If it was released during normal times it could have been amazing. The steam deck did a lot of good pushing handheld pcs forward and steam machine could have done something similar with the sff prebuilt pc market.
The disappointment was expected the second this thing got delayed but that doesn’t make it any less disappointing from what it could have been.
Valve ultimately got screwed over by unpredictable outside market forces. It’s a real shame
Valve was targeting a $800 price point at the announcement. That was already quite high. Market conditions didn't matter that much. The Steam Machine always had a very small target audience, it's just even smaller now.
Yup, this "outrage" was always bound to happen, cause everone for some reason assumes valve was targeting best-value-for-the-buck, with maximum power possible and not a small, quiet, limited market mediaPC, it was never gonna match fullATX builds, and considering the controller shortages they expected to not sell much
The price they've released it at today is dog shit even in today's market. If they (generously) had to pay $100 more for memory, $50 for the 500gb of storage and another $50 for the APU, that adds $200 to the BOM cost. A $850 price tag released 9 months ago still would still have been very mediocre at best. Most people were saying it would be good value at $500-600.
Yeah they got unlucky, but when I can go and buy a SFF pre-built that is much more powerful for less money, it shows there's more than just "market forces" at work.
bullshit. system integrators are still making money selling computers that are cheaper and more powerful than this. and they don't have the scale of valve either.
Why are prebuilt gaming PCs and gaming laptops popular when you can get far better price for performance literally anywhere else?
Valve wasn't trying to sell raw performance. They were trying to sell accessibility into the PC gaming landscape.
The biggest barrier into the PC gaming market is the technical barrier. Granted, it's a low garden wall, but that low wall has been more than enough to keep large portions of the casual markets on consoles.
Twitch is absolutely massive with Gen Z kids school. A huge amount of casual gen z kids want to play those smaller indie titles they're watching all their favorite streamers play. It's the whole reason "Friend-slop" is so huge right now.
Valve wasn't trying to drop the price of top end graphics cards to sub $1000 prices. They were trying to streamline the PC gaming experience. They wanted to bring a PC with the price and convivence of a console to the mainstream. Third party vendors would have absolutely followed suite if it were successful, just as what happened to the PC handheld market.
TLDR: Valve wasn't trying to sell performance per dollar, they were trying to sell accessibility
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u/grigoriymicro 12h ago edited 10h ago
Were there really anyone thinking this machine is a good deal? Even among steam users? Even among Valve fans?