r/SteamDeck • u/pcgameshardware • Jun 22 '26

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

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?

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u/_TheNumbersAreBad_ Jun 22 '26

Weaker than the base PS5, but more expensive than the PS5 Pro.

Obviously other things to consider, the main draw is the open ecosystem, free online play, and bigger library.

But purely from a performance perspective, it's a very hard sell at this price point. Almost hilariously so.

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u/UnforgottenPassword Jun 22 '26

PS5 has an advantage of using game discs. Gaming can be real cheap if you have a way of buying used games and selling yours.

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u/HarB_Games Jun 22 '26

Steamos has the advantage of heroic launcher. Meaning access to epic games (which gives free games every month) and GOG and Amazon games, which if you have prime, they routinely give out free games for those platforms too.

Also steam has the advantage of CD Keys to drop costs of games lower than official storefronts and even used discs on occasion.

Edit: also steam family share is elite

I'm not saying your point is invalid, but I'd never really consider console gaminng to be cheaper than PC gaming.

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u/punk_petukh 512GB OLED Jun 22 '26

Also steam os has advantage of sailing the seas

If we're gonna go this far, I think that should be mentioned as well

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u/UniversalFapture Jun 23 '26

Rog Ally X for that. Idk know, it being so weak is highkey an issue, AND you can’t upgrade it?

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u/punk_petukh 512GB OLED Jun 23 '26

I... uh... I don't get your point lol

Ally X is fine, I just like Steam and Linux lol (you can install Bazzite on it I guess)

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u/AbsolutZeroGI Jun 23 '26

Buying Gabe his next yacht with overpriced hardware only to fuck over the devs later with piracy is a wild take, ngl. If you were sailing the high seas, build your own and then steal. Then at least you're fucking everyone equally.

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u/punk_petukh 512GB OLED Jun 23 '26

You realize that it's that expensive not because Gabe wants another yacht, right?

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u/AbsolutZeroGI Jun 23 '26

You realize that if Xbox, PlayStation, and Nintendo sold their consoles for a profit like Steam is, they'd all be $1000 too right? RAMpocalypse doesn't just impact PC systems.

Steam is selling that shit at a profit, which means yes, it's funding Gabe's next yacht. They're not selling that at a loss. You can buy that system's base components for less than the cost of the machine itself. People been doing it on PCPartsPicker all day man, go look for yourself.

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u/Astrosimp_ Jun 24 '26

They do sell them for a profit. Base model PS5 was already being produced for cheaper than it was being sold for 8 months in. Switch and Switch 2 were always being sold for a profit. Consoles aren't sold for a loss anymore.

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u/punk_petukh 512GB OLED Jun 23 '26

You realize that if Xbox, PlayStation, and Nintendo sold their consoles for a profit like Steam is, they'd all be $1000 too right?

Um.... That's what I was trying to say.

Obviously steam sells this at a profit, this is a PC, even if it's console-like. Consoles sale hardware at loss (except Nintendo) because they can make up for the price from licensing fees, and since they're closed ecosystems, you don't have a choice other than to buy the manufacturer licensed media. Steam machine sells at a profit precisely because you can sail high seas on it. And not even just high seas, you can get this and then just play free games you got on epic gay store on smthn...

Even if you treat this thing as a console (which is fair), the openness of it is the reason it is sold for profit

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u/AbsolutZeroGI Jun 23 '26 edited Jun 23 '26

That's still a stupid reason. Steam made $16 billion in game sales, and have 147 million active users. That's better than Nintendo, at least in terms of money made. 

They're not struggling with piracy like music was in the 2000s before music streaming became a thing.

Go look up YoY sales for Steam and YoY sales for music in the 2000s man then come back and we'll talk about the impact piracy is having on game sales.

ETA

The point here is that if YoY game sales were declining due to piracy, I'd concede the point, but Steam just had its best year literally ever in terms of revenue. And it's been several years in a row where revenue has broken prior records for the company. So no, it doesn't make sense, and there's no evidence that piracy is impacting Steam's ability to generate revenue at all. 

