> I hardly understand the headline. Steam machine is just a computer, and since it can be used for other stuff than playing games, then it can't have the cheap pricing of a console.
I don't understand this train of thought. It absolutely can have the cheap pricing of a console, as long as Steam is the default store, and the majority of users will use the console as-is and buy games on Steam.
Let me give a quick analogy: Google paid Apple 20B USD just to be the default search engine in Safari, even though users can easily change it. Defaults matter. The vast majority of people are not highly technical users who customize everything in-depth and seek out alternatives. The vast majority of people just use whatever is the default.
The main problem I see is that if this is any cheaper than it's hardware, people will buy 100s of them and stack them in server racks for CI runners or whatever. Generating only losses for Valve and making the hardware unavailable to gamers.
It needs to either be at market rate or locked down to only be useful for gaming.
I don't think they could possibly make it cheap enough for that - especially once you consider all the money being wasted on RGB/Bluetooth/a GPU you won't use.
Messing around with weird consumer hardware in a datacenter context isn't exactly attractive. If all you need is some x86 cores, an off-the-shelf blade server approach gets you far more compute in the same space with far less hassle. Even if the purchase cost is attractive, TCO won't be.
There are already small PCs without a GPU for around $200–300, and this will cost at least 2-3 times that. Valve already comfirmed, that the pricing will not be 'console like' and would match entry level PC. And PS5 is $500.
The PS3 was weird. It had a unique architecture that made it especially useful for HPC in an era before GPUs were useful for that purpose. The CPU and GPU in the Steam Machine are not particularly high-end.
Does it have IPMI? Does it have ECC ram? Racking Mac Minis is a painful enough, this form factor is less rackable than that. If you need to physically adjust the form factor per device, whatever you could've saved will be immediately lost in labor.
The PS3 was uniquely powerful, compared to its x86 peers. It wasn't just cheap - it provided the compute of 30 desktop computers in the space, power, and price envelope of one.
I think the limitation on server gear these days is electricity price vs compute, with the hardware price being an up front investment but not dominating the lifetime cost. At least at this end of the price range - it's a consumer GPU, not an A100 or anything.
Iiuc, unlike Sony’s PS3 (which were bought and used like this), Steam is the unique distributor so it would be easy for them to not allow (or make really difficult to) buying thousands of machines.
(Or they could sell it everywhere for higher price but the Machine would come with a non transferable Steam gift card.)
> It absolutely can have the cheap pricing of a console
Valve hasn't committed to a price yet, but they told Gamers Nexus that it'll be priced less like a console and more like an entry level computer (i.e. more expensive than a console).
Weird statement, because I can search for PS5 pro & see $750 price points, and entry level computers have been far far cheaper. Cheaper than Xbox series X at $650. Getting pretty solid laptops for a bit under $500 has been possible for many years now.
But "entry level computer" has a very broad interpretation available. Could be higher for sure.
Do those computers play games competently? I doubt they play them as well as the PS5 or Series X. We aren't in the days where integrated graphics instantly meant sub 20 FPS on any game no matter how simple, but I still wouldn't throw any recent triple A game at even new-ish computers with integrated graphics and expect them to perform all that well. They'll play Rocket League, Stardew Valley and Minecraft just fine, and maybe that's all they need to do, but a Steam Machine that can't play tomorrow's title roughly on par with current gen consoles seems like a losing bet unless the price is equivalently lower.
Yes. There's a peer thread below this one with more examples, but in general the biggest (and most relevant) cost you're looking at with a new computer is the video card. And a PS5 level video card is the RX 6700 XT which is like $200-$300. If you're willing to purchase second hand you can go substantially lower.
I suspect most of us are of a vaguely similar age, and when "we" were growing up, PC gaming was ridiculously expensive. A new gaming PC was thousands of dollars and then obsolete within a couple of years, leaving you constantly checking new release 'minimum system requirements.' It was quite painful and a big reason I (and I suspect others) migrated to console gaming. But now a days? I have a relatively old PC and never even bother looking at spec requirements - it'll run it, just fine.
I used to budget the bulk of my yearly tax refund for a PC upgrade of some kind. A bit over $1k every year. Something was always due for a replacement in an endless treadmill of avoiding total system obsolescence.
Now, shit just lasts forever. I upgraded from a 1st gen i7 920 _this year_ into some mid-range Ryzen 5. I'm still using the 2070 RTX I bought over 5 years ago to power the HTC Vive and a 1440p monitor; with this new CPU the gfx card is finally getting a workout and has become the bottleneck while also giving me a massively better experience.
I'm tempted by the 9070 graphics cards but honestly, I just don't need it. I can tweak settings on any AAA game and get ~50fps of real frames and I'm just fine with that. I probably won't upgrade the graphics card until I pick up a dramatically better display device that requires it. Maybe the Frame will push the issue, maybe it won't.
