Valve certainly won't win it, but they're bringing the heat where it wasn't before.
SteamOS is the important part here - if it is proven to be a good console experience (which the deck has basically proven already) then licensing of the OS to other manufacturers will put a lot of pressure on integrated h/w s/w manufacturers.
Unlike the handheld format, the tvbox console is fairly easy to manufacture and is tolerant of a lot of spec and price variety. Any slip up by Sony and Microsoft in specs and price will result in steam machine variants carving away market share, which could force more frequent console releases.
The steam machine will almost certainly come in at a higher price point than the PS5, but with no 'online' subscription charge and reasonably priced storage upgrades we may see these revenue streams disappear from the next console generation in order to compete.
SteamOS isn't perfect, and the variety inherent in the platform that is a strength is also a weakness. The core markets for Nintendo and for Sony aren't going anywhere.
My main game console right now is one of those little gaming boxes you can buy on Amazon for about $400, where I have installed NixOS + Jovian to get the "SteamOS" interface.
I really like it. It really does feel like a "game console"; usually when I've made my own console using Linux, it always feels kind of janky. For example, RetroPie on the Raspberry Pi is pretty cool, but it doesn't feel like a proper commercial product, it feels like a developer made a GUI to launch games.
I have like 750 games on Steam that I have hoarded over the years, in addition to the Epic Games Store and GOG, which can be installed with Heroic, and the fact that I can play them on a "console" instead of a computer makes it much easier to play in my living room or bedroom. It even works fine with the Xbox One controllers; I use the official Microsoft USB dongle to minimize latency, it works great.
I think there actually is a chance that Valve could really be a real competitor, if not a winner.
Which box is that? I personally have a Nvidia Shield with Steam Link to stream games from my gaming computer to my TV. I connected an Xbox controller and it works pretty well. I also use an old iPad for streaming games for games that don't lend themselves well to a controller.
It's obviously not a direct replacement since it still relies on my gaming machine, which not everyone has, but it gets a pretty good console experience, and it's portable.
That sounds interesting because with NixOS it should be very easy to move your config to the next thing, and honestly I prefer NixOS over Arch.
What I wanted to ask you: have you converted the device into a STB as well or is that still standalone?
I installed NixOS + Jovian on my Steamdeck and it works great as well.
Nix support is built-in to SteamOS already btw, I used that to set up Ship of Harkinian for example.
Do you have link to the little gaming box?
Yep! https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0D733JFML?th=1
The one I ordered had 32 gigs of memory; this was more than a year ago so I'm sure there are better ones now, but I have to say that I feel like this thing "punches above its weight" in that it does seem to run a lot more stuff than I thought it would at a decent framerate.
100% agree with everything you said, and also Valve is a huge value prop in the cross-platform Steam store. I already prefer Steam because I have both Windows and Mac machines and generally travel with a MacBook.
Microsoft has limited Xbox to Windows buy-once, Sony has⌠nothing. Valve is building an ecosystem that goes from handheld deck to Windows/Mac/Linux to console to VR.
Itâs been a slow burn but that is a very nice strategy.
The x86 running Windows isnât perfect. The x86 rack system running Linux isnât perfect. Android isnât perfect. The Ford F150 isnât the perfect pickup. Budweiser is far from the perfect beer.
The phrase âworse is betterâ has a lot of historical significance in computing. Long before that, though, Adolphus Busch started his brewing empire. If you take a brewery tour at an Anheuser-Busch brewery, theyâll tell you that the companyâs flagship product, the aforementioned Budweiser, was never intended to be anyoneâs favorite beer.
Thatâs right. One of the top selling beers in the world was never intended to be a personal favorite of a single buyer or beer drinker. What it was designed to be was unobjectionable, approachable, and good enough to serve your guests when their preferred beer runs out. There are so many varieties of beer that are so different, and they are often loved by some and despised by others. So an intentionally unremarkable but quality beverage was marketed to be a very popular second or third choice.
If most households have a Playstation and a Deck or Frame, or have a Switch and a Frame, or have a PC and a Deck then in total numbers the Steam machines just might be the top seller even if itâs not a universal favorite.
Steam on Linux works really well now. I sort of built my own steam machine a few months back with a framework desktop that now sits in my TV rack. Gaming on it is a really good experience. Had to buy a PS5 controller though because I could not get the XBOX controller to work over bluetooth which was a bit of a bummer. For me the new controller is most interesting as most games have XBOX controller support (with xbox button captions) and the steam controller adopts the button naming.
I just built one of these as well. For your Xbox controller, see if this works: find any Windows PC and download the Xbox Accessories app. Connect the controller (via USB) and update its firmware. Once I did this, I was able to pair it with the framework desktop via bluetooth (under linux) reliably, and it's been rock solid ever since. Apparently some of the models shipped with buggy firmware that linux really doesn't like for whatever reason.
If you still have the xbox controller, I'd recommend the dedicated USB wireless adapter. It's reasonably priced and very solid.
Especially if you ever use more than one controller at a time, a dedicated dongle is essential.
