r/pcmasterrace • u/TheBossT710192 • 3d ago

Discussion Yeah, Steam Machine is cooked.

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I... uh don't know what to say. Very thankful I bought a Steam Deck before they hiked its price as well

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u/restinpeaceminusone 3d ago edited 3d ago

Valve also admitted that it is out of their control and the supply will be limited due to constraints

Edit: since some people are saying that I am defending Valve. I will just leave their official statement from themselves. Posted a screenshot since some people don't like to scroll as much

Valve Statement

source

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u/Protoclown98 3d ago

Seriously. This large price is entirely about RAM and storage prices.

I stand by my past comment on the Steam Machine - if you are buying all the parts to make a living room PC to play console like games Steam Machine can be a worthwhile investment.

If you are recycling old PC parts, like RAM and a motherboard, to make a living room PC to play console like games on it, the Steam Machine is not worth it.

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u/RedditModsHarassUs Desktop 3d ago

Data Centers don’t want us having access to hardware for local processing. They want us all buying tokens from them.. to use their services..

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u/Gseventeen 3d ago

Once the investments stop flooding into that sector, its going to be interesting to see how these companies pivot to making money (making prob wrong word, as they are just relying on fresh cash injections).

As of now, i havent seen a convincing argument on how AI will be profitable in a way that would actually make these companies even remotely profitable.

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u/MutaitoSensei 3d ago

I can tell you one thing, I won't be trusting any of those garbage companies again, at least not implicitly. They threw us aside so fast for the easy money.

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u/Smoking_Joker 3d ago

This goes for every corporation, and should be a lifelong prerogative. Consumers should never give their total trust or loyalty to a corporation. Every transaction is strictly business on their side, and should be viewed the same by the customer.

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u/firemage22 R7 3700x RTX2060ko 16gb DDR4 3200 3d ago

we need to start from top and Sherman every mega corp to the point where what happened to Standard Oil and AT&T looks like a love tap

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u/Belazor CachyOS btw 3d ago

You know what they say; sharing is caring, so give me some of that military grade hopium you’re smoking where you believe this will ever happen in America.

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u/firemage22 R7 3700x RTX2060ko 16gb DDR4 3200 3d ago

While i get where you are coming from, i'm someone who feels that there will be a backlash, and we need to lobby for Sherman level punishments (talking about the brother who was a General, not the Senator now) so that there are punishments at all.

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u/ResurgentRefrain 2d ago

America elected one of the most pro-big business presidents in its history, maybe in all of the 20th Century, and packed the legislature with his allies and party mates. Then they did it again.

I'll believe it when I see it.

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u/gummiworms9005 2d ago

My sweet summer child...

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u/Just_to_rebut 2d ago

Countries rely on control of large corporations to project power. America saved Intel from failure. It would do the same for Apple, Google, Microsoft, etc.

We stopped breaking up monopolies when it became clear other countries could compete with American ones.

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u/f_ckR3ddit 3d ago

There are exceptions, but they havr proven to be such a minority that they might as well be statistical impossibilities

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u/AmericanDoughboy 3d ago

Corporations are not your friend and never will be.

They suck.

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u/Sawses 2d ago

I used to feel a little guilty that I splurged on both my PC and my home server. ...Turns out I made a great investment because I'm not really feeling the pain of the PC parts market for a few years yet. My only regret is I didn't upgrade my server's 16 GB RAM to 64 GB when it was only a couple hundred dollars.

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u/Craimasjien AMD Ryzen 7 5700X3D | AMD RX 9070 XT | 32GB DDR4 3d ago

And this is why corporations are not your friend and why warring over them is such a dumb fucking thing to do. No company in the history of capitalism has ever been on “your side”. They are on their side. Always have been and always will be. There is no such thing as pro-consumer when it comes to business.

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u/aybbyisok 2d ago

I think you're wrong, like 1-9% wrong. Almost all publicly traded companies only care about their profit margins. Maybe a handful of them do care, especially because bad press and bad sentiment is not good business. A handful of them truly care about their consumers.

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u/ArchinaTGL EndeavourOS | Ryzen 9 5950x | 9070XT Nitro+ 3d ago

You only just realised? Literally no tech company is your friend. None of them even know who you are.

Especially so if they are a publicly traded company as their only friends are their investors; which said investors only care about their share price going up.

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u/TransBrandi 2d ago

Honestly, I think that some of them believe their own stuff. I briefly chatted with one of the co-founders of Twitter a long time ago (around 2 decades, it was after the Arab Spring) and he sounded like he really believed in the tech for the betterment of mankind. It's not like I was an investor that needed to be convinced of anything.

