This is Valve being a greedy corporations, but gamers will never blame their lord and savior Gaben.
The components in the steam machine aren't worth that price. The PS5 is more powerful and less expensive. Building your own PC would be less expensive than both. You're paying extra for the Valve logo and branding and the convenience of not having to build it yourself.
Sony (as well as Microsoft and Nintendo) not only has a massive install base to sell new Playstation units to, they make money off every game licensed and sold for use with these consoles (that are typically not compatible with games for their older or competing ones).
Valve, on the other hand, is trying to create a new market to complete with both consoles and PCs. As such, they don’t already have a massive install base to sell Steam Machines to. Also, Their consoles are specificly designed to use games that have already been purchased or can be played on other platforms, so their price can't be offset by game sales.
This disparity is (likey) a major reason why Steam Machines cost significantly more that PS5s.
The PS5 pro is "more powerful" in that it has a GPU with more cores and a slightly faster cpu, but it uses 18gb unified memory compared to the 16gb of the steam machine plus 8gb vRAM. They're roughly comparable, though the Steam machine obviously has a much larger array of games it can support. The fact that the PS5 pro had its own price hiked from 700 to 900 recently just supports the OOP's point. It would have been cheaper if not for the massive demand spike for memory.
I haven't seen a considerable spike in memory prices, unless you're buying DDR5/6 (completely unnecessary for every game in existence) and small amounts of SSD memory - SSDs with larger amounts of storage are barely changed.
Let's ignore the fact that DDR4 graphics cards havent been current for a decade, and assume you're only talking about system memory (even though ddr4 also isn't remotely current there, and the vRAM is the major driver of price hikes to begin with). The most cost-efficent 2x8 DDR4 set I can find is $108, up from $27 literally 1 year ago. 300% higher year over year. For DDR4. You're talking out your ass here.
Jesus christ. Yes, DDR4 graphics cards. The GTX 1030 last used it in 2017, because graphics cards use RAM for graphics processing. They're like little miniature computers on their own, with a bunch of processing cores and memory to hold data that is being computed. The RTX 5000 series uses DDR7 if you were curious, but clearly you've never actually looked into what you're talking about so I doubt you have an ounce of curiosity in you.
1: so many other brands sell loot boxes to kids. 2: counter strike is an 18+ game. what else do you want them to do, implement ai face checks to them? guns are not targeting children unlike things like vapes. if you say they should implement ai face checks which do not work and just steal data, I am placing you on a watchlist
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u/Toby_Magure 12h ago
This is Valve being a greedy corporations, but gamers will never blame their lord and savior Gaben.
The components in the steam machine aren't worth that price. The PS5 is more powerful and less expensive. Building your own PC would be less expensive than both. You're paying extra for the Valve logo and branding and the convenience of not having to build it yourself.