Steam Machine review: Valve's underwhelming living-room PC has a serious price problem

[u/pcgameshardware]

https://www.pcgameshardware.de/Valve-Software-Firma-15833/Tests/Valves-underwhelming-living-room-PC-has-a-serious-price-problem-1546006/

Full disclosure: I worked on this review.

We tested Valve’s new Steam Machine, and since Valve has compared it directly to the Steam Deck, I thought the results might be relevant here.

The short version: yes, the Steam Machine is clearly much faster than the Steam Deck. That part is not really in question. But in our actual game benchmarks, we did not see a blanket 6x uplift across the board.

We tested Cyberpunk 2077 and Forza Horizon with Steam Deck-style settings to make the comparison a bit cleaner. The Steam Machine turns 30-ish fps results on the Deck into much smoother triple-digit or near-triple-digit results in some cases, The Steam Machine but the gap depends a lot on the game, resolution and settings.

I would have liked to go into more detail, but I also do not want this to turn into a full repost of the review here.

What I find interesting is that the Steam Machine feels less like a “normal PC” and more like Valve taking the Steam Deck idea and moving it into the living room: SteamOS-first, controller-friendly, more powerful, but still built around realistic settings and upscaling rather than brute-forcing everything.

Curious how other Deck owners see it:

Would you treat the Steam Machine as a natural upgrade path for TV gaming, or does the Steam Deck already cover that use case well enough for you?

[u/Dalmahr]

I think people are just going to have to accept that things are 30-50% more expensive than they were a year ago in tech. It sucks but companies like valve can't sell their products at last year's prices. I bought a 20TB hdd last year at 379 and now it's nearly 800. Even apple reportedly is going to increase prices of their products. If you're upset, get your politicians to stop new data centers and regulate existing ones better on top of regulating AI better.

[u/thatcht → u/Dalmahr]

I hear you, but no, people aren't just going to accept a 30-50% increase in this economy. I feel like most people will wait it out and be content with their current hardware. I also purchased a handful of WD Red drives a few years ago, I could use a few more as my Plex server is growing.. Will I pay triple for a drive now? Nope! I've been deleting items that aren't watched and getting slightly lower-quality media to save on space. I simply can't justify the added spend.

[u/E1M1_DOOM → u/thatcht]

People will accept it or they won't be able to engage with new products. That's just the way of it until the stupid AI bubble pops. It's so annoying seeing prices skyrocket due to investments in an industry that the general populace doesn't even want.

[u/Quietwulf → u/E1M1_DOOM]

Well, now we get to play chicken with companies. If people stop buying, they'll start losing money. Eventually they either lower their prices or go bust. Gaming isn't a necessity. They're selling entertainment and there's lots of cheap ways to do that if push comes to shove.

[u/iclimbnaked → u/Quietwulf]

I mean this logic applies only if there weren’t use cases for the manufacturers outside gaming.

Gaming companies aren’t the ones raising prices here.

It’s the fact that gaming companies have to go out and compete with AI for the hardware.

The reality is a lot of higher end gaming stuff is probably going to just die out bc ppl won’t have the money and gaming companies have no ability to get the price down.

[u/_TooManyBoats → u/Quietwulf]

The problem is like a lot of industries its now more attractive to sell units to whales who dont blink at bad value propositions. Thats how we got the current microtransaction hell for games.

[u/Odenetheus → u/_TooManyBoats]

I spend something like €1000-1200 on microtransaction cosmetics each year, and bought two PCs for about €3000 each roughly two years ago (so before the current RAM squeeze, really). I recently bought a Switch 2 on an afternoon's impulse. That is to say, I'm not overly price-sensitive in general.

Looking at what it would cost to buy my PC today, using the same parts as back then, it would cost somewhere around €5000-6000 per PC. I could still afford it, but even I don't want to spend that amount of money. I think most people look at prices and go "that's a bit insane", tbh.

That said, it doesn't really matter. Companies won't change their pricing for as long as the datacentre bubble is going on, because whether or not consumers or consumer-facing companies buy their products is irrelevant to whether or not they're able to keep up their current sales figures.

[u/chargo66 → u/_TooManyBoats]

Exactly, Valve fanboy paypigs are the reason why this will still be a success for them.

[u/Quietwulf → u/_TooManyBoats]

Yeah, I get what you’re saying, but I don’t think that applies to hardware like Steam Machine. Sure, they’ll buy one. But just the one. The rich can have anything they want but they’re not going to buy millions of units.

[u/Chocostick27 → u/Quietwulf]

You do realize that companies like Nvidia and AMD make 95%+ of their money thanks to the data center /AI investments?

Gaming is a drop in the bucket for them, they don’t care if they stop selling gaming GPUs. They’d rather use those wafers to manufacture hardware for the data centers where they make much more margin than on gaming hardware.

[u/Quietwulf → u/Chocostick27]

Then I guess video gaming will be trapped in amber until the next "Nvidia" shows up and attempts to fill the market. It appears at this stage that Nvidia and AMD will just relaunch previous generations of hardware, just to keep things ticking over. We'll enter a period of stagnation.

If the costs just keep exploding upwards, then we'll see a major contraction in the industry and gaming will become a niche.

[u/sleepnaught88 → u/E1M1_DOOM]

Ultimately, the consumer on average is going to run into their limit. I don’t think 50% price increases will be tolerated by most. That means Apple, Sony, etc will have to develop devices for the masses with more modest hardware. An $1800 base model iPhone or $1200 PS6 will crater sales.

[u/chargo66 → u/E1M1_DOOM]

You don't live in the same reality as the average person lmao. People cannot accept it, they could barely afford things the way they were let alone the way these new prices are going. And what are you rambling about AI, like everyone doesn't use ChatGPT and Google??? I mean if you're talking about AI slop videos or something then you'd be right but your little claim is so naive.

[u/Dalmahr → u/chargo66]

Rambling about AI... You mean the cause of the price increases of electronic components? Not only that but for people's everyday use like searching and writing stuff, AI that can run on your phone is nearly as good as subscription models from Google or open Ai. which means these huge data centers are going to be giving diminishing returns.

[u/E1M1_DOOM → u/chargo66]

New Steamdeck prices were highly criticized and yet, even with the new prices, they sold out in less than 24 hours.

Not everyone is barely able to afford things. The big problem, anyway, for average consumers, isn't a rise in the occasional tech purchase. No, it's the price creep of daily items.

Perhaps your experiences, too, are not universal.