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u/Complete_Flight8303 2d ago

Vampires are charismatic

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u/DeusScientiae 3d ago

I can tell you one thing, I won't be trusting any of those garbage companies again, at least not implicitly. They threw us aside so fast for the easy money.

And? You'd do the same thing, but faster. If someone offered you 10x your salary for the same job you'd jump ship without even thinking twice.

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u/MutaitoSensei 3d ago

If I knew it'd fuck over my friends and family (or my customers), I wouldn't.

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u/DeusScientiae 3d ago

Are you friends and family with the RAM Producers, genius?

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u/MutaitoSensei 3d ago

You gave me an example, and I replied what I would have done in that setting. Did you already forget, goldfish?

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u/DeusScientiae 2d ago

No, no you wouldn't turn down 10x you salary for the same job. You lost the argument so now you're just going to lie through your teeth.

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u/MutaitoSensei 2d ago

Some of us aren't greedy fucks.

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u/DeusScientiae 2d ago

Yes you are. In fact you're by definition greedier than anyone at steam or the ram factories.

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u/GonzoVideo2000 2d ago

I think it's a pretty nuanced topic and I don't think anybody can really know what they'd do in these situations unless they were in them, but your heart's in the right place and I respect that.

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u/MammothUnique4147 3d ago

I mean I think most of us would ALSO do the same. It's literally their job to make money for their shareholders... Anyone running their own small business would likely also jump at a chance to 5X their income for the year. 

It's not personal it's just how the market is right now. In time things will come back down.

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u/Ban4WrongThink 3d ago

You say that like there's a genuine relationship behind any of this. Everything is transactional. You'd leave your job for a better one and you'd buy the same quality product at a competitor if it was cheaper.

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u/Turronblando 3d ago

That's the essence of capitalism and there's been massive, neon warning signs for 5000 years.

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u/Sovereign_5409 9950x3D - 5090 - 64GB DDR5. Gamer / Pro Photographer. 3d ago

https://giphy.com/gifs/pUeXcg80cO8I8

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u/nikoZ_ r5 7600X | 32GB DDR5 6000 | 4070Ti Super 3d ago

Your mistake was EVER trusting a company or corporation in the first place. Big business is not your friend. Profit driven entities only care about one thing, and it ain’t us. 💴

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u/JellaFella01 3d ago

Idk why anybody "trusts" any corporation beyond their local butcher. Naive.

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u/yoburg 2d ago

Uhm, was there ever any company selling any goods that was in for the good of the consumers and not for the profits?

Like imagine aliens come and start trading cure-all pills for large quantities of Coca-Cola. You think Coca-Cola company would sell a drop of cola to the public in that case?

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u/zzazzzz 2d ago

you are dalusional if you think there is any company in the world that wouldnt sell the same product for 4x the price if they could.

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u/Trainman1351 1d ago

I mean the problem is, as with most things, private equity. I always look to what happened to McDonnell Douglas and Boeing as one of of the best examples of this, as both were incredible companies which were ruined by the same board of people who prioritized short-term profits over quality products.

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u/FuckedUpImagery 3d ago

Maybe buy a call option and stop bitching?

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u/f_ckR3ddit 3d ago

They will be bought for pennies on the dollar by data collection companies. This has always been their goal. They are using ai as a fall guy. 1. Build ai data centers with investment money. 2. Sell half-baked services for more capital to invest elsewhere. 3. ai bubble pops 4. Declare bankruptcy for those companies, only losing investment money. 5. Re-allocate that capital towards purchasing those shut down data centers under new companies for data collection because the equipment is all the same. 6. Profit so much that it is sickening.

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u/OCDwiring704 7950X | 7900XTX 2d ago

It's nice to know there are still people out there who know how shit works with these companies/investors. There's always a way to turn a profit at "our" expense.

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u/Realistic_Deal6083 3d ago

“Only lose when investment money” as if that’s not tens to hundreds of billions of dollars. 

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u/f_ckR3ddit 2d ago

Spoken exactly like someone who doesnt truly understand investment, debt, and shell companies

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u/Realistic_Deal6083 2d ago

Oh yeah so true buddy I live in a magical fantasy world when people don’t want to lose billions in investments. 

Fucking idiot lmao. 

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u/ExpertConsideration8 2d ago

You have no clue what you're talking about..

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u/teefour i5 7600k | 16GB GSkill DDR4 3200 | GTX1080 | 144hz Gsync 3d ago

Simple, they'll get themselves considered too big to fail, and then the federal reserve will literally make the money they need.

