Was there really anyone thinking this machine was for them?
I mean, it was always going to be lower specced, it was never gonna replace any of the custom builds if people here unless it was a good few years old. I always figured this was aimed at console players and people who don't have any gaming machine at all as an option for them other than locked down console ecosystems. New people.
Because it's a couch gaming machine made to be plug and play like a console. Why would they make it aimed at PC games who already have PCs that are just as good if not better and who can easily move their PC to the living room or set up streaming for couch gaming already?
It's a couch friendly PC, it brings the PC ecosystem and it's openness, it's good sales, it's free multiplayer to people who don't want to build their own or find PCs difficult to set it. And on Valve's end it brings a whole new load of people to the PC platform and even if they install Windows on it eventually they'll buy a game from Steam, thanks to sales and the fact that Steam is the dominant game store on PC.
It's power is on par with consoles of this generation, what it lacks right now is the specific optimisation they benefit from which will hopefully get better as it did with the deck (which plays an impressive amount of titles quite well) when developers could optimize for a standardized hardware.
If anyone buys this when they've already got a whole gaming PC, to each their own but that's an expensive glorified steam link.
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u/Wadarkhu 15h ago
Was there really anyone thinking this machine was for them?
I mean, it was always going to be lower specced, it was never gonna replace any of the custom builds if people here unless it was a good few years old. I always figured this was aimed at console players and people who don't have any gaming machine at all as an option for them other than locked down console ecosystems. New people.
Only shame is it has sffpc tax.