this post was submitted on 18 Dec 2025
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Well, It's a game box that doesn't record everything you do, shove it into AI, and sell all your secrets to the highest bidder.
It's basically a linux PC from a reputable vendor that comes with support.
And yeah, you could build your own cheaper.
Notably, though, this is the case with any pre-built PC; the Steam Box isn't an exception. We don't know the final price or specs yet but presumably it's no worse value than buying something from e.g. Dell. Probably better value purely based on it coming with Linux and without the bloatware.
And also cheaper because steam expects to make additional money on each user in the future via steam purchases, so they can keep the margin smaller in the hardware price
Steam has explicitly said they are not subsidizing the steam machine as other console makers do
iirc they said they weren't selling at a loss, but that's not the same thing as selling at a low margin. PC manufacturers have to make essentially 100% of their profit from the initial sale of the device, but valve can make a smaller profit from the sale of each device because they know each device will lead to additional profit through game purchases
I thought pc makers made side profits with all the bloatware they install. And possibly some weird deals with M$ too.
Like everything else, you can find some that do and some that don't. Best yet, it goes both ways. When someone sells you a bloated PC, they often share a bit of the payoff with you making the price slightly cheaper than would be possible otherwise.
Historically M$ has even threatened manufacturers NOT to sell with Linux installed. They attacked some major retail brands, threatened to pull their license to sell windows.
it's a great big clusterfuck
They don't know that, if they sell cheap enough it might be worth it for a random office somewhere to order a hundred and use them as work computers with no intention to ever buy a game in them. Also they aren't going to be locked, nothing prevents you from getting one and run games purchased in every market under the sun that isn't steam (and/or pirated games).
I don't think they have any certainty that they'll even make decent money on them. I am hopeful that this will be good for everyone but can't exactly see how at the moment.
https://www.vice.com/en/article/valve-finally-confirms-leaked-steam-machine-price-rumors/
Well, it's true we don't have actual numbers yet, we do have some pretty solid info on the hardware. And we have some statements from Valve themselves that it's not going to be console-priced, even though the hardware is clearly console specced.
Don't get me wrong. I really really want it to work out well. I would love to have well, supported Linux workstations in people's hands.
But I think we're going to find its price is going to shove it into a niche audience.
With the prices of RAM...
Valve would have secured a pipeline prior to announcing the news at least for the first however many thousand/million/whatever units
This article says absolutely nothing except here say from a YouTuber?
They didn't confirm anything?
biggest point.
When you build your own linux pc, you will always have a big risk of some unexpected problems. Lowering the bar of technical expertise to run linux is the main selling point here IMO.
Yeah, I think the missing point is the average Lemmy user is not the target market. This is Steam's attempt to grab market share from the other consoles. People with gaming PCs are probably already using steam. People with Xbox or PS are probably not. Steam needs to provide an out of the box ready product to let them existing console players play steam.
And it will be a development target, meaning devs will put in some effort to get their games working nicely on it.
This is me. I used to be a PC tinkerer back in the day. But now, ain’t nobody got time for that.
NGL, I kinda want one as a desktop. I have better gaming systems, but having a little borg cube on my desk with an ok amount of horsepower pushing two monitors would be pretty neat. I'd either give it a Tardis siege mode skin or a borg cube skin
Not just the highest bidder. All bidders.
I call BS.
At what theoretical price point for a Steam Machine, can you match the or exceed the specs, for less cost?
Ok, now also try to do that, and match the Steam Machine's power draw, and form factor.
... Go on, show me your build, with current US prices.
Unless I somehow missed an actual price announcement for the Steam Machine, I wanna see how cheap you can get an actually comparable build done for.
Hey troll, go find a hobby.
I'm still waiting for a build and a price point for it.
Would you like to see the build I've been planning out for a while?
Its not an attempt to replicate a Steam Machine, its more of a... maximum possible bang for your buck build... it does have a similar form factor though, and an unconventional kind of architecture...
...though I did try to replicate a PS5 price point/performance parity build a while back... turns out, its not as easy as you may think to just lay out a PC build that's actually pretty close in price/performance to a non PC standard architecture, made by a large corporation.
Or did you just want to do some namecalling, and entirely avoid actually backing up your claim?
You said you could probably make that build.
I'm just asking you to actually do that.