this post was submitted on 04 Dec 2025
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How would you know? They literally haven’t announced a price, yet.
EDIT: The only official word we’ve had on pricing is that it will be priced “like a PC”. Their stated reasoning is that because it’s a general purpose PC on an open platform, making margin back on games isn’t a guarantee.
If they priced it too low, there would be nothing stopping volume purchasers (like companies) buying them all up at scale because it’s the best compute / $ and then not using them for actually playing games.
Step 1: already have a better PC
And it's that small and capable?
"Better" would imply those things yes
Nice! Do you have any specs or pictures? I'd be really interested.
I think everybody should be happy then. Imagine you have a good PC, then you don’t have to buy the steam machine and yet you can still buy your games on steam and use the steam controller on it.
Why are people upset?
“I can build a better computer for cheaper” great then just do it and be happy you’re not wasting money.
No one is forcing y’all to buy the steam machine.
I don’t think you’re their target group…
They just saw one of those predict (absolutely horrific because they don't even count companies partnerships, prices being different for companies vs common folks etc etc)
It's a safe bet that this will be true. It'll be priced like a prebuilt PC which are always a little more expensive than building yourself
Lol prebuilts were actually cheaper when GPU prices skyrocketed and it may happen again thanks to RAM prices
Prebuilts are often cheaper due to the manufacturers selling bloatet crap as "preinstalled OEM Windows" where they get paid to include a bunch of unnecessary software into their images. That way, they can sell their PCs for cheaper while still making a profit.
They also get better parts prices than consumers if they buy bulk.
So things you can easily remove by resetting Windows, ok got it.
Yes, that has been the conventional wisdom for the last 20 or so years.
I think the argument is the Steam Machine won't get that advantage because it's running Linux out-of-the-box. There's still some stuff that could be bundled, but I expect it not to do so for money. I don't think the Deck does.
One thing to note is that the GPU that Valve is using is apparently a custom one that was created for a cancelled Microsoft project or something, and so Valve is probably getting a better deal on it than we ever could because they're the only ones buying it off the manufacturer.
But regardless, anybody who is willing to build their own PC is not the target market for Valve. The target market is the other 80% of Steam users and potentially console players. A coworker of mine was just talking the other day about a friend of theirs who is replacing their PS4 because Sony is shutting down the PS4 servers, and they were telling them to wait and get the Steam Machine and get out from under Sony's thumb.
There have been multiple points in history where stripping a pre-built for parts was cheaper than buying those parts individually. Honestly, that is probably the case more often than not because they get the parts cheaper.
I kinda think the controllers and size justify a slight premium over building as well though. At least in this stage (mid 40s) of my life.
I'm riding into my fifties - and given recent pricing ridiculousness with video cards and now ram, my desire to build my own is significantly less. No cost savings and then adding the time investment starts to become less attractive as years go by. I was looking forward in the next year or two to upgrade my circa 2020 build. I've held off due to abhorrent video card pricing - Love me some games but I've been playing more single player non-demanding games (metroidvania types).
Probably won’t be cheaper than a PC. Otherwise people are just going to buy it just for cheap compute.
As long as it's not sold at a loss, that's not a problem for Valve.
And if they want to they can sell it like they did initially with the Steam Deck, one purchase per Steam account.
I've heard this so many times. I don't think so. It's still going to be more expensive than a cheap corporate desktop that can't play games, and it's not going to be that good for compute compared to powerful datacenter hardware. I'm assuming some YouTube said this and everyone is repeating it, but I don't think it makes sense. The comparison is always made the the PS3, but it's a very different time and hardware is dramatically different.
For real. I know for a fact that Valve can buy hardware for less than any of us can. Its just a question of how much markup they want to slap on this, but it could easily be cheaper than any of us could build an equivalent.