as unified memory co…

Steam machine uses about 200W. Can you even buy any 240W pd power bricks. Quick search on amazon shows that all that advertise 240w can only output 140w max on single cable

It took me a bit of digging but Framework sells a single port 240w USB-C charger https://frame.work/au/en/products/power-adapter-240w?v=FRAKM...

That said I would not trust this as a PSU for a computer which uses almost all the available power output and does not have it's own internal battery. Most USB-C chargers are not designed to run at 100% capacity for extended periods and could not handle sudden spikes over the rated capacity. Even for desktop PSUs you always want to get something that has a good headroom over the actual power draw for stability.

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