I hardly understand the headline. Steam machine is just a computer, and since it can be used for other stuff than playing games, then it can't have the cheap pricing of a console. Most consoles are sold at a loss, and the benefits are made when selling console-exclusive games. If you sell something at a loss, but users aren't forced to buy your games, then you're not gonna make any money. Hence, the Steam Machine (AKA GabeCube) is gonna be as expensive as a laptop (or slightly less expensive because of the bigger form factor and lack of portability).
On top of that, the base OS can't run a ton of games that run on console, because it runs in the way of kernel anti cheats (think: battlefield, call of duty, valorant, league of legends... the biggest games basically), while consoles are guaranteed to run most AAA games.
So with all that in mind - while I appreciate what Valve is doing a lot - I don't think it'll win the "console generation". I hardly see how it can even be called a console. It's just a PC, and that's how they call it themselves.
> Most consoles are sold at a loss
You're thinking of 'back in the day.' The original XBox's video card was worth more than they sold the entire system for, and the PS3 was a complete beast of computation (even if not entirely inappropriate for games...)! But in modern times (PS4 gen onward) consoles have become relatively vanilla midrange computers designed with the intent of turning profit on the hardware as quickly as possible.
The hardware cost of the PS4 was less than it's retail price from day 0 [1], and they began making a profit per unit shortly thereafter. Similarly the PS5 also reached profit per unit in less than a year. [2] XBox models from the PS4 gen onward are conspicuously similar as well.
[1] - https://tech.yahoo.com/general/article/2013-11-19-ps4-costs-...
[2] - https://www.theverge.com/2021/8/4/22609150/sony-playstation-...
PS2 and PS3 were price-competitive with stand-alone DVD and Blu-Ray players (respectively) at launch.
However, Switch is another console that sold for more than component and manufacturing cost at launch.
But most of the cost that needs to be amortized is R&D.
> PS3 were price-competitive with stand-alone Blu-Ray players at launch.
We got a PS3 at home for this very reason, needless to say my brother and I were ecstatic.
> I hardly understand the headline. Steam machine is just a computer, and since it can be used for other stuff than playing games, then it can't have the cheap pricing of a console.
I don't understand this train of thought. It absolutely can have the cheap pricing of a console, as long as Steam is the default store, and the majority of users will use the console as-is and buy games on Steam.
Let me give a quick analogy: Google paid Apple 20B USD just to be the default search engine in Safari, even though users can easily change it. Defaults matter. The vast majority of people are not highly technical users who customize everything in-depth and seek out alternatives. The vast majority of people just use whatever is the default.
The main problem I see is that if this is any cheaper than it's hardware, people will buy 100s of them and stack them in server racks for CI runners or whatever. Generating only losses for Valve and making the hardware unavailable to gamers.
It needs to either be at market rate or locked down to only be useful for gaming.
I don't think they could possibly make it cheap enough for that - especially once you consider all the money being wasted on RGB/Bluetooth/a GPU you won't use.
Messing around with weird consumer hardware in a datacenter context isn't exactly attractive. If all you need is some x86 cores, an off-the-shelf blade server approach gets you far more compute in the same space with far less hassle. Even if the purchase cost is attractive, TCO won't be.
Does it have IPMI? Does it have ECC ram? Racking Mac Minis is a painful enough, this form factor is less rackable than that. If you need to physically adjust the form factor per device, whatever you could've saved will be immediately lost in labor.
you don't remember playstation clusters?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PlayStation_3_cluster
that said, practically buying hundreds of them should prove to be quite difficult.
I think the limitation on server gear these days is electricity price vs compute, with the hardware price being an up front investment but not dominating the lifetime cost. At least at this end of the price range - it's a consumer GPU, not an A100 or anything.
> It absolutely can have the cheap pricing of a console
Valve hasn't committed to a price yet, but they told Gamers Nexus that it'll be priced less like a console and more like an entry level computer (i.e. more expensive than a console).
I didn't say it "will", I said it "can". And since pricing is not announced yet we have no idea what they will do in the end.
Weird statement, because I can search for PS5 pro & see $750 price points, and entry level computers have been far far cheaper. Cheaper than Xbox series X at $650. Getting pretty solid laptops for a bit under $500 has been possible for many years now.
But "entry level computer" has a very broad interpretation available. Could be higher for sure.
Itâs like android. You sell pixel at relatively high price but create a wave of other with cheaper alternatives, so you end up make money from being default store.
It's strange how neither you nor seemingly any of your replies have heard of the Steam Deck.
Valve sold the Deck at a loss that GabeN himself described as "aggressive and painful," 3rd party estimates put it at $150/unit for the base model.
I see no reason to believe they won't employ the same strategy for the Machine. If I can lodge my own bet, I think they'll price it somewhere between a PS5 digital and pro.
> I see no reason to believe they won't employ the same strategy for the Machine.
They have already said its gonna be priced like a computer and not a console. [1]
An "entry level" computer which could mean anything. The first thing I did after the announcement was put together a micro atx PC with similar specs on PCPartPicker and came up with $800, so I consider that the ceiling.
