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

Steam Machine

store.steampowered.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

951–960 of 1001 posts

Re: Steam Machine

#951

Post by wiseowise »

Yokolos wrote: post #274
hs86 wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not sure how heavy SteamOS is, but wouldn't modern games actually prefer a flipped memory configuration? So, 8 GB RAM and 16 GB VRAM would make this a more 'balanced' gaming appliance. But it is advertised as a general purpose PC, so 8 GB RAM wouldn't be enough.

8GB just isn't enough for modern AAA games. Battlefield 6, probably the most highly optimized AAA game to have come out in the past few years, still has a 16GB RAM minimum and Arc Raiders, which is also incredibly optimized, still has a 12GB minimum. Games are only going to become more resource hungry from here, so 8GB in early 2026 would be a terrible idea.

> Games are only going to become more resource hungry from here, so 8GB in early 2026 would be a terrible idea.

Game developers better start preparing to optimize their shit, then.

Re: Steam Machine

#952

Post by ekianjo »

neya wrote: post #803
lazyfanatic42 wrote: post #775

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Valve respects its customers. It is so insane that this isn't a norm; what a world we would be in if all companies did so.

Gamers are a passionate bunch. Screwing around with them is a losing game that no one has historically ever won. And also because a lot of their competitors fucked up to pave the road for them (Think Sony's PS fiasco, Microsoft's X-Box clusterfuck from which they're yet to recover from, a decade later). Valve has gotten alot of billion dollar lessons in here that Valve got for free.

> . Screwing around with them is a losing game that no one has historically ever won

DRM is everywhere so gamers have clearly lost

Re: Steam Machine

#953

Post by bartvk »

okayjustonemore wrote: post #893

This seems to have been targeted especially at someone like me: I don’t like to play on PC, have no interest in building a gaming PC and I only reluctantly buy consoles because of their (kind of) plug-n-play experience. If this thing can get me a console-like experience and allow me to play my extensive library of games (most of them classic/vintage games you can’t get on modern consoles) hassle-free, then I’m (proba…

I have a Steam Deck and it’s definitely more janky than for example an Xbox. It’s not bad! But do not expect the same level of polish. Small example, there’s often a need to dial back the graphics quality. Or the text is too small. Or the screen recording is a hassle.

Re: Steam Machine

#954

Post by 59nadir »

ecef9-8c0f-4374 wrote: post #829

I really like my steam deck. After buying it I wanted to Download Musik and checkout some Films just to realize they removed all non game media years ago

Go into desktop mode and solve it like you would on any other PC.

Re: Steam Machine

#955

Post by wiseowise »

musicale wrote: post #612
culi wrote: post #558

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I haven't gamed in almost a decade but what an exciting time to be alive as a PC gamer: - almost every classic console is easy to emulate - most modern consoles are, less-legally, emulatable - we have thorough archives of Flash games and ofc almost all non-flash web games are still functioning - cross compatibility across OS's has never been better And, best of all, almost all of this is achievable on Linux! You can…

> In fact, I can't think of a single thing a console can do that a PC can't Play current Nintendo game cards (and run the eShop etc.) without headaches or workarounds of dubious legality? Run your whole PSN library reliably, without headaches or workarounds? Full game system (with decent 4K in the case of PS5) for the price of a GPU? Work out of the box without messing with it?

> Run your whole PSN library reliably, without headaches or workarounds?

Can your ps5 run all ps1, ps2, ps3 and ps4 games?

> Full game system (with decent 4K in the case of PS5) for the price of a GPU?

Not with current gen AAA, but older titles - yes.

> Work out of the box without messing with it?

Absolutely, yes. SteamOS/Bazzite literally just works.

