Bold of you to assume you can build an equivalent PC in terms of price/performance without knowing Steam Machine’s price. Good luck with RAM
Valve already announced it will be priced similarly to a PC you build yourself.
There’s a lot of assumptions going around the internet as fact with valves new devices.
Something worth mentioning with RAM is that it’s still cheaper than a GPU. Prices are going to be double, perhaps triple what they were last year, but that’s £200 at the upper end. An upper end GPU is still over £1000.
Proportionally it’s awful, but I don’t have money proportionally. I’ll have £200 before I have £1000.
That said, I’m running the gtx 900 series and 16GB DDR3 RAM happily because I don’t really play new games, so it’s not my fight.
You’re not seeing the big picture. It’s not a box. It’s much more than that.
It’s a cube.
A Weighted Storage Cube, if you will. ( ͡~ ͜ʖ ͡°)
That’s a whole new dimension!
I feel like the biggest thing everyone always overlooks is the amount of researchyou need to do to build a PC. Understanding what motherboard, ram, cpu, and gpu will let you play the games you want is not very clear, especially now we have AMD making good cpus and Intel making Gpus.
The naming conventions are all over the place and the specs on what’s best and what’s compatible is opaque at times.
Building the PC is easy, but making sure you didn’t waste your money by buying a motherboard that won’t work on the next generation of chips or you misunderstood the 10+ gpu models distributed by multiple different distributors is also easy.
Well first we don’t know the price, other than “like a PC” unless I missed something.
Second, sure, someone like me, who already has the background and experience building gaming PCs, maybe (maybe) I could replicate most of the specs at the same cost, possibly even improve them in a few areas. But economies of scale, the labor on my end, shifting market prices… Unless Valve is marking these things up like 50% or more I just don’t see how an individual is going to compete on cost once you include labor.
It’s not for people that build their own PCs. It’s for console people that are Steam-curious. People that bought the Steamdeck but don’t have a PC. I know a few of them.
I’m excited to see an expansion away from MS and Sony and see what improvements Steam makes for Linux. Steam (combined with Win 11) is a big reason why Linux is growing in use and development.
I like Steam as a whole but I do wish the PC market was a little more decentralized.
Typical, “it is not for me, therefore I declare it is stupid and not for anyone!”
It’s ok to not be marketed to. It’s good that a product was not designed for you specifically. “I can build the same PC…” Shhhh, shut up. Go do it, let other people like and enjoy their stuff. You don’t have to buy it if you don’t like it.
They didn’t declare anything. OP was just asking what is the point of it when you can build a cheaper PC that does the same thing. It’s a valid question and others have provided answers to it.
EDIT: You all don’t have to argue with me about this. All I’m saying is OP didn’t declare that this product wasn’t for anyone.
Yeah people are so dumb. You can go to a scrapyard and build a cheap car yourself. Why anyone would buy a car is beyond me.
That’s a false equivalent. I am confident that I could coach my mother through building a computer. I think most mechanics would struggle to assemble an entire car.
This, but unironically
Did you know that I make a mean risotto? It’s so fire. Like, I use all these high class ingredients, a delicious local cheese that tastes like magic. And I can get it to the perfect consistency, and I can do it for relatively cheap. Because I’m doing it myself, labor is not accounted in, I just pay for the ingredients. Thus I can use more expensive ingredients as well.
You know what I also like to do? I like to go out and eat at fancy restaurants with my friends and family. I also eat risotto when I eat out. Their risotto is also just as good as mine. Sometimes better, sometimes not so much. It is always more expensive than cooking myself of course. But you know what I don’t like to do? I don’t like to cook for dozens of people. It is too much labor. However, I can go with a party of 10 or more people and eat in a restaurant. And they will serve us, because they don’t care that there are too many of us. Because we are paying them to cook. I exchange money, for more convenience and less effort. Ain’t that wild?
So, anyways, I’m not talking about food.
In the time you spend making a risotto, you could probably put together a nice PC, and it will probably last a lot longer than a meal. I’m not sure this is a good analogy
The point is that it is for people who don’t know or even want to know how to build a PC. The only thing they care about is playing games with minimal effort.
So saying you can build a faster PC is a non-argument that makes no sense.
