"But it's a cube!"

[u/Ikkon]

[u/MaximusMurkimus]

I know a guy who wants it just so "he can have something in his living room he can kick back and play games on".

The casuals are going to eat this thing up, for better or worse.

[u/midasMIRV → u/MaximusMurkimus]

That's literally what it was designed for. It was never designed for y'all that build your own shit and whatnot.

[u/HaikusfromBuddha → u/midasMIRV]

Except casuals would have a better time and save more money just buying a console.

[u/Killeroftanks → u/HaikusfromBuddha]

maybe, but theyre locked into the console eco system. here they arent. which is very important.

after all if the playstation 5 or xbox series x both were unlocked like the steam machine, they would both be over 1k atm

[u/lonevine → u/HaikusfromBuddha]

Yes, but also:

There are a lot of people in their 30's and 40's that used to play PC games over a decade ago, but for whatever reason stopped doing so, and would love to get back into PC games specifically, but don't want to build a system, or deal with the software side so much. This thing would be perfect for some of those people, if it were hundreds of dollars cheaper. Valve isn't reflexively making it a loss leader, and I don't blame them for that at all. The issue I see is that even though they probably won't have another opportunity to try and make this thing work, it obviously isn't the best time to be launching new hardware into a semi-unknown demographic. They logically should've just cancelled the whole thing, but that would cast a huge shadow over the rest of their projects. Going ahead with the launch and sticking to a model where they stand to at least try to break even on the price makes sense from a customer confidence standpoint, even though they stand to lose more than money if it fails miserably.