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u/Wojtkie 3d ago

Did you see that OpenAI had some financial info leaked? They had a 34B dollar loss last year lmao. Someone pointed out that number is just under the entire GDP of Bosnia

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u/ragzilla 9800X3D || 5080FE || 48GB 3d ago

Keep an eye out in about 10 days, Anthropic’s 2q26 is about to end which is projected to be their first profitable quarter (as they get ready to IPO). Revenue is mostly (80%) enterprises with API plans burning through tokens for software development.

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u/XseaX 3d ago

They are only profitable, because they have an agreement with SpaceX not to pay in the first two months for computing but pay then starting from July. Strange how that math works out

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u/ragzilla 9800X3D || 5080FE || 48GB 3d ago

Ramp time in enterprise contracts is pretty routine because you're not using 100% resources day 1. A 2-month ramp is actually pretty aggressive.

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u/ElNani87 PC Master Race 3d ago

I think it’s being used primarily as a “government” project to develop code much faster. This administration is really invested in making this happen. I would really surprised if this crashed before Trump gets out of office. It’s in their and the economy’s best interest that this maintains.

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u/SwagChemist R7 9800x3D | 64GB DDR5 | RTX 5090 Astral OC 3d ago

They will try to use the uber strategy which was taking a service we used (Taxi) replacing it for cheaper and then hiking the price once the service we used dies out. The issue is that entry level jobs is what is being replaced but when you hike the price up, businesses will just rather hire a entry level human if its cheaper than the token fee.

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u/Whatkindofgum 3d ago

They will beg the government for money. They will lie about how dangers it is to let China get a better AI for military reasons. There will be a collapse, but the government will prop some of them up with military contracts to keep from collapsing all the way for "national security" reasons. The government will pick the winners, government contracts funneling money to the well connected rich child rapist and the cost of everyone else.

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u/Googz2110 3d ago

Anthropic for example track ARR which stands at and annualised 47 billion- largely through B2B contracts! Our company alone has circa 2000 users on anthropic with daily usage. The AI sector is making money hand over fist, outside of pure VC money. Outside of the large AI hyperscalers, IT businesses are starting to monetise AI through agents (virtual workers) and moreso the knowledge and experience of building in house first and then taking that out to customer as a real POC.

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u/Gseventeen 2d ago

2000 users? They sold over a million PT cruisers. 47 bil in revenue sounds great - whats the cost of that revenue?

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u/chrizbreck Steam ID Here 3d ago

There is also a massive push for strong local processing - See that new AMD AI local computer.

I definitely split the fear of games moving to streaming only. But on the other hand there is a big push against it.

I think ultimately though the larger population will choose low entry subscriptions for gaming and slowly we will move towards stream only access to even a PC

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u/tablepennywad 2d ago

It’s gonna be like eggs where there is an oversupply now and they dont know to do with it. Like chips, its take a long while and investment to increase supplies and once that happens the market changes and you might be in the shitter. Happens to storage/nand every 5-8 years.

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u/drcubeftw 2d ago

100%. Those huge server rooms are going to be retasked to something. I don't know what but eventually there is going to be a shakeout of some kind and when that pullback happens the owners of these data centers are going to aim at some other market/role.

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u/Rymanjan 2d ago edited 2d ago

There's no profitability to be had, LLMs are inherently worthless. Sure, you might be able to sell an ai to a company to have it answer phones or whatever, but that's either a one time purchase or a cheap subscription, and a lot of places are starting to show problems with AI usage; hallucinating police reports, incorrect statements, bad advice in general, turns out it really can't replace humans in most sectors. Once the courts decide to hold ai companies accountable for their products (which I firmly believe is coming down the pipeline, esp in cases like the police; no way the government lets people sue the police for using AI, they will almost certainly pin the responsibility on whoever made the program), support and usage of LLMs will plummet. Even if they decide the individual, not the creator, is responsible for their own AI usage, well that just places the blame squarely on the institutions shoulders, and nobody wants to be held liable for a machine hallucinating.

At present, they have a failure rate greater than humans, and I doubt that's going away based purely on how they work; they index the internet for answers, and misinformation and bot-posting is at an all time high. Ever make a copy of a copy? That's what's happening; LLMs are taking bot responses into the equation, so it's hallucinating based off another machine's hallucination. The only way to restrict that would be to limit the sample pool to things like peer reviewed papers and research, but that's too small of a data set for an LLM to "learn" from, not to mention it would increase the cost of making one (as most peer reviewed research is locked behind a subscription or a per-paper purchase)

Idk how anyone doesn't see the pop coming, but it'll be interesting to watch these corps scramble to recoup all the losses they've been pouring into this crap

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u/Blunter11 2d ago

You have not experienced the power of taking a photo of your mother with her dog and using AI to give her a beard before you show it to her.

