We finally know the price, and it’s bad
We need to talk about the Steam Machine.
We finally know the price, and this thing is not going to be cheap. You have to fork out a full €1,039 for the base model with 512 GB storage and no controller. It is not even on sale here in Norway, since we sit outside the official sales regions.
The price is meeting a lot of pushback online. “Dead on arrival”, “what is Valve doing” et cetera can be read across social media and Reddit, with the consensus saying that this is too damn expensive.
Hope you are ready to open your savings account! / Screenshot: Steam
Valve will not subsidise the Steam Machine
Valve, for their part, chooses not to sell the unit at a loss or subsidise it. Because they want the PC to stay an open platform.
And if you think about it, the Steam Machine’s price is about as expensive as building your own today.
As everyone knows, RAM and storage prices have gone up insanely over the last few years. That is not great for those of us with this hobby, but the problems we see in the Steam Machine’s price are the same ones we run into everywhere else when buying any hardware.
In fact, Valve’s engineers, Yazan Aldehayyat and Pierre-Loup Griffais, told PCGamer that the one thing they would really like to change about the Steam Machine is to make it cheaper.
How Valve makes money
Valve deserves credit for the work they do with Linux and Proton. They recently shipped SteamOS 3.8, and they also say they are working with Nvidia to get support for Nvidia hardware on SteamOS, eventually.
This is good for us gamers, because this gives us the option to choose Linux over Windows as our gaming rig OS.
But why do they put all this work into making games available to more consumers?
If you think about where Valve actually makes its money, it makes sense. The more people who use Steam, the easier it gets to buy games - the more money Valve makes. They take a cut of every transaction that happens on Steam.
I believe Valve when they say they will not subsidise the machine, because they do not believe healthy ecosystems are built on subsidised prices. Gamers will probably use Steam regardless of what hardware they have.
The problems we see in the Steam Machine’s price are the same ones you face when building a PC yourself. Blame AI datacenters and their allocation of RAM and storage. This is, unfortunately, our new reality.
If we think further about the work being done on SteamOS, it is not inconceivable that other hardware vendors will come to market with their own “Steam Machines”, or hardware “powered by SteamOS”.
Something we have already seen with handhelds from Lenovo, with their Legion Go S. In which case it might have been unfair for Valve to sell a subsidised box?
Build with what you already have instead
So my tip to all of you out there, instead of getting annoyed that the Steam Machine is expensive, check whether you can build your own living room machine instead. With hardware you already have, or a combination of new and used components.
Maybe you can start dabbling with SteamOS, or a gaming-friendly Linux distro like Bazzite or CachyOS.
I think the next console generation, the PS6 and Xbox Project Helix, will also be shaped by the same global component market. Unless the AI bubble bursts by the time the next gen consoles are produced and launched - this is simply the new reality. Bad news for us who love hardware and computers.
The advantage of Sony and Microsoft, seen from a consumer perspective, is that they have no qualms about locking us into their ecosystem. That lets them subsidise their boxes, because we are getting our games from their store.
Locking us in is, on the contrary, something they want, and we are seeing signs that exclusive titles will become a clearer focus going forward and with the next console generation. For both Sony and Microsoft.
For my part it is a lot more fun to build my own living room friendly box anyway.
Phew! Luckily, I can avoid spending 15,000 NOK / $1,400 of my savings account on a Steam Machine.
