Nibodhika
@Nibodhika@lemmy.world
- Comment on 3 hours ago:
I never said $800 would be selling at a loss, in fact I said that there’s a good possibility that they can sell it cheaper than 800 and still make a profit because they buy things in bulk. You were the first one who even mentioned it being profitable for them selling at a loss:
They could totally make money selling it at a loss.
Which is completely false, if they sold at a loss by definition they would lose money on each sale, and because it’s an open platform people would just buy the cheap hardware to be used for any project which would make Valve bleed money like Sony did with their PS3 until they closed the system.
- Comment on 10 hours ago:
And then we could make money having people riding her. If you’re going to start a hypothetical scenario of Valve still being able to make money selling at a loss you can’t be angry that people are replying on the basis your premise is true.
- Comment on 11 hours ago:
If they’re sold at a loss, by definition they have to be cheaper than anything sold at a gain with the same performance.
- Comment on 16 hours ago:
I don’t think so, I think a normal user would pause when the system asks him to type “Yes, do as I say” as that is clearly a sign that you’re about to shoot yourself in the foot.
- Comment on 16 hours ago:
If it’s sold at a loss like a console it would beat the price/performance of any other x86 chip on the market, which is why they can’t sell it at a loss, ergo my point.
- Comment on 16 hours ago:
No, it won’t. $800 will get you a machine that’s around 50% faster. Controller included.
Care to share a link to a PCPartPicker with that? Here’s a link on the same thread of someone building a similarly speck machine for 800 lemmy.world/comment/20649777 and that is without the controller. In case you haven’t noticed, RAM prices are a bit crazy at the moment.
It’s literally a laptop CPU with a laptop GPU.
It’s literally not, they custom developed it for the product, similar to the Steam Deck one, it is based on the architecture used on laptops, but so are Playstation and Xbox AFAIK.
Also not true. A 1k prebuilt is around 70% faster. Controller not included, though.
Can you provide a link to such a prebuilt? Here’s the first prebuilt I could find with similar specs, and it’s 1k periphio.com/…/firestorm-7600-prebuilt-amd-gaming…
Sure, but that’s an argument in favour of it costing less.
Yes, that was my point, the top of what this should cost is the same as a prebuilt with similar specs since Valve buys stuff in bulk it should be cheaper than that.
Yeah, and the best selling console of the generation is $450 for the digital-only version.
And the other one is 700, your point is?
Stop this delusion. If this was an actual possibility, it would already be happening with the Steam Deck. Yes, I know you know someone who did it. I know someone who bought a Surface to put Linux on it. There’s dozens of us!
It didn’t happened with the Deck because it’s not sold at a loss, so it’s cheaper to assemble a similarly built PC for you. But I definitely saw several posts through the years recommending people just buy a Steam Deck as their machine in certain conditions. If the Steam Deck costed 300 I guarantee you people would be using it as their daily drivers or building clusters of them.
- Comment on 1 day ago:
Only after they closed their system, which they did because they were losing money to every single enterprise in the world who wanted a cluster and PS3 were the cheapest option.
- Comment on 1 day ago:
This is the thing I’m replying to, emphasis on the prebuilt.
Buying the same build as a prebuilt brings a premium and costs around 1000
For 1k you can get a 9600 9060XT 16gb system, which is waaaaaay more powerful, so this is quite an exaggeration.
But yeah, I don’t think the machine will cost the same as a prebuilt, but that’s the high end of the price range.
- Comment on 1 day ago:
The answer I’m replying to suggested you can get a prebuilt with a 9600 for 1000, since they’re replying to my point that a prebuilt with similar spec is 1000.
- Comment on 1 day ago:
No, they couldn’t, have you read about the PS3? They were a lot cheaper than building a similar system so several companies bought thousands to build clusters, I personally worked at a relatively small university that had a cluster made of dozens of PS3s, since each Playstation costed Sony around $200 my university on its own costed thousands to Sony, and I imagine every other university and some private companies did the same.
- Comment on 1 day ago:
It’s a lot more than that, it’s:
- Knowing what parts to buy, I don’t think most average people can cite every piece in a desktop
- Selecting parts that are compatible, try plug-and-play an AMD CPU on an Intel MOBO.
- Selecting parts that fit the chassis you selected, unless you went with a full ATX that’s a concern.
Now that you bought the components:
- Knowing to ground yourself before doing anything, currently I’m getting static shocks daily where I live, if I didn’t know about this I could very easily fry a RAM by picking it up wrong.
- Cable management is not easy, most cheaper chassis don’t have enough or dedicated space for it.
- Correct amount of thermal paste is something lots of people get wrong.
- Some pieces require strength to lock in place, others break if you even look at them sideways.
Now that you’ve assembled everything:
- Installing OS
- Installing drivers
- Installing Steam
- Depending on your OS and controller of choice pairing controller and getting it to work could be difficult
I’m not saying that assembling a computer is hard, but is definitely far from plug-and-play, and not something I would recommend for someone without technical knowledge who just wants something to play games.