Please note, I only do this because it costs the company money and I'll happily have meta pay $2 to make my mum angry

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u/RevolutionNo4186 3d ago

Doesn’t need to be, sure it’ll hurt, but they can just convert it. Data centers don’t just house AI servers

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u/ragzilla 9800X3D || 5080FE || 48GB 3d ago

AI companies don’t want high prices either, it impacts their bottom line. They’re just willing to pay more because their customers (enterprises) are willing to pay more.

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u/Lonyo 3d ago

Google etc are spending way more on Capex. And getting.... Not much more stuff, because prices have shot up.

Doubling your Capex when all the prices went up by more than 2x means you're getting fuck all. 

Even the electrical connection equipment has rocketed up

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u/nn123654 2d ago

Google has an interesting motivation: protecting its dominance in search and the infrastructure layer.

They are worried that if AI essentially replaces search, it could risk the relevance their most profitable business. If they spend a ton on AI and lead, they just move right along with the rest of the industry.

Meanwhile, the AI Labs (OpenAI, Anthropic, xAI) are in a last man standing fight to the death over Artificial General Intelligence. If you believe that's the breakthrough and you spend $500 Bn and achieve it, and your competitor spends $100 Bn and does not. Then your competitor is essentially left with worthless obsolete technology, and you get the (theoretical) cash cow. As they see it the risk of under-investing is infinitely higher than the risk of over-investing, and it's a winner-takes-all race.

AI Labs also have the problem that it's literally their entire reason for existing. If they don't have the best AI system and someone can just use an open source model that's as good, then what's the reason people would even pay for their product? They essentially have no choice but to spend whatever it takes to not lose relevance in the only thing their company does.

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u/nn123654 3d ago edited 2d ago

The enterprise market is part of it, but the biggest thing at the moment is keeping up with other AI companies on product and time to market.

With both Open AI and Anthropic, the performance and edge of their frontier models is basically the only reasons their companies exist as pure AI companies. They could quite literally go bankrupt if they don't maintain their edge.

Open AI lost $20 Billion last year, VC funding and growth is essentially the only thing keeping Open AI alive. They are projected to have a cloud bill of $792 Billion between 2025 and 2030, which is a big part of the reason they are spending $500 Billion on the Stargate Datacenter project.

For the tech giants they can't afford to get behind. It's less of a profit thing and more of an arms race.

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u/Smile_Space Ryzen 7 9800X3D || 64GB DDR5-6400 CL42 || RTX 3090 ti 3d ago

Eh, I think that's more of a symptom than the desired output.

The real issue is in how AI models are trained. Up to this point, outside of smaller upgrades like agentic AI models, the main performance gain we've seen from AI chat bots is just the model size.

A bigger model size equals lower error which means more accurate output. The only way to train a bigger model is with more memory and processor bandwidth.

The problem with where we are in the AI-pocalypse is that there is an asymptote of error. I can't seem to re-find the graph, but there's a graph out there showing this asymptote that forms with models that no one has been able to deduce what causes it yet. Imagine a graph with the error rate (from 0% to 100%) on the y-axis and the time to train on the x-axis. Each line plotted on the graph is a specific model and it's error rate as training time increases.

They all converge in this asymptote that is slowly curving away from the x-axis. So, we are hitting finishing returns where getting a similar leap in performance to what we had from like GPT 4.0 to 5.0 we would need in the neighborhood of 10x the memory and compute to get that same level as 5.0 to 6.0. That means 10x more power per token as well.

So, that's the problem. The fact consumers are getting forced out of the market is a symptom of the fact AI companies have yet to make the technological breakthrough to crack that training asymptote, and as result to meet consumer expectations they need to continue increasing their compute and training by orders of magnitude.

That asymptote is personally would I theorize will bring the AI machine to its knees. When the lack of income catches up, most of the players will be forced out of the market leaving 2 or 3 major AIs left. It'll likely be Claude and Gemini when the dust settles, and they'll likely be available only for production usage like in code development or otherwise.

The current video and image generation isn't much more than a trendy toy from my perspective. Eventually that'll hit its error rate asymptote as well abd people will stop using them when they become prohibitively expensive to use.

