Seems fine for most gamers… As others have said, Steam don’t make much profit on it, and the hardware isn’t bad.
Not everyone is playing 4K titles with raytracing. And when you start considering how quickly the cost of games adds up, steam ends up cheaper fairly quickly (I can’t imagine buying 300 games on PS5 lol)
The hardware is bad. It’s a power throttled bottom of the barrel GPU and CPU. It’s a 1080p30fps machine for anything other than indies, and for most AAA gaming it will need the atrocious FSR to even get to that.
It’s not upgradable either, so it’s not like you can just swap out the GPU or CPU for a better one later.
For a machine that’s targeting the living room, where most people who might consider buying this would be wanting to use it on a big 4K TV, they’ve made the worst possible performing machine for that use case.
I’m not sure how much of a console gamer you are, or how much you keep an eye on game prices, but almost every sale on steam for games that are on consoles happens on Xbox and PlayStation too. I know because I often have to choose between buying on Xbox or Steam when there’s a sale, and the Xbox version with play anywhere is the same price as the steam one so I usually buy the Xbox one.
I’m kinda surprised they don’t just sell it at cost. We knew they couldn’t subsidize the price with game sales, as anyone could buy this and install a different OS without ever buying a single steam game, but I kinda figured they’d bank on most people not doing that, hence selling at cost.
Maybe it’s just ~$71 margin for component costs to inflate further without the need for them to change the price.
It doesn’t really matter how much profit they’re making on it, it’s a bad deal because every other comparable low end pc is upgradable whereas the steam machine isn’t.
There’s just no reason for a locked-hardware low-end device like the steam machine to exist. Why would anyone want a non-upgradable PC, when the reason people play on PC is for the upgradability?
The steam machine from valve is just a small form factor junk box.
Seems fine for most gamers… As others have said, Steam don’t make much profit on it, and the hardware isn’t bad.
Not everyone is playing 4K titles with raytracing. And when you start considering how quickly the cost of games adds up, steam ends up cheaper fairly quickly (I can’t imagine buying 300 games on PS5 lol)
The hardware is bad. It’s a power throttled bottom of the barrel GPU and CPU. It’s a 1080p30fps machine for anything other than indies, and for most AAA gaming it will need the atrocious FSR to even get to that.
It’s not upgradable either, so it’s not like you can just swap out the GPU or CPU for a better one later.
For a machine that’s targeting the living room, where most people who might consider buying this would be wanting to use it on a big 4K TV, they’ve made the worst possible performing machine for that use case.
I’m not sure how much of a console gamer you are, or how much you keep an eye on game prices, but almost every sale on steam for games that are on consoles happens on Xbox and PlayStation too. I know because I often have to choose between buying on Xbox or Steam when there’s a sale, and the Xbox version with play anywhere is the same price as the steam one so I usually buy the Xbox one.
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Yeah but it has the Steam logo on it. That’s worth $1000 by itself
From the comparison I saw valve is only making ~$71 per device which honestly isn’t that much of a premium for a pre-built mini pc
I’m kinda surprised they don’t just sell it at cost. We knew they couldn’t subsidize the price with game sales, as anyone could buy this and install a different OS without ever buying a single steam game, but I kinda figured they’d bank on most people not doing that, hence selling at cost.
Maybe it’s just ~$71 margin for component costs to inflate further without the need for them to change the price.
It doesn’t really matter how much profit they’re making on it, it’s a bad deal because every other comparable low end pc is upgradable whereas the steam machine isn’t.
There’s just no reason for a locked-hardware low-end device like the steam machine to exist. Why would anyone want a non-upgradable PC, when the reason people play on PC is for the upgradability?
The funny thing is, I don’t believe it actually does lol