- Comment on 1 day ago:
A prebuilt plug-and-play device? Can you share a link to that?
- Comment on 1 day ago:
It was known beforehand and was fixed already by the time he released his video, he just happened to luck out and encounter it during the short spam it existed.
I disagree that he approached it as a complete idiot, he approached it as someone who knows what they’re doing, when he definitely doesn’t, and that was the issue. Anyone without technical know-how would have panicked at the system asking him to type “I know what I’m doing”, and anyone with enough technical know-how would have paused at that and read the message carefully and moped the fuck out. He had enough knowledge to think he knew what he was doing, but not enough to actually do, and the boldness to think he knew better.
That being said, I agree that there’s plenty of other stuff to bash him for, and that was not a great example, lots of people would have found themselves in that same situation, and I don’t think it’s unfair to say the fuck up there was not entirely on his part.
- Comment on 1 day ago:
Yup, like I said, it depends on how prices will fluctuate, my guess is what the price would be if it was being sold now, if RAM increases they would have to compensate for it.
- Comment on 1 day ago:
Yup, I love DIY, had tons of fun building my wife’s mini-itx gaming rig, my NAS and even my desktop (although it was the boring one of the three since it’s just standard). I love poking on my system, trying out stuff, etc. But I bought a Deck and my only mod was getting EmuDeck in it, it just works for what I want it to, and that’s worth a lot to me, it allows me to pour my time on stuff I want to be building and just game on my gaming boxes.
- Comment on 1 day ago:
Let’s talk wages.
Absolutely agreed, if every company had wages at the level Valve does it would be very good.
- Comment on 1 day ago:
Yeah, but to be fair that was a shitty thing the system did, anyone with experience would know not to do it, but honestly it should have never happened. On the other hand, Linus is a bit daft and lots of stuff blows over his head monumentally, in the same video where he said he would be building a Steam Machine he also couldn’t seem to grasp that this is just a computer and people would see it as a prevuilt. In short I don’t think he will acknowledge lots of the killer features in the Steam Machine just so he can claim his thing does the same. But at least it will be an interesting watch.
- Comment on 1 day ago:
Facts people forget:
- Assembling your own Steam Machine with similar parts will cost around 800
- Even if you assembled it yourself you would be missing features, such as cec, wake by controller, sleep mid game, etc. LTT will try to build one, it will be interesting to see what they come up with, but I’m 90% it won’t have feature parity.
- There’s lots of engineering gone into this machine, they’re way more compact, less power hungry and more quiet than anything you can build yourself.
- Buying the same build as a prebuilt brings a premium and costs around 1000
- Valve purchases stuff in scale so they can diminish their margin and could potentially sell it cheaper than prebuilts, and possibly cheaper than building it yourself.
- Consoles are sold at a loss, and they recover it with games because the platform is closed.
- The Steam Machine is not closed, they can’t be sure they’re getting game purchases, because people might be buying this to be their work computer. So they have to price it as a PC, with margin on hardware, not promise of future returns.
- Price might fluctuate between now and announcement, RAM prices are going crazy nowadays.
With all of that being said, it seems to me it’s very likely it will be around 800 but less than 1000. For people saying you can build one for that price yourself, sure, go ahead, you’ll have a huge, power hungry loud box, without the same features and you would have saved only a small fraction of the value by having to assemble everything yourself.
- Comment on Steam Hardware [new Steam Controller, Steam Machine, and VR headset Steam Frame, coming in 2026] 1 week ago:
Still, my point was about the price guess that the other guy made. Valve was very clear that it would be priced as a PC and not a console, consoles are around the 500 mark, so it would be at least 700 otherwise they would have mentioned aggressive pricing or something.
- Comment on Steam Hardware [new Steam Controller, Steam Machine, and VR headset Steam Frame, coming in 2026] 1 week ago:
I think that was the right approach for the first controller. It is one of the worst controllers for traditional controller games, but it’s the best by a long shot for mouse driven games. So when you plug it somewhere that doesn’t have the correct drivers it’s more likely that you want to use it as a mouse than as a controller. There’s an open source driver for Linux (or at least there used to be), but I don’t think it ever got ported to Android since I guess it would require a rooted phone.
- Comment on Steam Hardware [new Steam Controller, Steam Machine, and VR headset Steam Frame, coming in 2026] 1 week ago:
I think you’re way off, they said that they will price the GabeBox like a PC and not a console, that probably means the price for it will be around 1k since that’s what a similar PC would cost, here’s an example of the price of a prebuilt PC with a 7600 which is the GPU that they mentioned as being the closest to the one they use periphio.com/…/firestorm-7600-prebuilt-amd-gaming…
Also the Frame was mentioned as being priced less but close to the Index, and the Index was also 1k with the base stations, so I think the Frame will likely be very close to that as well.
