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

121–130 of 283 posts

Re: I don’t need a Steam Machine

#121

Post by deng »

dizhn wrote: post #93
Wurdan wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't really get why people are calling it a console. It is a PC to me in all the ways that matter, and it's probably going to save me from spending 1500 euros on a mid-range gaming laptop that I don't really need. The only thing that I don't use my ipad for is playing games with my friends in other countries while we chat on discord. And the last 5 games we've played together do benefit from keyboard and mouse con…

If you don't need to get an expensive gaming PC your should not get an expensive gaming PC. The steam hardware isn't magic. You can already get equivalent specs for cheap.

The APU from AMD they have is pretty much magic. You will not find anything comparable, any Ryzen APU you can actually buy is pretty much trash apart from very light-weight gaming. You absolutely need a separate GPU, and even low-end will set you back at least 250$. The only way to build something comparable for cheap would be to buy used.

Re: I don’t need a Steam Machine

#122

Post by yetihehe »

tormeh wrote: post #84
zavec wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Support from professional software vendors (Dassault, Autodesk, et al) and Nvidia could be better, admittedly, but these restrictions aren't very relevant to me. I think that's maybe what GP was getting at. If you know how to debug stuff and such then Linux is perfectly serviceable today. With something like this, between Valve presumably publishing some docs and a big community for a single platform it should beco…

What do these things have to do with each other? You can't debug your way out of bad Nvidia support or nonexistent Dassault support. You have to just not use these products in combination with Linux, or just accept the issues that come with them.

> You can't debug your way out of bad Nvidia support or nonexistent Dassault support.

With bad Nvidia support very often you can, there exist a lot of workarounds found by people.

With Dassault support you are right, because a lot less people use their products than Nvidia products and those people typically don't share on public forums.

People using Steam Machine will be sharing problems and solutions on public forums and there will be more of them than people using Dassault products.

Re: I don’t need a Steam Machine

#123

Post by sekh60 »

gary_0 wrote: post #101
torginus wrote: post #27

When I first saw the Arduino I didn't see the point - after all there were boards that cost less, did more, and the Arduino IDE seemed very barebones compared to what you could do with GCC and a custom toolchain. Then eventually I saw how much community support, ready made hardware emerged around it, to the point that after a while, not going the Arduino route was a decision you needed to justify heavily. Same thing…

Another nice thing about the Pi is that you know for sure there won't be any major Linux issues; the official distro is tested for that hardware and that hardware alone. I'm assuming the same will apply for Linux on the Steam Machine, whereas most of the time when I install Linux on a random PC, I have to debug some issue with audio/networking/video (which is less common these days, but I guess I'm unlucky). Speaking…

I have a Framework Ryzen AI 300 series. Had the screen flickering after a kernel update several weeks ago. Fix was to add "amdgpu.dcdebugmask=0x2" to the grub kernel cmdline. Running Fedora 43, fully up to date as of yesterday. I sadly can't find the official forum thread about it. Hope it helps though.

Re: I don’t need a Steam Machine

#124

Post by deng »

torginus wrote: post #27

When I first saw the Arduino I didn't see the point - after all there were boards that cost less, did more, and the Arduino IDE seemed very barebones compared to what you could do with GCC and a custom toolchain. Then eventually I saw how much community support, ready made hardware emerged around it, to the point that after a while, not going the Arduino route was a decision you needed to justify heavily. Same thing…

The Arduino was 30$ when it came out. The Raspberry was 35$.

I'd be astonished if they manage to get the Steam Machine down to 800$ (bundled with a controller). Knowing how Valve loves their margins, it's probably closer to 1000$ or even more. This is not something you spontaneously buy to play around with.

Re: I don’t need a Steam Machine

#125

Post by cardanome »

My only problem is that the hardware looks downright antiquated compared to the near-silent and power efficient setup offering world leading single-core performance that you get with a Mac Mini.

Especially when both run ARM so you have a apple(s) to apples comparison.