Assuming they can bring costs down at scale and subsidize a bit, I don't think undercutting the PS5 pro is unreasonable.
Laptops have lots of components that the Steam Machine doesn't have. The screen, keyboard, touchpad, cameras, microphones, speakers, battery, et cetera are all fairly small costs, but they add up. Plus using a Linux-based OS instead of Windows automatically knocks around $50 off the price because the price doesn't include the cost of an OEM Windows license.
I don't think the Steam Machine will be priced lower than a PS5 or Xbox (unless Valve is willing to burn money in exchange for market share), but I think that it'll be priced significantly lower than an equivalent-spec laptop (which would be in the $600-800 range based on the fact that the Steam Machine has an "AMD RDNA3 28CUs" GPU, which according to Google is roughly equivalent to an Nvidia RTX 4050, laptops containing which are priced around $600-800).
> Laptops have lots of components that the Steam Machine doesn't have. The screen, keyboard, touchpad, cameras, microphones, speakers, battery, et cetera are all fairly small costs, but they add up. Plus using a Linux-based OS instead of Windows automatically knocks around $50 off the price because the price doesn't include the cost of an OEM Windows license.
Yet's all the mini PCs I've come across are more expensive than their laptop equivalent
Because it's also about the demand, and how much you can mass produce them to reduce the cost
The 'AMD RDNA3 28CUs' is likely to be the 7600M, as all the major specs are the same (power draw and clocks is lower, but given that the Steam Machine is not a laptop, it probably will have more headroom for that).
I mean, Valve built this with the profits, at least, in no small part with the profits from selling games, DLC, and gacha skins on their storefront which has many many competitors too bozo-brained to run their stores as well as Valve does.
If any company has a business case for âweâll sell the form factor at a loss with our store preinstalledâ now itâs Valve, especially if they want to make the hardware only to prove the viability of the form factor, and especially since they already have been selling on platforms they donât own.
For me, the big killer feature would be if this device is approved for modern media DRM. As much as I'm tired of streaming and its level of control over how I watch TV, it's still a decent part of my media consumption, but any Linux mini-PC I connect to the TV can only do low-resolution streaming from most providers. If the steam machine is approved for high-resolution streaming, it could totally replace the smart TV stack in most homes.
Yes, I think one of the most important things we as consumers can do is flood the zone for companies like Netflix, Disney, and Apple and keep asking about native Steam Machine apps installed directly from the Steam store that support 4k streams.
But if more people didn't have locked down devices, the streamers would be forced to open up.
> Yes, Steam Machine is optimized for gaming, but it's still your PC. Install your own apps, or even another operating system. Who are we to tell you how to use your computer?
That makes me very happy.
> The big thing I want to see in practice is their implementation of foveated rendering. This beautiful hack abuses the fact that human eyes have the most sharpness and fidelity at the exact centre of your field of vision, whereas your peripheral vision is abysmal at it. This means that on average you only have to render about 10% of the frame at maximum quality for it to feel like it's running at full resolution all over the screen.
> This should make the fact that the Frame is using a "weaker" CPU/GPU irrelevant. Games should look fine as long as they render the slice that needs to be in full quality fast enough.
It's not foveated rendering, it's foveated streaming. The CPU/GPU should easily be able to handle decoding video, whether foveated or not.
What they're saying is that they might have a foviated rendering solution in addition to the foviated streaming solution we know about, and we'd like to hear about it.
It is for games running natively
> The only possible flaw I can see is that the strap it ships with doesn't go over the top of your head. If this ends up being an issue in practice, somebody is going to make a third party strap that just fixes this problem
Not even a third party: https://youtu.be/b7q2CS8HDHU?t=380
> the option of an ergonomic strap that you can hook onto the top, hook onto the back, to take more weight off the front of your head.
https://www.pcgamer.com/hardware/vr-hardware/steam-frame-spe...
> There's an optional ergonomic accessories kit for the Steam Frame that adds an extra strap for your head and a pair of straps, one for each controller. These added controller straps are reminiscent of those found on the Index and seem like a reasonable investment, if the price is right.
To win this console generation and outsell the PS5, Valve would have to sell 85 million Steam Machines (as of today, and likely need to sell 120 million by the end of the generation). About a 0% chance of that happening.
Looks cool, though
The Nintendo Switch also sold over 150 million units, and the Switch 2 has had a faster sales velocity so far.
Steam only has something like 140 million monthly active users, so moving that much hardware is incredibly far fetched.
I'm implying they'd win via a cultural victory TBH
I am up for a lego pyramid made of Steam machines.
Surely the Steam Machine is in a newer generation than the PS5?
Its specs seem on par with the PS5 Pro, and this doesn't even have a price or a shipping date yet.
The PS5 is already about five years old, has had a slim release and a PS5 Pro. The PS6 announcement is probably a year away, with a 2027 or 2028 release.
Valve is launching a last-gen console, probably at a price that won't be competitive, right before the PS6 comes out.
and do that while having none of the big multiplayer games
Maybe a bit early to call it, but I'm hoping for it as well.
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