The controller I would guess around $70, but there’s likely to be one together with the Machine, so all in all I think we’re looking closer to 2k. But I would be very happy to be wrong.
- Comment on Steam Hardware [new Steam Controller, Steam Machine, and VR headset Steam Frame, coming in 2026] 1 week ago:
That was my thought too, as far as I understand ARM is superior to x86 in many aspects, but because of compatibility it never took over the desktop market, this could be the beginning of an amazing transformation.
- Comment on Steam Hardware [new Steam Controller, Steam Machine, and VR headset Steam Frame, coming in 2026] 1 week ago:
I mean, the VR is an ARM chip that can run APKs, so if someone can find a way to plug a SIM card there that’s it.
- Comment on Steam Hardware [new Steam Controller, Steam Machine, and VR headset Steam Frame, coming in 2026] 1 week ago:
Yup, that’s me too, love VR, but refused to get a headset before because I would need a Windows machine. I bought a Quest 1, still use it sometimes, but I knew it was never going to be a long term for me, Meta is not a company I trust enough, and they did exactly what I expected them to do.
- Comment on Steam Hardware [new Steam Controller, Steam Machine, and VR headset Steam Frame, coming in 2026] 1 week ago:
They do, I’m 99% sure I heard it mentioned by someone (I think it was Linus from LTT)
- Comment on 'I think we're in the fight of our lives': Fired Rockstar employees and IWGB are confident the GTA 6 developer will be held accountable for its alleged union busting 1 week ago:
That’s an interesting approach, but eventually you’ll run out of shares to allow employees to buy, and you’ll have to dilute the ones you’ve already sold. You need to think that AAA studios have hundreds of people working there, and certain games have thousands of people working on related stuff that’s not directly the game but contributes, like engine, servers, social, etc.
- Comment on 'I think we're in the fight of our lives': Fired Rockstar employees and IWGB are confident the GTA 6 developer will be held accountable for its alleged union busting 1 week ago:
Unfortunately for larger games individual devs don’t have that much control nor can have a mensurable impact. For example, I wrote a few lines of code for a large game, those lines will be executed every single time the game runs, but if they weren’t there no user would notice. I was told to write those lines, and it’s not something I personally wanted to add to the game, there was an issue, I was sent to fix it, I did. This is true for the vast majority of the game code, most devs are pointed to issues to fix or features to implement, they have some wiggle room in the how to do stuff, but the what to do has been approved by the boss of the manager of your manager’s manager, and unless there’s a good reason it won’t change.
Think about it this way, have you ever watched the credits from a AAA game? The vast majority (as in there are likely only a couple of persons who didn’t) of the people in that list contributed something to the game, either directly or indirectly, it’s hard to measure how much each contributed, a small but critical fix might be more important than a large but unused feature, how do you measure between the two?. Not to mention past employees who did stuff for a previous game that got re-used.
Don’t get me wrong, it’s a nice idea, one that I would personally benefit from, but I think it’s just not feasible for large games. In short it’s impossible to be fair doing that, and people would get hurt because John from accounting got the same share that he did. And if you do it in any other way that’s not everyone gets the same share, you’re essentially playing favorites with the people whose job is to do the stuff you’ve ranked higher, even though the other person’s job is just as important.
- Comment on Gamepad for Linux Gaming? 2 weeks ago:
Not sure how the prices are in your location, but these are the rough prices here in Europe that I had in mind when replying to you, I assumed the relative prices would be similar in your location, apparently I was wrong:
- 8BitDo Ultimate 2: €60 amzn.eu/d/56fZr1E
- PS5 controller: €75 amzn.eu/d/0yjVEDP
- Xbox controller: € 65 amzn.eu/d/7w1Q3Ib
- 8BitDo Ultimate 2C: €35 amzn.eu/d/43BPDAh
- 8BitDo Ultimate Wired: €31 amzn.eu/d/4PLthC1
- Comment on Gamepad for Linux Gaming? 2 weeks ago:
Fair enough, the ultimate 2 is the same price as the Xbox and Playstation, so I guess those are also outside your range. The ultimate 2C wireless is only $5 more than the wired, I think that’s a good benefit for that price difference, but even the wired should be good since 8BitDo does good hardware.
- Comment on Gamepad for Linux Gaming? 2 weeks ago:
I have lots of different controllers, and have had even more through the years. My personal recommendation is the 8BitDo Ultimate 2, should be plug and play either on wired, wireless or Bluetooth on most modern distros, comes with a stand for charging so you never have the issue of picking the controller and being out of batteries, has Hall-Effect track pads so you won’t get drift with time, has 2 extra back buttons which are configurable on steam. Plus specifically against each other major controller:
Pros over Xbox controllers:
- No need to install any driver
- Batteries included
Pros over Playstation controllers:
- Most games show ABXY glyphs