I still hope they succeed. Steam is the one good monopolists that will probably only go full evil when Gabe dies.

My dream would be Steam OS on hardware that can rival apple silicone.

Re: I don’t need a Steam Machine

#126

Post by TheRoque »

Manfred wrote: post #44
TheRoque wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah I think what they'll miss is a small tool to stream your games to your TV (well maybe it's already possible ?) because the drawback of having just 1 machine as PC and console is that it can't be both at your desk and in next to your TV

Do you mean Steam Remote Play and Steam Link?

Rightttt steam link, as I wrote this I wasn't sure it existed already or not. Perfect !

Re: I don’t need a Steam Machine

#127

Post by testdelacc1 »

torginus wrote: post #27

When I first saw the Arduino I didn't see the point - after all there were boards that cost less, did more, and the Arduino IDE seemed very barebones compared to what you could do with GCC and a custom toolchain. Then eventually I saw how much community support, ready made hardware emerged around it, to the point that after a while, not going the Arduino route was a decision you needed to justify heavily. Same thing…

This is already happening with the Steam Deck! Some of the best AAA games released in the last few years play excellently on the Steam Deck. This is mainly because it provides an excellent baseline that developers can test and optimise for. When least 1.5% or more of your customers have this exact configuration, it makes sense to optimise for them.

The 2023 game of the year was Baldurs Gate III. During the development they specifically tested on the Deck and it played pretty well. But they optimised the heck out of it, finally shipping a native Deck build earlier this year.

That’s why the Deck punches well above its weight - all the optimisation that devs do for it. And that’s why gamers continue to buy it, years after it released. Devs aren’t lazy, or averse to optimisation. They just need a large enough target to optimise for. If the Deck/GabeCube is a large enough proportion of the player base, they’ll put in the effort.

Re: I don’t need a Steam Machine

#128

Post by cubefox »

input_sh wrote: post #97
cubefox wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You wouldn't like Valve so much if you explicitly saw the 30% Steam tax, I mean fee, declared every time you bought a PC game on Steam. Imagine if Microsoft did that. +30% for every Windows software. Like iOS. Then Steam games would be +60% rather than +30%.

You don't have to imagine anything, Microsoft also takes 30% of every purchase made via Microsoft Store.

Apparently they don't, this says 12% to 15%: https://www.techradar.com/pro/microsoft-just-dropped-its-sto...

That's still higher than what seems reasonable for a simple store front, but they aren't as bad as Valve or Apple.

Note that Valve is a relatively small company with only a few hundred employees, but with one of the most extreme revenue-per-employee ratios in the world, estimated at $19 million per employee:

https://upptic.com/valve-structure-employment-numbers-revenu...

That's orders of magnitude higher than companies like Apple, Elsevier or Nintendo. Steam is basically free money for Valve. Valve is extracting huge rents (around 6.5 billion yearly revenue) for negligible expenses (only 79 people working on Steam).

Re: I don’t need a Steam Machine

#129

Post by goda90 »

I built myself a new gaming desktop and set up my old one next to our TV, telling myself I'd get it all situated with controllers and my large library of split screen games. We have a Shield TV for most streaming, so the desktop is pretty much only used for two things: My wife watching Chinese shows on random websites and watching movies remotely with friends over SyncLounge[0].

So while the Steam Machine is intriguing, I really don't have a good reason to buy one. That being said, I like the idea of supporting this kind of hardware development.

[0]https://github.com/synclounge/synclounge

Re: I don’t need a Steam Machine

#130

Post by lm28469 »

tetha wrote: post #53
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…

> I'm on a 7 year old system and if you're not chasing to max out the latest AAA game on launch

Yep, people who didn't fall for the resolution meme can play any games maxed out with a 2060. People chasing 4k and 120+ fps will never ever get satisfied and will always spend $1k every other year for the new high end gpu

I made two upgrades since 2015, ryzen 7 1700 to ryzen 5 5600,for $100. And I swapped my gtx 970 for an rtx 2060, for $300

Post reply on HN