The Steam Machine uses a dedicated graphics chip, similar to a discrete AMD RX 7060M. Laptop chip sure, but a stone's throw from integrated graphics. These Machines will be able to keep up.
That build uses a 13 year old CPU from AliExpress, there's no accounting for taste but I think most entry level builds are aiming a little higher than that. Some newer games won't even try to run on a CPU of that vintage since it doesn't have AVX2 support.
It was released in 2016 and does support AVX2. In general what matters when building a decent rig is aiming to balance performance to optimize against bottle necks. He demonstrated the system in various modern games, for instance running Delta Force at 4k/120FPS. And the CPU was scarcely getting touched - running at around 20%.
You can spend a ton of money on a bleeding edge CPU and see 0 performance gain in almost all cases, because basically no modern games are CPU limited, or even remotely close to it, so you're sitting there with your overpriced CPU basically idling.
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I think many people are out of the loop on PC costs and performance. The days where you needed some $1000+ bleeding edge rig to even begin to play the latest stuff are long gone. Since this thread is on consoles - an approximate PS5 equivalent video card is the RX 6700 XT which is like $200-$300, and that is, by far, the biggest expense.
Gaming tends to adjust to consors, and we're nearing 6 years of gen 9 consoles. expect any "entry level gaming" computer to either be portable or competitive with the $600 price point I can grab at any major retailer.
Otherwise, sure. I can build a potato for $300 and i will probably enjoy Silksong just fine. But at that point why not buy a non-gaming laptop?
The $400 system linked above can run modern games in 4k/120FPS. And that was far from some search for the most efficient price:performance build, it was just the first thing that came up on a quick search. If one is willing to do things like buy a refurbished hardware and assume you already have an OS, you could easily bring that down to $300 and maybe even start pushing towards $200.
Gaming has just gotten so absurdly cheap, but most people's mindsets are stuck in 15 years ago, when it was absurdly expensive and consoles were really the only way to help keep it to a relatively reasonable, and stable, cost. In modern times consoles will generally be price competitive for about a year, but then fall off as hardware prices decline, yet their retail sticker price generally stays the same.
On top of this now a days just about everything also comes to PC as well, so one of the biggest arguments of the past (console exclusives) is no longer valid. Even Japan is finally bringing their stuff to PC. And there also tends to be much more competition on PC, so rare will be the time that you need to pay $60++ for a new game. Though that is one area where many Japanese studios are still lagging behind the rest.
Older games at medium settings, or shooters at low settings sure. If that's your compromise for frames then a relative potato can still play it. I'm not sure I call that "modern" in the same way something God of War Ragnarok is "modern".
>Though that is one area where many Japanese studios are still lagging behind the rest.
Its a different model. They aren't trying to sell millions of copies to report engagement and sales, so they want to lock in the smaller audience they have and get as much out of that. Nintendo style. That's why you'll see the larger public studios like Square Enix and Capcom doing western style, generous sales so their sales calls can be "we sold 20% more YoY from new releases". Koei Tecmo, not so much. And Sega seems to straddle the line depending on the franchise.
Delta Force was released in January of this year. He was running it at 4k and 120FPS in medium. If you're willing to go for 60FPS or 1920x1080 I'm certain he could have it running in ultra or whatever at 60FPS. And that was on a less than $400 PC. Similarly he was also playing CS2 (released late 2023) in medium 4k at what seemed to average around 90FPS.
For contrast most PS5 games are going to run at 1080p at the highest, which is then upscaled to 4k output, and generally capped at 60FPS.
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I think Japanese studios are simply mispricing their games. Shin Megami Tensei V is a game that could probably be quite big on the PC but instead has less than 3500 reviews (as a ballpark for sales) because of a price that's way outside the peak point on the supply:demand curve. It also has almost no regional pricing adjustments - like $50 in India and Vietnam, $40 in China, etc, for a game may as well have a label saying 'please pirate me, I don't want your patronage.'
In classical advertising it was believed that lowering the price of something was subconsciously associated with a lower quality/brand damage in the consumer, and they're probably still under this school of thought. But I think at this point it's largely obsolete, certainly in software. People, in general, just don't pay $60 (or anywhere near it) for games on PC anymore.
Defaults matter at scale. And as for scale, the Steam Deck has the most generous estimates at 7 million. For a side hustle that's great. For trying to compete with the scale of other consoles, that's not enough.
Hardware is very hard to break into. You can't treat it like software and expect to dominate.
It’s like android. You sell pixel at relatively high price but create a wave of other with cheaper alternatives, so you end up make money from being default store.
I don't understand this train of thought. It absolutely can have the cheap pricing of a console, as long as Steam is the default store, and the majority of users will use the console as-is and buy games on Steam.
Let me give a quick analogy: Google paid Apple 20B USD just to be the default search engine in Safari, even though users can easily change it. Defaults matter. The vast majority of people are not highly technical users who customize everything in-depth and seek out alternatives. The vast majority of people just use whatever is the default.