Steam Machine

B-1 said:
I asked one of the AIAIOhs and it agrees.

Estimated Retail Price: $699 for 512GB standalone; $799 for 2TB; +$50-100 for controller bundles.
  • Rationale: BOM is ~$570, leaving room for ~20-30% gross margin ($120-170) to cover shipping, marketing, warranties, and Valve's ecosystem goals (e.g., driving Steam sales). This aligns with analyst predictions ($699-$999) and positions it competitively against PS5 Pro (~$700) or mid-range PCs. Valve historically prices at slight loss initially (like Steam Deck at $399 vs. ~$350 BOM) to build market share, but this higher-spec box suggests profitability from day one.
  • If bundled with the new Steam Controller: Add $50-70 retail (est. BOM $30).
Click to expand...
Probs PS5 pro price range, depending on if you take the full VR and 2 controllers.
 
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SauRoNZA said:
Yeah maybe, but I think the deeper problem would be making everything SteamOS compatible.

Then again I have no idea how complete their library is on SteamOS at present.

My primary issue would be losing decades of games in my Xbox library that I would no longer be able to access and I certainly don't want to pay for again.

Their own hybrid console will likely address that, but if they go completely open and let it work equally well on other hardware that would be magic and would motivate me towards a (hardware) switch.
Click to expand...
I still have access to most my xbox library via Geforce Now.
 
KleinBoontjie said:
With Xbox giving up on hardware, hopefully they'll roll out a Linux client soon. You know, like they're saying, "Xbox is everywhere"
Click to expand...

They can start with a native MacOS app.

Still can’t stream from my console to my Mac.

And the joke is they need only allow the iPad app to work on Mac they don’t even need to make an effort.
 
So I installed Bazzite on an old Asus Chromebox I had laying around here, which is some i7 with 4GB of memory and a 128GB of onboard storage of some kind.

When I saw the same old same old Fedora Linux installation wizard I thought oh good lord this is going to be a drama and just the same old Linux fully expecting to be met with a KDE Desktop and left to my own devices.

Colour me surprised when a fullscreen desktop setup wizard shows up and about the only failure point there is that it didn't immediately ask me to setup a controller and just assumed I'm using a mouse or keyboard, but this can be forgiven under the guise I guess that it expects me to be on a Steamdeck or other touch control type device.

Either way I soldiered on and was very surprised when it just took me a full screen interface from the word go. Some of it feels very "web wrapper" but then that's the nature of Steam in general so I really shouldn't expect otherwise.

Found the Bluetooth settings and quickly paired my Dualsense controller and I was pretty damn surprised by the fact the whole interface just changed to PS buttons and GUI elements everywhere which takes all the usual "hack job" confusion away.

Figure Magic The Gathering Arena would be the absolute worst thing to try with a controller so hit install on that, went to Downloads and found a few system type updates and let them run. It bailed a few times with "content server no available" type stuff but got there in the end just left alone for a little while.

Forgot to mention connecting to WiFi also just worked which is some kind of modern miracle.

Eventually got into Magic Arena and my first annoyance as a south paw was that the mouse pointer was bound to the right analog stick. No biggie, I can surely just change this...well yeah that wasn't nearly as easy as I expected it to be and I'm sure it's possible but I wasn't going to Google it either.

Username and password entry was a challenge with the onscreen keyboard as one can expect...but not all bad until I got to the password field and it simply would not type inside it no matter how I went about it. Enter the real keyboard which would have been a massive fail when I'm sitting in my lounge with my Steam "console" but this all being a hack I'll let it slide.

Got into the game and it just worked. I mean it's garbage with a analog stick as a mouse pointer but I fully expected that...but here I am in LINUX of all things and I just clicked a button and it downloaded and just played without any kind of drama.

And consider the spec level of this thing is ancient...I'm actually surprised how playable it was.

I'm not about to go install it in my living room in this form, but I've walked away from the whole experience quite impressed and there's not really as much work required here as I had anticipated.

Oh one other thing that simply would not work with the controller was browsing the store and going under the Free Games section it's like it was not hooking up inputs to the tiles at all and made it impossible to select anything directly and had to pull out the mouse again.

I reckon this little box might just get Batocera on next week to see what I can do with that...not as if I need another console between an Xbox, Switch and PS5.
 
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The new Steam Machine straddles the line between PC and console gaming so much more effectively. It looks more like a console, for starters. I would expect to see it in a living room in a media center next to a PlayStation 5 or Nintendo Switch. (I mean, you could mistake it for an Xbox Series X’s half-pint sibling.)

Simultaneously, its specs punch like a respectible budget gaming PC. Inside will be a semi-custom configuration of an AMD Zen 4 six-core, 12-thread CPU with a 30W TDP, AMD RDNA3 110W TDP GPU with 28 compute units and a 110W TDP, 8GB GDDR6 VRAM, and 16GB DDR5 memory. The storage and memory will be upgradable, too.

For the first time, I think the PC may be poised to grab a hefty chunk of console gamers.

www.pcworld.com

Valve's Steam Machine will help PCs replace consoles—and I'm down

The upcoming reborn Steam Machine will launch into a very different world than its predecessor.
www.pcworld.com www.pcworld.com
 
Besides not being able to run certain mp games
 
1763182597483.png

Valve believes the new Steam Machine can succeed where the first models failed, and according to two senior engineers, the reason is simple: the software finally caught up, leading to a wider game catalogue.

