It’s funny how you say this as if valve doesn’t make money on steam sales. The legal gymnastics on display in this thread are definitely something. Song doesn’t even sell their consoles at a loss anymore.
A PS5 pro blows this out of the water for a lower price
Why everyone us this stupid argument? The PS5 pro cost less because sony will get back the money with the games they sell on the playstation store and the monthly subscription you are forced to pay if you wanna play online
The playstation plus essential is €70 for a year, let’s say you will pay for 5 years, it will be €4350 sum it to the €898 of the console and you get €1248 spent
The steam machine with 2TB is €1359 (or 1428 if you really want the controller) and you can use it forever, run old ass games with emulators, mod games, play pirated games, use it how you want, even for productivity and without any subscription
Do you see why Valve can’t sell hardware for less like Sony does?
dreamkeeper@literature.cafe 5 days ago
Axolotl_cpp@feddit.it 4 days ago
Games aren’t a physical object, it doesn’t take 30€ to host a single game so it’s really not a problem to make discounts on games
I don’t defend a company because i like it, i hate corpos but this time y’all are saying no sense
ChairmanMeow@programming.dev 5 days ago
That’s the thing, I do care about all of that. But it’s still a very expensive deal for what you get. That’s why I was very interested in it, but the price/performance scared me off.
The only thing hard to match right now is the small form factor. But honestly, that’s not the primary selling point of this thing that most gamers care about when they’re happily purchasing consoles or pcs several times the size.
Everything else it offers is matchable or handily exceeded with a pc build you put together (or let someone put together for you). Just today LTT put out a budget build video that doesn’t do anything complex to reach essentially double the Steam Machine’s performance, for the same price. If you want to fix the minor things they compromised on you end up maybe paying 100/200 more. Sure it’s a tiny bit more expensive, but when you get twice the performance out of it it’s an easy deal to make. Especially given that it means you’ll make the build last much longer, and it’s more easily upgradable making it much cheaper in the long run. And you still get all the benefits that you mentioned that the Steam Machine offers (especially if you install SteamOS on it, which ended up running better than on the Gabecube as it showed an apparent bug with quick-resume).
The comparison to consoles makes the Steam Machine a bad deal for those who just want a console-like experience. For those who care more about PC gaming, it’s a bad deal due to the bad spot it sits in in the price/performance curve. This narrows the target audience to a very small sliver of gamers, who then need to be willing to shell out that much money on an already dated system that will be harder to upgrade in the future.
You don’t really get enough performance for the AAA games, and there’s cheaper out there if you’re just an indie enthusiast. Given the pretty overwhelmingly dismissive response from the community, I doubt this thing is going to sell very well.
Axolotl_cpp@feddit.it 4 days ago
I didn’t watch the LTT video yet, how muxh they cheaped out?
ChairmanMeow@programming.dev 3 days ago
They did not go for an ITX build but an mTX build. Ultimately you only lost HDMI CEC and some of the gazillion antennas in the Steam Machine, but that did not seem to matter that much. It’s a cheaper build, but not one using problematically cheap parts imo.
It also wouldn’t cost much to get slightly better parts to fix the shortcomings of their version. You’d go over the budget, but end up with a pc nearly twice as powerful. That’s what I was referring to with the odd price/performance ratio the Steam Machine sits in.
If your requirements are that it has to be ITX and it has to have HDMI CEC, then the Steam Machine is likely the best option. But if you just want to couch game and don’t mind clicking a button first before you pick up a controller, it’s just a really expensive cube.