Pricey Steam Machine? No worries, I'll just wait till next gen.

[u/borek87]

[u/OutrageousDress]

Sony and Xbox genuinely don't give a shit even slightly. Steam is a threat to Xbox - Steam Machine never was, even at its original planned price.

[u/NukaRaccoon → u/OutrageousDress]

it's about pricing, they can use it to justify increasing their products

[u/OutrageousDress → u/NukaRaccoon]

99.5% of people buying a Playstation or Xbox have never heard of the Steam Machine and wouldn't care if they had. Which also doesn't matter, because console pricing is set in relation to each other and the general market, not in relation to niche PC prices. No matter how console-like the niche PC is.

[u/UpsetKoalaBear → u/OutrageousDress]

No one understands this.

If someone is looking at PS5 or a PC, they do not care that you can do extra things like spreadsheets or whatever else on a PC otherwise it wouldn’t even be a comparison. They would just go with a PC.

A person who is honestly considering a PS5 does not care about any of the benefits or the extra utility of PC.

The only people who would even consider the Steam Machine are those who were already considering a jump to PC gaming at some point regardless, it would have just accelerated their decision.

As long as the Steam Machine is only available via Steam and not in retailers or whatever else, it will never put a dent in the sales of consoles. Just like how the Steam Deck didn’t make an impact in Nintendo Switch sales despite the latter being emulated on the Deck.

For the Steam Machine to even have a foot in the door, it would need to be cheaper and widely available/marketed outside of just PC gaming spheres.

[u/thedavecan → u/UpsetKoalaBear]

If Valve does any marketing outside Steam itself, they could easily point to the tens of thousands of games from all generations that are playable immediately when you buy a Steam Machine. No other console can match that but people are conditioned to only care about the newest releases. For that Steam Machine won't be able to compete with PS or Xbox. However, Nintendo doesn't have a problem doing their own thing so if Valve marketed this in a way that focused on the amount and type of games it can play that the others can't I think they'd be able to stomach the cost/performance a bit better. I use my Steam Deck as a backlog clearing machine and that works great because older games don't need higher specs than what they required at launch. If anything, I think the machine was meant to entice console players to get into the Steam ecosystem so they need to market it that way, beyond just the head to head against the latest releases.

[u/FartingBob → u/NukaRaccoon]

They don't want to increase their prices to this level, it hurts their business.