Have they even given a potential price yet?
I don’t get it. We don’t know how much it will cost so how could anyone claim they can build one cheaper? Have you seen the cost of memory lately?
The general point is that a closed proprietary system is seldom a better option than an open non-proprietary one.
Yeah, sure, “It’s Steam” and “Gary is a good guy” (so supposedly was “Elon” about a decade ago, by the way), but Gary might have a heart attack and die tomorrow (nothing personal, Gary, I can happen to any of us) and then those with the closed proprietary system are way more likely to end up shafted by Steam’s new “enshittification is the future” MBA management than those with the open non-proprietary one.
Ultimatelly it all depends on just how easy it is to wipeout the OS in a Steam Box and get a new one in.
For the average PC user, the (modern) Steam Machine is a mediocre 3rd-party prebuilt system with the interesting quirk of being Linux native with no Microsoft licensing.
For the average gamer, the Steam Machine is a console-like experience to a game library stretching back to nearly the dawn of gaming with little worry that the next release will have you purchasing your favorite titles again.
For the average game developer, the new lineup is excellent reference hardware. Having something real to target helps combat scope creep, whereby a game has fancy features that look nice until you realize the game only runs properly on a $15K machine for example.
For Valve, they are in a life or death battle to sever their dependency on Microsoft. Their hardware is mostly an excuse to build out their platform capabilities
- The 2013 Steam Machine coincided with releasing a Linux native version of their client.
- The OG Steam controller encourages devs to implement their Steam Input virtual control package.
- The Steam Link upgraded their remote play capabilities.
- The Steam Deck coincided with the deployment of Proton, so they can make their back-catalog run outside windows on any x86_64 machine. It also served as a testbed for improving their power efficiency and standby mode operations.
- With the Steam Frame, they’re implementing both FEX and Lepton:
- FEX runs x86_64 games on ARM devices (meaning that it can run any windows game on any average smartphone/tablet/etc if it’s powerful enough)
- Lepton is based on Waydroid to run Android apps on Linux, allowing game developers for Android and the Quest to easily import their titles into the Steam platform
- The Box is an important accessory to the Frame, as the headset is going to be lightweight system comparatively.
There’s a hidden advantage here apart from moving away from Microsoft, or having 1st party controller support.
Game devs will have a precise target to optimize for.
If enough steam machines and steam decks are out there, it simplifies porting software since you have a handful of fixed targets to hit. A studio could easily buy a few of these appliances for testing and development, and know for certain the product will run as intended. It’s a luxury currently enjoyed by consoles, and it really does help their dominance in their respective niches.
This also helps smaller studios since the bare minimum means targeting a known steam platform, rather than pulling machine specs out of thin air and taking their best shot. It’s a much easier problem to solve and takes a lot less time and money.
I think there will always be room for high-end gaming, but as long as you’re “steam machine 2025 compatible” or whatever, you know what you’re going to get.
Yep. My friend is an indie game developer and while his studio’s next release is “Windows only” (and consoles) they are testing to make sure it runs well on the Steam Deck via Proton / will be Verified.
The next release is Windows Only. However, it includes consoles and Steam Deck verified…
Did I read that correctly? What are they skipping, the Commodore 64?
They are not making a Linux build, but they are making sure the Windows build plays nice with Proton. At least that’s how I read that.
Does that mean that I’m left hanging with my Sinclair ZX81? Again?
Windows only (plus this long list of other hardware.)
With the diversity of Steam boxes out there, you can’t really optimize anything.
There’s a single one. The valve one.
apart from moving away from Microsoft
Linux.
You’re on Lemmy. I’d appreciate you not using such cuss words
Forgive me father, for I have sinned.
But it has what PCs crave.
If you ever want to see the concept of “survivor bias” in action, watch PC Master Race dudes try and explain why you don’t need a Steam Box.
Yeah but the Steam Box comes with steam already inside. If you build a PC you need to get your own steam and then someone put it all inside yourself.
I dunno, that sounds like like Sisyphean task to me.
The target audience for the Steam Box? Game developers.
Makes sense for Valve.
How do you not get it? Didn’t you buy an eggs box when you were a kid? What was in it? Eggs. Now this is the same thing but with Steam. Your just pretending you don’t get it.
