Technology

Yes, I'm ready. I'm interested in buying all three new products. Whether I do depends on price. I'm fine with not buying them if I deem them not worth the cost for me.

I kinda doubt Valve would produce and sell a Machine with a 1k USD target price. When watching the announcement video, I was wondering how affordable it would be, whether it would be something like 300 € (not having seen any specs), although the “runs even the big titles” puts that into question to a degree.

There's no real use in speculating. It's better to just wait. I didn't look for or into third party information either. I'm waiting for official information, waiting for the next announcements and/with product page launches.

From everything we have heard... I would be shocked if it wasn't pretty damned close.

Gamers Nexus touched on the pricing info they were given. Go watch the video to confirm but off the top of my head:

• The Steam Machine will be priced competitively with an entry level computer
• The Steam Frame will be below the price of an Index

So what that translates to is

• The Steam Machine will likely be in the 800-1500 USD range
• The Steam Frame will be up to 1000 USD

Which... sounds about right. The Steam Frame is going to use a comparatively cheap Snapdragon processor but it still needs all the HMD tech. The Facebook Quest 3 is around 500 USD and considering economy of scale... that is probably the price floor for the Steam Frame.

And the Steam Machine? That is rocking a proper Zen 4 with 16 gigs of DDR5 and 8 gigs of DDR6. Considering how expensive RAM already is and how that probably ain't going down until late 2026 at the earliest... And it is worth noting that people lost their shit over the ROG XBOX ALLY X S 45 WHATEVER being 1k but... spec wise that lines up with similar laptops. The display is a decent chunk of that, which the Steam Machine won't have, but.. yeah.

Computers is expensive. Especially in a Post Liberation Day world. It will be a miracle if the base console price (because you can bet the PS6 is gonna do the same stupid bullshit MS did with the Series S...) is below 900 USD with the "real" price being well over 1k. And the Steam Machine is going to be priced along those lines because Valve (presumably) doesn't have a bunch of warehouses full of parts from five years ago.

The good news is that if you already have a gaming PC, and don't need the Valve branding, you can get a pretty solid AMD NUC for 300-600 USD that will run Bazzite perfectly and play a lot of your games locally with the rest streaming over Moonlight or Steam Link. GMKtec pretty much have this market on lock and I personally love my K11 (overkill but also really nice to not have to walk upstairs to wake my desktop for every single game).

You'll have the same nonsense with HDMI 2.1 as the Steam Machine will (so VRR) and AMD but there are workarounds for that (basically you flash a displayport dongle to be REAL sketchy). And you'll be able to take advantage of most of the software improvements Valve are pushing for SteamVR, SteamOS, and Steam Link that are going to be coming rapidly for the launch. MUCH less oomph but... people who are expecting proper 4k experiences out of a Steam Machine are lying to themselves.

I mean I have a pretty decent laptop i can plug that into my TV with out needing steam to provide gaming hardware..

I would pay 700 for the 2TB bundled with the new controller.

Not going to happen

For $1000 I prefer to buy a real PC with a x64 processor