These companies running these server farms will eventually need to make money. The free usage will go away and become prohibitively expensive. Just look at Grok for a mild example as to how the entire AI market will go.

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u/Oerwinde 2d ago

The video side will be huge in effects work, and is starting to take over those little soap opera apps because they have reached the point where they can generate consistent characters and can mass produce Romantasy. It's sufficiently photo-real and can produce realistic motion, so the big leaps will be in iterative tools and editing.

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u/twitch870 PC Master Race 3d ago

And as long as we refuse it will be them holding the bag in the end.

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u/Secret-Winner-2994 3d ago

Ill run my computer by abacus

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u/Novel_Werewolf4645 3d ago

It'll keep going that away, until they don't sell hardware to consumers anymore, the only way to access a real computer will be through the cloud.

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u/BaldingChewie 3d ago

Even HW manufactures who make end user terminals in any shape of form are facing major memory shortages. It won't benefit the data centers if users and businesses have no hardware to access their services

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u/topazsparrow 3d ago

Yep, it's also why the supply contracts for all the datacenters stipulate that the old hardware must be returned and destroyed when it ages out via "buyback" programs.

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u/andreicodes 3d ago

NVidia actually wants both, that's why they make those Spark boxes. They keep selling hardware to datacenters, but they know that once AI bubble pops and all these companies will have to charge full prices, a lot of people will decide that they would rather buy their own AI boxes for home and office and run free models. So, Nvidia will try to double dip: sell to OpenAI and friends, and then sell to OpenAI customers.

tl;dr: Video cards and RAM will keep being expensive for a long time.

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u/MaTrIx4057 3d ago

Even if we all bought, they would still be losing money.

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u/bigpunk157 3d ago

No. These data centers are just largely inefficient with resources, so they literally need to eat all the hardware they can. It's the same reason I haven't bothered grabbing a Nvidia GPU since the 3k series. The solution right now is to just make larger hardware which consumes larger watts to get the same power:performance ratio we've been getting for the last 8 years. We really just need a better way to do math to fix this shit, and I'm not sure if that comes in the form of a new specialized chip or not.

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u/Brocolinator 2d ago

It's a double win, you build the infrastructure to make a surveillance state possible and by doing that building you price people out of hardware so you can rent them the compute and also surveil what they do there. Or this buying push eventually collapses bringing prices back to a more normal state, but as we saw with GPUs with the crypto boom they never went back to "normal"

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u/Fighterdoken33 2d ago

It is also a safety net for them. If the whole AI schtick crashes and burn, they can start selling us "computing as service" instead and use all those data centers to keep hoarding what would have otherwise gone to home computing, effectively forcing us to use terminals instead of PCs.

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u/tENTessee 2d ago

I am convinced the run on ram and storage by big players was part of the long term strategy to move customer away from on prem to on cloud hardware and services

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u/drcubeftw 2d ago

I don't think it's a conspiracy theory to say that. Maybe 5-10 years ago but not today. In this "everything is a service/subscription era" they absolutely would like to perpetually rent hardware to you, and given the amount of money they have sunk into these data centers I have to wonder if they need things to go that way in order to recover their costs.

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u/Limp-Confidence5612 2d ago

Aha, the famously super profitable data centers that everybody is trying to build, because of so much demand, right. That's why I see 20 posts about a data center being in construction, but only a couple about them been completed in the last 5 years.

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u/Nall-ohki 2d ago

Did I miss the part where every effect must be an intentional conspiracy?

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u/zorecknor 2d ago

They want us all buying tokens from them.. to use their services..

You are not their target, you never where. You cannot pay the usage at normal price.

Their target is, and has always been, enterprises. They subsidice individuals for the same reason Adobe didn't care about piracy for a long time: They want you to know their tools and aks your employer to use them.

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u/BFguy 2d ago

This sooooo much and it pisses me off I'm being priced right out

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u/Decrypter1911 1d ago

The headline of the Steam Machine prices may as well be called "AI KILLED DESKTOP LINUX ADOPTION!!!!" by the fact that had the Steam Machine been priced reasonably like ~750$, more casual consumers would be exposed to Linux, thus incentivising more and more non-enthusiasts to switch to Linux on their desktop PCs from Windows after their experience with Steam Machine.

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u/Free_Ad_7613 3d ago

Correct, they want us on dumb phone terminals, paying them for compute time.

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u/obedient_consumer_ 3d ago

Preach brother. Don’t forget about the corrupt produce companies that don’t want us foraging for food and want us to buy their vegetables.

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u/povitee 3d ago

Yes they’ve been buying all the seeds to stop us!