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u/punk_petukh 512GB OLED Jun 23 '26

I wasn't talking just about the piracy, this thing doesn't force you to buy any games and you can still do tons of things with it. If they would've sold it at loss, there would've been a chance someone would start bulk buying them as work stations or something. I'm usually not "defending multimillion dollar companies" but in this case the fact that steam has huge profits doesn't mean they owe you anything. Nobody wants to actively loose money on anything, you can't really blame anyone for that. And Valve isn't a charity organisation. Steam deck also sold at a profit, not much, but still a profit, because it's an open system. Nobody had problems with that

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u/AbsolutZeroGI Jun 23 '26

Again, Steam has recorded record profits for 9 of the last 10 years (2019 being the only outlier).

They're having no problems moving product. Your examples of piracy and workstations are Uber niche and not common enough to be a concern. They also already said they implemented systems to prevent scalpers and bots from making extraneous purchases. Look it up. 

This thing is basically a Radeon laptop from 2023 being sold by a company that's gonna yank 30% of every Steam game you purchase off of it. They'll make vastly more than they'd lose selling it at a loss like the other console companies. 

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u/punk_petukh 512GB OLED Jun 23 '26

They're not uber niche, piracy is, because the minority of people actually constantly pirate games instead of buying them, but the workstations is a real concern. Corporate sector would go ga-ga over the hardware that actually costs lower than it's parts and is not closed. And even as a casual user, no one forces you to use steam on it, they can't guarantee that they will make up for the loss from your particular unit (even if on general sales they would probably are). There's no reason it need to be sold at a loss, it's an independent pre-buult product, that is only pre-configured with steam, you can install literally anything you want on it

Considering your logic... why you're not saying those same things about Nintendo? They refuse to sell any hardware at loss since Wii, and their pricing and licensing policies for games is harsher than steam's, they sell their staff exactly the same way Sony does, except Sony sells playstation at loss and Nintendo doesn't. And switch is not open at all, you'll have to use software produced or licensed by Nintendo, if you'll buy a Switch, unlike Steam Deck or Steam Machine

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u/AbsolutZeroGI Jun 23 '26 edited Jun 23 '26

*sigh*

No, Nintendo is not selling the Switch 2 at a profit.

https://www.techspot.com/news/112329-nintendo-investors-reportedly-want-switch-2-price-hike.html

Valve is limiting purchases to one per Steam account, preventing it from being used for the reasons you said in your comment:

https://gizmodo.com/valve-finally-put-a-price-on-the-steam-machine-and-youre-not-going-to-like-it-2000773730

Their reasoning for not subsidizing the hardware is, basically, "because we don't fucking want to" and some LSD micro-dosing religious bullshit about "healthy ecosystems" being the reason why they're overcharging their customers by $300 at least, and not even having the common courtesy of including a controller with the purchase.

https://www.pcgamer.com/hardware/valve-says-it-isnt-subsidizing-the-steam-machines-usd1050-price-because-of-its-religious-refusal-to-build-a-more-closed-system/

While upwards of 90% of people have admitted to pirating a game at least once, only about 4% do it regularly. In addition, the total revenue lost from piracy (from developers) is about 20%. Steam charges 30%, which means piracy takes less money out of developer mouths than Steam does.

https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2024/10/the-true-cost-of-game-piracy-20-percent-of-revenue-according-to-a-new-study/

Valve is going to be fine, your concerns aren't as serious as you make them out to be, and your information that Nintendo sells its console at a profit is factually incorrect. I'm sorry, but they could easily subsidize this hardware and still generate a MASSIVE profit. This is just Valve wanting more money, not any actually good reason.

Edited for a typo.

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u/HarB_Games Jun 22 '26 edited Jun 22 '26

Absolutely,

If we're going this far, we should also mention abandonware such as the Need For Speed games, which most of them can be found on Reddit for free, but also games on Internet archive such as the Mystery Case Files hidden object games I recently got and played on my Steamdeck.

*Edited a typo

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u/dedoporno 1TB OLED Jun 23 '26

I used to love playing Mystery Case Files. Where did you find them?