Speaking with Rock Paper Shotgun, Yazan Aldehayyat stated that one of the reasons the original Steam Machines failed was the lack of software, as very few games were compatible with SteamOS (based on Linux), and only a few games could run well using other compatibility tools like Wine.

1763182682999.png
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Although the new Steam Machine is expected to run games at 4K@60Hz, early tests suggest some games, such as Cyberpunk 2077, may struggle to hit these performance targets. The system, however, is still far from launch, and with further improvements to its software side, the new Steam Machine could deliver better performance than in its current pre-release state, although the 8 GB of VRAM is definitely a limiting factor, and will be even more so in the future.
wccftech.com

This is why Valve believes the new Steam Machine will be more successful than its predecessors

The new Steam Machine will succeed where its predecessors failed thanks to the work done on Proton and SteamOS, according to Valve
wccftech.com wccftech.com
 
Steam will fail because of YouTube. Not because of marketing, not because it is a good or bad product. Steam will fail because of YouTube. The tech YouTubers that can only **** on products never have anything good to say about anything. That is how the Xbox died.

Secondly the Steam cube will fail because of compatibility layers. There are literally Thousands of YouTube tutorials on how to get software running on Linux. Very few of them are relevant if they are 3 months or older. If anyone of you ever tried to install a game on Linux you will know it is buggy, it doesn't always run and when it does run it is not always stable.

The bigger flop is software compatibility. The bullshit YouTubers tell viewers will damage Linux's reputation and the Steam cube will have to somehow absorb the fallout. I am talking about installing stuff like Microsoft Office for example. I followed the tutorial to the letter. It did not work, not only did it not work the software that was suppose to allow it to work failed because I suspect it is not longer enjoying updates.

Yes you can run Windows on the Steam cube and most people probably will do just that. Linux is not the answer, I personally put it to the test. I was unable to get my scanner to work, I was unable to get Microsoft Office to work and it has to be Microsoft Office because that is what the accountant wants. I was unable to get smooth game play with most of the games. Yes they started up but if the game was build in Unity you will have a bad day with FPS and stability.

The last thing is we can no longer say these are still early days for Linux, they have been at it for many years now. Yes they didn't get the support they needed BUT all that aside, nothing really works on Linux. Not scanners, not printers, not webcams and not USB microphones that need special software to work.

I have tried Mint, Ubuntu and Pop all of them had the same universal problem. Not to mention Nvidia cards do not work well with Linux. They do work but Intel cards and AMD cards work better.

I would love to own a Steam cube and if it does clock in at R10k or R12k I might even consider getting once considering GPU costs lately. But I will probably load a bloat free Win11 Pro install on it. To make it a real computer.
 
Jackal65 said:
Steam will fail because of YouTube. Not because of marketing, not because it is a good or bad product. Steam will fail because of YouTube. The tech YouTubers that can only **** on products never have anything good to say about anything. That is how the Xbox died.

Secondly the Steam cube will fail because of compatibility layers. There are literally Thousands of YouTube tutorials on how to get software running on Linux. Very few of them are relevant if they are 3 months or older. If anyone of you ever tried to install a game on Linux you will know it is buggy, it doesn't always run and when it does run it is not always stable.

The bigger flop is software compatibility. The bullshit YouTubers tell viewers will damage Linux's reputation and the Steam cube will have to somehow absorb the fallout. I am talking about installing stuff like Microsoft Office for example. I followed the tutorial to the letter. It did not work, not only did it not work the software that was suppose to allow it to work failed because I suspect it is not longer enjoying updates.

Yes you can run Windows on the Steam cube and most people probably will do just that. Linux is not the answer, I personally put it to the test. I was unable to get my scanner to work, I was unable to get Microsoft Office to work and it has to be Microsoft Office because that is what the accountant wants. I was unable to get smooth game play with most of the games. Yes they started up but if the game was build in Unity you will have a bad day with FPS and stability.

The last thing is we can no longer say these are still early days for Linux, they have been at it for many years now. Yes they didn't get the support they needed BUT all that aside, nothing really works on Linux. Not scanners, not printers, not webcams and not USB microphones that need special software to work.

I have tried Mint, Ubuntu and Pop all of them had the same universal problem. Not to mention Nvidia cards do not work well with Linux. They do work but Intel cards and AMD cards work better.

I would love to own a Steam cube and if it does clock in at R10k or R12k I might even consider getting once considering GPU costs lately. But I will probably load a bloat free Win11 Pro install on it. To make it a real computer.
Click to expand...

Wtf did I just read?

Steam isn't gonna fail (and neither will this cube), and if it does ever fail it won't be because of some tech YouTubers no one cares about, jeez...

bcace46000f9681c4c87a295221d0f0d.gif
 
Such a great concept but why only 8GB Vram. Limiting this device for any UE5 games coming out.
 
dotdan said:
Such a great concept but why only 8GB Vram. Limiting this device for any UE5 games coming out.
Click to expand...

If you look at their stats its what most players have and they would want to keep the costs down.

I'm pretty sure they will release a pro version for those who are looking to play the new AAA games on it.
 
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