Re: Steam Machine

#956

Post by wiseowise »

agoodusername63 wrote: post #585
culi wrote: post #558

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I haven't gamed in almost a decade but what an exciting time to be alive as a PC gamer: - almost every classic console is easy to emulate - most modern consoles are, less-legally, emulatable - we have thorough archives of Flash games and ofc almost all non-flash web games are still functioning - cross compatibility across OS's has never been better And, best of all, almost all of this is achievable on Linux! You can…

> - most modern consoles are, less-legally, emulatable wheres the PS4 or like, any xbox emulator? It's just Nintendo that has modern, usable emulators for most of the games you'd want to play. xbox never got lucky for basically any of their consoles and Sony never got anything usable after PS3.

> wheres the PS4 or like, any xbox emulator?

There are probably 10 exclusives combined on PS4 and Xbox, even less worth emulating. Everything else is already available on PC.

Re: Steam Machine

#957

Post by squigz »

bartvk wrote: post #953
okayjustonemore wrote: post #893

This seems to have been targeted especially at someone like me: I don’t like to play on PC, have no interest in building a gaming PC and I only reluctantly buy consoles because of their (kind of) plug-n-play experience. If this thing can get me a console-like experience and allow me to play my extensive library of games (most of them classic/vintage games you can’t get on modern consoles) hassle-free, then I’m (proba…

I have a Steam Deck and it’s definitely more janky than for example an Xbox. It’s not bad! But do not expect the same level of polish. Small example, there’s often a need to dial back the graphics quality. Or the text is too small. Or the screen recording is a hassle.

I don't know if it's fair to compare a Deck to a proper full-sized console - especially things like font size being too small, which of course is likely to happen more on a handheld.

Re: Steam Machine

#958

Post by wiseowise »

keyringlight wrote: post #57
thot_experiment wrote: post #37

> Who are we to tell you how to use your computer? i'm having a hard time describing the feelings this makes me feel. like i've been stressed, bedraggled and worn down, and suddenly there's a moment where i can just rest it's nice to be excited about something for once instead of the baseline expectation of a horrible adversarial experience, which is the case for most tech in 2025 it is somewhat depressing that it's…

An ongoing 'background noise' concern I've had for a while is how PC gaming seems to be centralizing around steam. There's reasons why that happened, but it'd be real nice if 'infrastructure' was able to decouple from their store. It feels like practically requiring steam for PC gaming on windows and certainly on linux isn't a mile away from requiring MS windows, is it much freedom to pick which Seattle based company…

When alternatives are Epic, EA and Microsoft, you choose lesser evil.

Re: Steam Machine

#959

Post by wiseowise »

atonse wrote: post #28
perihelions wrote: post #24

> "SteamOS 3 (Arch-based)" Holy shit, it's the Year of The Linux Desktop, for real this time. It's happening. It's actually happening . A standard Arch Linux/KDE[0] PC for every home, in a polished, vendor-supported package. Like Apple, it's a single standard hardware/OS pair, so, FOSS' fatal hardware-support hell might well be made obsolete. The vendor is a household name corporation. There's an incredibly fortuitou…

If hype is to be believed, Omarchy is also pushing a lot of devs to Linux.

Jesus Christ, do you seriously not see a difference between established game development company that IS the de facto and de jure PC gaming, and a hypeman who developed some web framework?

Re: Steam Machine

#960

Post by calessian »

happy-dude wrote: post #906
beAbU wrote: post #886

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think this needs to be a theory. Valve regards Microsoft's flirtations with walled gardens (MS Store) as an existential threat. They see their investment into linux gaming as a hedge against future locked down windows OS, which is at this point probably inevitable.

Absolutely. This is a long term strategy stemming from the moment Microsoft spawned their app store. A lot of people are missing the fact that the Steam Frame is Valve's attempt at staking a position in the wide-open and malleable VR space. With Google, they identified that Microsoft developing their own search engine as an existential threat. Additionally, Internet Explorer being the only bottleneck for the web as a…

VR has so far failed to reach an amount of people to make developing games for it really worthwhile, and the metaverse really doesn’t have much going for it either.

I don’t really see much momentum in that space, and the consensus among my friends is that it’s a gimmick to try a few times - with their vr headsets collecting dust since.

Post reply on HN